London-based artist Nick Gentry makes great use of discarded 3.5” floppy disks.

His arresting portraits are applied directly onto the obsolete disks, with minimal interventions of paint that reveal the colors, markings, and notes that brand each old cartridge. Certain aspects of the disks are used strategically: metal plates for eyes, colored casings for a jackets and hair, etc.

On his website, the artist describes his inspiration:

Throughout history, information has always been recorded on physical objects. Important documents, favourite songs, videos and more were stored on mountains of tapes, polaroids, cassettes and disks. As media is rapidly absorbed into the World Wide Web the rich variety of formats of the past are becoming obsolete.

This represents a big shift away from physical, real world objects, driving towards a human existence that is ultimately governed by billions of intangible data files. This release of information from the physical form allows personal data and identities to now be revealed and infinitely shared online. At the same time many of us consider individuality and privacy to be more precious than ever. Will humans be forever compatible with our own technology?

Each floppy disk used in the paintings has a history and story of its own. It represents the increasing pace of the modern life cycle, where objects are created, used and disposed of quicker than ever. To challenge this notion, as these personal artefacts of life are cast aside, the obsolete are now given new life and a renewed purpose by using them as a medium for art.

I like it a lot. And something about the colors and gritty technology makes me really want to watch Blade Runner…

NYC-based Rosemarie Fiore has a great process. She uses live fireworks to create these intensely colorful and layered drawings. The bright gunpowder residue is sometimes guided with a long staff and sometimes contained and concentrated inside various overturned buckets.

I just found the technique really refreshing — that her relationship with such a volatile media is part precise control and part unknown. She isn’t controlling much about the paintings other than the boundaries of the colors themselves, and even those lines are often compromised by the force of the explosions.

There’s also something very primal or elemental about the way the colors are bleedng and sitting on top of each other… a burnt black spot near the center of a circle giving a subtle clue as to the colors incendiary birth. In a series of controlled palimpsests, the drawings offer hardly any reference other than the method in which they were made. In some cases the traces of making can be read even further, as you start to notice the small white dots within colored areas, marking the location of a sparkling pipe on its end.

All this evidence of the artist is lost on first glance (at least it was for me) since the pieces are so brightly confrontational. But I thought it was nice to start to understand how certain forms were made, and slowly realize different details about what went into each composition. To me that gives a very intimate record of the artists intentions, and puts the viewer right there into the moment again, as if standing alongside Rosemarie as she drew.

Anyway it’s a new type of media I for one haven’t seen before… and it definitely gives new meaning to the thought of drawing as “marks on paper”, since this canvas is literally being bombarded with color.

found at booooooom.

If you were in doubt about the power of color in the landscape… here you go.

These extraordinarily sparse graphics, made by Maria Zaikina, all depict basically the exact same scene, and yet manage to convey a huge variety of moods and places… simply by a considered palette of colors.

I was surprised at how moved I was, actually… and I think it is as a collection that they gain the most meaning as a wide survey of the seasons and times of day. This lonely structure is so easily transformed from a calm lakeside retreat, to an abandoned desert factory, to an idyllic barn in green fields, to a tropical beach cabana — all with a few choice swatches from Adobe Illustrator.

It makes me wonder how often we really notice our landscape for its detail, and how often we are just affected by the broad hue combinations in the view. How deeply ingrained is a fiery yellow wooden wall against a deep plum eastern sky at sunset, to signify a calm transition to night? What about a beach, and those three colors which remain unbroken: sand sea and sky?

I love this project, and how much it’s proven to me about the minimal pieces my brain can assemble to feel emotion. Josef Albers would be proud.

For an even better experience of this little house, check out the entire set as a slideshow, set to fast speed.  So nice.

C-prints by Christine Nguyen.

What I like about her work (other than the fact that it’s gorgeous and natural and elemental) is that it’s right on the threshold of drawing, painting, photography, and science.

She says:

..the photo-based work is a combination of drawing and a photographic processes. “Negatives” are drawn on layers of Mylar, which are projected onto light-sensitive paper.  The paper is developed in a color processor, creating a camera-less, photographic image. What you are seeing is a negative of the drawing. I use paints, inks, pens, pencils, and also grow salt crystals on the mylar to create my drawings…

Geez. Love that process…
Just taking your work and subjecting it to the optical rigor of projected light.

Makes me wonder what other artistic works have this kind of potential when put under the darkroom enlarger.

(By the way, I think they should have commissioned her to do the opening titles for Avatar…)

It’s when you find something like this in the city that you realize how important architecture is. When it confronts you as a raw and elemental work of art, which happens to function as a useful building.

Great textures, a wonderfully graphic tree, and just the right ratio of window to wall.

…and I love how deep this place feels. Maybe in a courtyard or something, full of old growth trees, light washing down from an overcast sky across wet stucco and sparse pine.

came across this incredible set of victorian-era microscope specimens over at the nonist.

immediately i was blown away by the state of the slides, given their age. then what i really started liking about them is the range of cataloging technique - the labels, numbering systems, and overall aesthetic of the objects themselves.

also i found it slightly ironic that these samples, collected and stored in what was once thought to be a standard and unobtrusive way, are now becoming objects of curiosity in and of themselves. at the time, the biological samples were a novelty of scientific breakthrough, and viewing such a small scale of life was a romantic escape for collectors. today, as microscopic imaging becomes commonplace, we look at these objects and are instantly more intrigued by the archaic way in which they were assembled… their aesthetic variety as compared to the sterility our modern slides.

as a basic record of man’s curiosity, i don’t think you can get any more iconic and elemental than these small glass strips. it’s a beautiful, human way of keeping things, little fragments of life and minerals… but the passage of time allows for another kind of specimen to emerge. as the scientists were recording their own observations of the earth, they were simultaneously documenting themselves, and their process.

it’s a clear moment in time, preserved by the same method used to save the natural samples. and it’s strange, because in an weird reversal, the timeless natural forms in the center of the slides can be read as the “control” - the thing which remains the same between that era and today. that leaves the words, the filigree, and the classification styles (the man-made elements) as a new specimen of ourselves.

when did they stop being current? was it as soon as they were designated historically valuable that the microscope zoomed out to look at the whole slide?

love this video for WTF? by OK Go.

thought it was great how they used props and patterned objects/clothing to repeatedly paint the frame, really taking full advantage of the graphic potential of the pixel trail glitching.

i’m amazed by the amount of thread types i’ve never heard of on these peter pan yarn sample cards, circa 1955.

ombre, cordet, guimpe, organdy?
velvanna, nubby, sport fingering, wool-o-nyl?

was someone just making these up?

in any case, i love the names, and just the overall “cataloged specimen” character of the cards. the sheer multitude of weights, colors, and fiber types reminds me of some weird taxonomic record of a old fabric store, documenting the extinct threads that have long been out of fashion or only ever existed as samples.

from the collection of Jim Linderman, at dull tool dim bulb.

pretty nice graphic visualizations from Parsons MFA design + tech student Nick Hardeman in New York City:

“These images are generated by evaluating and interpreting the 1997 music video “Mo Money Mo Problems” from the first disc of the Notorious B.I.G. album, Life After Death. The initial frame detects edges in the image and attempts to trace motion from frame to frame. The output is rendered as a vector image, the curves represent the motion. The points represent the pixels detected in the edge, their size determined by the distance from their previous location, the further, the larger. The color of the points are determined by the color of that pixel in that frame. The only imagery added manually is the background color.”

gotta love rule-based generative operations, especially when they produce something that looks as good as this.

i hope he makes an animation of the data that syncs with the actual video…

“bad penny” by custom steel track bike fabricator peacock groove, based in minneapolis.

the frame is completely copper-plated, so whoever owns this thing is going to be riding on a beautiful green patina in a few months. i don’t think any paint job can stand up to that. i especially like the coordination of the bar tape and saddle, chosen with the final color in mind…

well done.
now if only i had 140,000 pennies to spare!