As someone who designs boardgames, I feel lucky that I get to see all
the different stages a game goes through before it's published. First there's
making a prototype, typing up rules, playtesting, etc. But my favorite part
is watching the artwork develop. I'm no artist myself, so aside from making some suggestions along the way I leave the artwork to the professionals at
Fiery Dragon.
My latest game creation is on the very Nerdabout-worthy topic of mad scientists, so I thought I'd share some of this early artwork, to be followed
up with pics of the finished product when it comes out in a month or two.
First up is the board, which no boardgame should be without. This first pic
is of my own homemade prototype which I used while developing and playtesting the game.
By now you’ve probably seen Carl Sagan’s (born 75
years ago on November 9) viral music video hit from beyond the
grave, “A Glorious Dawn”:
Well, Monday 11/9 would have been Carl Sagan’s 75th birthday, and
there are two celebrations on tap.
One: White Stripes guitarist Jack
White has a
record label, Third Man Records, which has issued “A Glorious Dawn” on
limited-edition 7"
vinyl . Who knew that Jack White was a secret nerd? Even more
awesome is the fact that the record’s B-side has an etching that
reproduces Sagan’s famous “Golden Record” of earth sounds, which was
launched on the Voyager 1 probe in 1977. The probe left our solar
system in November of 2004.
Two: I’ve conducted a short interview with the creative genius behind
the song, John
Boswell. Enjoy!
What inspired you to remix COSMOS into a music video?
I gained a deep appreciation for science and philosophy in college,
and when I first saw an episode of Cosmos about 5 years ago, it
immediately resonated with me. I loved the style and message, and
Carl's charisma was the cherry on top. The idea to remix it came to
me after being inspired by other artists that have used auto-tune
technology on speech, such as the Gregory Brothers and DJ Steve
Porter; they were both working in mostly comedy but I wanted to apply
the concept to a more personally meaningful source. I turned to
Cosmos because I knew how profound Carl's message is and that it would
fit well with a mash-up; the result was surprisingly pleasing, so I
decided to put it on Youtube for anyone who may take interest in such
an idea.
Were you surprised at the attention that "A Glorious Dawn"
received? Has anyone from Carl Sagan's estate commented on it?
At first, I was only expecting maybe a few thousand views for the
video - through some devoted Sagan fans that keep tabs on new
Sagan-related material. However, the song and video quickly caught on
to the Sagan community, and spread from there, to viewership levels
that I did not forsee in any way. To my delight, the song has reached
and inspired many people who have never heard of Sagan and motivated
many to further research his books and TV series. I have been in
touch with his wife and people who have worked on Cosmos, and they
have expressed their sincere appreciation for the song, which is
highly satisfying for me. I feel honored to give back to the Sagan
community in this sense.
How did the record release with Third Man come about? Is Jack White
a COSMOS fan?
Third Man Records approached me about releasing A Glorious Dawn not
long after the video began its viral spread. Jack White loved the
song, and I can safely assume he is a big fan of Cosmos and Carl's
message. I was initially skeptical about the ability to get proper
copyright clearance for release, but Jack and friends really pulled
through on that front. We reached an agreement that keeps them, the
Sagan family, and myself very happy and excited about the release.
Even if you don't own a record player, it is a pretty cool collector's
item.
You’ve made a sequel to the original music video. Are you going to
make a whole album's worth?
Since the follow up video, We Are All Connected, was a success as
well, I will definitely continue the series. Whether I will
eventually compile a whole album's worth of material is yet to be
seen; there is a plethora of footage out there with excited scientists
talking about all sorts of fascinating subjects, so there will never
be a shortage of source material. I am currently working on a third
video, which is coming along great, and it should be out in about a
week or two. If you enjoyed the previous two, this new one will fit
right in.
Martin Sobey, a NYC based photographer and artist, spends a lot of time walking the streets trying to find the perfect spot to place his work. Whether it stays up 10 minutes or 10 months doesn't much matter; Martin's main purpose it to fill up a crack in the sidewalk, a hole in the wall or an empty space looking for purpose. Using only a point and shoot camera and light manipulation, his photos, which he then turns into both sculptures and street art in his SoHo studio, have a 1980's ethereal air about them--bright, colorful, and sparkly.
As a designer I get a fair number of requests from friends asking for help designing their web pages, posters, and other little pieces. For a lot of these projects I find that with a few nudges or suggestions they would probably be able to handle the job on their own and produce a passable piece of design. I have decided to compile some tips and tricks that I have often suggested to people who want to start designing for themselves. Now please note that these are general suggestions and there are a lot of philosophies on what "good design" is.
Check out the trailer for “Between the Folds,” a new, extremely nerdy documentary from Green Fuse Films that uses origami as a lens for exploring intersections of math, science and design. The film documents the individual stories of ten paper-folders who have chosen a life of origami over more conventional professions in spite of graduate degrees and others’ expectations.
Computer scientist Dr. Erik Demaine is the youngest professor ever to be tenured at MIT (he was 20 at the time) and one of the world’s most respected origami theorists. Vicent Folderer is an expert in freestyle-folding, or “crumpling,” which he uses to interpret things found in nature. Miri Golan is an Israeli teacher who uses origami to teach geometry to children in Israel and Palestine. Eric Joisel is a sculptor turned paper folder who is one of the most technically advanced origamists in the world (He re-envisions works by Daumier and Picasso in paper).
The film features music by the Budapest Symphony Orchestra and is directed, written and produced by Vanessa Gould, a pianist and painter who studied architecture and astrophysics at Columbia and music at the New England Conservatory. The documentary airs on the PBS series “Independent Lens” in Dec. 2009.
I'm always looking for new mashups and was quite happy to discover
Twyric via digg. When I first started to use Twitter, I tried to write only in haiku. That fell by the wayside for a bit but I'm working on picking it back up which is why Twyric--with its minimalistic approach--is so appealing to me.
With the assistance of Twitter's real time search, Twyric collects tweets that include the hashtags #haiku, #twyric, #twly, #gedicht, #poesie, #lyric, #poetry, #limerick, #poetic and #poem. Keywords are parsed out and using the Flickr API, an image is matched up with the tweet. I've seen the same poems fade in and out. Sometimes the image paired with the poem remains the same, other times it changes.
I did my first haiku this morning and it took about 1/2 hour to be on Twyric. Two things I learned: 1) reread tweets for typos and word repeats (as you can see I make many in the morning) 2) don't put a title (in this case "Tea") before your hashtag otherwise it appears in your haiku (minus the hashtag because that's removed).
It all too often seems the image of slave Princess Leia chained to the slobbering Jaba the Hut outshines the awesomeness of the Galactic Empire. Let's set the record straight with our Top 10 Storm Trooper Memes.
Fellow Ravelry Warcrafter Arwen Lietz otherwise known as Nimcraft in the world of gaming and crafting, was lucky enough to score tickets to BlizzCon 2009 and kind enough to write about her adventures for us.
How does one wire coat hanger, a piece of foam, and a baseball cap transmute into two collector's item posters? Well, if you're a nerdcrafter at Blizzcon, these things can happen.
There's nothing better than traveling the world. But if funds prevent you from doing that on a regular basis the 2nd best thing is cruising flickr which is exactly what Liz Suman did this weekend--a virtual tour of the Top 10 Coolest Statues in the World. Click on the nose to start.
When I was a kid my friend Jennifer moved from Poughkeepsie out West, to live under a hill. Her parents were hippies, mine worked for IBM. We never went that route and I eventually ended up in New York, which is
considered one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the US. (I'm sure some city in Germany way out shine us on the front.) With the largest subway system in the world--it carries an estimated 5 million people on a week day--commuting to work sans car is quite easy. Despite the building boom in recent years (which thanks to the tanking economy has slowed) many of us live in places that are old (my building was built in 1896) and urban farming is on the rise. But not everyone wants to live in an old building in a city, where noise and smog is still very much a reality. I'll admit I frequently dream of moving to someplace cleaner, someplace quieter. One of my favorite escapes I often think about: Earth Ships. Ten percent of the appeal is the name alone.
It's Friday. It's August. This can only mean you have ample time to look through images of funny cats with X-ray eyes eating people. And so we give you today's Top 10 Kitty Memes which we gathered from Ffffound.
Candy Corn Bag. You can put all the toilet paper you were storing in your sushi tp cozies in here and no one will suspect you're about to decorate their house.
Fortune Cookies. Scare your friends by making weird and strange predictions.
There will come a point in the evening when people won't notice you have slipped them a knitted Olive.
We felt Mochi Ice Cream deserved a mention if only because it reminds us of the "We're Not Candy" singing pills of our youth.
This past weekend Portland, Oregon played host to the now famous--at least among knitters--Sock Summit 2009. We couldn't make it out there but happily Chandra Rogers, who Joanna knows from her World of Warcrafters group on Ravelry was in attendance. Here's Chandra's wrap-up of the weekend's happenings.
Only in New York City will you find an international chalk art celebrity's first solo exhibit inside an old hardware store on the Bowery.
Making good on his word to experiment with light and shadow in different contexts besides the street, Ellis Gallagher's latest show at Collective Hardware, "Ocular Echoism: The Autonomy of Ellis Gallagher," features striking photographs of some of his most beautiful chalk-outlined objects throughout New York City. Curator De L'Autonomy, defines the work through the lens of Plato's Allegory of the Cave, which you can read about here. But what I thought was the most interesting part about the exhibit was how it brought the street indoors, playing around with what goes where in the same way Ellis does by bringing art onto the street with chalk.
In addition to the dozens of photographs lining the walls of the converted hardware store, the exhibit includes a chalk-outlined bicycle hung from the ceiling, a plastic crate outlined in chalk and surrounded by garbage (the planted trash was a bit much), and a lineup of newspaper dispensers covered in tags, standing to attention in the center of the gallery. It is a who's who of graffiti writers in New York at the time of the show's opening and a live (and far more interesting) roll call than the black and white, two-dimensional name-dropping you find on Gawker the day after a big party in NYC. This inanimate roll call combined with Ellis' installations, a handful of candy-colored Claws, and a fire-tag shout out to Dash Snow provide the perfect anthropological icing to Ellis' beautiful photographs.
The exhibit is only up for a couple more days, but you can check out the work below and stay tuned for Ellis' upcoming shows by keeping tabs on his Facebook page.
I've been running around like a crazy woman gathering the necessary materials for my own hydroponic system and finally...all the running has paid off. Yesterday Britta from Window Farms plus her team--Ted, Lisa and Anja--spent 8 hours in my apartment installing a home version of the window farm at Eyebeam we blogged about back in June. Sadly I bought the wrong pump so my system isn't fully operational but the new one is in the mail. I'll post a full wrap up on Monday when the pump arrives and I've installed it. In the mean time here's a bit of what we did yesterday.
This just in...Google Maps Flash API 3D now available. The mashup demos posted are very cool and the developers have provided excellent DYI documentation if you're interested in creating your own map--which I am although it might take me some time considering I'm not a programmer. Still--totally doable. Our insect expert Lonesome Polecat's partner in crime loves arcade driving games so this one is included here especially for her: the work-in-progress Driving Simulator by Katsuomi K.
Since NYC is becoming like London with our massive amounts of torrential rain as of late, I've been pouring over weather maps. Trice Designs has a good one with cloud overlays. Here's my pick because it makes me feel like I'm in a cartoon: UK Weather Map by Ian Watson.
Our friend Tommy passed on this site--a virtual, 360 degree tour of the late CBGB's. We're particularly fond of the bathroom shots and happy that we couldn't see the floors or toilets in the dim light.
Noah and I were in the East Village buying t-shirts on Saturday night. He found some great ones at Upper Playground, which is right next door to Giant Robot, one of our favorite galleries/stores in the East Village. (Noah and I were at an art opening there for Jack Long a few weeks back. Here's the review in case you missed it or are curious.) We had no idea Giant Robot was having another opening and were psyched when we popped through their door to discover Dime Bag 3 accompanied by beer and snacks.
Can puzzles be art? The french artist Invader certainly thinks so and I for one am obliged to believe him. His latest show, TOP 10, uses Rubik's Cubes to recreate "what he believes are the top ten album covers of his generation". The cubes are a perfect medium for his pixel/pointillist style, each representing a configurable grid of nine pixels. There is an art movement known as Rubikcubism that Invader is actually believed to be the creator of. But it was not always maddening puzzles for this crafty street artist. Invader's first pieces were made of colorful mosaic tiles. With them he recreated video game characters from the 1970's. Probably the most recognizable and the source of his name being Space Invaders. These little murals would be placed at predetermined locations, usually in very public and heavily trafficked places. Since starting in Paris these Murals have spread to over 40 different cities and 5 continents. All of the invaders are catalogued and their locations mapped out so you can witness the spread of their infiltration. It is also possible to use the mapping to plan a local or even global tour of this ongoing installation.
Invaders pieces do not seem to get taken down or destroyed very quickly as is the case with most illegal art. Part of this may be because the tiles are fairly robust and not easily removed. Another reason may have more to do with the nature of street art that we are most familiar. Invaders mosaics become a part of the buildings and structures that they adorn. I do not mean "a part" to simply state that they are affixed to the structures surface but to push the point that they seem to belong there. You see them and accept them instead of being jarred by them. These pieces do not act the same way that graffiti, paste ups and advertisements do. It didn't look like a tag or an act of vandalism. It didn't try to sell me something or influence my opinion, at least not in any sort of active blatant way. They strike me in a similar way that Chip Tune music does. It is a re-purposing of a nostalgic icon that is embedded in our subconscious. I know myself and countless others spent a large part of our childhood staring at these little guys, our attention fully focused on their glowing pulsing pixels.
Thanks to Invader these little creatures from our past have been freed from their cathode ray tube prisons and are invading the streets of a city near you. Be sure to check out his show, TOP 10, at the Jonathan Levine Gallery that is running until July 25th.
The other night Noah and I went to an art opening for Jack Long at Giant Robot, a gallery and store (they also publish a magazine) on E. 9th Street in NYC. I've been thinking a lot about urban gardening and greening and growing things on my fire escape and window panes so this show was perfect. There was lots of that going on--flowering cities, water, plants. As the name of the show, Singing Her to Sleep suggests, Jack's art is like dropping into the middle of a story and peaking through the window. The colors are bright and beautiful, the details small and delicate. Each wooden canvas seems connected to the other, creating a long, winding journey, reminiscent of a fairytale. You can't always imagine what he was thinking when he was painting but that doesn't really matter. Like all stories, I take bits and pieces and fit them together in a way that makes sense to me.
Jack's show runs through July 15th. If you have a moment while wandering the E. Village during the next two weeks--which promise to be a hot, rainy, muggly ones--drop into Giant Robot and check out their walls. I think you'll like what you see.
The record for the world’s longest paper-doll chain has been broken! On June 10, 2009 the Guinness Book of World Records awarded the new title to a 2,591 ft (20,000-doll) chain in France, beating the world’s previous record holder out by 49 feet and 15,000 paper dolls (The old record belonged to a 2,542-ft chain (5,000-doll) chain in China.
A group of children spent months making dolls for the chain in response to a competition to celebrate the 10th anniversary of a French publication called [Science et Vie Découvertes Magazine]( http://www.science-et-vie.com/ “Science et Vie Decouvertes Magazine”). The highest individual winner and recipient of the official Guinness record-holder certificate is a 12-year-old boy named Dylan from Lyon, France, who spent six months creating 400 paper doll chains.
For each paper doll chain, 3 euros were contributed to Aide and Action, an organization building new libraries in Vietnam. The kids’ paper doll chain raised 6,000 euros overall.
The longest paper-doll chain in the world: 2,591 ft (20,000 dolls).
Dylan, the individual record holder (with a contribution of 400 paper doll chains).
Ten years ago, Ellis Gallagher began lighting his graffiti on fire because he was bored. Just like his chalk art, the trend caught on like wildfire in the graffiti world (no pun intended) and now “fire tagging,” as it’s come to be called, produces almost two million hits on Google and 19,000 results on YouTube.
Unlike some of his successors, Ellis doesn’t use lighter fluid, nail polish remover, or alcohol. He just writes on a wall, turns off the lights, and sets the wet paint on fire. The effect is brief and pretty and the result is art in and of itself (Some of his canvases are covered in layers of fire-tagging residue - a molten lava replica of his pyrotechnics).
Over 300 vendors crowded their tents around the track at McCarren Park for the Renegade Craft Fair. There was a huge variety of sundries on display. Hamburger rings, watch movement necklaces and squid tentacle sconces are a few that caught my eye but the predominant craft being peddled was without a doubt T-Shirts. Waving lazily in the wind in neon green, powder blue and basic black. They carried simple silkscreened silhouettes, ironic phrases and in some cases beautiful and complex designs that might be fetching enough to draw some glances on Bedford Ave.
One vendor who's snarky wares caught my eye was Sable Yong. She makes Tee Shirts and Tote bags that will definitely put a spring in your step. One of my favorites sports the phrase "My Tote bag is a totier tote bag than your tote bag" If that doesn't turn your sass up to eleven I don't know what does. You can check out some of her other totes and tees at her etsy shop, Sabletooth Tiger.
The highlight of my day had to be Diane Koss's booth. She makes these absolutely adorable, mostly cycloptic and totally huggable plush toys. Each has a name and a lovely story about their personality. They have the uncanny ability of completely disarming you with their charming and curious smile. I think Nigel is my favorite, he is a scientist. Be sure to catch Diane at one of the many fairs she will be visiting or just grab a doll at her etsy shop, Cutsey But Not Cutsey.
All in all I had a great time at the fair. I did feel that it was a little over populated with t-shirts that were for the most part underwhelming. I think with most fairs of this size you will always have to do a little sifting and ultimately, if you put in a little effort, you'll come out with some very unique treasures. If your a fan of the Renegade Craft Fair be sure to check out Bazaar Bizarre, another indie craft fair that always has a great showing of merchandise.
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