We just stumbled upon this impressive stop motion film about a girl who misses her train in Milan and has to wait overnight.  While the film itself is quite beautiful, it made us wonder, when do stop motion films simply become films? 
This particular project is less than seven minutes long and uses over 4,500 photos.  Imagine what a basic little point and shoot will be able to do in just a couple more years?

[via Notcot]

This past January, PSFK held a Good Ideas Salon in London, inviting our favorite innovators and thought leaders to present their current projects and share some of their own good ideas. One of the day’s most visually inspiring presentations came from Eva Rucki, one of the founding partners of Troika, a multi-disciplinary art and design practice based out of London.

Eva shared insights into the philosophy and ideas behind Troika’s varied work, covering graphics, communication, art, product design and engineering, with a focus on the iterative process employed in the development of their projects.

On April 2, 2009, PSFK will [...]

Media architecture collective, Urban Alliance, recently installed what they call “interactive urban wallpaper” in a pedestrian tunnel in Amsterdam.  Made from 2,500 LEDs set behind a ribbed, semi-transparent wall, the lights react to people’s movement as they they walk through the tunnel.  In addition to making it less vulnerable to graffiti, the curves in the wall also enable the images to be seen more clearly from outside the tunnel.
Urban Alliance is composed of Dutch architects Studio Klink, production company Illuminate, artist Matthias Oostrik and design and construction firm Cube.
[via Dezeen]
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Massive Installation Utilizes 41,000 LEDs
LED Installation Lights Up [...]

The Internet Famous Class at Parsons New School is all about studying the art and science of getting hits.  Recently featured on Current TV, the course is dedicated to teaching students the most effective ways of leveraging social media to gain the largest possible audience online.
In order to test their theories and experiment with new strategies for gaining popularity, students are expected to develop their own projects, either collectively or on their own, utilizing any and all media in conjunction with the internet.
What makes the course particularly interesting is that students’ grades are based entirely on how much traffic they [...]

Here are PSFK’s top five articles from Feb. 22 – Mar. 1, 2009. Results are based on Google Analytics and in order of overall page views.
Christian Faur’s Crayon Art – Piers Fawkes
Massive Installation Utilizes 41,000 LEDS – Jeff Squires
Poster Boy & Aakash Nihalani Remix the MOMA Collection – Dan Gould
Site Visit: Droog Store NYC – Dave Pinter
United States and the Electrocution of Passengers – Piers Fawkes

For all those Atari lovers out there, be sure to check out Röyksopp’s new video for “Happy Up Here,” the debut track from their forthcoming Junior album. Directed by Reuben Sutherland, the video looks at all the flickering, pixelated lights of a city and watches as they come to life and turn into a real life Space Invaders scene.  lalondontokyobeijing@gmail.com
 

Robbie Conal is an LA based artist known for his gnarled portraits of American political figures.  Raised in Manhattan by union organizers, Robbie describes how his art evolved from “abstract, metaphorical soup,”  into the iconic pictures of human figures he’s known for today.
When asked about his unique style, Robbie explains that he simply takes whatever is bothering him about a particular person, and just jams all those bad feeling he has about them into the way he paints their face.
He goes on to explain how the current zeigeist has changed enough to where he no longer feels the need to [...]

The New York Times published a fantastic article yesterday about a new culinary movement brewing in Brooklyn.  Attracted by cheap rent (as opposed to Manhattan) and the experimental nature of the borough, there has been a surge in artisan chefs resurrecting traditional methods and emphasizing old school craftsmanship.
These Brooklynites, most in their 20s and 30s, are hand-making pickles, cheeses and chocolates the way others form bands and artists’ collectives. They have a sense of community and an appreciation for traditional methods and flavors. They also share an aesthetic that’s equal parts 19th and 21st century, with a taste for bold [...]

Last year, during the Festival of World Culture in Ireland, German artist Edgar Mueller painted one his iconic optical illusions over a 250 square meter patch of asphalt.  Using acrylic wall paint to create the scene, it took the artist five days, working 12 hours a day to paint the massive crevasse; which, from the right perspective, looks remarkably realistic.
The below video is a great time lapse piece depicting the creation of the illusion as well as the curious interactions people have with it.

Be sure to also check out the Mueller’s Lava Burst.

For the Tate Triennial 2009, which opened on February 3, curator Nicolas Bourriaud declares that postmodernism is over and that we are experiencing the emergence of a global ‘altermodernity.’
Bourriaud, the French cultural theorist and co-founder of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, believes that a new form of art is emerging, fueled by non-stop communication and globalization.  He explains that altermodernism is a “sort of dream catcher attempting to capture the characteristics of a modernity specific to the 21st century.”

Regine Debatty of We Make Money Not Art summarizes his theory quite nicely:
If early twentieth-century Modernism is characterised as a broadly [...]

We wrote last week about a colorful LED installation on the streets of Paris that blew us away, today we’re inspired by Multiverse, a massive installation by American artist Leo Villareal that features approximately 41,000 LED nodes that run through a 200-foot-long tunnel in the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C..
As passerbyers move between the East and West buildings on an airport style people mover, the zillions of lights flicker on and off over head creating rhythmic patterns and abstract configurations.  The custom designed software also has an element of chance built into it, so it’s unlikely that anyone [...]

Here are PSFK’s top five articles from Feb. 16 – Feb. 22, 2009. Results are based on Google Analytics and in order of overall page views.
The Future (Present) of Internet Dating – Dan Gould
Visualizing the $780 Billion Stimulus – Christine Huang
NVDRS Cassette Tape: Designing Limitations to Manage Digital Abundance – Dan Gould
Musical Youth II – Ruby Pseudo
When Graffiti Doesn’t Get you Street Creds, Fall Back on Gentrification – Jeff Squires

Ever since the slow food movement came to prominence in the 90s, there has been a general shift in the way we perceive food and how we expect it to be produced. First, there was the whole fair trade thing, then it was all about being organic, now, it’s all about being local – and one of the latest trends we’ve been noticing is young urbanites taking matters into their own hands, and growing their own food.
The Greenhorns is a documentary currently in production focusing on the lives of America’s young farming community. Speaking with farmers from Maine to [...]

We found this visualization of the current credit crisis remarkably informative.  The ten minute long video does a really great job breaking down all the different players and provides a general overview of how investment banking works.  By the end of it, terms like sub-prime mortgages, collateralized debt obligations, frozen credit markers, and credit default swaps actually make sense.
The video was created by Jonathon Jarvis as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program at the Art Center College of Design.

PATACHROMO, a brilliant installation by French artists Superbien, was based on the principles of CHROMOtherapy seen through the lense of PATAphysics . Presented as a succession of animated light frames lasting about 2 minutes each, the PATACHROMO program is provided as a tool for passers-by to face the grey Parisian winter weather with more serenity. How? According to the project page on Superbien’s website: “by exposing one’s chakras to the light diffused by the LED structure of the installation (covering a surface of 6.65 sq meters).”
We love the idea of walking down a dark and lonely Parisian street and stumbling [...]