Photographer Todd McLellan has been on my mind ever since I saw this post on making an Inventor’s Box: a collection of tools and second-hand electronics for kids to disassemble, organize, wreck, rebuild, or reinvent into something completely different… you name it!
In this time-lapse video (or this one), watch Todd disassemble different kinds of machines so that they can be meticulously arranged and photographed. Here are two examples of the final product:
Then view his project, Things Come Apart, where he’s also photographed the same parts “flying” through the air.
McLellan’s photographs seek to challenge our disposable culture by making transparent all the things that we regularly throw away. He said he wanted to get inside the older objects to show the quality, beauty and care that went into the original manufacturing process.
“I hope people think a little bit more about the things they use. Not that people should have feelings for objects, but instead think about ‘reuse and recycle,’ not just ‘use and discard.’ “
The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry is featuring Things Come Apart until May 19th, 2013, or check out McLellen’s new book available for pre-order on Amazon: Things Come Apart: A Teardown Manual for Modern Living.
via NPR.
Related art from parts: One Plastic Beach.
Swiss photographer Fabian Oefner works with the intersection of art and science. He takes perfectly-timed photos of brightly-colored paint being spun at high speeds. From the artist:
“Black Hole” is a series of images, which shows paint modeled by the centripetal force. The setup is very simple: Various shades of acrylic paint are dripped onto a metallic rod, which is connected to a drill. When switched on, the paint starts to move away from the rod, creating these amazing looking structures.
The motion of the paint happens in a blink of an eye, the images you see are taken only millisecond after the drill was turned on. To capture the moment, where the paint forms that distinctive shape, I connected a sensor to the drill, which sends an impulse to the flashes. These specialized units are capable of creating flashes as short as a 1/40000 of a second, freezing the motion of the paint.
We’d love to watch high speed, slow-mo video of this project. See more of Fabian’s images here, and then check out his painting in magnetic ferrofluid project.
via Colossal.
This short, silent video shares a few behind-the-scenes moments from the ”fish tornado” photograph, titled David and Goliath, taken in Cabo Pulmo, Baja California Sur, Mexico by photographer Octavio Aburto.
“As people have seen this image, I have been getting a lot of messages in my inbox and phone calls asking me “is this photo real?” And “how did you congregate all these fish in one place to take the photo?”
“My response to these questions has been this — of course it is real. Fish, as is the case with many other animals, have certain behaviors that they perform when they reproduce. For example, when monarch butterflies mate they travel hundreds of thousands of kilometers, crossing from Canada down through Mexico to form unbelievable congregations. Sea turtles also have unique reproduction behavior —some travel the entire Pacific just to return to the beaches where they originally hatched. Birds fly hundreds of kilometers to certain areas to nest as well. These behaviors are well known within terrestrial animals and within the scientific community we have also known of these behaviors with fish and other marine creatures for many years. In Cabo Pulmo for example, blacktip reef sharks and mobula rays also congregate in large numbers to mate during the winter season.
“Even after I explain this unique behavior and the spectacular spawning aggregations of fish that occur naturally, some people don’t believe this image is real.
“In some ways I think this photo, and others like it, force people to think about the environment and more specifically in this case the ocean, dwindling fish populations the health of marine ecosystems worldwide and our role in it all.”
via EarthSky.org.
