White Elephant

Swiss artist Sipho Mabona is attempting to elevate the concept of origami as performance art with an Indiegogo campaign to help him realize his whimsical ambition to fold a life-size elephant from a single sheet of paper.

Mabona expects the process will take about two weeks. The project will require three assistants and the elephant will be shored up by an aluminum frame and sealed with white acrylic paint. He plans to set up in a local art venue and provide a live online video stream of the process. If all goes well, he hopes to repeat the performance in other venues.

And I thought completeling a Senbazuru was difficult. At least it was a manageable size.

H0les

These glasses are conceptual accessories. 

They aren't sensible.

I am amazed how inexpensive these really are. Only $100, compared to high end sunglasses that do nothing but show you like to pay for a brand and cover the sunlight in only one shade? Bargain! you can keep your rose colored glasses, I'd prefer to see the world as a cacophony of rainbows.

Soo Sunny Park

Soo Sunny Park: Unwoven Light from Walley Films on Vimeo.

If I ever have some sort of very tall loft, with lots of natural light streaming in, an installation such as this by Soo Sunny Park would be ideal. I could star at this for hours and hours, just watching how the sun moves across it and the light changes. Absolutely beautiful.

Culture?

“These cheeses are meant only as ‘food for thought,’ ” Agapakis said. “What we hope is that after the first visceral response of ‘ew,’ we can start to think more about the intersections of human and microbial cultures.”

“Culture” in two ways, that is.

“Cheese is a wonderful artifact with which to demonstrate how ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are not merely inseparable, but fully implicated in one another,” Heather Paxson, anthropologist and author of The Life of Cheese and toe bacteria donor, said.

I can understand the breast milk. I can understand the smelly and donkey. I cannot understand or stomach the idea of maggot cheese. I can't eat rice because it reminds me of maggots, and at least rice doesn't move.

King of Gore!

A newly-discovered dinosaur, which has been christened "King of gore" by the scientists who have studied it, is the oldest known member of the dinosaur group that gave rise to the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex.

The 80m-year-old fossil of Lythronax argestes was found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in the desert of southern Utah. The two-legged carnivorous beast was eight metres long and weighed around 2.5 tonnes. It had a head full of sharp teeth and lived during the Late Cretaceous period, between 95m and 65m years ago.

Cyclique

CYCLIQUE (short version) from NOhista on Vimeo.

Happy 80th

Celebrate by watching the Ken Burns Prohibition documentary with a glass of scotch in hand. :)

Sculptures by Morgan Herrin

I immerse myself in the subject matter of my work. Often, several very different forms combine to create one physical object. My process is ultimately a result of the combination of my fascination with figurative sculpture of the past and obsessive research into a subject. I reference the passage of time and its effect on art in terms of both physical change and change in viewer perception.

Empathy helps kids understand sarcasm

“It’s a very tricky thing to recognize that people are deliberately hiding what they mean,” Pexman says. “Children have to listen and look beyond the words to what’s in the mind of the speaker and the emotion they’re trying to convey. Empathy seems to help children get beyond the literal meaning of the words.”

Pexman and her colleagues wondered why some kids got the joke earlier. They suspected that children who were more empathetic might be quicker to recognize the contradiction between what was being said and the tone and expression of the person saying it....

When the researchers correlated the empathy findings with the responses to the puppet shows they saw a clear role for empathy: the more empathetic kids were, the more likely it was that they’d correctly identify sarcastic comments in the puppet shows.

I'd love to see the results of this across a larger group over a longer time. I'd be curious to see how this differs across cultural and class upbringings, as well as whether this understanding of sarcasm has any impact as to how the kids employ both sarcasm and empathy as they age.

What Averaged Face Photographs Reveal About Human Beauty

As per the finding that 32 faces are seen as more attractive; I used this as the threshold for the amount of faces to average. The selection of images to use was based on my own criteria: facing forward, eyes looking into the camera, limited facial expression, decent size and decent colouration.

For each ‘category’ (Male and female, attractive and unattractive) I aligned and resized the images, until the internal features of the face (eyes, nose, lips and chin) were as aligned as feasibly possible. Then they were averaged....

What’s interesting is that attractive male and female faces seem to have similar structures and similarities. When aligning the images in Photoshop; I could see that faces which appeared completely different actually have similar basic proportions. You can see this in the averages and in relation to conformity with the Marquardt mask.

The most interesting aspect, to me, is the incoherence seen in the ‘unattractive’ averages. Attractive faces seem to conform to a basic attractive structure, with little variance of internal features. Unattractive faces have more varying features – this would explain why the unattractive averages are less coherent.