Amusing Planet

World's Largest Chocolate Sculpture

2012-05-24T11:11:00.001-07:00

Qzina Specialty Foods has broken the world record for the world’s largest chocolate sculpture by building a replica of the ancient Mayan temple - the Kukulcan pyramid of Chichen Itza in Mexico. The sculpture which weighs a whopping 18,239 pounds surpasses the previous record of 10,736.5 pound set in Italy in 2010.

The structure is exactly proportional to the original, down to the the number of steps and panels. It's precisely one-thirtieth the size of the original with a base of 10 feet by 10 feet and a height of six feet. Altogether, the project took more than 400 hard hours of construction.

The Qzina Institute of Chocolate & Pastry made the delicious temple to celebrate its 30th anniversary - choosing the Mayan theme because of the crucial role the culture played in the origins of chocolate. The Mayans were one of the first civilizations to cultivate Cacao trees and discover the true potential of the cocoa bean. Realizing the delicious possibilities of this powerful discovery, the Mayans worshiped the Cacao tree and praised its beans as the food of the Gods.

The pyramid will be on display at the institute from June 4 through Dec. 21, when it will be destroyed to coincide with the end of the Mayan calendar. The method for destruction is yet to be decided.

10 Most Crowded Islands of the World

2012-05-24T10:36:00.001-07:00

Human beings are an amazing species. Given enough time, they will multiply, relocate and establish even on the most remote corners of the world. The following islands, I’m sure, were once uninhabited full of lush green forest, beautiful beaches and perhaps an animal or two. Today, entire cities stands on them. But unlike communities on mainland, land and resources on an island are scarce. With no space to grow geographically these islands are crushingly dense with people and housing.

Here is a collection of some of the most populous island in the world.

Grocery Stores at Night by Richard Vantielcke

2012-05-24T03:46:00.001-07:00

French photographer Richard Vantielcke prowls the night on the streets of Paris looking for late night grocery stores for his photographic series titled “Urban Oasis”. In his words:

I always enjoyed these grocery stores open late at night, first of all because they often saved the life of a starving photographer, then because they all look more surreal as each other, becoming oasis of light in the darkness of the Parisian night.

“Urban Oasis” reminds me of Matt Barnes’s Deserted Gas Stations.

Stone Sculptures by Hirotoshi Itoh

2012-05-23T23:58:00.001-07:00

Hirotoshi Itoh graduated from Tokyo National Fine Arts University in 1982 and later went into his family business as a stonemason. He spent several years working with metal before turning his attention to stones. He utilizes stones found in a river bank near his home, to create sculptures that juxtapose the original shape and hardness of the material with surprising humor and texture.

World’s Largest Swimming Pool

2012-05-22T04:17:00.001-07:00

The swimming pool at the San Alfonso del Mar resort in Algarrobo, Chile holds the record of being the largest in the world. At 1,012 meters (3,324 ft) in length and a total area of 8 hectares (19.77 acres), it is larger than 20 Olympic-size pools and six-times bigger than its closest competitor, the Orthlieb Pool in Casablanca, Morocco. It also holds the Guinness World Record for being the world's deepest swimming pool in the world with the deeper end at 115 feet.

The pool opened in December 2006 after nearly five years of construction work and is said to have set developers back as much as £1billion. It takes a further £2million a year to keep it in working order.

The enormous man-made pool sucks water directly in from the sea using a computer-controlled suction and filtration system. Water is pumped from the ocean into the pool where the sun warms it to 26C - nine degrees higher than the sea. The pool holds 250 million liters (66 million gallons) of water and is navigable in small boats. Its turquoise waters are so crystal clear that you can see the bottom even in the deep end.

Famous Black and White Photos Restored in Color

2012-05-22T03:42:00.001-07:00

Swedish artist Sanna Dullaway has taken a number of historic black and white images and brought them to life by adding color. Dullaway is doing it to promote her business as a photo restorer.

The fascinating results has caught the media’s attention during the last few months and caused a lot of debate.

“Colorization is WRONG”, screamed one commenter on Huffington Post. “It is creating a lie by imposing an an artistic interpretation on historic images. The artist was not there so therefore cannot know what the true colors, shades, and subtleties were.” Another user mocks, “Lincoln wore a blue coat with a brown vest? And who did his makeup, a funeral director?”

As more reasonable commenters point out, the originals are intact so there is no need to get upset. Frankly, this is not the first time black and white pictures were colorized: photo manipulation and parodies of famous photos/videos appear on the Internet all the time, and colorization of old movies are happening from a long time. As long as the originals aren’t destroyed, people should stop getting so worked up on trivial matters.

Socotra: The Island of Strange Plants

2012-05-22T02:58:00.001-07:00

Socotra is a small archipelago of four islands in the Indian Ocean, near the Gulf of Aden. Situated some 250 miles off the coast of Yemen, the largest member of the archipelago, also called Socotra, is home to some of the weirdest looking plants that are found nowhere else on the planet. Like the Galapagos Islands, this island is teeming with 825 rare species of plants of which more than a third are endemic. Extremely high levels of endemism also occur in Socotra’s reptiles. 90% of its reptile species and 95% of its land snail species do not occur anywhere else in the world. The marine life of Socotra is also very diverse, with 253 species of reef-building corals, 730 species of coastal fish and 300 species of crab, lobster and shrimp, and well represented in the property’s marine areas.

Some 250 million years or more ago, when all the planet’s major landmasses were joined and most major life-forms roamed freely from one region to another, Socotra already stood as an island apart. Ever since Socotra has been a breeding ground of birds, plants and animals. The isolation from other land masses meant whatever evolutionary process the flora and fauna underwent never spread to the mainland.

Dragon’s Blood Trees (Dracaena cinnabari) Photo credit

One of the most striking of Socotra's plants is the dragon's blood tree (Dracaena cinnabari), which is a strange-looking, umbrella-shaped tree. Its red sap was thought to be the dragon's blood of the ancients, sought after as a medicine and a dye and today used as paint and varnish. Also important in ancient times were Socotra's various endemic aloes, used medicinally, and for cosmetics. Other endemic plants include the giant succulent tree Dorstenia gigas, Moraceae, the cucumber tree Dendrosicyos socotranus, the rare Socotran pomegranate (Punica protopunica), Aloe perryi and Boswellia socotrana.

RP FLIP, the Strangest Ship in the World

2012-05-19T03:06:00.001-07:00

The U.S. Office of Naval Research owns a very strange piece of oceanographic equipment. It’s called the FLoating Instrument Platform (FLIP), conceived and developed by the Marine Physical Laboratory (MPL) at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California. FLIP isn't a ship, even though researchers live and work on it for weeks at a time while they conduct scientific studies in the open ocean. It is actually a huge specialized buoy. The most unusual thing about this ship is it really flips.

FLIP is 355 feet (108 meters) long with small quarters at the front and a long hollow ballast at the end. When the tanks are filled with air, FLIP floats in its horizontal position. But when they are filled with seawater the lower 300 feet of FLIP sinks under the water and the lighter end rises. When flipped, most of the buoyancy for the platform is provided by water at depths below the influence of surface waves, hence FLIP is a stable platform mostly immune to wave action. At the end of a mission, compressed air is pumped into the ballast tanks in the flooded section and the vessel returns to its horizontal position so it can be towed to a new location.

During the flip, everyone stands on the outside decks. As FLIP flips, the decks slowly become bulkheads and the bulkhead becomes the deck. Most rooms on FLIP have two doors; one to use when horizontal, the other when FLIP is vertical. Some of FLIP's furnishings are built so they can rotate to a new position as FLIP flips. Other equipment must be unbolted and moved. Some things, like tables in the galley (kitchen) and sinks in the washroom, are built twice so one is always in the correct position. The entire flip operation takes twenty-eight minutes. When FLIP stands vertically, it rises more than five stories into the air.

Colorful Indian Street Art

2012-05-18T08:43:00.001-07:00

Modern graffiti art is rare in India, but traditional hand painted street art is ubiquitous. From tea stall signs to election messages on walls, from mud flaps on rickshaws to whimsical messages behind trucks, from brashly painted deities to giant larger than life paintings of Bollywood heroes, everything in India is hand painted. Though very few India’s street artists are formally trained they have collectively evolved styles that are very unique and typical to Indian visual culture.

Today, I present a very talented photographer and designer Meena Kadri who has been following the Indian street art scene.

An undergrad in anthropology and Masters in design, New Zealand–born Meena Kadri has taught at institutes in China, New Zealand and at the National Institute of Design in India. Her photography and artwork have been exhibited in Glasgow, Delhi, Rome, Barcelona and New Zealand. She currently works as a Community Manager on OpenIDEO.

Huge Swarms of Mosquitoes Invade Russian Village of Mikoltsy

2012-05-17T10:11:00.001-07:00

No, these are not Starling Murmuration. They are mosquitoes, millions of them that descended upon the Russian village of Mikoltsy near Myadel, Belarus, in the Minsk region on May 14. The mosquitoes were so loud that even cars could not be heard. Photographer Dennis Sour who managed to capture this unusual phenomenon said that although the swarm looked threatening, they didn’t bite. Such activity of mosquitoes is probably caused by the weather.

According to Tatiana Zhukova, director of the Naroch Biological Station, this is a natural process. The lake is home to mosquito larvae. When the larvae grow into adult they leave the water and come to land, where they mate and lay eggs. Large clouds of mosquitoes gather every year but they are usually not noticed because the windy weather blows away the mosquitoes. But on quiet and sunny days, like that on Monday, they become more than apparent.

Weather is known to cause weird behavior among animals and insects. Last year in Pakistan, rising flood waters drove millions of spiders up into the trees where they wove webs completely cocooning the trees.

Grass Portraits by Ackroyd & Harvey

2012-05-16T11:05:00.001-07:00

Grass is like photographic paper which becomes pigmented upon exposure to light. The more intense the light exposure, the more intensely pigmented the grass becomes. By exposing plots of seedling grass to light through a custom-made negative, Surrey, England-based Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey makes the grass grow in different shades, from yellow to green creating unique portraits out of them. After a couple of weeks, when the growing process is complete faces or landscapes starts appearing in the grass.

Grass photography wasn’t invented by this duo. This technique was pioneer by photographer William Henry Fox Talbot and his photographs published in a book in 1844. Ackroyd and Harvey admit that their photography is greatly inspired by his work and ethos towards nature.

In a small room Ackroyd and Harvey experimented for the first time with imprinting an image onto a growing wall of grass. Projecting a negative image of the storeroom containing all the large neon letters for Le Fresnoy, onto a growing wall of grass, the results were astonishing. The grass revealed an extraordinary sensitivity to light and the ability to print a living photograph was first realized. Ackroyd and Harvey spent over a decade fine-tuning this process.

Unfortunately, just as miraculously as these images emerge, so do they degrade over a short period of time. Lately, the couple has been working actively with scientists at the Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research in Wales to create 'stay green,' a form of grass that lasts longer than the regular material and is grown from a genetically modified seed.

Fighting Protesters With Colored Water

2012-05-16T04:20:00.001-07:00

You must have seen photos of protesters being doused with colored-water cannons by the police. Using water canon is understood as it’s an easy non-hazardous way to disperse mob, but why would police spray protesters with purple and pink water? Simple: to identify and arrest them later. Many water cannons on the market today come with a tank specially designed to store a semi-permanent colored dye. If police decide they want to "tag" protesters with the dye, they can press a button to inject it into the main water stream. Once the water cannon is trained on a crowd, anyone hit by the spray will be easily recognizable by police.

The most famous use of colored-water cannons took place in South Africa in 1989, when police soaked anti-apartheid activists with purple water. But in the ensuing chaos, one of the protester turned a water cannon back at police and towards the local headquarters of the ruling National Party. The headquarters, along with the historic and white-painted Old Town House, were doused with purple. The next day, a graffiti artist tagged the Old Town House with the phrase "The Purple Shall Govern," which soon became an anti-apartheid slogan.

Police spray Ugandan opposition party leaders with colored water during demonstrations in the capital Kampala, May 10, 2011. President Yoweri Museveni has vowed to crush the protests and blamed rising food and fuel costs on drought and global increases in oil prices. (James Akena / Reuters)

During the last 15 years, protesters in Hungary, Indonesia, Argentina, Malaysia, India and Israel have all been showered with colored water. In Uganda last year pink dye was employed to humiliate protesters. In Israel, Palestinian rioters were sprayed deep blue, the colour of the Israeli flag. The Hungarian police use green, the Koreans orange. Indian police is particularly fond of purple.

10 Most Incredible Flower Festivals Around the World

2012-05-15T22:39:00.002-07:00

Flower festivals are celebrated all over the world and almost around the year. Even as I write this one such festival is taking place in India, the Malabar Flower Festival, and another scheduled to start later this month. The Kegworth Flower Festival is underway in Derby, England, and a dozen other places are preparing for theirs in the coming weeks. Here we present 10 most fascinating display of flowers in different parts of the world.

Bloemencorso

The Bloemencorso, a Dutch word which means "flower parade", are held in many towns in the Netherlands and Belgium. In a parade of this kind the floats, cars and in some cases boats are magnificently decorated or covered in flowers. Each parade has its own character, charm and theme. Zundert holds the largest flower parade in the world.

The parade takes place on the first Sunday of September. The floats are large artworks made of steel wire, cardboard, papier-mâché and flowers. In the Bloemencorso Zundert, only dahlias are used to decorate the objects and it takes thousands of them just to cover one float.

The huge floats are made by twenty different hamlets and each of them consists of hundreds of builders, aged 1 to 100, who are all equally crazy about the bloemencorso. The older members of the hamlet are often responsible for planting and growing the dahlias, while the younger ones build the float in large temporary tents that are built exclusively for the event.

Celebrity Pin Art Portraits by Philip Karlberg

2012-05-14T11:03:00.001-07:00

Photographer Philip Karlberg has just created a unique shoot for Plaza Magazine, sculpting famous faces by simply using clever lighting and carefully arranged wooden pins. The wooden pin are sparingly used yet the faces he created are instantly recognizable.

A couple of months ago I came up with an idea I have had in mind for years. I just did not know what I could use it for. But then I did a test with sunglasses, and it really turned out great. So I sent an image with the test to Plaza Magazine, and a week later I started shooting. It was a real challenge to ‘sculpt’ the faces of some classic wearers of sunglasses. It took me 6 days to shoot the 6 faces, and around 1200 sticks were used.

Poo Machine by Wim Delvoye

2012-05-14T08:57:00.001-07:00

Wim Delvoye is a Belgian artist known for his inventive and often shocking and repulsive projects.

Cloaca, also known as the "poo-machine", is probably Wim Delvoye's most famous art installation. In 2000, he put together a complex machinery at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Antwerp, Belgium, that mimics the action of the human digestive system and converts food in feces. Real food is dropped down a funnel into a meat grinder (simulating the teeth) twice a day. Then, viewers can follow the food as it makes its way through a series of glass containers containing human digestive juices and enzymes, which represent the various stages of digestion. At the end of the tract, the machine produces feces which are then vacuum-packed and sold in translucent boxes. It is told that the smell is so powerful that not many visitors can take it.

It took Wim Delvoye eight years of consultation with experts in fields ranging from plumbing to gastroenterology to construct the poo machine. When asked about his inspiration, Delvoye stated that everything in modern life is pointless. The most useless object he could create was a machine that serves no purpose at all, besides the reduction of food to waste.

Amazingly Realistic Cakes by Debbie Goard

2012-05-14T08:54:00.001-07:00

Debbie Goard is a cake designer who runs “Debbie Does Cakes”, a single-woman cake company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Debbie has been crafting incredibly realistic looking cakes over the last two decades. Debbie enjoyed her work but didn’t initially believe that cake design was her calling, viewing it as a job versus a career. But after countless instances where her cakes were mistaken for real objects – most notably a life-sized chihuahua cake that compelled restaurant patrons to exclaim “Why is there a dog on a table?!” – she began to realize that maybe she had been denying her fate.

Debbie says: "The best part of my job is being challenged by unusual requests. This year I had a gallery show of cakes based on scenes from Horror movies including the rat on a platter from Whatever Happened to Baby Jane......and food from the kitchen in Poltergeist, the most outrageous of which was maggot-covered chicken."

Bryce Canyon National Park

2012-05-11T04:38:00.001-07:00

Bryce Canyon National Park is located in southwestern Utah in the United States. Bryce Canyon which, despite its name, is not a canyon but a giant natural amphitheater created by erosion along the eastern side of the Paunsaugunt Plateau. Bryce is distinctive due to geological structures called hoodoos, formed by wind, water, and ice erosion of the river and lake bed sedimentary rocks. Some of these hoodoos are up to 200 feet high. The red, orange, and white colors of the rocks provide spectacular views for park visitors.

For millions of years water has carved Bryce's rugged landscape. Water drips into the cracks in the rocks, freezes and expands thereby splitting the rocks - a cyclic process that occurs some 200 times a year. In summer, rainwater etches into the softer limestones and sluices through the deep runnels. In about 50 years the present rim will be cut back another foot.

Bryce lies at a much higher elevation than nearby Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, varying from 8,000 to 9,000 feet (2,440 to 2,740 m), whereas the south rim of the Grand Canyon sits at 7,000 feet (2130 m) above Sea Level. Bryce Canyon National Park therefore has a substantially different ecology and climate, offering a contrast for visitors to the south west.

The Bryce area was settled by Mormon pioneers in the 1850s and was named after Ebenezer Bryce, who homesteaded in the area in 1874. The area around Bryce Canyon became a U.S. National Monument in 1923 and was designated as a national park in 1928. The park covers 35,835 acres and receives relatively few visitors compared to Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, largely due to its remote location.

Photo credit

Amazing Sculpture of Burning Tires by Gal Weinstein

2012-05-11T02:34:00.001-07:00

Tel Aviv based artist Gal Weinstein (born in Ramat Gan in 1970) is one of the internationally renowned artists of his generation. Gal Weinstein is best-known for his project “Huleh Valley”, where he created a large-format installation covering the floor at Helena Rubinstein Pavillion for Contemporary Art in Tel Aviv and wall paintings which address the famous swamp draining and land reclamation project in Huleh Valley. The government had commissioned the drainage of the 1.5 square km lake in 1951, to convert it into arable land for future generations of farmers.

In his exhibition in Kunsthaus Baselland organized last year, Gal Weinstein presented his latest series of works, “Fire Tires”. The motif of burning tires is a universal code which we associate with socio-political unrest, revolution, and also with various, mostly pagan customs. “Car tires are cheap fuel,” says the artist and thus also explains why this material is used worldwide, when a fire is started for fun or – as we increasingly experience it – fire kindled as a symbol of (political and social) upheavals. The tires are moulded from wax, the construction material consists of polystyrene foam and the surface of the smoke clouds consists of artificial pillow filling, complemented by multi-coloured graphite dust. Distributed in the exhibition space, the sculptures become almost pop-art-like icons that are able to enter into an immediate relation with the recipient due to their quick legibility.

Hyper-Realistic Sculptures by Jamie Salmon

2012-05-10T22:50:00.001-07:00

Jamie Salmon is a British born, self taught contemporary sculptor, living and working in Vancouver, Canada. He started his career working as a commercial artist and sculptor for the movie effects industry. He specializes in hyper-realist sculpture, both figurative and portrait, utilizing such materials as silicone rubber, resin, hair and fabric.

Jamie says of his working process: “I want to make something that tells a story or moves people in some sort of way, not something that just looks very real. Of course, I need my works to have a certain degree of reality about them, but it`s more of a heightened reality. This is also why I like to play with scale in a lot of my works as well. I think it is something that catches people off guard and forces them to confront their ideas about reality, and to also think about the idea behind the work more deeply. Maybe more so than they would do if the piece were just life size.”

Manhattan of the Desert: Shibam, Yemen

2012-05-10T08:55:00.001-07:00

The city of Shibam, located in the central-western area of Hadhramaut Governorate, in the Ramlat al-Sab`atayn desert, is best known for its towering mudbrick skyscrapers. This small town of 7000 is packed with around 500 mud houses standing between 5 and 11 stories tall and reaching 100 feet high, all constructed entirely of mud bricks. The bizarre skyline that the high rise buildings bestow upon the city has earned Shibam the moniker "Manhattan of the Desert."

Shibam is often called "the oldest skyscraper city in the world" and is one of the oldest and best examples of urban planning based on the principle of vertical construction. Its plan is trapezoidal, almost rectangular; and it is enclosed by earthen walls within which a block of dwellings, also built from earth, have been laid out on an orthogonal grid. Shibam was founded in the 3rd century AD, but most of the houses you see here dates only to the 16th century, following a devastating flood of which Shibam was the victim in 1532-33. However, some older houses and large buildings still remain from the first centuries of Islam, such as the Friday Mosque, built in 904, and the castle, built in 1220.

Photo credit

In general the windowless lower floors are used for grain storage, with areas for domestic use above and those for family and leisure above that. The main room on the second floor is used by men for socializing. It often has wonderful carved plasterwork and freestanding decorated wooden columns supporting the ceiling, while women's areas are found higher, usually on the third or fourth floor. The highest rooms are for communal use by the whole family, and on the upper levels there are often bridges and doors connecting the houses. These are a defensive feature, but also a practical one – especially for old people who find it difficult to walk up and down the interminable staircases.

Oymyakon, the Coldest Inhabited Place on Earth

2012-05-09T10:10:00.001-07:00

Oymyakon is a small village located in the north-eastern Russian Republic of Sakha (Yakutia). It is commonly considered the coldest populated place on Earth. Situated in the heart of Siberia an area nicknamed "Stalin's Death Ring" (a former destination for political exiles), Oymyakon boasts an average winter temperature of -45C, with a one-time world record low of -71.2C. Ironically, Oymyakon means "non-freezing water", situated as it is to a nearby hot spring.

Before the 1920s and 30s, Oymyakon was a seasonal stop for reindeer herders. But the Soviet government, in its efforts to settle nomadic populations, claiming they were difficult to control and technologically and culturally backward, made the site a permanent settlement. Today, the village is home to some 500 people, and until recently had a single hotel with no hot water and outside toilet. While a flurry of snow in Western Europe can cause schools there to close for days, Oymyakon's solitary school shuts only when temperatures fall below –52C.

Most homes in Oymyakon still burn coal and wood for heat and enjoy few modern conveniences. There is no mobile coverage in Oymyakon and even if did, it would be unusable as most electronics stop working in freezing temperatures.

Fur is considered a luxury in the West but it is the only thing that keeps you warm. Nothing grows here so all people eat is reindeer and horsemeat. There is a short summer season during which people can grow things, but for the most part people don't eat fruit or vegetables. Medics say the reason they don't suffer from malnutrition is that there must be lots of micronutrients in their animals' milk. A single shop provides the town's provisions and with jobs in short supply most locals resort to reindeer-breeding, hunting and ice-fishing for their livelihoods.

Lord of Rings Movie Set Now Houses Sheep

2012-05-07T11:32:00.001-07:00

When Peter Jackson spotted the Alexander Farm during an aerial search of the North Island in Matamata in New Zealand for the best possible locations to film The Lord of The Rings film trilogy, he immediately thought it was perfect for Hobbiton, the village where the Hobbits live. He began preparing the site in March 1999 for filming that was to commence at the end of the year.

The New Zealand Army was brought in to build 1.5 km of road into the site. They brought diggers, bulldozers, loaders, trucks, rollers, graders and other heavy machinery to the site. Thirty-seven hobbit holes were created on the hillside with untreated timber, ply and polystyrene. Barberry hedges and trees were brought in and gardens were nurtured throughout winter. Thatch on the pub and mill roofs was cut from rushes around the Alexander farm, and oak tree overlooking Bag End was cut down and brought in from near Matamata. Each branch was numbered and chopped, then transported and bolted together on top of Bag End. Artificial leaves were imported from Taiwan and individually wired onto the dead tree. For nine months, 400 people toiled each day to convert this hitherto unknown place into Middle Earth.

Today, only 17 of those hobbit houses remain and they have been taken over by sheep. In 2011, the set was completely rebuilt for the feature films "The Hobbit" and now remain as permanent exhibit and tourist attraction for fans.

Photo credit

Liu Bolin Disappears Again

2012-05-05T21:50:00.001-07:00

Liu Bolin (previously on Amusing Planet), also known as “The Invisible Man” is currently exhibiting his camouflaging prowess at the Eli Klein Fine Art in New York. New works by the artist including his most recent collaboration with Harper’s Bazaar and fashion powerhouses Gaultier, Lanvin, Missoni, and Valentino, will be on display. Titled “Lost in Art,” this is Liu Bolin’s fourth solo exhibition at the gallery.

In recent years, Liu Bolin has garnered a particularly high level of international acclaim. Both his most recent and his upcoming series have centered on a concept of "hiding in the city,” wherein the artist paints himself into the background of various notable locations in China, France, Italy and New York, in order to investigate the often contentious relationship between the individual and society and between man and nature.

In collaboration with Harper’s Bazaar, Liu Bolin met with Jean Paul Gaultier, Elber Albaz of Lanvin, Angela Missoni, and Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pierpaolo Piccioli from Valentino, as they became the latest subjects of his camouflaging performance. The designers underwent the process of becoming nearly invisible within a background of their most celebrated signature designs. Creating four fantastic photographs, this collaboration stands as a true and marvelous beacon of the merging of fashion and art.

Liu Bolin was born in China’s Shandong province in 1973, and earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Shandong College of Arts and his Master of Fine Arts from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. His work has been exhibited in museum shows around the world including recent solo exhibitions “The Invisible Man,” Fotografiska Museet, Stockholm (2011) and “The Invisible Man,” Ekaterina Cultural Foundation, Moscow (2012).

The exhibition will be on view at Eli Klein Fine Art from March 20th through May 11th, 2012.

Wendy Tsao Turns Children’s Doodles Into Real Toys

2012-05-05T02:38:00.001-07:00

Wendy Tsao made her first toy based on a drawing by her 4-year-old son Dani. The school had asked the children to bring a toy from home. The idea was to use it as an emergency measure if the child were to throw tantrum or had a crying fit. Wendy didn’t want to send Dani’s favorite toy with him to school fearing he may lose it. Instead, she decided to make him a new toy. Using a drawing made by her child, one which he often repeated, as a guide, Wendy Tsao improvised a toy snowman.

Five years later, Wendy Tsao has her own business, the Child's Own Studio in which she transforms drawings of children into plush and cloth dolls. Wendy Tsao receives requests from parents all over the world, and she made several hundreds soft toys based on children’s drawings, each one as unique as the child who drew it. Details and color choices are reproduced as closely as possible so that the stuffed toy that arrives in the mail is immediately recognizable to the child who designed it.

“It’s a fun, rewarding process, and kids love seeing their drawings come alive”, she says.

Wendy is so overwhelmed with requests that she has made a list of artists around the world who are doing similar work, and published it on her blog. She recommends some 20 craftsmen, 14 of them in the United States, two in Australia, two in Canada and two in Europe. If you want your kid’s doodles to be turned into toys, send her a request. Be aware, the list has 500 people waiting.

If you liked Wendy Tsao’s work you will also love The Monster Engine: Children’s Drawings Painted Realistically

Heavy Lift Ships and their Impossibly Massive Cargoes

2012-05-04T23:29:00.001-07:00

When you need to transport large cargo, goods, and materials from one place to another, ship is the ideal choice even though they are extremely slow. Thousands of cargo carriers ply the world's seas and oceans each year, and they handle the bulk of international trade. Then there are heavy lift ships that are designed to carry excessively large loads that even cargo ships cannot bear, such as other ships, drilling rigs or anything else too large or heavy to be easily transported on a conventional ship.

Heavy lift ships are of two types: semi-submerging capable of lifting another ship out of the water and transporting it; and vessels that augment unloading facilities at inadequately equipped ports. Semi-submerging are more commonly known as a "flo/flo" for float-on/float-off. These vessels have a long and low well deck that can go down under water allowing oil platforms, other vessels, or other floating cargo to be moved into position for loading. The tanks are then pumped out, and the well deck rises higher in the water, lifting its cargo, and is ready to sail wherever in the world the cargo needs to be transported.

The world's first heavy lift vessel was MV Lichtenfels (118 long tons; 132 short tons) constructed in the 1920s by the Bremen based shipping company DDG Hansa. After World War II, DDG Hansa became the world's largest heavy lift shipping company. Today that title is owned by Dockwise which currently operates 19 heavy lift ships – the world’s largest fleet of semi-submersible vessels of various sizes and types.