Dedd Pixel

Sweet. The Olympics has an interactive art component! Check out Vectorial Vancouver where you can arrange the lights on display in Vancouver and submit your designed to be played in succession. Participate in anonymous, public, interactive art!

Here’s mine, dedicated to my sweetie.

VIDEOGIOCO by Donato Sansone from Enrico Ascoli – Sound Design on Vimeo.

Includes graphic violence

And here I am just trying to get back into pencils…

a co-worker showed this to me: Autodesk Sketchbook Mobile.

For three bucks? How could I not download it? It’s quite flexible and you can apparently get down to some significant detail with the app. It will take me some time to get used to the interface – there’s a million options – but amazing images can be created.

Download it from iTunes

A while back, I read an article in the newspaper about Denver’s Magnet Mafia, a group of local artists that decorate magnets and stick them up around the metro area. I thought it was an awesome concept and probably would’ve bounded down to join them if I was more socially extroverted.

Graffiti in general is quiet fascinating as it’s simultaneously viewed as both art and a defacement of public property. Though the term ‘graffiti’ usually brings to mind the modern depiction of fat letters on fences and boxcars, it does have roots in the ancient world …I suppose The Life of Brian’s Graffiti Lesson isn’t too out of place.

Check out MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU. It’s graffiti come to life.

To see what’s going on in the world, take a look at Top 50 Graffiti Trends and Counter Culture Art in Q1 2009.

Feel inspired? Try some graffiti in the comfort of your own backyard by growing your own graffiti moss. Think of it as another form of living art.

I’ve gotten some annoying email forwards in my day but sometimes someone blesses you with a true gem. Below are some links to a few of those jewels representing sculpted works made from existing materials.

Ghost in the Machine by iri5.
Uses non-traditional recycled material or ‘another person’s trash’ to create art. In this case, iri5 uses old cassettes and cassette tape to form famous portraits of the musician.

Paper cutout art by Peter Callesen.
Amazingly detailed and creative paper cutout art pieces. This is not from the actual forward because the original email had inline images. Luckily, I was able to find a artist’s website on the web.

This veggie art is cute and creative. This is not the actual forward I received because the forward was just a bunch of inline images. Naturally, I can’t find the original artist either, so please leave a comment if you know who created these beautiful sculptures.

If there’s one philosophy that was fervently brandished by the art students I went to school with, it’s that text has no place in art and any worthwhile art piece shouldn’t need text on it to get the point across.

But, can text itself can be artful?

With the rise of web2.0 technologies, tag clouds are springing up all over the web on blogs and in a variety of mashups.  In addition to providing quick and interesting information at-a-glance, I find them to be quite beautiful. I’ve seen Wordle, in particular, twice since Obama has been elected – once on the web after his inauguration speech and another just last week during a mini-state of the union style address on CNN. readwriteweb.com wrote an interesting content comparison post that compared the speeches of several past presidents and immediately shows the overarching themes.

Another neat textual art project is TextArc, a program that demonstrates the relationships between words within a text. I highly recommend checking out the analysis of Alice in Wonderland. Similarly, Visual Thesaurus provides a visual word definition and relationship view. Check out the word list for Carroll’s Jaberwocky to see it in action.

Beyond the containerized context of a specific written work, you can see the commonness of many English words at wordcount.org, which uses size to represent how frequently a word occurs.

I’m sure there’s many more neat text-based art projects on the web. If you find any, please comment and leave a link so I can check them out and bookmark them. I created a neat analysis of 100 spam emails and subject lines between March 13-15 with wordle. Conveniently, it’s somewhat pill-shaped.