Artist Spotlight: Stephan Zirwes Aerial Photography

Soccer field species, abstracting nature, and why you aren’t nearly as big as you think.

We’re aware we don’t go easy on superlatives here. But German photographer Stephan Zirwes is of the most deserving kind — words like incredible, phenomenal and fantastic are all but an understatement of his unlike-anything-else aerial magic.

One series, fields, explores the diverse “species” of soccer fields.

Leisure takes a look at the landscape of our free time.

Industry puts into perspective the vast scale of our man-made environment through geometric images that are aesthetically stunning, but somehow unsettling at the same time.

In construction, Zirwes takes a birds-eye look at the making of said man-made scale.

Leisure II presents a curious intersection of the above series — the unusual places people choose as oases of relaxation and recreation. If you look very closely at each image, you’ll find someone sprawling on a beach towel amidst the industrial clutter.

But perhaps our favorite series of his is titled snow — it abstracts nature with such simplicity and beauty that each image is more akin to a textured art canvas than a photograph.

There’s something incredibly humbling about seeing ourselves, from 10,000 feet, as the tiny figurines on a miniature set of life — a potent antidote to our grandeur-obsessed culture.

For the full Stephan Zirwes experience, we recommend fullscreen immersion.

via VSL

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Globe-Trotting Goodness

The big picture gets bigger, P2P filesharing gets legal, why the Japanese are better smilers than us, what Kentucky and Lithuania have in common, and how to replace the White House with a potato.

EARTH IS IN THE AIR

Today, we tour the world of ideas by touring the world of, well, the world — and we start our cultural journey in France, with photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

His entire body of work comes from an incredibly inspired humanistic and planetarian perspective, but we’re particularly taken with his project Earth From Above, a collection of 500,000 breathtaking aerial photographs shot across 100 countries on 6 continents. (You may recall our fascination with aerial photography from the Birdseye Visionaire special issue a while back.)

Each photograph in Earth From Above includes a caption by an expert on sustainable development, making the bigger picture all the clearer: the world is a precious, fragile being whose beauty and heritage we must try our hardest to preserve.

In Holland, for example, chemicals have seeped into the water and are causing a deterioration of the soil, endangering the 5-century-old tradition of flowering bulbs and The Netherlands’ astonishing crop of over 800 tulip varieties.

In 2005, Yann Arthus-Bertrand founded GoodPlanet.org, a nonprofit aimed at promoting and educating about sustainable development across the world through various creative projects.

Our favorite: the Alive Exhibition, a collection of stunning photographs that raise awareness about biodiversity and the need to look beyond our own species in caring for the planet.

MUSIC GOES DUTCH

Next, we move a little north towards those tulip-covered lands of Holland, where we take a look at up-and-coming Dutch indie rock band Silence Is Sexy.

Besides loving their sound — it’s distinctly unique, yet somehow makes us think of what would happen if Thom Yorke sang to the beats of Coldplay with the lyrical sensibility of Vampire Weekend — we have tremendous respect for their industry-revolutionizing choice of distribution.

We’ve long been singing the same old song about how the music industry’s business model is undergoing massive tectonic shifts. Now, Silence Is Sexy are joining our choir — their new album, This Ain’t Hollywood, was just released as a free, legal download on peer-to-peer torrent network Mininova.

Mininova actually has a powerful, free Content Distribution service aimed at doing just that: Helping indie artists and filmmakers discover new audiences, and helping musicologists discover up-and-coming acts.

Take that, Steve Jobs.

via Mininova Blog

KEYBOARD SAYS CHEESE

In honor of brilliant Japanese director Nagi Noda, who passed away at the pitiful age of 35 last week, we bring you a more obscure piece of Japanese culture you probably never knew about: Japanese smileys. These little weirdos are Japan’s answer to the sideways smileys that we all know (and often abuse), invented by Scott Fahlman in 1982.

Unlike those, Japanese smileys are read upright and their method of interpretation has a stronger focus on the expression of the eyes — which makes a lot of sense, since we remember from behavioral psych class that much of human emotion is indicated by the muscles surrounding the eye, just like we’re wired to distinguish a genuine smile — also known as a Duchenne smile — from a fake one through the presence (or absence) of those small crows-feet wrinkles in the outer corner of the eyes.

Most Japanese smileys can be created with a Western keyboard and your usual UTF-8 character set. For ones you can start texting to your friends immediately, check out this list. Meanwhile, a few of our favorites:

(^_^) Hi

(#^_^#) Blushing

(-¡-)y-~~~~ Smoke a cigarette

((+_+)) Ummmh

o(^-^o)(o^-^)o o(^-^o)(o^-^)o Dancing

(^_^)/~~ Bye

via Google Blogoscoped

ACCENT ON THE U

Are feeling all worldly and cultured yet? Don’t let it get to your head — let the good folks of Language Trainers Group show you who’s who with the Accent Game, an interactive quiz that puts your knowledge of different accents to the test: Folks from across the globe read Rudyard Kipling to you, then ask you to guess where they come from.

It’s harder than you think — take it from us and our ego-devastating score. Think you know a Finish accent from a Norwegian one, or Lithuanian from Estonian?

Don’t think you’ll get away with just the country, either. After each correct guess, you’re drilled on the country region the person comes from — Kentucky vs. Chicago may be on the easy side, but let’s see you do Cape Town vs. Pretoria or York vs. Birmingham.

And if you’re reaching for the map just reading this, shame on you and your middle school geography teacher.

via Very Short List

THE WORLD IN THE PALM OF YOUR HAND

We’ll wrap up with an ultimate culture-crosser: Since 1999, London-born, Berlin-based photographer Michael Hughes has been trekking the world and dabbling in the simple wonders of perception — his collection Souvenirs playfully replaces some of the world’s greatest landmarks with their toy replicas using nothing but a camera and some strategic perspective.

In much of the collection, Hughes’ subtle and not-so-subtle snark comes through — like the image of the Trabant car model, a brand synonymous with all the ills that lurked behind the Iron Curtain, seemingly bursting through the remains of the Berlin Wall.

Souvenirs is part of an ongoing book project, so we’ll be sure to keep an eye on Hughes. Meanwhile, we got the sudden urge to go photo-replace the White House with a potato.

via Very Short List

Birdseye Visionaire

How a paraglider, a camera, and a blooming field of lavender will change the way you see the world.

THE WORLD AS WE NEVER SEE IT

Ecology. Our collective discourse on the subject ranges from hipster t-shirts to scare tactics by various nonprofit apocalypticists. But rarely are we faced with a gripping eye-opener that uses the beautiful rather than the frightening and ugly to challenge how we think about the future of the planet.

Bulgarian photographer Alexander “Sasho” Ivanov does just that in his stunning 360° BULGARIA exhibition, a collection of breathtaking aerial photographs taken from a paraglider over the course of 8 years.

The project aims to awaken our emotional connection to the environment and remind us what exactly we’re losing as we’re squandering our planet.

The 58-year-old photographer’s inspiration is movingly honest and raw:

I was born here. I grew up here, together with the grasses, the stones, the trees, the rivers and the winds. They taught me who I am, they showed me how to see, hear and feel, but most importantly – what it means to love and be free. This nature is a part of me, a part of my memory of myself.

We find the collection powerfully humbling. The birdseye take reminds us of our own smallness, of what a tiny fraction of the grand natural equation humans are and how full of marvel the world beyond us is — a world we’re slowly losing as we continue to stomp our little feet on every fiber of it.

The message is loud and beautifully clear: it’s time to rise above our petty sense of entitlement and look — really look — at the big picture. Because, unless we do, its magnificent vibrant color will continue to fade into the man-inflicted grayness.

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