Drawing with your Eyes

“That was the first time I’ve drawn anything in seven years. I feel like I had been held under water, and someone finally reached down, and pulled my head up so I could take a breath.” 

— Tempt

Graffiti artist Tony “TEMPT” Quan could no longer create his art, let alone communicate with his family…Mick Ebeling was determined to help the artist accomplish both of these things. Thus, the EyeWriter was born — a pair of glasses with hardware that allows the wearer to draw and communicate … just by using their eyes.

 

Sculptures That Would be at Home in the Deep Sea [Shih Chieh Huang]

Public Art + Engineering + Environmentalism

“Natalie Jeremijenko blends art, engineering, environmentalism, biochemistry and more to create real-life experiments that enable social change…Her work has been exhibited in the MASS MoCA, the Whitney Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and she is part of an artists’ collective called the Bureau of Inverse Technology.”

Living, Breathing Canvas

Alexa Meade paints on living subjects. Instead of creating the illusion of 3-D on a 2-D canvas, she creates the illusion of a 2-D canvas on living 3-D subjects. She explores space, light, and surface- by painting on humans.

Keep in mind that these are photographs of people, painted on with real paint, to mimic paintings of people…

In her own words:

“as you’re willing to look beyond what’s already been brought to light, that you can see what’s below the surface, hiding in the shadows, and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye”

 

“Art that Craves your Attention”

“Aparna Rao shows her latest work… sculptures that play with your perception — and crave your attention”

Optical Illusions and our Perception of Color

A fun and mind-boggling TED Talk,  that will interest anyone who thinks they can see color- especially artists and synesthetes!

“Color enables us to see the similarities and differences between surfaces, according to the full spectrum of light that they reflect. But what you’ve just done is, in many respects, mathematically impossible. Why? Because, as Berkeley tells us, we have no direct access to our physical world, other than through our senses. And the light that falls onto our eyes is determined by multiple things in the world — not only the color of objects, but also the color of their illumination, and the color of the space between us and those objects. You vary any one of those parameters, and you’ll change the color of the light that falls onto your eye.

This is a huge problem because it means that the same image could have an infinite number of possible real-world sources.”

“Color tells us… that the brain didn’t actually evolve to see the world the way it is. We can’t. Instead, the brain evolved to see the world the way it was useful to see in the past. And how we see is by continually redefining normality.”

Color can Transform Cities (and can even Decrease Crime!)

“One day I remember walking along a street that had just been colored, and where we were in the process of planting trees, when I saw a shopkeeper and his wife putting a glass facade to their shop. They had thrown the old shutter in the garbage collection place.

“Why did you throw away the shutters?” I asked him.

“Well, because the street is safer now,” they answered.

“Safer? Why? They have posted more policemen here?”

“Come on, man! What policemen? You can see it for yourself. There are colors, streetlights, new pavement with no potholes, trees. So it’s beautiful; it’s safe.””

“The rehabilitation of public spaces revived the feeling of belonging to a city that people lost. The pride of people about their own place of living, and there were feelings that had been buried deep for years under the fury of the illegal, barbaric constructions that sprang up in the public space. And when colors came out everywhere, a mood of change started transforming the spirit of people. Big noise raised up: “What is this? What is happening? What are colors doing to us?””

Art and Cultural Change

“I was interested in the idea of why and how I could create a new story, a new narrative in art history and a new narrative in the world. And to do this, I knew that I had to see the way in which artists work, understand the artist’s studio as a laboratory, imagine, then, reinventing the museum as a think tank and looking at the exhibition as the ultimate white paper — asking questions, providing the space to look and to think about answers.”

“Can a museum be a catalyst in a community? Can a museum house artists and allow them to be change agents as communities rethink themselves?…. Think about artists, not as content providers, though they can be brilliant at that, but, again, as real catalysts.”

Art Made of Storms

Artist Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from massive storms and turns it into complex sculptures that embody the forces of nature and time. These sculptures then become musical scores for a string quartet to play. (Via TED).

 

“Weather is an amalgam of systems that is inherently invisible to most of us. So I use sculpture and music to make it, not just visible, but also tactile and audible.”

“This piece here is read very differently depending on where you place it. You place it in an art museum, it becomes a sculpture. You place it in a science museum, it becomes a three-dimensional visualization of data. You place it in a music hall, it all of a sudden becomes a musical score. And I really like that, because the viewer is really challenged as to what visual language is part of science versus art versus music.”

Bio-Inspired Architecture and Design