"...This is not important, except that it is possible to continue. Writing about art seems to me more and more dangerous. There are too many words troubling the wonderful silence of the visual."
much more of this insightful interview between gomez and ernesto neto here.
thanks to helen and scamper, this wonderful device has just been brought to my attention.
read more about how it works here.
1.) this lamp/swing.
2.) looking down from a great height.
3.) just missing a bus.
4.) waking up from oversleeping.
5.) kissing someone for the first time.
6.) running a yellow light.
7.) being caught taking a picture in a place where photographs are not allowed (you didn't know).
i forget, who was it who said: "objects are frozen thoughts"?
chandelier by delusions of grandeur via
labour of heart.
poppy bobby pins by foundling at poppytalk handmade.
egg throne, wire feeder and shoe tree by bailey's home and garden. via a cup of jo.
"I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming."
- Goethe
boy, did i need this quote today. thanks, swissmiss.
also for the flying robert, one of those objects i would very much like to have.
"once there was a man
who wrote a symphony based entirely
on the arrangement of birds on power lines outside;
it's called solmifying- to solmizate in the infinitive; transitive: to sing
any object into place."
~cole swensen
actually, james russell lowell said "books," not blogs. books are the bees. but there's a lot of cross pollination i see going on as of late regarding bees themselves. a couple of days ago i posted about the beeswax vase, then i see over on chris's blog he's featured an artist by the name of aganetha dyck, who's been doing collaborative art with bees for years. she puts such objects as shoes, clothes hangers, and dolls into her bees' hives, uponwhich they create the most compelling wax and honeycomb sculptures.
when i visited miranda over at geegaw, i was reminded of the strange and inexplicably widespread bee disappearance which began last autumn. one of her readers put in a link to an interesting article on synchronizm concerning certain symmetries arising between honeybees and the sun.
listed in miranda's sidebar is a link to a wonderful blog called woolgathersome. her april 14th entry is all about the bee, and contains loads of links to other bee lovers, including jean henri fabre and rudolph steiner, the father of waldorf and biodynamic farming.
she includes as well a poem written by osip mandelshtam entitled "necklace of bees," which i would just like to put here also in its entirety, to pollinate further:
For the sake of delight
Take from my hands some sun and some honey,
As Persephone’s bees enjoined on us.
Not to be untied, the unmoored boat;
Not to be heard, fur-shod shadows;
Not to be silenced, life’s thick terrors.
Now we have only kisses,
Like little furry bees,
Which perish when they fly from the hive.
They rustle in transparent thickets
In the dense night forest of Taigetos,
Nourished by time, by honeysuckle and mint.
For the sake of delight, then, take my uncouth present:
This simple necklace of bees
That turned honey into sun.”
this is Amy Franceschini's pogoshovel, part of what this sf gate article calls her effort "to create a kind of utopian agrarian future." the pogoshovel is part of her special kit for planting gardens. another of her"possible/impossible" prototypes is a wheelbarrow that can be attached to a bicycle to transport soil and seeds. both are part of her project to revive the idea of victory gardens in public parks, and has proposed to revive the practice by mixing her special combination of "art, politics and gardens."
great link via eyeteeth.
then there's this unstoppably dapper chair over at ikea hacker.
lastly, over at the institute for infinitely small things, you can get a quick and delightful reminder that there are at least 57 things in life that are still free.
link also via eyeteeth.
found this over at inhabitat, and was completely smitten by the idea. the vase was made by 40,000 bees over the course of one week. writes inhabitat: "Studio Libertiny constructed a vase-shaped hive that the bees then colonized, building a hexagonal comb to encompass the existing form. And in the usual dry yet oh-so-clever Dutch manner, Studio Libertiny calls this process “slow prototyping,” a more time-consuming, yet much more poetic alternative to CNC rapid prototyping."
what the artist says about it:
"i have been interested in contradicting the current consumer society (which is interested in slick design) by choosing to work with a seemingly very vulnerable and ephemeral material - beeswax. To give a form to this natural product it has occurred more than logical to choose a form of a vase as a cultural artifact. Beeswax comes from flowers and in the form of a vase ends up serving flowers on their last journey.
At this point I asked myself a question: “Can I make this product already at the place where the material originates?” My ambition to push things further led me to alienate the process by which bees make their almost mathematically precise honeycomb structures and direct it to create a fragile and valuable object – like a pearl. This takes time and time creates value."
an object i deeply desire, brought to us by bb. 
this room, complete with a set of those cups...
(sadly i don't remember where i found this picture.)
this is so inventive. if this kind of imagination was put into gyms here, i'd go a lot more often. link via sf girl by bay.
and then there's ithaa, the first ever all glass underwater restaurant, in maldives. five meters down. as travel post puts it: "as the fish swim freely on the outside, diners are the ones occupying the aquarium."
how i adore the topsy-turvy.
"this is cannibalism, a type of cookery. it is part of cookery, which is part of human endeavor."
quote from harper's.org
