Alex Chinneck’s spectacular levitating building in London

A piece of the historic Covent Garden market appears to have broken free of its stone base, with its top half levitating in the air, in the latest installation by London designer Alex Chinneck.

Take My Lightning but Don’t Steal My Thunder by Alex Chinneck is a precise replica of a section of the 184-year-old market building in London’s Covent Garden that has been made to look as if its upper portion has broken away from its stone base to float in mid air.

Built from a steel frame and filcor, a type of expanded polystyrene, the 12-metre-long structure took 500 hours to shape using digital carving techniques and was painted to replicate the appearance of the existing building on the site.

A four-tonne counterweight enables the suspension of the top half of the fake building.

Take My Lightning but Don’t Steal My Thunder will be on display in Covent Garden’s East Piazza until 24 October 2014.

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The Secret Life of Heroes. Pop Art Illustrations by G. Guillemin

What do our favorite superheroes and villains get up to when we can’t see them? Are they as super as they seem?Grégoire Guillemin decided to explode the myth. This French digital illustrator shows that reality is always stranger than fiction, making no exceptions for these idealized characters. Off duty, many of them look just like us mere mortals, and in Guillemin’s work, they share our vices too.

Using pop-art style snapshots of mundane, sometimes compromising scenes, Guillemin hints at the private lives of characters from our best known comics and cartoons. This collection, entitled “The Secret Life of Heroes”, is made up of over 60 pop art illustrations.

 

SEE CLASSIC ARTWORKS COME TO LIFE IN SPELLBINDING “BEAUTY” VIDEO

from Rino Tagliaferro website:

Over Beauty, there has always hung the cloud of destiny and all-devouring time.
Beauty has been invoked, re-figured and described since antiquity as a fleeting moment of happiness and the inexhaustible fullness of life, doomed from the start to a redemptive yet tragic end.
In this interpretation by Rino Stefano Tagliafierro, this beauty is brought back to the expressive force of gestures that he springs from the immobility of canvas, animating a sentiment lost to the fixedness masterpieces.
Its as though these images which the history of art has consigned to us as frozen movement can today come back to life thanks to the fire of digital invention.
A series of well selected images from the tradition of pictorial beauty are appropriated, (from the renaissance to the symbolism of the late 1800s, through Mannerism, Pastoralism, Romanticism and Neo-classicism) with the intention of retracing the sentiment beneath the veil of appearance.
An inspiration that returns to us the sense of one fallen, and the existential brevity that the author interprets as tragic dignity, with an unenchanted eye able to capture the profoundest sense of the image.
Beauty in this interpretation is the silent companion of Life , inexorably leading from the smile of the baby, through erotic ecstasies to the grimaces of pain that close a cycle destined to repeat ad infinitum.
They are, from the inception of a romantic sunrise in which big black birds fly to the final sunset beyond gothic ruins that complete the piece, a work of fleeting time.

Disney “Fallen Princesses” pictures by Dina Goldstein

Dina Goldstein is a Canadian conceptual photographer and a Pop Surrealist artist with a background in editorial photography.

Dina explains the work by saying, “For me, photography is intended not to produce an aesthetic that echoes current beauty standards, but to evoke and wrest feelings of shame, anger, shock and empathy from the observer so as to inspire insight into the human condition. I have always felt that my experience as a documentary photographer complements my conceptual photography — they inform each other technically and creatively. For example, my Fallen Princesses series was born out of deep personal pain, when I raged against the “happily ever after” motif we are spoon fed since childhood. The series created metaphor out of the myths of fairy tales, forcing the viewer to contemplate real life: failed dreams, pollution and ocean degradation, war, obesity, the extinction of indigenous cultures, cancer and the fallacy of chasing eternal youth. By embracing the textures and colors created by Walt Disney, which built a multi-billion dollar empire exploiting these fairy tales, Fallen Princesses exposed the consumerism that has negated the morality of these ancient parables. It also begged the question, “how do we define the concept of ‘good’ and how do we live a ‘good’ life?”

 

Art: Hyperrealistic sculptures

Hyperrealistic sculptures by Ron Mueck(1 to 6), Jamie Salmon(7 to 8) & Jackie K. Seo(10 to16)

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Alejandro Monge_Zaragoza

Paintings or pictures?

The Arch Nova Project ( mobile concert hall ) / Isozaki + Kapoor

Two years after a major earthquake and tsunami hit Japan, architect Arata Isozaki and artist Anish Kapoor have completed an inflatable mobile concert hall that will tour affected regions.
It is an air-inflated membrane structure which equipped with the necessary stage and sound equipment. The membrane can be folded up and the equipment dismantled and loaded on a truck, so they can be brought to each site. The interior is a single uninterrupted space which, depending on the arrangement of equipment, is a multistage format which can accommodate various events from orchestras to chamber music, jazz, the performing arts or exhibitions. It is envisioned to seat 500 during an orchestra performance, and is planned to have a width of 30m, length of 36m and maximum height of 18m.

What if flat-pack furniture was smart enough to assemble itself?

Belgian designer and engineer Carl de Smet is experimenting with a kind of smart foam technology, which he believes could do just that.
Once heated to a set temperature, the material he works with, shape memory polyurethane (SMPU), will expand to a given design.

 

Today “ARTchitecture”: Visual pattern facade projection