(Video link here.) It’s been an eerily snow-less winter in New York City. With the exception of a single January snowfall there has been nothing—and we kind of miss it. This post is in honor of the snow we think may be on its way…and the possibilities it brings with it.
We wrote a couple of summers ago about artist Jim Denevan and his large-scale sand drawings which totally transformed how we think about playing in the sand. Now our attention has been called to his work with snow and ice. In 2010, Denevan made the largest piece of artwork in the world on the surface of Lake Baikal in Siberia. This nine-mile spiral of circles over the ice is stunning and allows us to once again completely re-imagine the possibilities of using snow as/in art. read more…
We’re just a few days into 2012, but apparently the future is already here. Our resident futurist, Stuart Mason Dambrot, sent us a bunch of amazing and fun science and technology finds, making us wonder what the next year has in store for all of us.
We’ve talked about vertical gardens, but a vertical forest takes the idea to a whole other level. This 27 story forest designed by Stefano Boeri is currently under construction in Milan. We wonder about the ecosystems that will develop in a man-made vertical forest?… read more…
(Video link here.) This video features the great natural history documentarian, Sir David Attenborough, reading lines from the Louis Armstrong song “What a Wonderful World” as stunning scenes from Attenborough’s documentaries fill the screen. While we watched, we were both delighted and a bit stymied. The video was both beautiful and perspective-broadening, while bordering on being precious and slightly manipulative. It was in fact made by the ad agency RKCR/Y&RH as a tribute to the aging Attenborough and a promo piece for his latest, and possibly last series, Frozen Planet. That explains alot.
As often happens, we held off on posting it until something came along to point it in an unexpected direction. We found it on the strange and beautiful blog Rolu, in a poem by James Broughton. If you mute the video’s corny soundtrack and keep the poem in mind as you watch, you get a WHOLE other experience…
From National Geographic’s 2010 Photography Contest. Perfect for now. We like remembering Christmas trees in the wild as we see them all spruced up around town.
On Dargelos’ Tumblr, we found this picture with a mysterious caption: “Leaf art found in Prospect Park.”
It seemed too simple to be true. This leaf sculpture was so beautiful, we wanted to know more of the story. So we emailed Dargelos and asked. Right away, we got an answer:
“We were literally just walking through the park, about to exit and Max noticed it at our feet. It broke soon after : ( “
So we wrote back: “Was it just made of leaf? It looks almost like it had been gold leafed… wonder if someone was just hanging around and took a knife or swiss army knife to it..” read more…
“A wide field meteor camera at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center recorded this spectacular meteor breaking up in Earth’s atmosphere on Sept. 30, 2011, 8:37 p.m. EDT. Also visible is a star-like object moving slowly toward the upper middle of the field of view — the upper stage of the Zenit booster that launched the Russian Cosmos 2219 intelligence satellite back in 1992. Orbiting 500 miles above Earth, this empty rocket body can get bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye.”
(Video link here; start at 4:50) We had a non-stop day, working on a big project, then racing back to write a post many hours late…wondering if we might write about lateness, or busyness or not-living-up-to-our-obligationness, which so many people we know are trying to figure out. We were poking around the files, half-written posts, and bookmarked bits when we STOPPED to watch a video clip Cara de Silva sent us this morning with these words:
“This is a segment of a TED talk that I found profoundly moving because of the images and the speaker and the narrative. Somehow all together they go beyond the subject.”
On flixxy.com, Cara had found the 4 minute video that filmmaker and TED speaker Louie Schwartzberg had used as an example of what his work as a cinematographer using time-lapse photography had taught him over the years: gratitude. You can watch the whole TED talk, above, or let the video load and jump right into Schwartzberg’s film at 4:50 mins. read more…
We found this beautiful gif of a running scrapwood horse on dvdp, with the caption “horses know how to run with style.”
That’s what we want to do.
(…It’s a clip from the Chemical Brothers video ‘Horse Power’, which we find curiously thrilling watched with the sound off; we felt like we’d been riding a galloping horse…which always shakes things up).
(Video link here.) Every once in a while, if we can’t actually get a dose of REAL nature, we turn to a video of some crazy wonder of the natural world to shift our view. This owl’s identity changes radically depending on his perceived threat level – kind of like many humans we know…
Conceptual Artist Myeongbeom Kim makes eerily beautiful and evocative work that fuses manmade things with big doses of nature. We can totally see ourselves lying down on this bed, and feeling like we are in a mossy woods…
…we can imagine how we’d feel riding an elevator like this one: read more…
Jansen, who has been working on his beasts for over 20 years, has often referred to their genetic code and ability to reproduce. His ultimate goal is enabling them to live on their own on the beaches of Holland. As he shows in this charmingly awkward Ted talk, his creatures are indeed evolving. The Strandbeests, made entirely of ordinary materials, now have what Jansen calls “a simple brain.” read more…
As much as we love the vertical shipping pallet garden we wrote about in May, it’s flaw is that if you needed to move it off your balcony, you might be in some trouble. Enter the milk crate farm! When the bad economy stalled construction at New York City’s Alexandria Center for Life Science, Chef Sisha Ortuzar and business partner Jeffrey Zurofsky had a brilliant idea: use the stalled site as a farm. There they grow fresh veggies to use at Riverpark, the restaurant next door.
While rooftop gardens are popping up all over the city (see the Brooklyn Grange for example), this one presented a special challenge: it needed to be portable read more…
On a trip to Finland a couple of summers ago, we visited the extraordinary Bovik Farm, where Sebastian Nurmi and his wife Ülle tend to indigenous breeds of cattle and sheep. We found many reasons to be knocked out – not only by the beautiful house and land, but by Nurmi’s story of a profound and unexpected life change.
While working as a fashion photographer living in Helsinki, in the 1980′s Nurmi bought a charming but derelict 40-acre farm in the province of Western Uusimaa. He planned to use it as a retreat and a rural base for his photography business. Over several years of going sporadically, he grew conscious of the need to tend the land, which was overgrown, with many fields let fallow. As he described it, it became absolutely clear to him that he should be working it. And he embraced the change. read more…
We’ve long been a fan of using the flowers and seed pods of farmer’s market vegetables and herbs for our flower arrangements. But we hadn’t thought of dill weed flowers until Terry Bordenave sent us an email:
We subscribe to a new, small CSA in northern Vermont (Deep Earth Farm) and in one of our weekly baskets of produce, Josh & Isaac included a bunch of dill weed. After stripping off the leaves to use in a meal or two, I was left with these striking seed heads. They reminded me of fireworks bursting – I’m a big fan of them and my husband is a member of the Pyrotechnics Guild of America and puts on amazing displays for our family – and I wanted to use them at the table somehow. This is what I came up with. I left them in these old medicine bottles for about a month, and they began to dry up and curl a bit. Before I tossed them on our compost pile, I saved some of their seeds for next year’s garden.
It reminds us of all the great “weeds” that can be flowers, with a slight shift of view.
