More domestics

I like the bike gears bulb decoration. It is also no bad idea to think of things to do with trashed bikes, because there are two in the garden which it would be nice to get rid of. Again, no idea where I found these, but I will soon put up a list of websites with this kind of stuff for you to browse through...

because it's NEW

I love this thing.

Big ideas

project here by James Houston is wonderful - Radiohead's Nude played with old computer parts.
'I grouped together a collection of old redundant hardware, and placed them in a situation where they're trying their best to do something that they're not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there'.

Random niceness

via swissmiss.

A short digression on interiors

and probably not the last. Some random nice things:




I can't remember where any of these pictures came from.

Tidal bathing pools

There is a nice list of tidal salt-water swimming pools around the UK here. (photos a random selection from flickr).

Playing the building

David Byrne installation at the Battery Maritime Museum in New York that turns the building into a giant musical instrument. The control organ is hooked up to various structural parts of the building - pipes, beams, pillars - and produces a variety of sounds out of them.

Hiding places

From here, and this most beautiful thing ever
which is apparently for sleeping in the garden. From here.

Estrangement scrapbook

A new feature! You can now browse through the scrapbook of things I keep in store for you here. (and link on sidebar).

Chalk shadow outlines

Here. Via the letter.

Capitalising on distance

Tim Knowles has postal projects here. They are wonderful. They make pictures of journeys.

Metabolising report 1

Today I made 400 words out of
3 cups of coffee
8 cigarettes
half pita bread with coconut oil
pasta
1 courgette
peas
parsley
parmesan

Random picture of the day

via here.

cycledog

In my weekend sorting spree, I found this.

Years ago I read an interview with Jim Crace, and the interviewer asked him what his best ever purchases had been. He said his dog and his bike, but that since riding one interfered with walking the other, his best ever purchase would be when someone fitted a dog with pedals. I couldn't get the image out of my head and this, I imagined, was what Jim Crace on a cycledog would look like.

Food art

This site is simultaneously maddening and beguiling. There are two arms to it - food pairing and interchangeable foods. Grapefruit above is an example of the first; Rosemary an example of the second. Aren't they beautiful? But the maddening element comes from the incomprehensible rubric that accompanies them. The interchangeable foods seems to make some sense - the idea is that each of the branches represents a type of flavour, and by taking one element from each branch you can recreate the flavour of the central ingredient. So far so good. But there is no explanation as to why they are clustered as they are, any indication of proportions (if something appears on two different clusters can you double the quantity of it?) and it just doesn't seem to make any sense. I don't believe that a combination of 2 parts respectively of ginger, nutmeg and alspice will approximate to rosemary. The foodpairing aspect is either not explaining itself very well or is extremely underwhelming. They propose 'By comparing the flavour of each food product eg strawberry with the rest of the food and their flavours, new combinations like strawberry with peas can be made'. I desperately want this to be more interesting than it sounds. They add that the more flavours foods have in common the closer they appear to one another on the chart, but I am still struggling to make any sense of this. These diagrams are wonderful, I love love love the idea of the project, but I'm pretty disappointed with the outcome. I think we can do this better.

Plastic bags and gusts of air

Plastic bag animals via wooster collective - 'there's an artist who's been making these animals out of discarded plastic bags. He (or she) ties the bags to the ventilation grates above the subway lines so that when the subway rushes through underneath, the animal jumps up and springs to life'.

Ellen Harvey

Between 1999 and 2001 Ellen Harvey was painting these miniature landscapes around New York. There is a map with links to the pictures on her website here. She has some other nice projects on her website - I love her series of impossible self-portraits -

Gormley men

I love these figures. Pictures of London and Crosby Beach installations courtesey of various flickr members here and of the Time Horizon project from Gormley's website here.

Things David Horvitz will send you for money

More at his website here. Via Heading East. There are some more great postal related projects at The Modern Letter.

Very small objects

The Collier classification system for very small objects is beautiful and can be found here.

Sea Forts

A set of photographs of these things on the north kent coast is on flickr here and the photographer has written a brief history of them here.

Humboldt's Parrot

In 1804, the Prussian naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt returned from his five-year expedition to Central and South America, bringing with him a transcription of 40 words spoken by a parrot which was believed to be the last speaker of an extinct language.

In 1997 Rachel Berwick taught these 40 words to two amazonian parrots, exhibiting them behind translucent screens as last traces of a lost world. She has subsequently used recordings of these parrots to teach other parrots. There are now a total of six speakers of Humboldt's 40 words. More on this and some very cool other projects on Rachel Berwick's website here, and brought together with similar themes at language week at the Kircher Society here.

Sound mirrors

Acoustic mirrors built on the south and northeast coasts of England between about 1916 and the 1930s. Some beautiful pictures on flickr here and here.