Archive for the 'Art' category

Merci à Pierrick.

A friend of mine recently bought a copy of a Japanese wood engraving. While reading this article from BibliOdyssey, about the wood engravings of Kitagawa Utamaro, I thought I should share some of the pictures of this artist.

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806)

I consider that the most useful and often the most interesting wallpapers for your computer desktop are images that are relatively feature-less. A picture full of little details continuously grabbing your attention is a major nuisance. It’s much better to have either a very smooth image or a photo containing a lot of continuous tones.

Windows 7 official wallpapers

Look at the full set of the Windows 7 wallpapers. This is the upcoming version of Windows (after Windows Vista, it seems that Microsoft intends to switch back to a numbering scheme). Most of them may be colourful, but with very smooth surfaces where your icons will be appearing quite neatly and they offer a nice contrast.

Fresh Impact Crater Formed between February 2005 and July 2005
Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona

So, I was quite interested when I stumbled upon the collection of pictures taken by the HiRise (High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera installed on board the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter). Shooting photos of Mars surface, this photo camera brings extraordinary color images that provide nice patterns to be used as background for your Windows desktop (or even Linux or Mac desktop) and can be renewed quite regularly: Their catalog is available on the University of Arizona web site.

Furthermore, they provide an enormous resolution for their images which is a very good way to extract any size you may need for your extra-high-resolution background or to cover your 2- or 3-LCD display. Or even more. If you feel that there own selection of wallpapers is not enough:

• 800×600
• 1024×768
• 1152×864
• 1280×960
• 1440×1080
• 1600×1200
• 1920×1440
• 2048×1536
• 2560×1600

You can still stick to the original size (JPEG-2000 format images range between 0.5GB and 3GB).

And the good news is that there is no copyright restrictions, so you could do pretty much what you want with them: Really free desktop wallpapers.

The Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin is a museum presenting a large mount of technology history. Quite naturally, they are biased toward presenting a lot of German achievements and this country is known for hosting some of the very best optical engineers and being rightfully proud of brands like Carl Zeiss, Leitz/Leica.

Charlie Sorrel wrote a piece of article for Wired.com, titled “Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras” that I intensely recommend reading.

Belgian Kimberley Vlaeminck, 18, went to a tattoo parlor and asked for 3 tattooed stars. But, she fell asleep and woke up with 56 black stars. In a sense, this is nice, but she seems pissed off.

PETER DECONINCK/AFP/Getty Images

Update on 24-June: It appears that after some time and media pressure, Kimberley admitted that this was not a mere issue of misunderstanding between the tattooist and her. Frightened by her father reaction to her stars, she tried to explain that it was not her fault. But she actually requested 56 stars from the beginning. So, she was lying…

Summer: m.noun /ˈsʌmə(ɹ)/ (plural summers) Long period of time that millions of English-seaking people choose to replace watching silly TV reality shows by reading silly thick paper printed words selected first for their total lack of requirement of brain participation during the operation known as reading.

Let’s contribute to the improvement of knowledge and culture in the Human race: This year, let’s read English novels of the highest quality. They may come from the old United Kingdom or from the newly liberated colonies of North America. Quality is always here.

The 100 Greatest English-Language Novels of the 20th Century

Here is the beginning of the list. Which ones did you actually read?

1. (1922) Ulysses James Joyce
2. (1925) The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. (1916) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man James Joyce
4. (1955) Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
5. (1932) Brave New World Aldous Huxley
6. (1929) The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
7. (1961) Catch-22 Joseph Heller
8. (1940) Darkness at Noon Arthur Koestler
9. (1913) Sons and Lovers D. H. Lawrence
10. (1939) The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
11. (1947) Under the Volcano Malcolm Lowry
12. (1903) The Way of All Flesh Samuel Butler
13. (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
14. (1934) I, Claudius Robert Graves
15. (1927) To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
16. (1925) An American Tragedy Theodore Dreiser
17. (1940) The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers
18. (1969) Slaughterhouse-Five Kurt Vonnegut
19. (1952) Invisible Man Ralph Ellison

Free ad for friends in concert in Paris in a few weeks.

Gabriela Ungureanu / Anne-Elisabeth Halpern - Schubert

Schubert Concert on Sunday 24 May 2009 @ 12h30.

…up to the point of creating a chocolate-inspired video?

…or up to the point of sacrificing chocolate for the sake of pure art?

No fish for 1st of April!
These are bunnies.

We all love when things come free to us. Here I found a treasure trove of movies that are free to download. Legally.

Thanks to the Canadians of the National Film Board of Canada. They give us feature-length movies, documentaries, animated short movies. Everything, of the best quality, at the best price: Free.

Thanks to BibliOdyssey again, we can see magnificent reproductions of XIXth Century engravings of parrots, maccaws and other Psittacidae birds.

Macrocercus ararauna - Blue and yellow maccaw

But there are also interesting modern parrots. Go and watch the videos and photos from the Perroquet project from fashion photographer Sølve Sundsbø. Did I say impressive?

Using a Magnetic resonance imaging (RMI) technique, researchers have been able to represent graphically our human brain in a beautiful display.

Brain in MRI

Source: ScienceBlogs/Corpus Callosum & PLOS biology.

Copyright (C) Peter Nowacki

Peter’s web site.

This technique is used to demonstrate clearly the operation of a technical product by showing it as if parts were cut away to reveal the internals. This leads to quite a large choice of nice drawings. I collected some of them for your pleasure. They can be gorgeous when the graphic designer is a real artist:

Single Lens Reflex (SLR) camera (Beau Daniels & Alan Daniels)

Cut-away dog (Beau Daniels)

American car (David Kimble)

Kodak DCT Canon EOS Digital SLR Camera (Kevin Husley)

Ear cutaway (Medecine net)

General Motors engine

Spitfire Mk I (Century Imaging)

How a theatre is air conditionned (Frank Soltesz, Saturday Evening Post, March 1951)

Great Wall of China (circa 1570)

Noah's Ark (David Deal)

Source: Google

It depends on the cook, but if you have real difficulties with your own cooking style, you may find an excuse. Next time you fail, just say “Oh! I was trying one of jamesoff.net random recipes“. JamesOff is a systems engineer in the South West of England who created a Random Recipe Generator. Merely reload the page to get another recipe.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948 at Palais de Chaillot, Paris (France). So, tomorrow, this important milestone for Human Rights will be 60-year old. Of course, many people are denied their rights for plenty of reasons.

But this is a fight of every day, this is our fight, a fight to make the world better, a place where every Human Being can live free.

Seth Brau decided to celebrate this 60th anniversary by creating a video where it injected more life in these words, with animated graphics (View in larger size/higher-def here: www.humanrightsactioncenter.org. Created by Seth Brau, Produced by Amy Poncher, Music by Rumspringa courtesy Cantora Records):

Stacey Whaley is a painter using the most modern tools available and depending heavily on the mathematical principles of fractals (those graphical figures that tend to repeat themselves at different scales when you zoom in or zoom out).

Apophysis - Copyright (C) Stacey Whaley

In most cases, when people follow this path, the result is quite predictable and there are a few compulsory forms (like the Mandelbrot set) that pop in the pictures. Please, check the admirable result of the example above. Stacey is able to create something that is clearly fractal and simultaneously bringing all the personal content that is the mark of the true artist.

Check all her work in http://intergalacticart.blogspot.com/, even if the updates are too few for our pleasure.

Andrew Chase designed a strange mechanical elephant. It works, it’s articulted. Weird!

Source: Baekdal.com.