The Surreal Appeal of the Falkirk Wheel

Or how a remarkable piece of engineering bridges the eight story gap between two waterways. The only rotating boat lift of this type in the world, the Falkirk Wheel must be seen to be believed.

Image Credit Flickr User DaveWilsonPhotography

Portrait of an Artist | Guido van Helten

Australian artist Guido van Helten recently concluded a residency in Iceland.  His major project was to go to Akureyri - a town on the north coast of Iceland, to produce a very unique work.  Film director Selina Miles traveled with him and made this record of this very cool project. It went down very well with the locals too! If you would like to see more of van Helten’s work on Kuriositas, here is his recent abandoned silo project in Australia.

The Underwater Realm

This is something quite incredible.   The Underwater Realm has been funded by people from all over the world and created by a team of volunteers.  As you may have guessed – yes – it tells the story of Atlantis, or at least its inhabitants.

The movie is split in to five separate timezones and I am very pleased to feature all of them on Kuriositas.

Part I is set in the present day where a couple are spending their time on a thrilling diving vacation,  They are both experts but this will be the most challenging dive of their lives.

During their time underwater they come across something they had not bargained for...

Travel by Feet

You may remember back in January we shared with you the amazing Birdboy which made the Academy Award shortlist. The same team is now developing Travel by Feet, an animated short film directed by Khris Cembe, from a black comedy story co-written with his traveling mate Laura Aguado.

The synopsis is straightforward enough - a night rail journey. A car full of passengers. An undesirable fellow passenger is inside your compartment. What to do when it's not possible neither sleep nor escape?

However, as straightforward as it sounds, the production has run in to a slight hiccup – money – and that’s where you could come in. Take a look at the project description over at Verkami and, if you can, dig deep. If Travel by Feet is half as good as Birdboy it will be awesome!

Blue and Joy - Creations for a Contradictory Century

Blue and Joy is the creation of a duo of Italian born Berlin based artists. Fabio La Fauci and Daniele Sigalot joined forces at the end of 2005 and since then have been making something of a name for their immense media project. The characters of Blue and Joy appear throughout their work - you can probably guess which is which. They have been kind enough to let us share some of their work with Kuriositas readers.

La Fauci and Sigalot often take small commonplace objects and make something quite extraordinary from them.  They combine media, from video to mosaic, drawing to painting to create something of an aesthetic mirror of the times. Certainly their mosaics, which I particularly admire, do have something of the zeitgeist about them. Dreams Keep Me Awake, above, is made up of 4,500 pills. With this knowledge this piece takes on a new dimension. La Fauci and Sigalot have been described as cutesy anti-dreamers and there is much to be said for that description. Yet there is a harder edge to their work than meets the eye.

Joy takes center stage in Pazienza.  I think the above looks more like Impazienza (maybe that is and isn't the point). You see, Joy is the saddest creature in the universe. It is Blue who is the happy one. Voltaire may have called tears the silent language of grief but perhaps in this world they are more the summer showers to the soul. Can you guess what Pazienza is made out of?

There you have it! Like any great art their work is open to infinite interpretation. I see irony in their pieces but also a childlike sense of fun.  Often their work is captioned but I do feel too that there are deeper, hidden messages within.  It really is up to you. What I can't escape from, however, is the contagious enthusiasm of the pieces not to mention their forthright joie de vivre.

No material seems to escape from Blue and Joy.  Here, 40,000 thumbtacks get their inimitable treatment.

Another piece features one cent coins. Thousands upon thousands of them.

Name the medium and it seems the prolific duo have had a go! The above certainly produces a wry smile. Ironic humor is ubiquitous in their work but be careful. The next turn may leave you heartbroken.

Their fiberglass and polyurethane Siesta en el sofa (above) is wonderfully contradictory – emotionally speaking. I can’t look at it without smiling as my eye goes immediately to the happy little guy bouncing up and down. Then I see the (literal) heartbreak of his companion and my mood changes somewhat. Yet remember that appearances should always be deceptive!

Art is stimulation, sometimes like a feather at other times like a veritable cattle prod.  The work of Blue and Joy is something of a surprise: I feel the shock at revelation at times, of recognition, yet at others their work is elusive, a visit to unfamiliar shores. The note below, for example, is made from aluminum.

Blue and Joy show their work at their Berlin headquarter, the Pizzeria. This is where these pictures were taken and, if you would like to see more (and there is so much more) then please visit their wonderfully made website. It has only been online for a month but is already attracting a host of admirers.

Humans of New York

Humans of New York is something very special. A photographic census of the most populous city in the United States, it represents the outstanding work of a single photographer. It catalogues the city in a way a normal census never could, through the everyday lives of the humans who inhabit it, lived out on the streets as well as (occasionally) in their homes. So, who is the single human responsible for capturing so many so wonderfully?

Well, once upon a time there was a young man called Brandon Stanton (pictured left) who was a trader at the Chicago Board of Trade. While no Nick Lesson or Kweku Adoboli (we may have heard of him beforehand for other reasons otherwise!) something went badly pear shaped and he found himself jobless.

Blithely, his next career decision was to move to New York City and take photographs of strangers. Like you do. Yet we are so pleased that he made this (ever so slightly barking mad) decision because without that we would not have Humans of New York.

Brandon is the polar opposite of many photographers who conceal themselves in order to catch their subjects unaware. He actively engages his subjects writes many engaging posts about his various conversations and occasional adventures with them. There is also an associated Facebook page too which started as an appendage to the main site which has now acquired a separate life of its own.

Thanks to Brandon, we are able to give you an insight in to this amazing project by reproducing some of his photographs for you. Very generously he gave us free rein in our choice of which we reproduced (he wanted to see which we would decide might embody his work out of a choice of thousands).Click on any of the photographs to go directly to the site so you can choose your own favorite!

Humans of New York is one of those online projects which, once you have entered its world you might find it difficult to withdraw. Some websites come with a health warning (read between the lines!) but if anything, Humans of New York should come with a time warning. You can easily spend hours here perusing the thousands of remarkable portraits of the denizens of this most diverse of cities.

Grab a beverage and whatever else you need at hand when you have the urge to spend several hours on the interweb because you will not want to move from this site for quite a while.

Viral video by ebuzzing

How Would You Explain a Kindle to Charles Dickens?

Rachel Walsh had a lot to explain. The young illustration undergraduate at the Cardiff School of Art & Design had been given a brief by her lecturer – the kind which lecturers love to give out but would probably dread to do themselves. It was to explain a piece of modern technology to someone who lived and died before 1900. Hard times, indeed.

She chose to describe the Kindle – and the person who she would explain it to was Charles Dickens. The metaphor that she used was that Kindle is a book with lots of little books inside. You can never go far wrong if you make a metaphor visual so Rachel got to work creating just that – a book with lots of little books within.

It wasn’t the easiest of tasks. In order to fulfill her lecturer’s great expectations she created forty tiny books to go inside a larger one. She found that this was not the easiest of tasks; the books were so tiny that if her hand jogged she would ruin one and have to start again from scratch. At times even a 0.04 nib pen was simply not small enough.

However, she overcame these obstacles and came up with something quite special. Dickens would have understood this concept at a glance. His interest would, I believe, have soon wavered – Dickens was so much more of a writer than a reader. Within seconds he would no doubt have been demanding a laptop and internet access. His new novels would be serialized at charlesjohnhuffamdickens.com and he would make a mint from selling the last couple of chapters to Amazon before so that his blog readers would have to pay to read them on their, you guessed it, kindles.

Many thanks to Rachel Walsh for giving us permission to reproduce these photographs here. Her life is a tale of two cities – she studies in Cardiff but hails from South West London. Yet she does have a blog which bridges them – and it includes more examples of her wonderful work as well as her musings. Click on any of the pictures or here to get there.

Pencil Vs Camera - A Series by Ben Heine

Image Copyright Ben Heine

You could say that Belgian artist Ben Heine is talented.  As well as being a painter, he is a portraitist, caricaturist, illustrator and photographer.  These talents are combined in one of his latest projects, Pencil Vs Camera, some of which we reproduce here with his very generous permission. Above, a distinctly modern twist on a classic Vermeer, who becomes Girl With A Pearl Earring and Gas Mask.

Image Copyright Ben Heine

A dinosaur threatens Paris.  Taken from Montmartre Hill, the setting is fine for some fun with both art and the city.  We can't quite make up our minds here at Kuriositas whether this is a Tyrannosaurus rex but we are happy that he has finally found a use for those rather puny forearms.  Heine has been drawing and taking photographs for over ten years and this series is the natural result of graphic exploration and his evolution as an artist.

Image Copyright Ben Heine

The idea for the series came unexpectedly and like a lot of art, inspiration was drawn from the mundane events of life. One evening of multitasking a short while ago and Heine was writing a letter at the same time as watching the television.  When he re-read the letter before popping it in to the envelope he saw the image of the television transparently behind the letter.  The idea then came to show two actions in one image.

Image Copyright Ben Heine

Pencil Vs Camera was born.  In order to contrast the realism of the photograph Heine has come up with some extraordinarily imaginative alternate realities going on at the paper level.  Although very modern in approach this picture gives away the artist's love of the art of previous centuries.  In this he has interpolated his own takes on famous paintings by Millet, Botticelli and Goya - do you recognise them?  The eye at the centre? The tool by which the art is examined and interpreted.  Your eye.

Image Copyright Ben Heine

It is important to Heine that in a project like this there are no rules.  The imagination leads the way and what goes on to the paper is generally not what goes on in the every day.  The photos are after all the reflection of the real world and what is on the paper is perhaps what could happen if imagination were to become a reality.  Certainly where better a place for aliens to circle on their first visit to Earth than the Atomium in Brussels?

Image Copyright Ben Heine

Although all of the series are created with a sense of humour (if not occasional mischief) there are some serious messages too.  The above (no. 15) draws out attention to the plight of the koala in Australia, where its habitat is slowly being encroached upon and its numbers in the wild dwindling.  Effectively, the battle between drawing and photography is both the focus and message of the series.  As both transcend language (and Heine speaks six to varying degrees of fluency) the viewer can decide whether they ignore what is really going on behind the paper.

Image Copyright Ben Heine

We would again like to thank Ben Heine for his kind permission to use these images on Kuriositas.  As you may have guessed these represent only part of this particular series - and the tip of the iceberg for his creativity in general.  You can see the rest of them in their set on Flickr.  While you are there why not take a look at his collections?  Go make yourself something to eat and drink - you may be there for some time!

Image Copyright Ben Haine

Peace Shadow Project

Artist Tatsuo Miyajima visited a museum when he was young and what he discovered there he found difficult to accept.  How could a weapon destroy someone so completely that all that was left was an outline of their shadow where they once stood?

Now with the help of the Peace Shadow Project he has set up a remarkable website.

The aim of the Peace Shadow site is for people all over the world to submit pictures of themselves.  These pictures will then be converted in to shadows, but named and numbered as the collection increases.

These pictures of shadows will then be displayed throughout the world, particularly in nuclear countries.  It is an interactive project and, thanks to their marvellous flash driven website, you can submit your own Peace Shadow and join in with the project.

It is hoped that the pictures will quietly speak of the desire for a nuclear free world.  Take a look at the website – it really is something quite extraordinary, a fusion of art, politics and Web 2.0.