The Art Of The Hamburger

The hamburger.  One of the finest American exports.  Yet the rest of the world, UK and Europe very much included, are fast becoming culinary powerhouses (just try Ben Mulock‘s Iberico Pork offering at the Opera Tavern if you don’t believe me!) in defining all that is delicious about the humble burger.

Two people pushing the boundaries of what you can do with a burger, and bringing it bang up to date as the fashionable and high-end food of choice, are the French duo of brilliantly crazy designers Thomas and Quentin.

Despite being notoriously elusive they catalogue the creativity of their efforts on the “utterly majestic” Fat & Furious Burger.

Astro Burger

Vampire Burger

Burger… ice cream?

007 Burger in gold

My favourite, the Neil Armstrong Burger

Hunting Burger

Thanksgiving Burger

The remarkably lifelike Hawaiian Burger

These are just some of my favourites from their ridiculously wonderful and creative masterpieces, many many more over on their blog Fat & Furious Burger.  Go feast your eyes on their feed!

The Event Of A Thread

Not being in New York means that I wasn’t able to experience Ann Hamilton‘s fully immersive exhibition The Event of a Thread for myself.

Fortunately for me, and no doubt many other non-New-York-ers, Paul Octavious was inspired enough to take a camera along with him and documented the experience (worth watching in full screen).

Installation artist Ann Hamilton blends elements of nostalgia, sound, movement and time in her latest exhibition. As tots roam through a field of swings, live events will allow them to explore their memories and connect to others around them.

Read the full artist statement here.  Unerringly beautiful stuff, real shame I’m going to miss it.

Thanks to the guys at Not Tom for pointing this video out.

Van Gogh Tilt Shift

There are some fantastic examples of tilt shift photography all over the internet, making everyday scenes from the world look like tiny replica models or toy sets.  It is a fairly simple technique, though hard to judge and execute perfectly even using Photoshop (you can even achieve similar effects with built in focus sliders that Instagram has within the app itself).

The idea is to tweak an image’s colour and depth of focus (see tutorial here for more of an explanation) to achieve the desired effect.  When the same technique was applied to works of art, that’s paintings and not photographs, it really caught my eye.

The tilt shift technique has been applied to some classic works of art by Vincent van Gogh, transforming even the most recognisable of his masterpieces into something new.  By adjusting the focus of the painting (presumably much to the annoyance of van Gogh!) it draws out key features and brings to life aspects of the image you may not have noticed before.

Some elements that were deliberately painted as background features by van Gogh are now brought out so that we see them as the main feature.

Wonderful stuff.

These are just some of my favourites from the set that has been manipulated, but there is a whole tilt shift collection to see over on Art Cyclopedia.

Alchemy Of Light

We’ve seen some excellent projection mapping over the past couple of years bringing both buildings and objects to life, but this is the first instance I’ve come across using projection mapping as live performance art with an interacting human element.

I would have loved to see the original ten minute performance of Alchemy of Light by a dandypunk live, but the excerpts shown in the clip below give a real insight into it.

Labelled as a cluster of “art/movement/technology/inspiration” it truly is an exceptionally well executed piece of creativity.  I can only imagine the number of hours that went into rehearsing and synchronising this!

More from a dandypunk here.

Pointillist Power

Simply stunning “pin art”  installations from still life photographer Philip Karlberg.

Using the oversimplified pointillist technique Philip has worked some real visual genius to achieve some incredibly recognisable characters in his work.

Around 1200 coloured pegs and some very strategic lighting has given the rather impressive results.

If you didn’t get them all, they were (from the top) Karl Lagerfeld, Jackie O, Lady Gaga, Johnny Depp, John Belushi, Steve McQueen.

Check out Philip’s other work here.

Faceture

New Zealand based designer Phil Cuttance has a rather impressive series of vase and lightshade sculptures in his portfolio.

Known collectively as Faceture, each object is produced by casting a water-based resin into a simple moulding which has been manipulated by hand to give the object a completely unique form.

In a recent video Phil has lifted the curtain on the production process behind his series of Faceture sculptures, giving a rare insight into the manufacturing techniques used.

The casting takes shape complete with sharp accurate lines and a digital quality to its aesthetic, a visual ‘surprise’ considering the ‘lo-fi’, hand-made process involved.

The material used to cast these wonderfully tactile creations is Jesmonite, and the “low-tech” casting jig on the machine allows Phil to view directly into the mould and control the flow of the quick-set composite.  This allows it to be cast evenly to produce a uniformly strong wall thickness.

The final shape of the mould is dictated by triangular facets “popped” in and out by the designer.  Phil does the “popping” between every casting to ensure that no two of his creations take on the same form, so you’re sure to get an absolutely unique product!

The Faceture project was created with the support of Creative New Zealand.

The Obliteration Room

An extremely simple installation opened at Queensland Gallery Of Modern Art in December - The Obliteration Room by Yayoi Kusama.

Comprising of a typical home environment set up and painted uniformly in a glaringly pristine white, it offered a literal blank canvas to all visitors to the exhibition, and in the two weeks that followed every child that turned up got a handful of coloured stickers and was invited to contribute by decorating the room.

With the time almost measurable based on sticker density alone, a wonderful feeling of freedom transpires.   No pattern, no restrictions, no guidelines, just complete and utter indulgence to splash colour about as you feel.  Perfectly suited to a child’s mind and creativity.

The transformation is the vivid and colourful explosion of dots you see here, a kind of child-friendly version of that Sony advert from a few years ago.

Photo by Stupie.  Used with permission.

Thousands and thousands of stickers later the ‘obliteration’ is complete.

Photo by Stupie.  Used with permission.

The bold, block colours are reminiscent of childhood, and add a wonderfully fun dimension to the exhibit with a a real human and interactive element.

If you’re in Queensland you can experience the room for yourself as part of the Look Now, See Forever exhibition at GOMA until March 11 2012.

Ink Dot Hero

You’d be forgiven for thinking that this portrait of Miguel Endara’s father is a photocopy.  At first glance I was convinced, until I read a bit more about the artist involved.

This remarkable artwork was composed entirely by hand and is drawn using a pointillism (or “stipple”) technique, quite stunning I’m sure you’ll agree.

Miguel Endara spent 210 hours and logged over 3.2 million dots in the process!

Really incredible work.  Be sure to check out Miguel’s website too, it’s rather good.

Dot To Dot

Dot to dot drawings, for me, invoke memories of bumper summer holiday activity packs that occupy, oh say, five or ten minutes of an afternoon.

Aussie artist Thomas Pavitte has taken your typical childhood activity and created possibly the world’s largest dot to dot with an interesting take on one of the most famous women in the world.

One of the most basic forms of art given a complex twist with over 6,200 dots.

Over nine hours later this (remarkably recognisable) image is the final result.

Nano Art

Recently Wired magazine pitched an article enquiring “can science be art?”.  Given the following, it’s simply a resounding yes.

Ever since his PhD in 1994 Albert Folch, associate professor of bioengineering at the University of Washington, has been creating beautiful images – the result of a combination of atomic-force and scanning-electron microscopies.  In 1997 he uploaded some of his favourites to the internet and found that other people loved them too, “they were an instant hit”.  You can see why.

Folch has since refined the technique him and his team used in the late nineties, and nowadays uses a high end Canon SLR and a Nikon SMZ1500 dissection microscope to take pictures of both living cells and manipulated micro fluids to a wondrous and beautiful result.  Art on a nano scale, fantastic.

Be sure to check out the Folch Lab YouTube Channel too, some mesmerising effects to be seen.

I could’ve posted many more photos on here, so do check out Albert Folch’s gallery and the Flickr group Lab On A Chip.  Beautiful.