Probably the freakiest animated GIF you'll see this year.¹

[Via MetaFilter]

1. It may take a little while to load: don't judge it until you've given it time to load completely so you can see the animation running at full speed. ↩

Meet Melvin the Magical Mixed Media Machine. He's magnificent!

[Via swissmiss]

2001: A Space Odyssey on VHS.

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

Zadie Smith on the experience of watching The Clock, a film by Christian Marclay:¹

It's two in the afternoon. No one is groaning; no one turns over in bed or hits an alarm clock – it's much too late for that. Love set you going like a fat gold watch…. But by two o'clock the morning song is just a memory. We are no longer speculating as to what set us going, we just know we are going. We are less sentimental in the afternoon. We watch the minute hand go round: 2:01 becoming 2:02 becoming 2:03. It's relentless, when you think about it. Mostly we don't think about it. We're very busy, what with everything that's going on. The foreign schoolchildren have already left for the day, a burly gentleman is having his tea in a glass, Billy Liar is being asked "What time d'yer call this?" (seventeen minutes past two), and Charlotte Rampling is all by herself eating chocolate éclairs and smoking, in a garden somewhere, in France, probably. [...]

1. The trick is that the film consists of a series of excerpts from films where the time of day is shown or alluded to, and that the film starts and ends so that the time of day referred to on-screen matches the actual time of day at the screening. ↩

Trexels – Star Trek Pixel Art by John Martz and Koyama Press. So cute. I can't name every single character shown, but I recognise almost all of them.

One quibble: if they're going to give us separate images of characters whose appearance/uniform changed over the years,¹ shouldn't they also have given us clean-shaven and bearded versions of Will Riker? Growing The Beard was a really big deal back in the day!

[Via Pop Loser]

1. Multiple versions of Kirk/Spock/McCoy et al, obviously, but also versions Ben Sisko with and without hair, Worf and Miles O'Brien in both their TNG and DS9 incarnations. Tom Paris and Tom Paris as Captain Proton! ↩

Photographer Irina Werning's Back to the Future:

I love old photos. I admit being a nosey photographer. As soon as I step into someone else's house, I start sniffing for them. Most of us are fascinated by their retro look but to me, it's imagining how people would feel and look like if they were to reenact them today… A few months ago, I decided to actually do this. So, with my camera, I started inviting people to go back to their future.

My favourites: Lucia in 1956 & 2010, Ato 1992 & 2010, and Pancho in 1983 & 2010.

[Via Subtraction.com]

Another day, another post on origami. Dinh Truong Giang uses a technique called wet folding to produce paper sculptures of animals and people.

My favourites are his animals: foxes, gorillas and owls – even more so when they're miniatures.

[Via MetaFilter]

Jenny Burrows and Matt Kappler came up with a cracking idea for an advertising campaign for the Smithsonian Museums: Historically Hardcore.

Sadly, the Smithsonian Institution insisted that the designers remove the museum's logo from their work. Even with a generic logo, they're still pretty damn good.

[Via The Hickensian]

Susan Orlean on The Origami Lab:

One of the few Americans to see action during the Bug Wars of the nineteen-nineties was Robert J. Lang, a lanky Californian who was on the front lines throughout, from the battle of the Kabutomushi Beetle to the battle of the Menacing Mantis and the battle of the Long-Legged Wasp. [...]

[Via The Essayist]

The last month has been good to anyone who ever enjoyed a bit of Kirby Krackle.

Four Colour Process has zoomed out a bit and spent the last month posting a series of images from Jack Kirby's 1970s work titled Cosmic Debris: Kirby in the '70s, whereas HiLobrow has invited 25 writers to pick a single Kirby frame and contribute an essay to Kirb Your Enthusiasm.

My favourite from the former series is from Mister Miracle #17: in the latter series, I'm torn between images from Kamandi and Fantastic Four.

In her series Photo Opportunities, artist Corinne Vionnet takes hundreds of photographs taken from the internet of famous landmarks and overlays them to depict an eerily consistent consensus version of the building/monument/scene in question. I'm making it sound terribly dull, but in fact the results are beautiful.

The images at the artist's site are fairly small: My Modern Metropolis has larger versions of some of the pictures.

[Via My Modern Metropolis, via MetaFilter]

Andy Warhol's letterhead, circa 1959.

Exposition d'Art contemporain dans le parc de Chaudfontaine (Belgique).

[Via Yay Hooray,¹ via FFFFOUND!]

1. Warning: other images on that page are very much NSFW. ↩

My little piece of privacy.

Impractical.

Ineffectual.

Great fun.

[Via MetaFilter]

BBCX365:

I will light a fire that spreads beyond your fences and into your house. I will set ablaze your dormant minds. I will turn your preconceptions to smoldering ash. I am the arsonist that will wake you the fuck up.

I will do this by creating a more visually interesting vehicle for the news, use a credible news source (BBC), and promote, market, and network. I will design a poster a day for 365 days in reaction to a headline on the BBC news website and update this website everyday with the poster and the accompanying news story.

[Via The Hickensian]

Cliff Chiang's Star Wars Propaganda Posters are gorgeous.¹

[Via Prose Before Hos 2, via IMDB]

1. Compare and contrast with the xenophobic, hectoring style of Verhoeven's Federal propaganda from Starship Troopers. Chiang's work suddenly looks cosy, comforting even. ↩

A dress made of china. Not in China: of china.

[Via web-goddess]

Nice as the default view of David May's photograph of a statue of a Clydesdale horse situated just outside Glasgow is, viewing it at Original size is even better.

In the cropped view offered by my browser window, the full-size image looks more like a pencil sketch that a photograph of a real, three-dimensional object. Lovely work.

[Via MeFi user maudlin, posting to this thread]

52 Bad Dudes.

[Via Subtraction.com]

Compare and contrast.

[Space Shuttle picture via Word Magazine Blog, Light's Edge via FFFFOUND!]