art - others

The Art Guys, Situation Sculpture #18.46 (The Flying Stump)

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"The Flying Stump" is the latest in a series of Situation Sculptures [Internet Archive] by The Art Guys.
As shown in the documentation video, the stump doesn't fly along its guyline a la Peter Pan, but rather just sort of hangs there, halfway up the side of a wooden telephone pole. Also, it's not really a stump per se but a cross section of another pole, with some rusted metal cleats still attached. This work of situational art will not be noticed by 99% of the people walking or speeding through this forlorn intersection north of Houston's Interstate 610 Loop, and that's part of the beauty of this simple, absurdist gesture.
It's not known if permits had to be obtained for this work. It appears the support wire for the stump had to be strung to a pole across the street -- the hoisting activity might have attracted some attention while it was going on. Otherwise, this is about as understated as it gets. You have some documentation telling what and where this is.

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3d-printed Tardigrade

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EricHo_tardigrade

Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler famously declared: "The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more." This dictum never got around to Shapeways, a startup dedicated to filling the world with copious amounts of additional objects... via 3D printing. At Shapeways, kids using phones (or adults using laptops) create cartoony objects, a designer can be hired to help implement the project (some kind of Uber sharing/exploitation situation), and then Shapeways 3D-prints the objects to be sold in its online store.
The above sculpture, which actually looks pretty appealing, at least as a jpeg, is the brainchild of EricHo, working with designer Kostika Spaho. The tardigrade is an internet-fan-adored micro-animal that lives in ponds, eating moss. It looks like a space creature (and is in fact so tough it can live for brief periods in space), a comparison emphasized by the artist's placement of it on a futuristic grey pedestal. The "sandstone" textures of the creature and base, as well as the color choices, have a sensual allure. A viewer from the time before 3D printing would greatly like to see this carved by hand, looking much like this, but several times larger than its actual size (5 x 4 x 3 centimeters). It's an outmoded prejudice of wanting to think of a hand, with tools, patiently cutting and smoothing these particular bizarre shapes.

drawing by stage (from twitter)

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stage_CJprnrbVAAAjuNi

This resembles (riffs on?) those "deep dreaming" composite fractal-like photo-drawings everyone was posting a few weeks ago. Some Google programmers came up with a script that makes morphy psychedelic images that supposedly plumb the depths of wide internet (i.e., Google Images) but seem very big on attaching dog's eyes to things. Imagine a universe of Dali-esque monstrosities sprouting hundreds of dog's eyes, or the scene in John Carpenter's The Thing where the husky splits open, saturated in rainbow colors, with extra dog's eyes, and you've pretty much got it. Stage's drawing above captures the suffocating paranoid universe of these eye-vortexes, in a slightly less robotic context, without the rainbow colors.