Arts & Culture

Over on Current TV, there is a great pod about the Handmade Music Nights held at Etsy Labs every month. The events invite people to come play and show off their handmade music instruments and meet other like-minded tinkerers. The video highlights some of the more creative instruments from the event.

Last night, Charlie Rose had a great interview with Paola Antonelli, curator of the Design and The Elastic Mind exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

Thanks to everyone who has been contributing to the Flickr or Blurb pools for the collaborative book we’re going to publish. We’d love the rest of you to submit imagery too - more details here.

This past January, we reported on the man-made waterfalls that will be gracing New York City’s East River towards the end of June. Created by Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, the project has since steadfastly gained steam – with scaffolding already having been built. Both the Circle Line Downtown and New York Water Taxi have announced they’ll be offering tours (some of them free) of the four falls . Gothamist reports that NYC is expecting tourism revenues to increase by $55 million due to the project.

 NYC Waterfalls

[via Gothamist]

So, we’ve been playing with the print-on-order platform Blurb - and we’d like to create a series of books with your help. There’s a good few of you out there - let’s do something together.

Book 1: At Play - Images from around the world

Publish a collection of photographs of people At Play. These photos have been taken by PSFK readers and should be added by either:
a) Adding them to this Blurb Project group
b) Submitting them to the Flickr group ‘At Play’ : http://flickr.com/groups/at_play/

We want pictures of others At Play (sorry - not of you, the photographer) - and a small commentary about it with tags to know where the shots were taken.

Please add YOUR original high quality images. If this works, we’ll choose the photos on May 30 and the book should be ready for everyone to buy mid-June.

If we use your shot (and commentary), we will reference you and add a link to your site, if you provide it. PSFK may feature the shot on this site also. If we sell more that 30 copies of At Play, we’ll send you a free copy of the book too. Sound ok?

And what is ‘At Play’?

You show&tell us.

(and no, that’s not really going to be the cover)

Last weekend, Tristan Manco invited a number of A-List street artists to come down and paint up a tunnel under the old Eurostar terminal in London. Then they invited the public to add their stencils. Then the rest of us took photos of the vast collection of modern contemporary art - on Flickr you can already find 39,367+ results matching cans and festival (’W10′ has a rather good collection if you want to cut to the chase).

Flickr
The Cans Festival

Behance has introduced Creative Index as a site for creative professionals to find work, connect with each other and share portfolios. The free profiles are pretty easy to set up and the interface makes searching simple. We like that the site’s definition of creative professional is very inclusive; categories ranging from advertising, graphic design, illustration to acrobatics, costume design and ice sculpture can be found on the site.

Creative Index

While visiting San Francisco earlier this month, a friend of ours at Current TV mentioned that they were going to set up a booth at Maker Faire and hand out video cameras to the attendees to film their favorite projects as well as provide editing assistance for them to cut the videos on the spot and upload them to a dedicated site. We immediately loved the idea of this intuitive collaboration and have been anxious to check out the results.

The event was this past weekend and you can already watch some of the videos created. Other people who were filming at the creative gathering were also encouraged to upload or embed their films too.

This video about electric cupcakes caught our eye in particular:

While we all might be wondering whether a downturn could affect our jobs, the rise in number of folks who attended the recent Salone Del Mobile design show in Milan suggests that we still seem to have the enthusiasm to keep an eye on the future. Dexigner reports that the 2008 edition of the main exhibition I Saloni had a record number of visitors - 348,000 visitors, 29 percent more than last year with 210,000 attendees coming from abroad.

If you weren’t one of the lucky ‘few’ who made it to Italy, don’t worry - just read these detailed reports PSFK put together:

PSFK at the Salone Del Mobile - seating trends
PSFK at the Salone del Mobile - table trends
PSFK at the Salone del Mobile - lighting trends
PSFK at the Salone del Mobile - storage trends
PSFK at the Salon del Mobile - ideas and innovation