We traded our signatures for passwords, but all the personality and thought behind those epistles has been diluted into shared fonts and a send button. The project “Signatures Exchanged for Passwords” by Donna Rumble-Smith takes a nostalgic look at the waning use of handwriting in the digital age and the loss of intimacy and emotion that accompanies the use of digital text over the handwritten word.
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. No matter how metaphysical or symbolic it might be, make no mistake about it: it will cut through flesh like a thousand razor blades. People will bleed there, and you will bleed too. Hot, red blood. You’ll catch that blood in your hands, your own blood and the blood of others.
And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
Words: Haruki Murakami (from Kafka on the Shore)
Art: Ori Gersht
Mark Andrew Webber is a printmaker and graphic designer who specializes in traditional linocut prints. His Where in the World City Map series consists of linocut maps of Amsterdam, London, New York and now Paris. Webber uses names of places and landmarks to delineate the various areas of a city, much the way traditional maps use streets and geographical markers.
Artist: markandrewwebber.com
Way back in 1949, LIFE photographer Gjon Mili visited Picasso. He showed him some of his photographs of light patterns formed by a skater’s leaps, obtained by fixing tiny lights on the points of the skates and, inspired, the two created these photographs of Picasso ‘drawing’ with a small flashlight in a dark room.
There’s more to be found in LIFE gallery
“I want to ride to the ridge where the west commences
And gaze at the moon till I lose my senses
And I can’t look at hobbles and I can’t stand fences
Don’t fence me in
Poppa, don’t you fence me in”
Looking at the soft and tender, yet strong and powerful fence from the Dutch design house “Demakersvan“ this Bing Crosby song almost immediately popped in my head. This fence looks so wonderful but make no mistake it’s still a fence, meant to lock you up, like a jealous lover.
Still it is great to see how something which was meant purely functional can also be beautiful. Rejecting the throwaway nature and sameness in modern production, trying to retrieve that uniqueness that once existed among our things. At the same time, also try to balance the practice with possible industrial manufacture, so as to make the products available to the public.
Website: www.demakersvan.com
When the original petting farm burned down in the early 80’s 70F Architecture was asked to design a new one on the exact location and the remaining foundation. They came up with this gorgeous and animal-friendly design.
The upper half of the building features an open facade system allowing the wind to ventilate the whole farm continuously. Half of the building is stable; the other half contains working space and facilities for visitors.
The farm has no doors but relies on shutters to usher animals and people in and out. These shutters will open manually or automatically in the morning, reacting on the upcoming sun, as they will close again at the end of the day, when the sun goes down. The animals will easily learn to be inside again on time, if they like. At night, the building becomes a light beacon in the park.
‘One could say that the box, a building extensively reduced in aesthetic violence, wakes up and goes to sleep every day.’a href=”
They say that just before you enter heaven you’ll see your life pass before your eyes. Usually imagined as a fast-forward flip book of sentimental still images: birth, parents, school, holiday, first girlfriend, first sex, job, wife, kids, etc. and all the little things in between, summating a totality of meagre existence in a split second flash.
Yeondoo Jung, however, is a man who likes to take a bit of time with things, savour every precious moment, sit back and enjoy the ride.
Documentary Nostalgia is a one-take one-chance-only performance shot in real time. No stops, no pauses. This is Jung’s magnificent autobiography. Birthday party clown tricks, slapstick humour, cartoon exaggeration, and the clumsy ‘special effects’ of silent movie cliche; Jung draws from all the low-fi mysteries of childhood delight to reconstruct his own reality.
Not as it was, but as he prefers to remember it, a make-shift mythology in its conception, wide-eyed, innocent, and confounding.
He offers the possibility of not one existence, but many: to be urban and rural, contemporary or ancient, Eastern or Western, to be anywhere or anything at all. Everyone can do this simply by daring to dream.
Artist: Yeondoo Jung
Meter-high heads in baroque style, men with streaming locks and women with expressive faces, scattered around as fragments in space. They evoke associations of a battle having been fought between the gods and the titans, the remains of which have now become visible.
The work shows a conflict, an inner battle, but also the result of aggression; figures are tied together, they seem to be startled, sometimes wounded, and we occasionally see fragments of bodies indicating that the battle can also be fought at the level of life and death.
With Javier Marín, art is emotion, an emotion that balances on the edge of the shocking reality of today full of fear and horror on one hand and a world of ideal beauty on the other, the edge between the vigour of youth and the decline of old-age.
Website: www.javiermarin.com
The street where I live used to be quite a boring street until Florentijn Hofman decided to do something about that. He applied a layer of only 2 micron of blue paint onto one of the most unseen blocks of houses in my street and it became Rotterdam’s most photographed one. His redecorating made people start looking again at what was and maybe even think about what they will get in return.
Florentijn Hofman is not an average gallery-exhibited artist. The world is a playground and he likes to play. A giant rubber duck, too big to fit into anyone’s bath and impossible to ignore, floating in the Loire river in France, a 12 meter tall thatched musk rat reclining against a life-sized cottage and his latest: super sized stuffed animals.. All integrating, intriguing and interactive installations. To amaze and make life more fun.
*The blue houses in my street are unfortunately demolished, my street is now boring again.
Website: www.florentijnhofman.nl
Tea Time by Freaks United/ is a handmade porcelain high tea set based on characters. Build up to be a family each piece has it’s own identity. With their character-like look they seem to be living their lives on the table like soldiers in a little nation. But what is a high tea without a cake? And that can’t be an ordinary cake. No! we’re looking for a serious slice of camp so let me introduce you to De Taart van mijn Tante (cake from my Auntie). These cakes looks like something Dame Edna would run if in charge of Barbie’s bakery. This haute patisserie is art house kitsch all rolled into an amazing display of architectural wonders made out of icing and sponge cake.
