Plenty of photos here.

Torstrasse 166 is an artists’ space in Berlin. One artist’s work which really stood out to me was that of Chiharu Shiota, displayed above and below. Here is a rushed translation of some text from her part of the website:

Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972, Osaka) studied with Marina Abramovic and Rebecca Horn and has lived in Berlin since 1999. Her work has been shown in important exhibitions, museums and film festivals across the world, including the Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, National Museum of Modern Art Tokio [sic?], P.S.1/MoMA New York and the biannual film festivals in Kwangyu, Yokohama, Lyon and Fukuoka. In 2008 she was awarded with the most prestigious Prize of the Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan.

…

The power and energy of Chiharu Shiota’s installations fascinate and unsettle simultaneously. Fears and nightmares are packed into her works. Indeed it is the poetry, the aesthetic allure of her work which captivates the observer.

In earlier installations, Shiota encased herself in black wool, like a cocoon. She slept in exhibitions, trapped in her webs of wool which form an impenetrable bush between a bed and the walls.

Brandon Shigeta, on the other hand, had a new exhibition in February entitled Skate & Destroy, which showcased objects made from old skateboard decks. Here you can view a full flickr album of photos of the event:

And Scott Burnham has some interesting ideas on the role of urban art and the need for it:

If we were to consider the dialogue of design in the same way we do the linguistic development of a culture’s language, then just as informal street-level vernacular has innovated and filled in the gaps of a culture’s formal language, the street has as well developed its own vernacular to fill the gaps in the city’s formal design. This new street-level language of design – non-commissioned, non-invited interventions in the urban landscape – transforms the fixed landscape of the city into a platform for a design dialogue.

Ideas supported by photos of works of urban art which, as Burnham puts it, “are more than simply creative play in the streets – they signal a new aesthetic correspondence between the individual and the physical city”:

In descending order: work by Roadsworth (Montreal), Gualicho (San Jose), TR853-1 (Singapore).

In any event, having gone through the blog-post he had linked I decided to share some of my new discoveries here myself:

• Building Maker: A Google app I was unaware of, which lets you add the 3D element to Google Maps. For all bored architects out there (since this is just what they want to be doing in their time off.)
• Ikea Hacker: Neat stuff done with bog-standard Ikea furniture.
• Strange Maps: A blog of, well, old and interesting maps. I don’t know if I’d go as far as to say strange…
• Newseum: The front pages of newspapers from 78 countries around the world.
• Cooking For Engineers: This one reminded me of my father, a pragmatist who insists on weighing pasta before cooking it, in order to make sure he’ll be doling out the correct amount. Nothing wrong with approaching cooking as a science, as opposed to an art!
• GetHuman.com: An excellent idea for a website. This one tells you which keys you need to press in order to get an actual human operator on the line when calling a large company, saving you the time of listening to and trying to interact with a computerised system.
• PDFGeni.com: Another great idea — a repository of PDF documents such as old technical manuals, academic texts, and so on.

I feel I must write a disclaimer, saying I haven’t used or read these sites extensively, having just discovered them a few hours ago, but from first impressions they do look like they deserve a bookmark.

The photo above is from a short photoseries in Time magazine, the title of which is “Detroit’s Beautiful, Horrible Decline.” Below are a few photos from another, much longer series by 7 different photographers who state:

Detroit is one of the most visually interesting cities in the world however it is also one of the most misunderstood and misrepresented cities. This group of photographs illustrates what contemporary Detroit artists have been doing in regards to developing an understanding and appreciation for this complex and diverse city from street portraits of the “survivors” to the landscapes of wild new growth to the industrial leftovers.

You can view the full series here.

I also came across a German blogpost entitled, “The beauty of a city’s downfall,” which features photos from all over the world of derelict buildings and cities decaying.

An excellent article by Kurt Kleiner explores why people often act completely irrationally and how intelligence by itself doesn’t make you rational:

Jack is looking at Anne, but Anne is looking at George. Jack is married but George is not. Is a married person looking at an unmarried person?

Yes  /  No  /  Cannot be determined

The Fix Your Mix blog ran a series of articles studying the composition of pop music. Here are two: A Compositional Analysis of Kids by MGMT, Single Ladies by Beyonce. Another interesting post was entitled 5 Pop Songs With No Music. They run a good blog there — it’s worthwhile keeping an eye on it.

G.M.B. Akash was featured as the first guest photojournalist on Zoriah’s blog last April in a post concerned with child workers in Bangladesh:

My intention is not only to show the children at work as victims of bad bosses exploiting them, but I want to show the complexity of the situation: The parents who send their little boy to work in a factory because they are poor; the child who has to work to earn a living for the family; the boss of the factory who is being pushed by big garment companies to produce for less money; and the Western consumers as clients who buy cheap clothes.

Zoriah took some incredible photos recently of the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. Here is the second set of three. Naturally, some of the photos are quite disturbing.

On to lighter things, and Vincent Bousserez created a series of macro photographs which are quite amusing:

You can view the full set here and the artist’s website here, however be warned: for some reason, the artist decided it’d be a good idea to have music play automatically when you visit his website. As the Americans say, “go figure.”

Village of Joy had a blog post with photos of 50 strange buildings. Some are very well known, but a few I’d not come across before, such as this “Kettle House” in Texas:

This house sculpted out of a megalith in Guimarães, Portugal:

And this bizarre house again in Texas:

When you check the rest out, it’s worth keeping in mind that many of the pictures are links to more information and photos.

And here are mock-ups from Front Architects of one recycling possibility for billboards: compact housing.

More photos here.

Lastly, a quite lengthy series of hilariously bizarre photos from a Juggalo gathering. Quality stuff.

Some really impressive 3D effects in this one: spheres of light passing in and out of the buildings; flags being unfurled and waving in the wind, casting their shadows on the building; water gushing down from above.

A must-see.

Projection on Buildings from NuFormer Digital Media on Vimeo.

The Fleet Foxes play Sun Giant and Blue Ridge Mountains in an abandoned wing of the Grand Palais, Paris. Recorded in May 2008.

Slightly dodgy camera-work (did the cameraman really need to stand so close to them?) made up for by the music itself.

This also happens to tie in with Wikipedia’s featured picture of the day: Mane St [sic] of Pioneertown, “an unincorporated and inhabited town built in 1946 as a TV and film set by, among others, Roy Rogers. The town was designed to provide a place for the actors to live while simultaneously having their homes used as part of the set.”

This is a dangerous page to visit, as it’ll inevitably lead to a list of ghost towns, such as Bodie, California:

And Kayaköy, Turkey:

And by the time you’ve read about them all, the day is spent. Good work!

If not, then here are some extra, related wiki rabbit-holes for you to bound down:

Urban Exploration [and some extra photo galleries at undercity]

Urban Decay

Squatting

Head over to the Jarmuschek exhibition space for more info, and this Jorymon blogpost for more pictures.

Now, back to the thesis..