Via Today and Tomorrow

If you're interested in how the whole thing works, then check out this interview with Popp.

Via Pan-Dan

German interaction designer Alexander Wiethoff's "Colour Vision", an interactive installation at Rohrbach, Austria's Museum of Perception (try and tell me that's not a place you'd like to spend a day in...) is a study of how our body language affects colour, and vice versa. Guests enter the room and based on how they move, sit, or stand, the rooms colour automatically shifts to reflect it. Bouncing up and down creates yellow, while outstretching your arms summons red. Slumping down in the chair in the centre of the exhibit turns the room blue, while green, the colour of creativity, is brought out by tilting the held or placing your chin, like The Thinker, into your hands.

What is up with the Dutch painting everything they can get their hands on blue? It's like their favourite thing; They can't get enough of it. Anyway, I love them dearly because their art is just so gloriously freakishly random and Hofman is no different. He just seems to have the power to take seemingly ludicrous and all-together quite possibly pointless idea bubbles and convert them into reality. For this I admire him to no end. Case in point: 2007's "Rubber Duck".

He floated a gigantic rubber duck down the Loire River in France. By gigantic, I mean this fucker is 26 metres tall. That's 85 feet. Plus the artist's description on his site basically fills me with glee: "People have gathered and watch in amazement as a giant yellow Rubber Duck approaches. The spectators are greeted by the duck, which slowly nods its head. The Rubber Duck knows no frontiers, it doesn't discriminate people and doesn't have a political connotation." So true - if you're weary of the whole Obama vs. Hillary debate, just look to the duck!

In 2006, Hofman also gave the world "Signpost 5". A celebration for the the 5th anniversary of the Schiermonnikoog Chamber Music Festival (I wish I was making that up, but I'm not - you read it right, Schiermonnikoog bitches...), he envisioned a series of three huge grand pianos washed up onto the shore. Lucky beachcombers could then explore, climb about, picnic on, or even sleep inside the beached pianos.

I think we can all agree that his pièce de résistance, however, is 2004's "Musk Rat". Simply, he built a 12 metre tall thatched musk rat reclining against a life-sized cottage. Why? Why the hell not! The musk rat is lampin', y'all. Only in the Netherlands...

826LA is a non-profit writing and tutoring centre whose mission is two-fold: inspire kids to explore creative writing and inspire teachers to make it happen. Part of a national network of chapters across the US, 826 was co-founded by Dave Eggers, author of the brilliant "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius". Clearly, these guys and gals are thinking outside of the box. That's why they created the Echo Part Time Travel Mart as the store front to their new free writing lab. Sometimes, a door and foyer just isn't cool enough...

Having it's grand opening to the public last week, the Mart is fully stocked with all your various time travel needs:

Yes, you read that right. Mammoth Chunks. A-may-zing. Besides the unbridled fun of it all, the amount of detail and total commitment to fully flesh out each product blows my mind. They've also got a series of wines whose names come from the political and social ideologies of the year they were vintaged. It's a history major's wet dream. The wines include Nihilism (bottled in 1901), Optimism (1967), Romanticism (1818), Reaganism (1983), Socialism (1866), and Antidisestablishmentarianism (1871).

The crown jewel in this masterpiece is the space-age Slushee machine, complete with time-travelling out of order sign:

Imagine being a young writer and walking through all that full-on creativity before you get down to writing? Talk about inspiration, this makes me want to move to LA just to volunteer. 826 is my new favourite thing. If you're in the LA area, 826LA is looking for good folks to help out with its tutoring and workshop programs. Send an email to iwanttohelp(at)862la(dot)com.

Not in Oslo, Norway. Leave it to those damned Nordic geniuses to not only have a public transit system that works, but to actually put effort into making it an experience. It doesn't take a massive amount of effort to create a difference between dragging your ass to work in some dirty grey afterthought and being subtly motivated to go to work and turn your country into a design superpower. They've obviously gone for the latter.

Built around an escalator in Oslo's Nydalen subway station, this 27 metre translucent glass tunnel houses a brilliant shifting light installation created by a team of artists let by the station's architect Kristin Jarmund.

I'm a sucker for neon. It's bright, colourful, glowing, and often directs you towards something hedonistic like "Beer" or "Open All Night". When you think about neon sculpture (and who doesn't) think of French artist Daniel Firman.

His work is a diverse bunch of opposites. When it comes to neon, it looks like there's always an attempt at perfection that doesn't somehow make it. The multi-coloured lines tend to radiate out from a central point in an attempt to create a perfect shape, but they all deteriorate at a point. Near perfect circles have one line that goes a stray. Not a technological failure, but more like an organic neon form with a genetic defect.

His life-sized body cast plaster sculptures stand in impossible formations – balanced on each other’s feet or crawling upward into an inner tube. Clothed and proportioned, but with faces always hidden, their apparent realness is shocking at first.  He plays with the visual trick of making each mannequin look real but defy the laws of gravity at the same time.

He achieves the same effect with Suspensions – fully dressed bodies held in the air or flopped over metal bars. It’s clear that these aren’t static situations - a moment of action has been captured. Not the jump-off or the landing but some instant in between. Better still is when all the balances are incorporated together into one installation...

One of his current exhibitions, at La Galeri des Galeries, is a celebration in honour of the 20th anniversary of famed French couturier Christian LaCroix. Appropriately, rather than form the body sculptures from plaster he not only dressed them, but formed their very bodies, from Lacroix’s clothing.

I have deep respect for the way the girl in this picture is getting her face right in there. That's right, bitches - breathe deep.

Held at Casco Projects - the "Office for Art, Design and Theory" - the party used meteorological technology normally used for cultural farming to create the installation. My favourite part of the whole thing (as if breathing alcohol wasn't enough) are the safety signs they used out front:

"Danger - The Air Contains Alcohol". Easily the most enticing warning message I've ever read and, completely contrary to it's nature, it makes me feel little to no danger whatsoever. Only happiness. And joy. And an overwhelming desire to move to Holland.

I need this machine. I need it in my house. My office would be good too. Preferably I could just travel around with the mobile version of it, and take a puff when I need à la Céline Dion's "saline sinus treatments".

A “traveling experimental group studio with a rotating cast”, Collage Party has roamed North American and Europe creating walk-in, full-room cut and paste installations.

Unlike your run of the mill house party, these all-nighters (if the beer bottles and artists sleeping on clipping-strewn tables are any indication) are no-holds-barred creativity jams. The results range from nailing Teddy Bears to the wall to multi-coloured floor to ceiling construction paper towers to mummifying one of the artists in scraps and taping them to a pillar… when you think about it, why not? Its like pre-school craft time without having a teacher telling you not to eat the paste. No material is off limits as long as you can cut it, draw on it, and then stick it to something else.

Having referred to some of his own collages as “the visual equivalent of Prozac”, Butler’s individual works revolve around cutting, taping, pasting, and combining found images and objects in way that completely alters their original meaning and creates a whole new visual message. Austere and seemingly simple (taping the words “Go Go Go” on a discarded plastic shopping bag bring up a certainly layered take on the state of consumer culture), it’s that apparent simplicity that makes the deeply meaningful messages within so delicious to uncover.

In just a few words he can dilute these consumerist images into a commentary on what’s really being sold to us – when he glues “Decisions, decisions, decisions” onto a picture of a forest glade the relevancy of what he’s saying becoming subtly and immediately clear.

Butler is also founder of The Other Gallery, a “web-based nomadic gallery” designed to promote up-and-coming Canadian artists.