Notes + Links on creativity, art, & design

by Casey A. Gollan

The New York Earth Room, 1977, by Walter de Maria

An interior earth sculpture. 250 cubic yards of earth (197 cubic meters) 3,600 square feet of floor space (335 square meters) 22 inch depth of material (56 centimeters) Total weight of sculpture: 280,000 lbs. (127,300 kilos)

The New York Earth Room, 1977, is the third Earth Room sculpture executed by the artist, the first being in Munich, Germany in 1968. The second was installed at the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, Germany in 1974. The first two works no longer exist.

The New York Earth Room has been on long-term view to the public since 1980. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.

141 Wooster Street, New York City.

See also: A Loft Filled with Dirt, the Man Who’s Cared for it for 19 Years

The Broken Kilometer, 1979, by Walter De Maria

The Broken Kilometer, 1979, located at 393 West Broadway in New York City, is composed of 500 highly polished, round, solid brass rods, each measuring two meters in length and five centimeters (two inches) in diameter. The 500 rods are placed in five parallel rows of 100 rods each. The sculpture weighs 18 3/4 tons and would measure 3,280 feet if all the elements were laid end-to-end. Each rod is placed such that the spaces between the rods increase by 5mm with each consecutive space, from front to back; the first two rods of each row are placed 80mm apart, the last two rods are placed 580 mm apart. Metal halide stadium lights illuminate the work which is 45 feet wide and 125 feet long.

This work is the companion piece to De Maria’s 1977 Vertical Earth Kilometer at Kassel, Germany. In that permanently installed earth sculpture, a brass rod of the same diameter, total weight and total length has been inserted 1,000 meters into the ground.

The Broken Kilometer has been on long-term view to the public since 1979. This work was commissioned and is maintained by Dia Art Foundation.

It’s almost useless to post a picture of this except to entice you to drop whatever you’re doing and go here now. 393 West Broadway, New York City.

The Faces Behind the Famous Hands | The Big Money

Ellen Sirot has been in the hand-modeling business for 20 years. She has worked on countless campaigns selling just about everything from nail polish to pregnancy tests. Recently, she has jumped on new opportunities in tech advertising, such as this Verizon (VZ) campaign. While some models don’t bother to baby their hands, Sirot insists on it. She wears gloves all the time and has even developed her own line of hand cream to keep them moisturized.

Oh, no.

Walter De Maria is on the line and would like to talk to you.

meaghano:

I’ve never commented on the NYT before; that was kind of fun.

This guy’s like: “Oh god, can I Like this photo of people dying in Haiti?” and all of the Old People on the NYT are freaked out and suggesting new words, such as APPRECIATE (Marco: “because it’s better to APPRECIATE people dying it Haiti, right?”), and RECOMMEND or INTERESTED (wonder what that icon would look like?).

Also this is my favorite comment:

1. You don’t have to click on the Like button.
2. Instead of clicking on the Like button, you could have written something in response to the article’s posting.
3. You could have just done nothing — no one really cares about your opinion on their Facebook page posting.
4. Who cares?
5. Get a real job.

HAH. People are the worst/best.

Hah is right.

Hey, ‘Friend,’ Do You ‘Like’ My Sad Story? — NY Times

I recently “liked” a story about five people dying in an explosion in Connecticut.

I didn’t actually “like” the fact that five people had died in a terrible accident. Technically, I didn’t even “like” the story — I found the reporting and writing informative and the narrative engrossing, but not the contents of the piece. On Facebook, however, the only option I had to tell people I had read the article was to either add a comment or press the little “like” button that appears at the bottom of everyone’s status update.

The same act of “liking” something applies to the Web site Tumblr. Several weeks ago, when I visited a friend’s Tumblr Web site, at the top of the page sat a series of photos from the devastation in Haiti. There were images of dead bodies, of toppled buildings and of a child crying in the street. Yet below all of this there were a series of tiny icons with people’s names saying they “liked” this set of images.

You can also find these strange juxtapositions on Google Buzz and on the fan pages of Facebook.

Although these calls for approval have been around for a long time on social networks, they can still be jarring and confusing when this terminology is used in the wrong context.

(via infoneer-pulse)

It took me a minute to realize that this is a photo of a real thing. That is amazing. CP+B has a way less glamorous but also awesome version of this that tracks the projects for their larger company.

mrgan:

The Panic Status Board - one of the things I’ve been working on lately. Read Cabel’s writeup!

“Turbo“, 2008 by Baptiste Debombourg.

Tom Moody dissects this piece of “internet aware art” from VVORK, which he defines, in one sense, as “offline art made with internet presentation and dissemination in mind.”

Neat idea but it doesn’t need to exist as a piece—you have everything you need from the installation shot. The bulge, a gallery pole, and the human for scale. It reads as instantly and dramatically as an advertising image, with the “product” being an academic soundbite about patriarchal space rendered abject. Would this have been made without vvork.com and the internet to spread it around? Yes, it could be an image in an art magazine, but would it have survived the first critic’s visit who noticed the piece only “read” from a couple of angles and didn’t hold up to more than a few seconds’ study? Vvork means never having to explain—success is presumed.

One of my teachers says that a good work of art can’t be read like a sentence.