Landfill Harmonic: An Upcoming Documentary About the ‘Recycled Orchestra’ in Cateura, Paraguay | Colossal

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2013/04/landfill-harmonic-an-upcoming-documentary-about-the-recycled-orchestra-in-cateura-paraguay/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+colossal+(Colossal)

Cateura, Paraguay is a small city that has grown atop a massive garbage dump and is regarded as one of the poorest slums in Latin America, a village where people live among a sea of garbage. Incredibly, the landfill itself is the primary form of subsistence for many residents within the slum who pick through waste for items that can be used or sold. Prospects for most of the children born in Cateura is bleak as gangs and drugs await many of them. But then one day, something amazing happened.

A garbage picker named Nicolás Gómez (known as “Cola”) found a piece of garbage that resembled a violin and brought it to musician Favio Chávez. Using other objects collected from the dump the pair constructed a functional violin in a place where a real violin is worth more a house. Using items gleaned completely from trash pair then built a cello, a flute, a drum, and suddenly a wild idea was born: could a children’s orchestra be born in one of the most depressed areas in the world? As you can guess the answer was yes

Google adds a “dead-man’s switch” — uses cases from torture-resistance to digital wills – Boing Boing

Google’s rolled out an "Inactive Account Manager" — a dead-man’s switch for your Google accounts. If you set it, Google will watch your account for protracted inactivity. After a set period, you can tell it to either squawk ("Email Amnesty International and tell them I’m in jail," or "Email my kids and tell them I’m dead and give them instructions for probating my estate") and/or delete all your accounts. This has a lot of use-cases, from preventing your secrets from being tortured out of you (before you go to a protest, you could set your dead-man’s switch to a couple hours — if you end up in jail and out of contact, all your stuff would be deleted before you were even processed by the local law) to easing the transition of your digital "estate."

No one wants to think about their own death, but not thinking about it has a zero percent chance of preventing it. The Inactive Account Manager (great euphemism) can send your data from many Google services to your digital heirs, alert your contacts, delete the accounts, or do all or none of the above. It affects Blogger, Contacts/Circles (in Google+) Drive, Gmail, Google+ profiles, Pages and Streams, Picasa albums, Google Voice, and YouTube.

It also serves as a useful self-destruct button. Don’t want anyone watching your stupid YouTube videos after you’ve long forgotten that you had an account? Don’t want your kids to find your password notebook years after you’re gone and read your dirty chat sessions with their dad? You can have your account auto-destruct after trying to reach you using other e-mail addresses and by text message. You know, in case you just get tired of Gmail and wander off somewhere else.

http://boingboing.net/2013/04/13/google-adds-a-dead-mans-sw.html

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye [feedly]

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Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Alive Without Breath: Three Dimensional Animals Painted in Layers of Resin by Keng Lye sculpture resin paint fish animals

Singapore-based artist Keng Lye creates near life-like sculptures of animals relying on little but paint, resin and a phenomenal sense of perspective. Lye slowly fills bowls, buckets, and boxes with alternating layers of acrylic paint and resin, creating aquatic animal life that looks so real it could almost pass for a photograph. The artist is using a technique very similar to Japanese painter Riusuke Fukahori who was featured on this blog a little over a year ago, though Lye seems to take things a step further by making his paint creations protrude from the surface, adding another level of dimension to a remarkable medium. See much more of this series titled Alive Without Breath over on deviantART. (via ian brooks)

Update: I have some additional details from the artist that I’d like to add here, as this post seems to be getting a lot of attention. Via email Lye shares with me:

I started my first series in 2012 where all the illustrations were “flat” and depth was created using the layering of resin and acrylic over the different parts of the illustration. This year, I started on the octopus and it was purely an experiment; I just wanted to see whether I could push this technique to a higher level. After applying acrylic paint straight onto the resin, I incorporated a 3-D element in this instance, it was a small pebble for the ranchu and octopus. For the turtle, I used an egg shell for the turtle shell and acrylic paint for the rest of the finishing. The whole idea here was to give the art work an even more 3D effect therefore you can have a better view from any angle. I think there are still many other techniques to explore.

So to be clear the elements that extrude from the top of the resin are actually physical pieces that have been painted to match the layers of acrylic and resin below.

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Facebook Will Peer Into Your Grocery Bag to Sell an Ad [feedly]

[“the question of just how closely it can stalk consumers before such tracking gets creepy and alienating.” I’d say they crossed that line a good long while ago. -egg]
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Facebook Will Peer Into Your Grocery Bag to Sell an Ad
Facebook is tapping grocery shopping databases, car ownership records, and other real-world behavior databases to target ads ever more narrowly. The practice is winning over advertisers but could alienate users.

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