Airspace rebooted

Airspace Rebooted from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

In April of this year, much of Europe's airspace has been closed for several days, due to the volcanic ash after the eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in iceland. itoworld.com, with support from ideasintransit.org, made a visualization of the airspace traffic of Europe slowly coming back to life again.

The flight data is courtesy of flightradar24.com and covers a large fraction of Europe. There are a few gaps (most noticeably France) and no coverage over the Atlantic, but the picture is still clear.

Other than slowing the "reboot" of the flight lines, it also shows the density of airtraffic in on certain lines and airports. It also makes one wonder whether the amount of flight that we, in general, use nowadays will continue to exist - or better yet: how it could be made sustainable to maintain this density of flight...

Fixing the city with Lego

Sometimes, it's difficult to look around in the city and see all the decay. Many people just walk by without noticing, or without being bothered. Well, not artist Jan Vormann. However, his method of repairing holes in the walls is a bit unconventional, to say the least. What he does is basically filling holes in brittle walls with blocks. Thus far nothing too unconventional. However, the blocks are not ordinary blocks, but pieces of Lego. The repair probably doesn't last too long (because the neighborhood children will probably add the lego bricks to their private collections), but the initiative is a playful, colourful statement against careless decay.

Image Construction

Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin made a really intriguing series of photocollages under the title "image/construction". The starting point appears to be an existing building, which is cut up, sampled, mirrored, warped, distorted, cloned and appropriated to make a new structure, possible and impossible at the same time. It plays on the dichitomy of the image and reality. It questions the value of representation in many aspects. And it implicitly asks the question what a building is.

Other than this quasi-intellectual interpretations, these images just look great. So here's another one:

Giving directions

When working for Emery Studio in Australia, Axel Peemüller Design came up with a more graphic way of depicting the signs of the Eureka Carpark Tower. The letters of the directions one should go in the parking garage are distorted. They are smeared over the walls, floors and ceilings. Only from certain vantage points along the route, they are perfectly readable.

Schalalala

I've seen it pretty often during the last weeks. Cars with national flags attached to it, to show support to a specific national football team. And I must say that I really enjoy seeing cars with two different flags. Especially in the area where my girlfriend lives, I've seen a lot of cars with both the German and the Turkish flag attached to them. What happens on wednesday (when the two nations collide in the semi-finals of Euro 2008) is a different story.
But normally supporter-kits for football-fans are pretty absolute. They leave no room for double choices, or multiple options. Since not everybody it as rigid as this supposes people to be, Schalalala was invented. As they say themselves on their website: Schalalala is a fan-scarf remix project, which offers you a more self-determined formulation. Use the Remix-Interface to turn existing fan-scarfs into your own message. Download your knitting pattern from the Remix-Gallery and go ahead and knit it.

I'm back!

As you might have noticed, I haven't been too active on this blog lately. There have been several reasons for that: it started out with a holiday, prolongued with my girlfriend staying in the Netherlands for some time... And straight after that I started working on a competition, which pretty much absorbed many of the evenings during the past weeks.

Well, the competition entry is sent in, the holiday is definitely over, my girlfriend is back in Germany, so the postings can (and will) continue. However, there still is a little dent in the road: the European Championship Football in Austria and Switzerland. And I am just watching a full load of football matches. Of course, especially the dutch ones. So I will still be a bit slower than usual with my postings...

Oh, and in case you are wondering about the image above: it's a picture from the Church of the Sacred Heart in Prague, by Joseph Plecnik. One of the many great things I've seen during my holidays. I'll probably devote a post or two to Prague in the near future... (and oh, I didn't take this picture myself, but I took it from www.archinect.com.

52N 4E - Google Earth (6)

A little bit south of the city centre of Den Haag (The Hague) in the Netherlands lies a pretty non-descript housing area. Nothing noteworthy, to write about, one might say. True. True. But not in google earth. Just zoom in on the corner of the Westenbergstraat and the Boekhorststraat. What appears to be a normal housing area is, in fact, an area with a pretty remarkable solution for parking: some smart engineers probably found an impressive way to turn off gravity, so that cars can park on the side of buildings. It's either that, or a funnily stitched picture...

traffic light tree

Imagine this: just when you think that you'll manage to survive London traffic, you drive towards the Heron Quays roundabout. Instead of having to tackle one set of traffic lights, you are adressed to by a mere 75 of them. Just when you start to feel a bit scared, you realize it's a piece of art.

Traffic Light Tree was designed by the Parisian artist Pierre Vivant. When one of the three trees on the site was dying because of pollution by passing cars in 1998, he designed this set of traffic lights, mimicking a tree. But it's not just that, it's also a reflection of all the continuous rhythm of financial and commercial activities.

I found this one thanks to Citynoise.

Sneakers delight store (igor ferreira) lissabon

The owner of the Sneakers' Delight store in Lisbon, Igor Ferreira, was looking for the perfect way to make his shop a little bit more personal, attractive and fun. Since he's a designer, too - and loves graphic insanity. And he had a nice idea to make his shop more interactive. On the walls, he put a black and white mural by the French illustrator 'Skwak'. And then, he gave his costumers some coloured pencils, and let them colour in the illustration. So the shop is always "under construction" and in transition. Lovely.

If you think that you've seen this before, you might be right. And you are probably reading Frame Magazine, too...

The Chaos Game

Even though I am neither a mathematician or a physicist, I am fascinated by chaos theory. And that has nothing to do with the pretty pictures it mostly generates.
I probably don't even understand half of the concept of it, but still the idea behind it is rather appealing: all the order in the world depends on randomness. Or: disorder always seems to have a orderly basis.

The chaos game was one of the eye-openers for me. The idea consists of three simple steps:
1. Take 3 points in a plane, and form a triangle
2. Randomly select any point inside the triangle and move half the distance from
that point to any of the 3 vertex points. Plot the current position.
3. Repeat from step 2.

After a little while, you'll eventually end up with the figure above: the so-called Sierpinski triangle (or gasket). No matter where you start, no matter which directions you start off in. If you'd take another operation for step 2, you get another shape. Mostly fractal. For instance, you might end up with that famous fern-leaf shaped thingie. But it's not about form as such, it's about creating order from chaos.

But look at it from the other way around: imagine you have a shape, any shape. If you find the right algorithm behind it - the "constructing" algorithm - and feed it backwards, you'll end up with a random point. You never know where you'll end up... Or, you never know where the order came from...