TOYS'R'US - Dingy

TOYS’R'US – Dinghy scale 1:1. A boat and related equipment are joined together in a welded metal frame. Everything is painted in a unifying plastic layer to resemble the surface of a model kit.

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UNICEF Toy Soldiers

UNICEF Toy Soldiers

UNICEF has created a campaign to highlight the plight of Africa’s child soldiers. They have sent out a mailer containing a pack of what initially appears to be regular green toy soldiers. The miniatures are in fact models of children engaged in childhood activities like riding their bikes, playing games and relaxing.

As seen here.

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Sirio Magnabosco Yellow Ford Escort

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Makers

Cory Doctorow’s new novel Makers features some nice “On The Sprue” artwork on the cover. It reminds me ever so slightly of  the cover of The Blind Watchmaker.

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Martin and Munoz - Travelers

Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz are a pair of artists who express themselves through the medium of miniatures in snowglobes. Like Thomas Doyle much of their work is dark and surreal. Their work has been described as depicting the elaborate bleakness of an emotional icy desert, and indeed, most of the pairs globes feature snow and ice. Many of the scenes evoke a strong sense of foreboding or depict the aftermath of some tragedy with the unwitting participants stranded in an unforgiving wasteland.

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Clearing by Thomas Doyle

Thomas Doyle creates snowglobes with fantastically dark and subversive themes. Take for example “Clearing” from his “Reclamations” series. In this wonderfully recursive and self-referential work, a person (ironically trapped in a snowglobe) encounters another person trapped within a smaller snowglobe and crying out for help. It is this interplay of the real and surreal that makes Doyle’s work so compelling. The miniature person in the outer snowglobe is clearly amazed and confounded at having discovered a person trapped in a snowglobe, though he himself is blissfully unaware of his own predicament.

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1. Small Worlds – Part 4 – Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz

Entropa

Jesus Christ Kit

David Cerny Logo

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Artist Standing

Links:

• Interactive Storytelling Jewelry – Quirky Accessories That Tell a Story Each Time They’re Worn (GALLERY) – Interactive jewelry is a new concept found in the intriguing work of Allison Wells. Her pieces exercise elements of humor, play and interactivity.
• Miniature oranges from modelling clay – How to make highly realistic cut and peeled oranges from modelling clay. You can apply the same techniques to other items.
• Czech artist tells European Union to lighten up – Instead, he got together with his pals and made an eight-ton sculpture called “Entropia” that depicted Romania as a “Dracula theme park,” the Netherlands as being underwater “with only the tops of minarets sticking out,” Bulgaria “as a series of squat toilets,” Sweden as being “packed into an IKEA box” and so on.
• David Cerny – Sculptures – Kits – On-the-sprue art. A rock star, Jesus, The Artist and others as plastic model kits.
• Arts & Genomics :: VivoArts – This course will introduce students to issues and concepts relating to contemporary arts practices dealing with living biological systems (sometimes referred to as wet biology, art practice, Bioart, environmental art, body art, breeding practices). Emphasis is placed on developing critical thought, ethical issues and cross-disciplinary experimentation in art (art/science collaborations, art as research).
• DIYbio – DIYbio is an organization that aims to help make biology a worthwhile pursuit for citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers who value openness and safety. This will require mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills, access to a community of experts, the development of a code of ethics, responsible oversight, and leadership on issues that are unique to doing biology outside of traditional professional settings.
• Dangerous Liaisons and other stories of transgenic pheasant embryology – we make money not art – If we are in the process of engaging in auto-evolution, then diversity, the inherent biological love of difference, implies that the human genome should be engineered with as wide a range of genre humans as there are art movements and swanky tastes in the world. Posthuman integrity is only guaranteed by an expanded aesthetics of anatomy, the more obscure the better… ! Let’s alter our identity as a species by birthing versions of ourselves into every permutative potential of fleshbound imagination.
• who killed bambi? » Blog Archive » Julia Murakami – Anatomy of a fairy tale by Julia Murakami.

Image Credit: © David Cerny

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• Swedish artist uses “unethical” cash to fund cultural scholarships – He chose companies involved in what he called the “five main unethical industries”: arms manufacture (Lockheed Martin), tobacco (Swedish Match), alcohol, pornography and gambling. “My investments are [doing] better the worse the situation in the world [becomes]. Wars, drinking problems and so on lead to growing profits for the companies I invest in. But people do not understand that others get hurt to increase their fortunes
• I Fell In Love With The Majesty of Colors – I Fell In Love With The Majesty of Colors is a poetic exploration of alienation and social interaction. Are you a man dreaming you´re a cthonic leviathan? Or a cthonic leviathan dreaming you´re a man? Or are you a player trying to deduce a finite number of endings?
• I wish I were the Moon – There are five potential endings, and to the degree that there is gameplay, it’s a puzzle of a sort, working to uncover all five. It’s also rather sweet, in a vaguely romantic sort of way.
• Build Your Own Woolly Tiny (Mammoth) – Following in the footsteps of the Tinysaur, the Woolly Tiny is a miniature woolly mammoth skeleton. Completed, he stands about 3/4 an inch tall and an inch long. He’s seen here storming my laptop, trying to get to the freezer.
• Scratching at Cardboard – Scratching at Cardboard: Poetry & Short Stories Selected as the Best of the Whittaker Prize 2008
• Keyboard cemetery – Keyboard cemetery by Paul Chan. It is a physical referent to Alternumerics, a work on fonts that explores the relationship between language and interactivity by transforming the simple computer font into an art form that explores the fissure between what we write and what we mean.
• Floating Island Sculptures – 3D Art by Markus Hofko (GALLERY) – 3D replicas of miniature pieces of land and the imagined life on them. It seems that sometimes things make more sense when seen in smaller scales.
• Betty Pepper – Home – A strand of humour runs through Betty’s work using word games, hidden messages and secrets. The work features ‘grown-up’ interests, but they are treated with a child-like attitude.
• Recursive Generation — The Technium – Progress, intelligence, and life itself are all fueled at the fundamental level by bootstrapping, self-creation, autopoeis, auto-genesis — all names for recursive organization.
• The Video-Game Programmer Saving Our 21st-Century Souls – Jason Rohrer’s solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love
• Quotes on Experimenting, Writing, Art and Life | Confident Writing – Some quotes on experimenting.

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• The Book Design Review – I’ve always imagined any Silicon Valley complex full of faceless, like-minded programming drones, and I assume that’s what most other people imagine as well. So, it’s not a far stretch of the imagination to go with pixilated peeps.”
• Playpen » Blog Archive » Playing Word Games in Blog Comments – Word-association and other games going on in the comments of Fail Blog posts.
• 100 Must-See Art Blogs (of Every Form) | Art Career – These blogs can help keep you in the loop and provide inspiration for art of just about any kind from illustration to performance art so you don’t miss out on a single opportunity.
• lines and colors :: a blog about drawing, painting, illustration, comics, concept art and other visual arts » Larry Roibal – Roibal’s blog is often devoted to portraits of another sort, chronicling his practice of sketching character studies of people currently in the news directly on newspaper articles about those people.
• http://www.boingboing.net/2008/11/25/trainset-in-a-pocket.html – Pocket-watch that’s also a miniature train set
• Matt and Fred the Moose « Cardboard Safari – Moose Head by Cardboard Safari. It comes flat-packed and you assemble it yourself.

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