Ben Simon is an artist in every sense of the word — part musician, part wood carver, part mixed media sculptor, part something else entirely. He makes incredible, crazy guitars and performs with them on the New York subway, blending the charismatic quirk of a street musician with the art world street cred of gallery-worthy custom work.

Today, we sit down with Ben to ask him a few questions about the inspiration behind his extravagant instruments, his creative process, and how ordinary people react to his extraordinary art.

Hey Ben, tell us a bit about your background, what inspires you, and your brand of creative curiosity.

The giant extincted lizard thing. Looking at the world from different locations in outer space. Racism in the USA, learning to relax… My family moved around a lot when I was a kid, and when I finally made it through high school I continued to move. I guess I can identify with the mover. I don’t really know. I’m inspired by God’s light.

I’m working toward opening an instrument building program for kids who have some extra types of needs (kids with nothing). I’m inspired by something if I think it can be useful to an emotionally tormented teenage kid. For more information about this, please send me a note.

We’re all about the cross-pollination of disciplines and arts here. How did you arrive at this beautiful intersection of sculpture, woodwork and music?

I guess it happened naturally. I got a job at a custom woodworking shop in 2005 where I was allowed to come back to the shop after hours and work on my own stuff. I went to an arts high school and made some amazing friends that have always been a part of what I do. It’s not any different than anything else. I’ve been free and blessed to make stuff any way I’d like.

Lots of people never have a chance, but my life has been filled with chances. Wide open spaces to explore. If I died and my soul is lost, it’s nobody’s fault but mine.

How long does one of your guitars take to make, on average?

About two months. Each one has a learning curve. I’ve been woodworking for five years, so there is still tons that I don’t know. There are some tools that I don’t have that would make the process smoother. Not rushing is nice. Moving slow around the power tools is important. Depending on what the design is, I could probably finish in three weeks.

'This is the first guitar I built. It has about 15 different types of wood and was built in an improvisational style. I built some cutting boards that looked like the body on this guitar. The guitar has GFS pickups, a Hipshot trilogy bridge and a built in digital delay. All kinds of exotic and domestic woods.'

You play your marvelous instruments on the New York subway. What kind of music do you play? How do people react?

For a while I was playing one called “Guitar2d2″ that features a built-in circuit bent Yamaha keyboard and Boss drum machine, 3 amps and a few effects pedals. It has 5 speakers and is battery-powered. I improvise a lot and play songs. People often have funny reactions. Probably because “Guitar2d2″ is so big and different-looking.

We are making a documentary right now: In the film, I’ll be building a guitar dressed a bit like a Star Trek character, complete with voice changer. Then, the plan is to play that guitar on the street in the costume and sell the DVD. This will probably get some funny reactions.

This is hard, but let’s try it: Your all-time favorite visual artist and favorite musician…

Van Gogh and Beethoven I guess.

There’s so many people that make awesome stuff. I like this fellow: casperelectronics.com. I cried at an Ornette Coleman concert in 2008 because it was so beautiful. I go to see Bob Dylan every chance I get. I’ve been listening to a lot of Sun Ra. There are great artists everywhere — most we will never hear of. Ever heard of slide guitarist David Tronzo? Didn’t think so. We’re talking about the most amount of vibrance a human is capable of vibrating. Every color. All the rhythms.

My Dad would probably never call himself an artist, but he has built in his house some of the most detailed H.O. scale model trains around. He did this whole scene of Boston circa 1958. I’ve witnessed him put thousand of hours into this and other layouts over the years. His work has been in Model Railroader a few times, but mostly it just sits by itself.

I feel like this is common, especially in people. Often when you meet a new person, you enter into a world containing various amounts of anonymous art work. I wonder: What is art work? How much can one look at? What will be found?

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We’ve already seen artists make magic out of materials like paper, cardboard and even toilet paper rolls. One related creative trend we’ve been seeing lately is that of book sculptures. (We wonder if it has to do with the speedy demise of print as artists try to find new ways of engaging with these analog cultural artifacts whose core function digital platforms are deeming obsolete.) Today, we spotlight five of our favorite book sculptors.

NICHOLAS GALANIN

Artist Nicholas Galanin‘s What Have We Become? series offers incredible, haunting 3D portraits hand-carved out of several-thousand-page tomes.

A North American indigenous artist, Galanin’s work is inspired by Native American culture and reflects a certain layered authenticity difficult to capture in words.

PAUL OCTAVIOUS

Paul Octavious takes the concept of book sculptures quite literally — his typographic creations, sculpted out of piles of books, are a brilliant example of richness in simplicity.

Both playful and sophisticated, defying the laws of physics, the sculptures are a wonderful celebration of everything a good book stands for: imagination, balance, and delightful escapism from the constraints of reality.

BYGG STUDIO

For the ultimate meta-conceptual book art, look no further Royal College of Art graduates Hanna Nilsson, Sofia Østerhus and Markus Bergström, a.k.a. Bygg Studio, who have created an entire alphabet out of stacked books.

As bonified typography geeks, we’d love to see the series turned into an actual, usable font.

SU BLACKWELL

The great gift of literature is its ability to make incredible scenes spring up from the barren black-and-white landscape of the printed page and come to life before your eyes. British artist Su Blackwell does pretty much the same.

From Pandora’s box to Alice to Margaret and Marjorie, Blackwell’s brand of storytelling plays on stories we know and love but tells them in infinitely imaginative new ways.

The intricate, whimsical scenes reconcile serenity and urgency in a palpably delicate way, almost as though they set free the characters and settings trapped inside the books for centuries.

BRIAN DETTMER

Brian Dettmer is a surgical sculptor with a penchant for the esoteric, obscure and near-obsolete. His remarkable book sculptures are meticulously carved into vintage volumes using a variety of tools — Xacto knives, surgical clamps, pliers, tweezers — and are painstakingly cut away one page at a time.

From atlases to dictionaries to paperbacks to encyclopedias, his artistic ingenuity — as well as his scalpel — knows no boundaries.

An intersection of pop art, ancient craft and scientific fascination, Dettermer’s creations are the epitome of architectured whimsy, precisely measured to tell a story yet artfully flamboyant in a way that makes the story wildly captivating.

Rather than trying to subvert things and impose his own message, Dettemer aims to play on and reveal hidden undertones of the books themselves through his sculptures.

I try to reveal some of the undertones and unconscious stories books tell. If I’m working with a book that was full of information, the book becomes a sculpture and the information can become concrete poetry within the sculpture. With certain books like medical books, the text itself can become a metaphor for love and relationships rather than strictly the physical body. A lot of images and different types of field-specific language can be exposed in different ways to make it more universal.

Print may be dead, but its ghost is a thing of beauty.

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If you didn’t catch us raving about it on Twitter earlier this week, here’s your chance to catch up on this brilliant piece of work by directing collective Minivegas — a virtual gallery, featuring a visualizer rendering digital sculptures in real time in response to sound and gestures.

The gallery walls are adorned with album artwork of the mp3′s loaded into the visualizer (including the appropriately chosen Daft Punk classic, Technologic), with the music itself driving the shape-shifting mutations of the sculptures. The shapes can also be manipulated with hand-motion using a webcam.

Refreshingly innovative, this work illustrates an exciting intersection of multiple senses and multiple media — a beautiful epitome of the evolution of modern storytelling.

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Cinema history trivia: MacGuffin is a term, allegedly coined by Hitchcock, which stands for a cinematic plot device, most likely on object, whose only purpose and value lie in driving the filmic narrative.

So how would such an object — whose very essence, form and function are defined solely within the context of fictional circumstances — inhabit and relate to the real world? This is exactly what non-traditional product designer Onkar Kular explores with his project The MacGuffin Library.

The objects that he creates are neither products, nor sculptures, nor props, but a strange medley of all three, challenging the way we perceive art and design. They stand somewhat awkward and unsure of themselves, reminiscent, in all their black polymer resin glory, of Frankenstein’s monster.

Each MacGuffin comes with a one-page synopsis of a non-existent screenplay that inspired it. There is a plot for every taste as themes range from futuristic thrillers to midlife crisis dramas.

The exhibition is incredibly engaging since the role of each object is not specified in the adjacent synopses. Endless possibilities of interpretations and lively discussions arise.

Unlike other, more traditional art exhibits, where one sees, nods, and moves on, the enjoyment of The MacGuffin Library lies exclusively in the quantity and quality of the viewer’s own engagement. So go ahead, engage.

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Today, we’re looking at art that blows — literally. Think of this as a niche appendix to our best-of graffiti and socially-conscious street art series a while back, with a nod to the superhero issue. Yep, we’re multi-pronged like that.

D.BILLY

As much as we respect comic book culture, we’ve always wondered what it is exactly about the action illustrations that inspires such unconditional reverence, such loyal followings and such… dedicated… fan conventions. Could it be the unique intersection of visual and sound effects on the printed page, creating a POW! new reality of WURRRG! mixed media and OOH! non-linear perception? Perhaps.

And street artist D.Billy has decided to explore that intersection in our very real reality with his visual representations of sound effects through installations of colorful media like balloons and party steamers.

He works in “found scenes” of urban landscape and, after photographing the finished creations, he leaves the installations on the scene to engage passers-by and inspire a new awareness of the surroundings normally taken for granted.

We love the idea of bringing surreal elements to the most mundane corners of reality, and doing it in a way that plays with how we’re used to experiencing our own senses. Check out D.Billy’s Flickr stream and think about the visual action soundtrack to your own neighborhood. WOWZA!

JOSHUA ALLEN HARRIS

While bursts of color splattered throughout the otherwise mundane environment sure can be stride-stopping, it’s all the more fascinating when the stride-stopping stuff comes from the most mundane of materials. Case in point: artist Joshua Allen Harris, who uses plastic bags and subway vent air to create inflatable sculptures.

Harris has animated anything from a giant ape to a giraffe to the Loch Ness monster to an entire zoo. New York Magazine recently interviewed the artist for a look behind this unique breed of urban surrealism.

The magic of it is that it looks like plain ol’ trash until a train passes underneath, animating the sculptures and bringing entire scenes to life. And since Harris works mostly in the streets of New York, we find his work to be a brilliant, playful way to engage the world’s most notorious intentionally-oblivious pedestrians.

BANKSY IN, BANKSY OUT

Finally, Banksy is outed?

We won’t include a photo here because we think half the fascination of it is in the mystery — leave the man/woman be.

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BEND IT LIKE JAFFEE

The one, the only: Mad Magazine. What greater icon of American humor, political satire and pop culture commentary? The cult pub has been making waves since 1952, but some of its most recognized cultural contributions remain Al Jaffee’s infamous fold-ins.

Now, thanks to The New York Times, they’re available in interactive form, from 1960 to the present. And if there ever was a question of whether history repeats itself, this makes the answer loud and clear: most of the fold-ins are just as relevant today as they were decades ago, liberating history from its own confines.

Take the 1968 election year, when Nixon and Humphrey threw it down like there was no tomorrow, in the midst of a highly politicized war. Forty years later, the atrocities of another war are “turning our stomachs,” and a new generation is just as conflicted about a new war in an equally politically charged climate.

The entertainment business doesn’t seem to have changed for the better, either. In the year of the $2.7 million 30-second Super Bowl commercial, Jaffee’s snark resonates all the more powerfully.

See the full collection for a hefty slurp of history’s irony cocktail.

SIBERIAN COOL

Say what you will of the music industry’s demise, but all this commotion has actually propelled the evolution and diversification of the “indie” music scene. No longer is it all garage bands and acoustic pop and stale teen angst.

Case in point: indie up-and-comer Ghost Away. Their unique brand of alternative sound blends brilliantly sombre vocals with electrically charged instrumentals, fusing in beats that will both hypnotize you and make you wanna move. The getup is part Radiohead, part Junior Boys, part Battles, part something else entirely.

GHOST AWAY – SLOWDRIFT

Siberia, their debut album, is out this week. And as if to claim their place in the music business revolution going on these days, they’re launching the album as a free download. Talk about the ultimate self-publishing empowerment of today’s new media freeconomy — it cost the band close to nothing to record, produce and distribute the album (except, of course, hours of sweat and blood in the studio), and now it’s costing you nothing to experience it.

Get it now and get ready to dance the toldja so dance when Ghost Away make that Rolling Stone cover.

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

Speaking of self-publishing empowerment, we love Scribd: the document-sharing online library that takes information exchange and collaboration to a whole new level. It’s simple: you can upload any docs you like — Microsoft Office stuff, PDF’s, PostScript, OpenOffice, and more — and make them available to the world.

Similarly, you can search and access millions of documents other people uploaded.

Besides offering free unlimited storage (seriously?!), Scribd is the ultimate tool for self-publishing and reaching a wide audience. People use it for anything from backing up office documents, to storing and sharing photo albums, to publishing e-books and indie ‘zines, to collaborating on music chords and more.

And just when you think they couldn’t possibly give you more, there’s Scribd iPaper — a platform that lets you quickly integrate files from Scribt into a website, and you don’t even have to know code. Think of it as embeds on steroids.

In our humble opinion, Scribt is just the tip of the collaborative future iceberg, where information becomes the new social currency and the digitization of data builds a tremendously powerful communal pool of knowledge.

So go ahead, free yourself from the confines of static and introverted desktop software.

ALONG FOR THE RIDE

After last week’s French fusion of documentary and raw indie music, the empire strikes back: we’ve got a British sequel.

The Black Cab Sessions, a Just So Films initiative, shares a similar point of view, namely that venues strip music of its essence. So the project employs a simple concept: for each “session,” an indie band or artist hops in the back of a black cab and plays a song filmed in a single shot, which is then uploaded — completely unedited — for the world to see.

Currently on chapter thirty-five, The Black Cab Sessions have sported some of the best of the The’s, and then some — The Ravonettes, The Kooks, The New Pornographers, Cold War Kids, Spoon, and much, much more.

Our only question: where does the cab actually go?

NO HANGUPS

What is art if not the talent of looking at the mundane and seeing the extraordinary? Sculptor David Mach has just this sort of rare gift. He takes everyday objects like coat hangers, matchsticks and Scrabble pieces, turning them into sculptures, collages and installations that speak artistically, socially and politically.

Mach as been crafting his exquisite matchstick head sculptures and signature wire coat-hanger statues since the early 80′s. But, like a true artist, he spends more time concepting and crafting than tinkering with his new website and uploading visuals. Luckily, you can see the full breadth of his work on the archived old website.

We also dig the passion with which he stands behind his creative vision: Mach speaks freely of the great projects that never happened, which you can find in his Proposals section.

A particularly regrettable non-realization: Sound Wave, a gigantic tidal wave sculptured out of 250 upright pianos, which he conceived for the 25th anniversary of London’s Albert Hall. We feel your pain, Dave, we feel your pain.

WORD MEETS IMAGE, THEY MATE

You may recall the super nifty PicLens from a couple of months ago. Now, we bring you the next big thing in image search: the Flickr Related Tag Browser. The ridiculously sleek app does just what the name implies: lets you search Flickr images by tag, but does it visually in a way that halves the process and doubles the joy of it.

When you do a search, you get a collage of images tagged with that word, but you also get a tag cloud of contextually relevant images. It’s like the app thinks one step ahead for you and generating your next related keyword. You can click each tag in the cloud to sample the resulting images with another collage that pops up in the center.

You can keep scrolling through image results right there in the center collage, or you blow up a specific image thumbnail for a closer look. From there, you can either keep browsing the thumbnails if the image is no good, or click straight through to its Flickrs page to snag it.

The app is the work of freelance interactive designer Felix Turner, a Flash whiz who helped build the now-ubiquitous Brightcove video players.

BINARY FREEDOM

This week’s Untrivia is a different take on data, inspired by a new branch of the “found objects” art genre. We like to call these new digital artists “binary sculptors” — because the found “objects” are sets and patterns of mined data that they use much in the way traditional sculptors use mined ore, transforming the raw material into compelling visual art.

One such remarkable binary sculptor is artist and real-time visual performer Paul Prudence, who uses a software called Daub to project the digital data of a video stream onto a “brush” moving in 3D space, creating a neo-surrealist morphing mesh.

And speaking of video streams and data, it seems like Prudence won’t be out of raw material anytime soon. In February alone, Americans viewed 10.1 billion online videos, up 66% from last year. The average time spent watching web video that month? 204 minutes.

That’s a whole lotta cats falling down toilets.

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