Welcome to the jungle: The best tech when going off the grid:

Daniel Noll, half of the Uncornered Market travel team, used an iPhone to locate himself outside Srimongal, Bangladesh

Uncornered Market

Last Christmas, my cousin Martin do Nascimento received a Kindle 3G as a gift from my brother, Alex.
At the time, we all figured it would be a nice way for Martin to read books while serving in the Peace Corps Nicaragua on the Caribbean coast. But what we didn’t know at the time was exactly how indispensable it would be to him as he lived in a town so small that it barely has a Wikipedia entry. It turns out that this little, relatively cheap device has been a godsend for him in 2012, with its worldwide 3G Internet. Even though Martin lives in a remote area, I hear from him nearly every day by e-mail.
“Most of my e-mails I write on my Kindle,” he told me recently (by cell phone this time). “I use it to stay in touch with friends, even [through] Facebook. The Kindle’s not fantastic by any means, but I can read my e-mail reliably. It loads within a minute. Even with a 3G [USB modem] stick, [service] came in and out—I gave the modem away.”
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September 16, 2012:

Holy hell, that was the end of my hand.

beautiful failures | accidental 3D Prints | cunicode

On the path to get the perfect 3D-Print, many…:

beautiful failures | accidental 3D Prints | cunicode

On the path to get the perfect 3D-Print, many meters of filament get piled up as discarded disappointments,
as bastard objects that never were,
as unborn half-things…
… and they are beautiful:

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-ultimate-guide-to-writing-better-than-you-normally-do

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/hello-stranger-on-the-street-could-you-please-tell-me-how-to-take-care-of-my-baby

iPhone “oil paintings,” animated GIFs of artful screen smudges:

A little gross, a little genius. iPhone Oil Paintings (by JK Keller via Gautam Ramdurai).

Embarrassing Pothole Caricatures of Politicians Spur Action to Fix the Streets in Russia:

I can’t speak from personal experience about the political climate in Yekaterinburg, Russia but if we take this video from the ad agency Voskhod at face value it appears the powers that be neglected the city’s infrastructure one day too long. After repeatedly commenting and complaining about the pockmarked streets of Yekaterinburg, local blog URA.RU turned to Voskhod to create a brilliant campaign: under the cover of night they would paint the faces of local politicians around the most unsightly potholes and potentially shame them into action. The response? It worked! Via Ads of the World:

Quality of roads is the eternal problem of Yekaterinburg – the fourth largest city of Russia. The local site URA.RU, which writes about life in the city, decided to remind politicians that it is their duty to repair the roads. The problem is – our politicians don’t care about potholes. Their only worry is their own public image. We associated road holes with the images of certain politicians. In the night, on three potholes in city center, we drew faces of the governor, the mayor and the vice-mayor. The news about caricatures became a sensation. With this intense PR the politicians were no longer able to sit idle. The holes were fixed. The news about the action was released in more than 300 media venues, the website traffic on URA.ru doubled. The officials at last started to do their jobs.

Gotta love it when art and politics come together to create something positive, hopefully they don’t have to paint a face next to every pothole in the city. See much more over on Red Hot Russia.

Gorgeous Bird Paintings by Adam S. Doyle:






Artist Adam S. Doyle who recently relocated to Hong Kong creates beautiful gestural paintings of birds, where the seemingly incomplete brushstrokes form the feathers and other details of the animal. In some strange way it reminds me of the story of the Renaissance painter Giotto who is rumored to have been able to draw a perfect circle without the aid of a compass, as if Doyle just picks up a dripping paint brush and in a few seconds paints a perfect bird. In reality his work demonstrates a profound control of the paintbrush and careful understanding of the mediums he works with. Via email he tells me:

Yes, what you see is what it appears to be—strokes of paint. I’ve always loved unfinished paintings because you could see the alchemic process of surface and paint transforming into a living person. With my paintings, it does take quite a bit of working and reworking to arrive at the place where every brush stroke fits into a fluidly flowing whole. It’s important to me to find a balance between an elegance of form that holds both visible marks of paint and a representation of ‘energy within’. I’ll just add that the painterly craft of my images, which I consider secondary to investigating ideas and concepts, came about after a lifetime of expressive image-making, followed by doggedly exploring the aforementioned transformation in grad school. I realized during that same formative period that I was also captivated by trying to visualize energy, which I was quite familiar with having grown up with a dad who practiced Eastern medicine.

Doyle most recently had a show at Skylight Gallery in 2011 and is now currently working on a new body of work in Hong Kong. You can see much more of his work on his website.

[This is super, super cool, although I would have wanted to implement it acoustically with actual plucked strings. -egg]
Musical Light Swings on the Streets of Montreal:

21 Balançoires (21 Swings) is a recent project by Canadian design collective Daily Tous Les Jours, known for their wide variety of interactive public installations and experiences. Surrounded on both sides by a new music complex and science center, designers Mouna Andraos and Melissa Mongiat chose to bridge the gap between the two by converting a narrow strip of land into an enormous interactive instrument. Pre-recorded sounds from a xylophone, piano, and other instruments were programmed into color-coded swings that when in use play various notes, however when swung in unison with careful cooperation, more complex melodies and harmonies arise. An additional “secret mode” was programmed to only play when all 21 swings were in use. What a fun idea.
Earlier this week a few blogs reported a photo from this series as being some type of swingset bus stop. According to Andraos, while the installation has close proximity to the street it does not actually serve the purpose of a bus stop. All photos courtesy Olivier Blouin.