What alligators from 1972 have to do with the visual culture of modern design.
In 1972, iconic illustrator Ed Emberley published Make a World — a seemingly simple yet tremendously influential 32-page book, filled with 400 priceless illustrations that taught children how to draw anything and everything, from alligators to zeppelins. It shaped the visual culture of an entire generation of artists, designers and casual art-dabblers, democratizing aesthetic perception and practice.
This year, a collective of dedicated enthusiasts is working on Make a World: The Film — an independent documentary about the life and magic of Ed Emberley.
One of the project’s goals is to crowdsource stories, drawings and sketches inspired by Emberley’s work — so if you have one, email it to the filmmakers.
And like any grassroots art and culture project, the film could use some help from like-minded Emberley evangelists — you can get involved by donating money or your professional services, support the film by buying one of these gorgeous t-shirts from their store, and follow the project on Twitter.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
What a 1950′s house has to do with 125 days in Berlin and the weather in Sarajevo.
Over the past couple of years, we’ve seen a number of artists experimenting with data visualization at the intersection of digital and analog — you may recall Nadeem Haidary and his In-Formed series of physical data art. But Dutch artist Willem Besselink plays on a whole different level.
In his latest project, RE:ID, he tracked the movement of the 12,500 visitors to Rotterdam’s Museumnight, then visualized the data in real-time both online and as a large-scale public installation. The physical visualization was built out of bricks and cement on a public square, with full-blown construction equipment including a churning concrete mixer, red and white tape, and a crew of 10 construction workers working in near-real-time. Cement piles reflected the changing amount of visitors, “updated” every 15 minutes, and brick walls indicated the most popular Museumnight routes throughout the city.
Besselink has a long hisotry of physical data installations. In 2004, he exhibited 16 Days in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina — a cubic grid of 16×16 nylon wires, with one axis visualizing his pulse recorded in 30-minute intervals over the course of 16 days, intersected with temperature variations in the city over that period of time on the other axis. (This pulse visualization is somewhat reminiscent of Jonathan Harris’ 2007 project, The Whale Hunt.) The resulting 3-dimensional installation was suspended in mid-air in the gallery space.
Timelines offers an ambitious visualization juxtaposing how one specific house was used in the 1950′s, and how it is going to be used in the future, after a large-scale neighborhood renovation project.
Berlin Rotterdam is an abstract comparison of the scale of the two cities. During his 125-day stay in Berlin, Besselink recorded his position in the city in fixed intervals, then visualized these time and location data with glass beads, hanging from a map of Berlin suspended on the ceiling, down towards a map of Rotterdam laid out on the floor, moving closer to Rotterdam as the days progressed.
Explore the rest of Besselink’s data sculptures — while it may be tempting to dismiss this as cool-for-coolness’-sake postmodernist experimentation, it bespeaks a deeper cultural concern: Our restless need to make sense of all the abstract data that surrounds us, to make it more digestible and graspable by making it more tangible, more physical, more real. And art has always been a potent vehicle for exorcising our collective restlessness over the cultural concerns of the day.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
What liquor stores have to do with the advancement of the digital arts.
Last week, we saw artist-explorer Jonathan Harris’ profound reflection on the current state of the digital world. But as digital culture grows on, we need more explicit, concentrated efforts to make sense of it all and its ever-evolving relationship with the arts. Enter GAFFTA, the Gray Area Foundation for the Arts — a visionary Bay Area nonprofit dedicated to building social consciousness through digital culture, based on the principles of openness, collaboration, and resource sharing. (Principles validated all the more strongly as Firefox, the quintessential epitome of this movement, turns 5 today.)
GAFFTA‘s programs explore the creative intersection of art, design, sound, and technology — a celebration of the interdisciplinary cross-pollination of ideas we’re so fond of around here.
The world is experiencing an explosion of technological development that presents us with inspiring opportunities and challenges. While the ability to rapidly produce and consume information has fueled quantum leaps in innovation, its abundance can also disrupt our focus and fragment our consciousness. By funding and curating projects that offer insightful perspective on the information of our age, using the technologies of our time, GAFFTA provides a means to decode and humanize the evolving global database.
GAFFTA was born out of the realization that, beyond a limited number of mainstream museums, there is no cohesive public space for exhibiting and fostering dialogue around experimental digital art. Eventually, Gray Area took over 7 storefronts in San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, previously used as a porn arcade, liquor store and bar, and transformed them into a Media Arts Center populated by galleries, studios and office spaces.
It’s no coincidence that the ever-amazing Aaron Koblin is on the GAFFTA team, populated by equally incredible creative visionaries and artist-technologists.
GAFFTA‘s inaugural exhibition, OPEN, opened last month and runs through November 18, highlighting work from several digital art pioneers spanning a multitude of formats and techniques. And while such events and workshops are no doubt a fantastic leap forward for digital art, we’d love to see GAFFTA’s mission extended to the broader digital community in a portal or social network that transcends geography and allows for the wider cross-pollination of ideas.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
Brain Pickings has a free weekly interestingness digest. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week's best articles. Here's an example. Like? Sign up.
donating = loving
Brain Pickings remains ad-free and takes hundreds of hours a month to research and write, and thousands of dollars to sustain. If you find any joy and value in it, please consider becoming a Member and supporting with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:
You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:
In 1972, iconic illustrator Ed Emberley published Make a World — a seemingly simple yet tremendously influential 32-page book, filled with 400 priceless illustrations that taught children how to draw anything and everything, from alligators to zeppelins. It shaped the visual culture of an entire generation of artists, designers and casual art-dabblers, democratizing aesthetic perception and practice.
Psst, we’ve launched a fancy weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.
In his latest project, 
