In what may go down as one of the best billboard hacks of all time, LA’s Skullphone managed to hijack not one, but ten, of Clear Channel Communications electronic billboards in the Los Angeles area. To pull it off Skullphone found a way to hack into the billboard’s computer network where he then placed his iconic skullphone character amongst the various ads flashing on the screens.
Check it out here.
China’s crackdown on dissent in Tibet — and, well, everywhere else within its borders — makes Beijing an odd choice as host city for an international gathering dedicated to competition in the “spirit of friendship, solidarity and fair play.” So it’s no surprise that the Beijing Olympics logo is getting a few enhancements by culture-jammers.
Check it out here.
Alyson Fox likes doing things. In her case, ‘things’ mean drawing, taking pictures, designing clothes, making shop windows pretty – and probably one or two more ‘things’ since we last talked.
Check it out here.
Matt Borruso creates stunningly demented portraits of ugly children. The garish candy colors vibrate, making these unfortunate kids equally nauseating and mouth watering.
Check it out here.
My friend, Hillary Carlip, likes to collect other people’s discarded shopping lists. She likes them so much she created an art project based on the lists
Check it out here.
Painter Mike Davis has a new show of work opening at San Francisco’s White Walls Gallery tomorrow.
Check it out here.
Following sold out projects with Faile, Shepard Fairey, and Bast, we’re thrilled to launch today the latest in our series of “Wooster Special Editions.”
Our fourth artist in the series is…. Space Invader.
Check it out here.
The Saint Petersburg, Russia design team Indeepop demonstrates their expertise in character design with their Japanese Moleskine Project. The team presents a unique set of characters, meticulously depicted from cover to cover in a traditional Moleskine notebook.
Check it out here.
Here’s the plan: I’ll be releasing one desktop wallpaper every Wednesday morning (California time) until I run out of wallpapers. They’ll be free to download, and come in a multitude of monitor sizes, as well as iPhone and PSP versions just for the fun of it. As of writing this, there are 60 artists involved with the project, some of them providing multiple wallpapers. Who are these 60 artists that are participating? Well I’m not telling because I really like secrets and surprises, and I want you all to be surprised and excited come Wednesday.
To get things started though, I’m releasing three wallpapers by three amazing artists, Tim Biskup, Mcbess, and IMAKETHINGS.
Check it out here.
hey, diary and others.
i did these nine paintings for the Crazy 4 Cult show at Gallery 1988 in LA tomorrow night. They depict nine great movie showdowns. you might remember these great moments in movie history.
Check it out here.
I really, really like Nathan Ota’s paintings. His work contains characters such as eyeless birds, cyclops robots, and tree stump men
Check it out here.
In his 1999 book “The Art of Getting Over,” Stephen Powers (also known as Espo) profiled and catalogued the work of several dozen fellow graffiti artists. Among them was KR, known for drippy silver tags around San Francisco and also for the unusual material he made them with. “Krink,” Powers explained, “is a homemade silver ink” that was “developed in the KR kitchen.” Back then, KR, who says he stopped writing graffiti years ago and is thus more comfortable being known as Craig Costello, never figured his “Krink” would be known beyond that circle — let alone that it would become a brand name on his custom-designed ink and markers, sold in boutiques and specialty shops in the U.S., Europe and Japan.
Check it out here.
Photo by Simon Norfolk
Cai Guo-Qiang says his favorite artistic moment is the pregnant pause between the lighting of the fuse and the detonation of the gunpowder. “There is a pressure in it to be preserved, and then it explodes,” he says. “This moment belongs just to the artist and the work.” On a breezy afternoon last September, in a large A-frame shed at the Grucci fireworks plant on Long Island, he was setting the stage. With the help of his wife, Hong Hong Wu, he cut a long green fuse into segments, then laid the pieces carefully on eight contiguous panels of handmade Japanese rice paper.
After three young female assistants placed stencils in the shape of an eagle’s wings, head and beak onto the panels, Cai, a onetime serious student of martial arts, moved gracefully as he sprinkled different grades of gunpowder, some custom-made for him. “I don’t know what the result will be, even though I preplan,” he told me, speaking through an interpreter in Chinese. “It is like making medicine — a little of this, a little of that, watch it and taste it a little and see how it is working. My work is like a dialogue between me and unseen powers, like alchemy.” (In Chinese, the word for gunpowder is literally “fire medicine,” an allusion to the eighth-century Chinese alchemists who accidentally invented it while searching for a magic elixir.) The assistants lifted the stencils, and Cai scattered and rubbed gunpowder in the white space that had been covered. Then the women put the stencils back on the panels, and he tossed on more gunpowder. The entire process was repeated for another image, this one of a pine-tree branch below the eagle’s claws.
Check it out here.
:
The New York Times has the full run of Daniel Clowes’ (Ghost World, David Boring) “Mister Wonderful” online for free in PDF format
Check it out here.
:
The times they are a-changing. So, we at SWINDLE want to evolve, too. Issue 15 marks the unveiling of our newly redesigned layout. We’ve made the text more engaging, we’ve standardized the fonts, and added two regular columns: James Gaddy’s Classic Graphics delves into the history of iconic logos, and Henry Rollins gives us Dispatches from the Territories. We’ve got a feature on stunt doubles, who risk their lives in anonymity to make movie stars look badass; Doug Pray’s first-person account of making his latest feature documentary, Big Rig; the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s “School of Popular Painting,” an elite group of artists who showcase the thriving urban culture of their country’s capital, Kinshasa; and a fashion spread that is an ode to ‘80s group Strawberry Switchblade. Only SWINDLE can scour the cultural landscape of the globe to give you a mash-up of content this sweet!
Check it out here.
:
In December, graffiti writers AUGER and REVOK modified a billboard advertising the wonderful Takashi Murakami exhibit at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. Two days later, the billboard was removed. The LA Weekly now reports that Murakami himself saw online photos of the graffitied billboard and thought it to be “so wonderful, he had to have it for his collection,” according to his representatives. So apparently he had it taken down and shipped to his studio in Japan.
Check it out here.
:
I wanted to bring The Israeli border police in Weimar, the standard armored jeep that the border police uses to patrol will escort me in my daily life in town. I examine what such an action brings, how the presence of a militarized police force from Israel in a small quiet East German place would be perceived. Would it produce fear, antagonism, discomfort or maybe understanding and sympathy? The site of the Star of David is never neutral on the streets of Germany, all the more so when it is painted on an armored jeep. Not surprisingly, I could not bring a real jeep to Weimar. Instead, I built a two- dimensional life size cut out (like the fake police cars that deter driver from speeding). The cutout can do the same job that a real jeep can do and invoke the discussion I would like to create.
Check it out here.
