Australian artists The Glue Society have put together a series of altered satellite views showing what certain Biblical events would have looked like if seen via Google Earth.
Above, for instance, is the Crucifixion.
Below, we see Moses parting the Red Sea; Adam and Eve sunbathing nude in the Garden of Eden; and Noah’s Ark stranded on a dry spit of land amidst Flood waters.
By the way, whatever happened to the CIA’s search for Noah’s Ark…?

[Image: Biblical scenes as seen via Google Earth; by The Glue Society].

According to the Creative Review – where this project was first spotted – the artists are now “aiming to produce further works using the same satellite imagery next year but this time relating to mythological occurrences and major historical events.”
Personally, I can’t wait; the idea is genius.

(Spotted on the Creative Review, with big thanks to Michael G.!)

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG

It ain’t the Velib, but yesterday it was announced that Dutch team West 8 would design a 40-acre park for Governors Island, which will include a fleet of 3,000 wooden bicycles free for use by island visitors.

The Times reports:

The design, commissioned by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, calls for transforming much of the flat, sober island, which is roughly a half-mile from Lower Manhattan, into green space. That includes a two-mile promenade at the water’s edge, a new park on the southern flat expanse of landfill - where abandoned Coast Guard buildings are to be demolished - and an improved park in the island’s northern historic district. The architects proposed using the detritus from the buildings that are to be destroyed to form hills that would exploit the island’s views, which include the Statue of Liberty.

The Post, which says the Governors Island Gondola could also become reality, had a somewhat dispiriting quote from Mayor Bloomberg on the bike share feature, particularly when juxtaposed with designer Adriaan Geuze’s comments.

Adriaan Geuze, founder of West 8, said the company’s Dutch background made including bicycles in the plan a no-brainer.

"I am from Holland, where bicycles are an important part of street life, and everybody bikes," he said. "You could never walk the entire island, but the bikes will help get people to experience more of the island and go anywhere they want to."

Bloomberg said he was particularly impressed by the bike theme, joking "it’s a great idea; you don’t have to worry about them being stolen" because "you can’t take them anyplace" off the island.

The Times says the park is expected to be completed by 2012.

Rendering: West 8/Rogers Marvel Architects/Diller Scofidio + Renfro/Quennell Rothschild/SMWM

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Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, ReBlogged by Steve on Dec 22, 2007 at 10:05 AM

Originally by Brad Aaron from Eyebeam reBlog on December 22, 2007, 7:05am

 
This scarifying nine-minute peek into an auto-enslaved Disney world of the future, as seen from 1958, is as amazing for what it gets right (like urban sprawl) as much as what is laughably off the mark (like urban sprawl = Utopia).

Notice how skinny everyone is, though no one ever walks (except dad, from his car elevator to his desk). And dig that Sun-Powered Electro-Suspension Car — still right around the corner!

Addendum: Here’s another look at what the future might have looked like as this cartoon was being produced. 

Video from YouTube via Polls Boutique

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Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, ReBlogged by Steve on Dec 22, 2007 at 10:05 AM

Originally by Brad Aaron from Eyebeam reBlog on December 22, 2007, 7:05am

The Colcha Project by Doris Cacoilo, a study in crochet, code and community.

col - cha (koal-sha) noun. Portuguese word meaning bedspread. An outer covering, usually decorative, for a bed.

Friday, Dec 21 6-9pm
Martin E. Segal Theatre
The CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue Between 34th and 35th Streets
New York City Subway: B, D, F, N, R, 6, Q

Originally by cat from microRevolt reBlog on December 18, 2007, 8:24pm

Originally by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Thomas Hannich. Crocheted laptop by Joana Vasconcelos.

via NYTimes:

Handmade 2.0
By ROB WALKER (AKA murketing )
Published: December 16, 2007

The declaration from something called the Handmade Consortium materialized on a Web site called
buyhandmade.org in late
October. “I pledge to buy handmade this holiday season, and request
that others do the same for me,” it said, and you could type in your
name to “sign” on; within a few weeks, more than 6,500 people had done
so. “Buying handmade is better for people,” a statement on the site
read in part, and “better for the environment,” because mass production
is a “major cause” of global warming, among other things. There were links to an anti-sweatshop site and a Wal-Mart watchdog site.

The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist
group, but actually the consortium’s most prominent member was the
online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills
itself as “your place to buy & sell all things handmade.” Etsy does
not fulfill orders from an inventory; it’s a place where sellers set up
virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales. While eBay rose to
prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the
auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online
craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell
things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last
count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were
using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware,
stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the
highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a
bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.

Maybe
you’re interested in a “random music generator” called the Orb of Sound
($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a
whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs,
near Seattle. Or the “hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters”
sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las
Cruces, N.M. Or the “Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle” ($5), made by a
woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a
porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple
who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an
artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.

Browsing
Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount
an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of
all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly
difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an
art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is,
it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is
trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by
mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the
unsentimental notion of the profit motive.

On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit
two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying
300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent
increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking
sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable
but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web
2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends
on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback
to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. “Our
ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost,” the
Handmade Pledge site asserts. “Buying handmade helps us reconnect.” The
idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of
shopping is all about the past. [read on…]

See also (via murketing):

Handmade 2.0: Links of interest

Originally by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art

Last month, Front Studio architects gave a talk at the University of Pennsylvania Department of City & Regional Planning. There they outlined “Farmadelphia,” their now widely known proposal for the transformation of Philadelphia, in which that city’s vacant and abandoned lots are turned into a thriving agricultural zone – complete with crops grown for local consumption and soil remediation, and with an eye toward future tourism, including surreal petting zoos, hay rides, and even corn mazes.

[Image: Front Studio].

Philadelphia would become “an ‘edible landscape’,” we read, “with vast crop fields, and free roaming farm animals.”

[Images: Front Studio. “Free roaming city cows graze on locally owned pasture” (top); chickens hang out amidst lettuce (bottom)].

The project would also address – or is intended to address – “the rehabilitation of the existing city fabric by proposing ideas for vacant buildings that would allow the present-day character to remain while creating new uses.”

[Images: Front Studio].

From the project description:

For example, an abandoned building could have its walls and ground lined with a non-permeable membrane to prevent soil contamination for new plantings. Then layers of a weed barrier, soil bed, loam and mulch are added on top. The nurseries would provide: year-round job opportunities, high profit yields from selling flowers and the adaptive reuse of abandoned buildings.

Whole sections of the city would thus be deliberately cultivated. Or, from a slightly different perspective, it’s the controlled re-wilding of the city.

[Image: Front Studio. Philadelphia’s “urban voids interwoven with agricultural patchwork”].

This urban re-wilding would also include “the rehabilitation of abandoned buildings into stables to house animals.”

[Images: Front Studio].

“Looking into Philadelphia’s past,” Front Studio writes, one finds “a green legacy dating back to William Penn’s pastoral vision of a ‘green countrie towne’.”
But what about Philadelphia’s green future – not its past or some distant legacy it’s passively inherited?
How might Philadelphia actively re-green itself for the future?
Some appropriate crops for the proposed agricultural stabilization of the city might include the following, the architects suggest:

—start with low maintenance, easy to grow, and profiting crops; consider perennial crops such as asparagus, shallots, garlic and herb varieties
—other crops include shade tolerant, easy to grow kale, sweet potatoes, lettuce
—other crops that do well in Philadelphia climate: collard greens, broccoli, mustard greens, corn, raspberry bushes

Those plants, in particular, would form a biosystem that could help push the city onto a seven year agricultural plan – after which this newly implanted ecosystem would level off, forming something like a cultivated permaculture.

[Images: Front Studio’s seven year plan for agricultural stabilization].

More about the project can be found on Front Studio’s own website (under “Work” and then “Competition”).
See also Roof-farming southeast London, earlier on BLDGBLOG, as well as Going Agro.

(And don’t miss Sarah Rich’s write-up of the project, nearly 2 years ago, over on Inhabitat).

Originally by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG

Detail of the poster “Passerelles” by Think Experimental.

Originally by mail from VVORK on December 9, 2007, 2:23am

“The Tree”, a 10-meter high, real magnolia tree planted in the center of Chile’s National Stadium. By Sebastian Errazuriz.

Originally by mail from VVORK on December 6, 2007, 7:03pm

DELAWARE, “Sneakers in the Snow”, prepared digital print

Installation shots, screen shots, and a GIF from the “Bitmap: As Good As New” show at vertexList gallery are here. Also in PDF form (33 MB). “The alternative Biennial for the abject geek set.” –some dude

From the vertexList blog.

Originally by tom moody from tom moody on December 3, 2007, 7:44am