Taking photos with grass.
Art can come in many forms, but grass? This year at the 2008 Wimbledon Tennis Championships, Grass Art took center court in a new kind of art installation. UK artists, Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey used grass as a photographic paper by projecting a black and white image onto a large panel of grass in a dark room.
They are acclaimed for their ground-breaking work with the light sensitivity of seedling grass and its ability to record complex photographic images, creating unique works that articulate the seductions of time and visibility.
Ackroyd and Harvey stumbled onto this technique after producing an installation that involved covering an indoor wall with living grass. A ladder was leaning against the wall, and the artists noticed that after it was removed a faint outline of the ladder remained on the grass.
They set about experimenting with ways of enhancing this effect, and soon they were using a slide projector as an artificial light source for growing their unique photographs. A typical exposure time is just over a week, with the image projected for 12 hours a day.
Unfortunately, the images don’t last for too long without continued maintenance. Once exposed to natural light, the grass begins to grow more evenly and the images fade away.
Ackroyd and Harvey have received numerous awards including the Wellcome Sci-Art Award, NESTA Pioneer Award and the L'Oreal Grand Prize for the Art & Science of Colour.
Click for more of Ackroyd and Harvey's work.
All images courtesy of Creative Review
Comedian Eddie Izzard and the Lego Death Star routine
Eddie Izzard is a very successful cross-dressing British stand up comedian, actor and scriptwriter.
A talented and enterprising video-poster named Thorn2200 (who identifies himself as a 15-year-old) has created nearly a dozen Lego-animation videos to correspond with Eddie Izzard's stand up routines. One of our favourites is the video below of Deart Vader in the Death Star's canteen.
You can see more of the Lego/Izzard animations from Eddie Izzard & Legos and learn more about Eddie Izzard by clicking www.eddieizzard.com
Stephen Wiltshire - A living camera and a superb artist.
Stephen Wiltshire was born mute in London to West Indian parents on 24th April, 1974. At the age of three he was diagnosed as an autistic and expressed an interest in drawing at school when he was five. He began to use his drawings to communicate and his teachers at Queensmill School encouraged him to speak by temporarily taking away his art supplies so that he would be forced to ask for them.Stephen responded by making sounds and eventually uttered his first word - "paper." He learned to speak fully at the age of nine.
Wiltshire's incredible ability is that he can look at a target once and then draw an accurate and detailed picture of it. He once drew the whole of central London after a helicopter trip above it.
In May 2005 Stephen produced his longest ever panoramic memory drawing of Tokyo on a 10-meter long canvas. After a brief helicopter ride, it took him seven days to paint. Since then he has drawn Rome, Hong Kong and Frankfurt on giant canvasses, and is in the process of drawing Madrid, after taking a 30 minute helicopter ride on Saturday February 2, 2008.
When Wiltshire took the helicopter ride over Rome, he drew it in such great detail that he drew the exact number of columns in the Colosseum!
You can learn more about Stephen Wiltshire by visiting www.stephenwiltshire.co.uk
The world's largest drawing?
This drawing created a big buzz on the internet recently. Apparently, an 'artist' called Antti Laitinent shipped a briefcase with a GPS tracker around the world with DHL with precise touting instructions and this drawing was the result.
Unfortunately, that was not quite true - well the story was, but not the drawing.
Antti Laitinent (an advertising student) did send this GPS tracking equipped briefcase around with DHL . . . as a publicity campaign for DHL.
The resulting image, a self portrait, turned out like this.
Still, it was a great idea which worked: it did generate a lot of noise about DHL and it must be the world's biggest self portrait.
The sensational Pilobolus shadow dance troupe
The word 'Pilobolus' initially referred to a sun-loving fungus, however, since they performed at the "2007 Academy Awards" and on "Oprah", 'Pilobolus' has become synonomous with inventive and provocative shadow dancing.
While Pilobolus has attracted a lot of high-profile media attention in the last couple of years, the Washington-based dance troupe was formed in 1971 and is approaching its 4th decade.
Today Pilobolus is recognized as a major American dance company of international influence.
The company remains a deeply collaborative effort with an executive director, three artistic directors and seven dancers contributing to one of the most popular and varied repertoires in the field.
Their many decades of consistent artistic activity stand as a testament to the group's remarkable fruitfulness and longevity.
For more information please check out www.pilobolus.com