Research facilites

Deputydog has a series of unbelievably cool posts on unbelievably cool research facilites here, here and here.

But surely there's something missing from this glamorous lineup of research facilities?... A wonderful collection of these extraordinary things can be found at Curious Expeditions:

I have, I think, gone off books. Which is unfortunate. But looking at libraries in the same light as these strange devices is starting to claw back my interest...

Living patterns

Via Design Notes by Michael Surtees.

Planes and ships

In the archives of the wonderful deputydog is a post on abandoned vehicles. Here are google images of ships in Nouadhibou



And here, planes in Arizona

Fritture

This wins points for best silly idea/looks good ratio I've seen for a while. Via the letter.

More Burtynsky quarries

At Flowers Central until 2/2. More images from the exhibition here.

Impossible objects

These come from a beautiful website dedicated to the creations of Jaques Carelman, the author of the Catalogue d'objets introuvables (1969). For some reason it's in spanish.

Photo paint by numbers

Via English Russia. A wonderful staged photo project: instructions for a scene are provided, and participants in various cities produce photographs accordingly.

Here, for instance, are the instructions for the scene entitled 'A Cheating Wife'. 'You need to make a photo of a man, “a lover”, hanging outside the real window. The window should be not lower than a 3rd store of a multi-stored building. “A husband” should lean out from another window with a gun, aiming at “the lover”. From yet another window “the cheating wife” should look out in despair.'

Made out of the ordinary

A beautifully ambiguous tagline for Karen magazine. This is the out of the ordinary cover for issue 2.

Citation needed

Via nascent ideas.

Happy new year!

And for the first post of the year, Michael Wolf's series of photographs of Chinese copy artists. (There is also an interesting article here on the mass-produced painting industry in China).