Tools Hack Daily

Tuesday, March 2, 2021

Explore Kandinsky’s Work with Google Arts & Culture, Sounds Like Kandinsky #ArtTuesday

This interactive tour of Kandinsky’s art from Google Arts & Culture brings the museum (& more!) to you

Explore Vassily Kandinsky’s art with machine learning, augmented reality and more

Explore here

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Beeple Mania: How Mike Winkelmann Makes Millions Selling Pixels #ArtTuesday #NFTs

Mike Winkelmann is a dad from Wisconsin who drives a “piece of shit” Corolla. And his brilliantly absurd artwork, under the name Beeple, has made him the face of a crypto market you didn’t know existed.

Beeple is an artist.

He makes digital art—pixels on screens depicting bizarre, hilarious, disturbing, and sometimes grotesque images. He smashes together pop culture, technology, and post apocalyptic terror into blistering commentaries on the way we live. A recent frame depicted Donald Trump wearing a leather mask and stripper’s pasties, taking a whip to the coronavirus bug (title: “Trump Dominating Covid”). On the day Jeff Bezos announced he was kicking himself upstairs, Beeple imagined the Amazon founder as a massive, threatening octopus emerging from the ocean as military helicopters circled above (“Release the Bezos”).

Beeple has 1.8 million Instagram followers. His work has been shown at two Super Bowl halftime shows and at least one Justin Bieber concert, but he has no gallery representation or foothold in the traditional art world.

And yet in December the first extensive auction of his art grossed $3.5 million in a single weekend.

Why would someone pay $777,777 for an MP4? Couldn’t you watch that on Instagram for free?

Theoretically, yes, but the crypto art scene uses blockchain technology to authenticate and identify a single, unique piece of digital art. To understand how that piece of art sells for the price of a one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, one needs a brief primer on something called nonfungible tokens, or NFTs—digital goods that are bought and sold on emerging websites like Nifty Gateway.

Read more about Beeple and NFTs in the Esquire article here.

Life-Size Human Sculptures Reveal the “Inner Light” of Body and Soul #ArtTuesday

Artist and sculptor Joshua Limon uses metal to build life-size figurative pieces that are illuminated from the inside by LED strips, Via My Modern Met

Filipino artist Joshua Limon Palisoc creates figurative sculptures that not only explore the exterior of the human body but also shine a light on people’s inner life. He uses soldered metal to construct life-size pieces that are illuminated from inside by LED strips. The intentional gaps between the wires allow the radiance of the soul to peer through the body.

The series, entitled Ephemeral Vessels, was debuted in Palisoc’s first solo show at the Pinto Art Museum in Antipolo Philippines. The artwork is inspired by concepts from Filipino Psychology, including loob (personality of conscience), labas (physical body, and lalim (reason). Palisoc uses the human body to capture “the artist’s state of mind and being.” While some figures are presented in dynamic poses with their arms outstretched and backs arched, others appear more calm and at peace. These all represent different spiritual states to the artist.

See more!

In the Service of a Villain: Coby Kennedy’s Astonishing Afrofuturist Vision #ArtTuesday

If anyone was looking for a clear introduction to Afrofuturism, the work of Coby Kennedy brings all the threads together in one astonishing work called In the Service of a Villain. Here’s more from JUXTAPOZ:

In his work, Kennedy addresses the misapplication of the word Thug. Often used as a catch-all term for Black youths in the minds of privileged white America, the Thug is presented in Kennedy’s universe as the Thuggernaut, a weaponized biological slur created by manipulating stolen fetuses from the black community, gestating them into huge metal pachydermic shells. Now four stories tall, with six humongous lumbering brown arms, an oversized threatening genitalia and one cycloptic eye glaring victimizingly down from its bulking hardened steel shell of a body, they are set loose to roam the urban landscape dishing out death, self genocide and general sociopathic behavior designed to destroy black society from within.

Manifesting alongside (and emboldened as a consequence of) The Thuggernaut, a golem entity known as Jimmy Crow emerges. Composed of all the angst and pain experienced throughout the Black Diaspora in North America, Jimmy Crow took the name of the post-Civil War era that brought atrocities against Black people in America through untold violence and terrorism. A spirit of vengeance, Jimmy Crow is a force of reciprocity through destruction, and salvation through mythology.

See more!

Monday, March 1, 2021

Watch Scott on the @tomshardware Pi Cast tomorrow at 11:30am Pacific (15 hours from now) @tannewt #circuitpython

We’ll be talking about CircuitPython on the RP2040!

Benoit Lapray Makes Pop Culture Heroes Monuments Within the City of Paris

French photographer and digital artist Benoit Lapray in collaboration with studio 95 Magenta and Emmanuelle Vonck Lugand created a fantastic project that replaces famous Parisian monuments and statues with iconic pop culture characters ranging from Batman, Gandalf and Goku to Roger and Jessica Rabbit, Via DesignBoom

while walking in the streets of paris, creative photographer benoit lapray had the idea to create a photo series around public monuments. the idea was to integrate heroes from pop culture into the scenery and setting of existing parisian monuments. across the two-part series, lapray pays homage to the creators of the characters who have inspired and fed people’s imagination for decades. frozen on huge stone pedestals, cult characters from popular culture are raised to the rank of ‘monuments’. ‘it is a way for me to underline that these heroes of fiction are today part of the world’s cultural heritage,’ says lapray.

See more!

E-Eggs Track Turtle Traffickers

I didn’t know turtle egg poaching was a thing but I’m glad to learn this secret egg tracker is on the case! A real fun note is the idea came from Breaking Bad.

From Sciantific American:

Poachers take note. If you’re thinking about stealing eggs from the nests of sea turtles on the beaches of Costa Rica, well, you may wind up getting more than you bargained for. Because researchers have combined GPS technology with 3D printing to produce decoy eggs that look and feel like real turtle eggs…but can track where traffickers go when they swipe these endangered embryos. The egg-saving efforts are mapped out in the journal Current Biology