Making Reality

Ville Lenkkeri's Reality in the Making

Beware of the Cliché!

The World Press Photo of the Year 2006 shows upscale young Lebanese men and women visiting a bombed-out Beirut neighborhood like disaster tourists -- or at least that's what everyone thought. Bissan Maroun, one of those featured in the photograph, told SPIEGEL ONLINE the true story.

Michael Samuel's Miniature Fantasies

Miniatures by Michael Samuel

yet another great post by moon river

Fallout Shelter

" From 1962, deep in the midst of The Cold War -- everything you've ever wanted to know about fallout shelters but were afraid to ask."

It sure beats this low-cost fallout shelter (what, no food?):

Find more cold war ephemera at the Red Menace pool.

The Book of Poultry

"55 chromolithograph plates from 'The Illustrated Book of Poultry, with Practical Schedules for Judging, Constructed from Actual Analysis of the Best Modern Decisions' by Lewis Wright, first published 1880 are online at Ecole Nationale Vétérinaire de Lyon. [Some background]"

found in BibliOdyssey

Richard Sarson's Circle Project

"The circle drawings are an ongoing project which began in February 2006 as a way of exploring composition, space and symmetry using a physical, non-computer driven approach. all the images shown here are produced using a compass and ink and are generated from a series of measurements taken from a square grid of 100 points."

via winter sleep

Why the Japanese love Jazz.

shared by everything you do is a balloon

As someone who is utterly unable to follow the lyrics in any song, this article certainly struck a chord.

Log Eyes

real eyes

realise
real lies

nicked from oh dog, you sleuth!

(by the way, Sr Blanco, is that you in the third picture?)

The Science of Sleep

If you haven't seen "The Science of Sleep", do. It's great. And here is the director, Michel Gondry, solving a Rubik's Cube with his nose:

Stencilistic

shared by guspim and hmmlargeart

100 Suns

For some obscure reason I can't quite comprehend, nuclear blasts are a favourite subject of mine.

Here you will find some stunning shots by the aptly named Michael Light. The book looks quite appetising too.

via the always seductive moon river

Bonus Anonymous comment: "These images are so hot, so loaded," says Light. "In a sense they're pornographic."

Your "obscure reason" seems quite clear to me. XD

Busted!

Wasp

shared by knautia

The Blue Fleet

The doubtful guest went for a stroll on the beach in New South Wales and stumbled upon, and photographed beautifully:

Bluebottle

five cool facts about bluebottles

1) they are not one animal but actually a colony of highly modified and co-operative individuals - the single pneumatophore or float, the stinging dactylozooids which capture the food, the gastrozooids which do the digesting and the gonozooids, in charge of reproduction.

2) they really f*cking hurt when they sting. the most effective relief for the pain is ice. a most excellent reason ensure you take a well-stocked esky to the beach.

3) they live at the mercy of the wind and currents. the course of their voyage is determined by the curvature of the float and the resistance of the rest of the colony underwater. the float can project to right or to the left, each form being influenced differently by the wind. thus the sailing angle of one form may lead to it to be washed up on the shore but others, sailing to the opposite side of the wind may well escape.

4) a severe bluebottle sting is no laughing matter, often causing major respiratory distress in humans. however, the bluebottle colony primarily feeds on teensy-tiny surface floating crustaceans and other planktonic fauna.

5) when bluebottle floats dry out in the sun they go all crispy and make a really cool popping noise when you stand on them. (note: freshly washed up bluebottles also pop nicely but the tentacles have a tendency to flick onto the top of your foot, which hurts like the blazes - definitely not recommended.)

read more

Blue Dragon

"A blue dragon, a pelagic sea slug which floats about the ocean on its back (that's it's belly and foot you're looking at) feeding on blue bottles."

Violet Snail

"violet snails also feed on blue bottles. they produce a "raft" of mucus bubbles, float about the oceans with the flocks of jellys, and, i imagine, chow down whenever the fancy takes them. this one had picked up a bunch of bivalve hitchhikers. "

Unidentified Spiral Cephalopod

"from what i can figure out, this is the (empty) shell of some kind of floating cephalopod, a squid i think. each chamber would be filled with gas to give it buoyancy, and the squid would add a new chamber to the end as it grew. the little shells stuck to it are rafting bivalves, hitching a free floating ride."

floating bivalves

"floating bivalves (mussels) stranded on the beach. the one in the centre kept sticking it's bits out, trying to figure out what exactly was happening and why the water had disappeared all of a sudden. poor little bugger."

Upside down porpita jellies and a little crab

Blue Button Jelly (close-up)

"the blue button jelly (Porpita porpita) forms part of the "blue fleet", a huge drifting community of organisms which includes the infamous bluebottle. the blue colour apparently provides protection against uv light and, i imagine it also provides quite an effective camoflage against predators hovering above. "

Blue Fleet

"the blue fleet is a term coined by Sir Alistair Hardy to describe a community of floating animals including the infamous bluebottle, blue dragon nudibranchs, violet snails and other associated organisms. a floating raft of monochrome drifters, the blue fleet sails the world's oceans at the whim of the tides, winds and currents. humans generally only become aware of them when they are blown onto beachs and become stranded en masse at the hightide line. "

Great stuff. If I lived near that beach, I can assure you that this blog would not exist.

click on images to see the original Flickr page. All photographs and descriptions in this post by the doubtful guest.

discovered via the wunderkammer pool

Tarsier Revisited

shared by photos a day

Carlos el rojo sent me this this morning. I guess it's pretty obvious, but I hadn't spotted it. Turns out my favorite animal, the Tarsier, was the inspiration for Yoda.

Fort Ord

"Fort Ord, a de-commissioned military base in California, occupies an area as big as San Francisco. Most of what you see will be gone soon, torn down and built over. There are lots of stories here echoing off the walls. It's creepy yet compelling, and I keep going back."

Check out the rest.

Rust Impressions

Rust Impressions by dirtyaprons, who also created this wonderful pattern using rusty cans as seen here.


Great stuff.

Carrolton Tower

shared by bijou.

Her entire photostream is worth a browse.

Map Reading

"Maps are never value-free images; except in the narrowest Euclidean sense they are not in themselves either true or false. Both in the selectivity of their content and in their signs and styles of representation, maps are a way of conceiving, articulating and structuring the human world which is biased towards, promoted by, and exerts influence upon sets of social relations. By accepting such premises it becomes easier to see how appropriate they are to manipulation by the powerful in society."

- Harley. J. B. "Maps, Knowledge, and Power".



"Eurocentrism, like Renaissance perspectives in painting, envisions the world from a single privileged point. . . . Eurocentrism bifurcates the world into the "West and the Rest" and organizes everyday language into binaristic heirarchies implicitly flattering to Europe: our 'nations,' their 'tribes'; our 'religions,' their 'superstitions'; our 'culture,' their 'folklore'; our 'art,' their 'artifacts'; our 'demonstrations,' their 'riots'; our 'defense,' their 'terrorism.' "

- Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. "Unthinking Eurocentrism".



"Maps made it easy for European states to carve up Africa and other heathen lands, to lay claim to land and rsources, and to ignore existing social and political structure. Knowledge is power and crude explorers' maps made possible treaties between nations with conflicting claims. That maps drawn up by diplomats and generals became a political reality lends an unintended irony to the aphorism that the pen is mightier than the sword."

- Monmonier, Mark. "How to Lie with Maps".

via moonriver
second map found here.

Espionaje

• Espionage: The history and evolution of spy and investigative photography, Via. The evolution of spy tools. Spies that fly, including spy photos that made history. Top secret: myth and reality in espionage. The international spy museum. The top 10 strangest (modern) spy gadgets.

via the nonist

Video Feedback Long Exposures

"This is a long exposure shot of an animation playing on a computer monitor - the animation is a video grab of a video feedback experiment. The streaks in the image are the paths moving dots smeered in time.

Video feedback involves pointing a video camera at a screen showing the output of the camera (I find analogue cameras better) which can result in stable animated feedback images if the right combination of contrast, brightness, magnification, rotation, focus, etc, etc...

It can take a while to set it up but it's hypnotically fascinating when you get there. For more fun you can introduce mirrors between screen & camera or a vision mixer / DVE unit between camera & screen."

Here's the original video feedback:



Video Feedback Long Exposures by psymon1962

Stencilish

shared by markstravelphotos

The Rocket Cemetery

aberron dixit:

"the surroundings of the Cosmodrome have become a kind of “spaceship junkyard", as many fuel tanks and booster stages fell back to earth before reaching orbit. Recently, the norwegian photographer Jonas Bendiksen took some amazing pictures of the areas where the supporting rockets landed, and the people who live there."

This one in particular really does it for me.

SónicaSens

Clyde Borly & His Percussions - Music In 5 Dimensions - Bahia

One for the Esquivel fans out there.

The whole album is available for download here.

via peanut butter sandwich

Dark Architecture

Osaka based Palla, aka Kazuhiko Kawahara, cuts and splices his buildings like there is no tomorrow. (via)

I wonder what he could achieve with these:

"These photos are from a small book called 'Bauten der Arbeit und des Verkehrs' (buildings of work and transport) 1925, one of 'Die Blauen Bücher' (the blue books), a series of thin paperback books on art and architecture. Apart from depicting interesting expressionist or mordernist architecture, the pictures also seem to have a great 'Neue Sachlichkeit' appeal."

Yeah, very Neue Sachlichkeit.

(?)

German Industrial Buildings 1910-1925