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Posted by RL Tillman on February 18th, 2010 | Make: posted these images of “Air Force One,” a wall installation created entirely from staples by Baptiste Debombourg. It was inspired in part by an engraving by our Facebook Friend Hendrik Goltzius (after Cornelius van Haarlem).
According to the artist’s page, this piece is about “the protagonist Icarus, the Mannerism of the Renaissance, and the symbol of sublime power Air Force One -the plane of the American President. ” Though it looks to me that the image used was Phaeton, not Icarus. Both figures were included in “The Four Disgracers,” a series of prints about mythic hubris. These are the original images, from the Met’s Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History:
 Phaeton at left, Icarus at right
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Posted by RL Tillman on January 26th, 2010 | 
Gebhard Sengmüller’s Very Slow Scan Television (2006) proves RGB is the new CMYK.
Very Slow Scan Television (VSSTV) is a new television format that we have developed building upon Slow Scan Television (SSTV), an image transmission system used by Ham Radio amateurs. VSSTV uses broadcasts from this historic public domain television system and regular bubble wrap to construct an analogous system: Just as a Cathode Ray Tube mixes the three primary colors to create various hues, VSSTV utilizes a plotter-like machine to fill the individual bubbles with one of the three primary CRT colors, turning them into pixels on the VSSTV “screen”. Large television images with a frame rate of one per day are the result, images that take the idea of slow scan to the extreme.
(via rhizome)
Posted by Jason Urban on November 27th, 2009 | Faux-printeresting strikes again (and it isn’t even Tuesday)! Lisa Brawn makes relief sculpture/paintings that build on the woodcut tradition. Brawn carves a mean block but where most would turn to a press and crank out an edition, Brawn paints the block and, voilà, a one-of-a-kind object.
We’ve got a few more after the jump. And when you’re done with those, you can see tons more at Brawn’s website and her Flickr page. Continue reading Lisa Brawn
Posted by RL Tillman on November 24th, 2009 | You know how sometimes, after you’ve scratched your image into that rich brown hard ground and you’re taking it to the acid bath, the copper catches the light just so, and it’s so beautiful that you almost don’t want to etch it at all? Maybe just stick that fella in a frame, and call it a day?
That’s how I feel about these “light impressions” by Armsrock. The artist used an etching needle to draw on a coated slide and projected the result for Glow ‘09.
I’m not that crazy about the drawings themselves, but what a glorious gimmick!
Posted by RL Tillman on July 7th, 2009 | Lousy-looking ads for the lousy-looking movie Bruno:
 photo by Flickr user jetsetcd
It’s one thing when street ads actually pretend to be street art. You may feel like a sucker when the latest viral meme turns out to be a soda pop commercial, but at least the ad agency gets credit for a “gotcha.”
On the other hand, these Bruno posters don’t even try to fool you. They just ape an aesthetic, badly. The movie is meant to be an edgy satire, but this ad campaign is less subversive than the ads for a Disney movie about a talking chihuahua.
Ah, well. We snooze, they lose!
Posted by RL Tillman on March 3rd, 2009 | 
Recently I obtained a copy of One Million Things, a book described as a “comprehensive visual encyclopedia featuring gorgeous photography…that brings more than one million things to light.”
This visually rich tome is a twist on the standard desk referenc– HOLY CRAP WHAT IS THAT?!
Is there a better way to convey essential facts about “Feeding” than a photo-montage of canned animals? This book is full of weird choices that seem like art, but aren’t. And no choice is weirder than this Can O’ Tapeworm:
…That’s either an MFA thesis in Printmaking, or an Internet-meme in waiting.
Posted by RL Tillman on January 28th, 2009 | I don’t know what they’re up to over at Accidental Mysteries. But Printeresting has to give some love to any one who writes:
HOW MANY TIMES IN MY LIFE have I been drawn to the power and beauty of multiples? Too many times—with too few display areas, that’s how many. I have always looked at it this way. If one is wonderful, then two is better and three is awesome so four must be fantastic and five is….well, you get the picture. Only with multiples can you begin to see and appreciate the differences, the similarities and the sublime changes in design.
Alas, Accidental Mysteries thinks of ‘multiples’ a bit differently than we do. But at least we get to see this rad picture of “18 lithographed toy ray guns, 1920s to 1950s.”
And while you’re over there, you might enjoy these antique classroom posters.
Posted by RL Tillman on January 6th, 2009 | This fall some quirky billboards popped up here in Baltimore. They featured a field of orange Uncle Ben’s rice packages, with the looming visage of Uncle Ben arranged in various dramatic compositions. Like a teaser campaign for a blockbuster action movie, the ads are vague: they feature no prominent copy, and the cropping of Uncle Ben makes him even less recognizable than usual.
As you can see in that last photo (by my pal KVH), these ads have also been posted in places that are not obvious advertising locations, including street-level plywood favored by wheatpasters and such. The vague ads caused some confusion, with one blogger pulling a U-Turn and pondering the mystery for “several hours.” Others, enchanted by the design, express admiration for the billboards’ attempt to reach the consumer “on an emotional level.” There’s even a fan club of sorts: Uncle Ben’s Place is a dedicated Flickr pool.
With bold design, peculiar placement, and enigmatic content, the graphic aesthetic falls somewhere between faux-Pop, faux-street and faux-totalitarian. You might remember that another astroturf ad campaign, the “Heel” posters for Beverly Hills Chihuahua, used a similar approach. Is the goal just to make rice cool again? Or is Uncle Ben’s sounding a cautionary alarm about the frightening power of print?
Posted by RL Tillman on July 8th, 2008 | 
Heel, captured by Flickr user signalstation
When I first saw these posters pasted on a tiny dilapidated billboard on a stretch of back road here in Baltimore, I thought: “Those are pretty big! Some wheat-paster’s steppin’ it up!” Within seconds, I realized that despite this billboard’s run-down appearance, it’s actually in constant use as a ClearChannel advertising property. Alas, another viral marketing campaign.
A quick Google search revealed the marketing campaign supports an upcoming Disney movie called Beverly Hills Chihauhua. I just saw the trailer for this movie, and I can personally guarantee that it will be terrible.
The very weird Dog Art Today laid out the grisly details in a comprehensive post about the Heel campaign almost a month ago. They’ve already discussed the printeresting stuff, so I won’t post redundant content here. One thing I do want to mention is the shameful vector art the designers used for these billboards:
But perhaps the sheer hackiness of this image is a masterstroke! Only a local wheat-paster could be that bad at Illustrator! So this couldn’t possibly be the result of a corporate advertising campaign! Those Disney folks are crafty.
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