Curating Twitter: Three Hand-Picked Must-Follows

Because #followfriday is insufficient, props are to be given, and we like Big Words.

Twitter is quickly evolving into a superb way to discover fascinating content you normally wouldn’t have, by following interesting people who tweet with great editorial curation. The key, of course, is exercising your own curatory judgment in identifying said interesting people. And since we’ve been in the business of sparing you unnecessary curatory work since 2006, here’s some help — 3 incredible Twitter personas on whom we have a massive, butterflies-in-the-brain culture-crush.

NICK BILTON

Nick Bilton may work at a pillar of traditional media — The New York Times, to be exact — but his interests are closer to what we like to call enlightened futurism: Cultural and technological innovation of the most compelling kind. You can count on him for a steady stream of fascination across technology, new-age publishing, media, data visualization and miscellaneous finds of cultural relevance.

Nick may tweet infrequently, but when he does, it’s quality stuff.

Stats:

• Followers: 3,072
• Following: 342
• Tweets/day: 0.8

BBH LABS

Underwritten by Mel Exon and Ben Malbon, @BBHLabs is the Twitter outpost of — you guessed it — NY-and-London-based neo-agency BBH Labs.

These guys just “get it” — “it” being all the diverse incarnations of the business of ideas, from design to advertising to social media to interactive wizardry. Mostly, they seem to share our belief that the future of the marketing and advertising industry is not in the pushing of product but in the pulling of ideas — from innovators, from artists, from various cultural agents who pursue their own passions that may just so happen to make for great marketing.

You can count on @BBHLabs for a variety of creative explorations, but especially for bleeding-edge developments across data visualization and crowdsourcing.

Stats:

• Followers: 2,888
• Following: 802
• Tweets/day: 3.6

CHRIS ANDERSON

If you’ve been reading Brain Pickings, you’re well familiar with TED and thus with Chris Anderson — TED’s brilliant curator but oh-so-much-more.

Unlike most people who tweet as the “public face” of a big organization or institution (sorry, @SamsungMobileUS), Chris goes well beyond simply promoting TED’s (already fascinating) content and actually walks the walk of what TED stands for — ideas worth spreading — sharing brilliant ones across all facets of culture: Design, art, sustainability, technology, social media, philanthropy and miscellaneous curiosity about the world.

Chris also writes The Untweetable — a roomier outpost for insight that can’t be contained in 140 characters. There, you’ll find anything from the continuation of compelling, heated Twitter discussions to bonus content beyond Twitter to original social media experiments.

He comes with our highest stamp of approval — a rare combination of superb editorial judgment, compelling cultural curiosity and, to use a TEDism, incredible moral imagination.

Stats:

• Followers: 100,422
• Following: 269
• Tweets/day: 5.6

Photographic Time Machine

How to tear the space-time continuum with your bare hands and a camera lens.

The transformative power of photography is unquestionable — powerful images can move us emotionally, intellectually and morally. Now, it can also move us across space and time — here are three fascinating photographic projects that do just that.

SIEGE OF LENINGRAD COMPOSITES

Thanks to Google Translate, we understand this project has to do with the 65th anniversary of the Siege of Leningrad — perhaps the biggest military operation fiasco for the Axis powers in WWII. To commemorate the occasion, Russian artist Sergey Larenkov created phenomenal composite images of Leningrad, today’s Saint Petersburg, placing the dramatic events of the Siege in their contemporary context.

The images are a stride-stopping revelation of the scars WWII left, both physical and cultural, reminding us just how much more than architectural restoration it has taken for a healing process to begin.

LOOKING INTO THE PAST

We love seeing one creative project inspire another that plays off of it — a testament to the infectious power of ideas. And that’s why we love Jason Powell’s Looking Into The Past project, inspired by something you may remember from issues past: Michael Hughes’ Souvenirs.

Powell takes historical photographs from The Library of Congress digital archive (another innovative effort we love), prints them out, and holds them up against their respective modern-day location.

From the capital’s architectural icons to the quiet streets of small-town America, the project invites us into a fascinating cultural time machine.

If you find yourself infectiously inspired to tear the space-time continuum, you can contribute your own photographic time capsules to the Flickr group Powell created for the project.

NYC GRID 1961 VS. 2009

A strong city ages so gracefully that despite the colossal changes in the context of its era, the city’s own character remains an unchanged cultural pillar. That’s exactly the kind of vibe you’ll get glimpsing through images of the world’s biggest cosmopolitan icon — New York City — taken in 1961 and 2009.

This time capsule captures our technological and cultural evolution — from cars to fashion to outdoor advertising — yet there’s something oddly comforting in knowing that no matter how all these elements change, the city remains this unchanging force that keeps us centered.

Explore the full collection over at NYC Grid.

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.

Paper Whimsy: Top 5 Artists

The best thing to die for if you’re a tree, or what Darwin has to do with the visual scent of winter.

Let’s get one thing straight. We aren’t fans of “pointless paper” — we take our toilet paper recycled, our notes digital, and our magazines online. And while the waste of paper is frowned upon around here, its artistic uses are a whole different story. Here are 5 fascinating instances of paper-centric creativity.

YULIA BRODSKAYA

Russian-born, UK-based artist Yulia Brodskaya is a creative force to be reckoned with.

Her meticulously detailed, brilliantly crafted paper typography is unlike anything else we’ve seen. Not coincidentally, clients like Wired, Starbucks, Nokia, The New York Times Magazine, and many more seem to share our sentiment — Brodskaya’s work has graced the covers of various top-tier magazines and has appeared in multiple ad campaigns by the world’s leading creative agencies.

For us, it’s just a testament to the fact that you can take something utterly mundane, douse it in your unique brand of creativity, and transform it into something utterly original.

ALEX MERZ

This has to be the most innovative fragrance advertising we’ve ever seen.

Swiss visual communication student Adrian Merz decided to capture the essence of the fragrance Winter 1972 in an elaborate kit that comes with every 100ml bottle of the perfume. In it, there’s a poster that unfolds into a room transformed into a whimsical winterscape composed of thousands of white Post-It notes.

Adrian actually created the scene in his own living room — an undertaking just as laborious as you’d imagine it to be. But the end result is nothing short of phenomenal, both visually compelling and conceptually brilliant.

See more of the impressive making-of, and never look at a Post-It the same way again.

HELEN MUSSELWHITE

UK-based artist Helen Musselwhite has the imaginative prowess of a brilliant art director and the hands of a skilled craftsman. Her hand-cut paper sculptures are as impactful as they are visually stunning, drawing you into intricate and whimsical scenes that take on a life of their own.

Each sculpture has at least 4 layers of different-colored paper, assembled on top of each other to give the image dimension.

You can order some of Helen’s artwork online — the one tricky thing about appreciating paper art from a digital distance is that you lose out on all the rich tactile and dimensional detail of the piece.

via Design*Sponge

YUKEN TERUYA

We’ve always had an odd fascination with toilet paper rolls. Unfortunately, we never did much with it. But Japanese artist Yuken Teruya did.

In his signature style of taking everyday objects and transforming them into works of art reflecting on contemporary culture, Teruya creates intricate trees without adding or removing anything, just by cutting silhouettes into the paper and folding them out — a conceptual critique of contemporary consumerism and our tendency to add more to our lives while taking away from nature.

Teruya also works with paper bags, crafting objects of visual irony by juxtaposing the very resources that consumerism depletes with its quintessential symbol — the shopping bag.

via BOOM

PETER CALLESEN

Most of us don’t see A4 paper. To us, it’s just a carrier for whatever message is typed and printed on it. Not so for artist Peter Callesen, who has a special relationship with the materiality of A4 paper — a literal tabula rasa, each neutral and unassuming sheet allows him to create paper sculptures brimming with romance, tragedy and offbeat humor.

The sculptures are an exploration of probability — what the paper could be, how it could expand into the space surrounding it.

The negative and absent 2 dimensional space left by the cut, points out the contrast to the 3 dimensional reality it creates, even though the figures still stick to their origin without the possibility of escaping. In that sense there is also an aspect of something tragic in many of the cuts.

See more of Callesen’s creations and revel in the artistic potential of your office space.

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.

Sound Meets Image: Visual Tributes to Music

The world’s most international passport, why cassettes are the new Buddhism, and what Thom Yorke has to do with motion typography.

We love music. We love art. Naturally, we love seeing the two meet and make out. After last week’s Meta-Vinyl Creativity, we’re on a mission to dig up creative projects that pay visual tribute to everything music stands for, both aesthetically and conceptually. Here are our top three finds.

RAM FM

To celebrate the culture-crossing, border-blind power of music, Palestinian and Israeli radio station RAM FM channeled its slogan, Music has no boundaries, through a brilliant visual metaphor — artist portraits “painted” with travel stamps.

It’s one of those rare concepts that you instantly get — not merely because the campaign creative captures the positioning brief so wonderfully, but also because you can simply relate to it on a personal level. We certainly can — what better way to live vicariously, to connect and converse, than through music?

RAM FM is actually known as Peace Radio and serves a greater social purpose — to serve as a cultural bridge between the people of Israel and Palestine, through the most universal social glue there is: Music. Which makes us love the campaign on yet another level.

Out of Gitam BBDO, Tel-Aviv.

via Abduzeedo

GHOST IN THE MACHINE

Non-traditional media artist iri5 works with old books, playing cards, magazines, credit cards and other everyday miscellany to create compelling, double-take-requiring artwork. Her Ghost in the Machine series uses recycled cassette tapes to create phenomenal portraits of musicians from their original cassettes.

The project is inspired by the philosophical sentiment that the body is but a package for the spirit.

I imagine we are all, like cassettes, thoughts wrapped up in awkward packaging.

via NoiseAddicts

MUSIC MAKES US

The GRAMMYs. What a cultural icon. While it’s easy to dismiss them as an entertainment industry popularity contest, we like to think of them as a way of honoring the music that inspires, impacts and moves the greatest number of people.

This year, The Recording Academy wanted to capture this very sentiment in a fully integrated campaign that asks a simple yet profound question: Do we make great music or does great music make us?

It’s no secret we’re big fans of motion typography, so we love both the concept and the brilliant execution.

Out of TBWA\Chiat\Day.

Donating = Loving

Bringing you (ad-free) Brain Pickings takes hundreds of hours each month. If you find any joy and stimulation here, please consider becoming a Supporting Member with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a good dinner:

♥ $7 / month♥ $3 / month♥ $10 / month♥ $25 / month

You can also become a one-time patron with a single donation in any amount:

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.