Tag: Art
Bandsaw Magic
This is pretty amazing. The above video shows woodworking professional Adam Sandoval quickly making a long series of unmarked cuts into a block of wood. When he’s done and clears away the excess, a deer sculpture remains!
1,200 Hot Wheels Circulating Around a Track
This amazing track, built by Chris Burden with Erector Sets, Legos, and Lincoln Logs, is called Metropolis II and can carry 1,200 cars at a time along with 13 toy trains.
The California artist Chris Burden may be in his 60s, but he is still playing with toys. The thing is, the older he gets the more outrageously complicated the toys become.
Two years ago he created a 65-foot Erector Set skyscraper that stood in Rockefeller Center, and in 2004 he made “Metropolis I,” composed of 80 Hot Wheels toy cars zooming around two single-lane highways along with monorail trains chugging on tracks of their own. The piece was snapped up by the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan.
“I was happy with ‘Metropolis I,’ but it kind of disappeared once it went to western Japan,” Mr. Burden said in a telephone interview from his studio in Topanga Canyon in Los Angeles County. So in 2006 he and a team of eight studio assistants, including an engineer, began “Metropolis II,” a far more ambitious version. It includes 1,200 custom-designed cars and 18 lanes; 13 toy trains and tracks; and, dotting the landscape, buildings made of wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. The crew is still at work on the installation.
In “Metropolis II,” by his calculation, “every hour 100,000 cars circulate through the city,” Mr. Burden said. “It has an audio quality to it. When you have 1,200 cars circulating it mimics a real freeway. It’s quite intense.”
National Geographic’s Photography Contest 2010
National Geographic is once again holding their annual Photo Contest, with the deadline for submissions coming up on November 30th. For the past eight weeks, they have been gathering and presenting galleries of submissions, encouraging readers to rate them as well.
Here is an amazing entry from the Nature category.
Brown bear, Buskin River, Kodiak Alaska 100912-152a
Photo and caption by James Haskins
This bear had been fishing in the river on this morning. It climbed onto the bank and laid down in the grass. This photo was taken about an hour after sunrise just as the sun was starting to clear the trees. The temperature was near the dew point and steam was rising off its body. It didn’t seem at all concerned by the fishermen in the river or the photographer on the bank.