Mad Quickies: Sugababe and Other Skintabulous News, Desk Safari, Disasterpieces, Swimming with Jellies and More!

DonnaJune 1, 2015

0 5 2 minutes read

Hello, my darlings, and welcome to a new week. Well, really the second day because technically Sunday is the first day of the week, but you get my drift. I have a bunch of cool things for justifiable diversion. Let me digress for a moment. When I think about how much we might never experience if it weren’t for this wired medium, it chokes me up and makes me feel like I want to give everyone a hug. Such is the case with the video I’ve included. Maybe you’ll think it’s just a swim through a field of jellyfish [it is] or it’s the powerfully evocative score that tugs at your heart [it does] but it’s the larger truth that it’s magical and if you’re in the right place, it will transport you. And then you might become a jellyfish just like I did. Sending you all the loves…

I’ve run across two spectacular installations at landmark buildings. First, the iconic Sydney Opera House commissioned a Living Mural for its skin, a 100% hand-drawn animation, penned by 22 artists from across the world. Second, the most interesting thing about 1 World Trade Center’s new observatory, might not be the view. On the 100th floor, “City Pulse” is a ring of screens that tells stories about the city in a new way.
Bio-artist, Diemut Strebe Has harvested genetic samples from a Theo van Gogh descendant to grow an ear that resembles the ear Van Gogh purportedly cut off circa 1888. Strebe calls the new ear Sugababe. Which naturally brings us to performance artist Stelarc’s ongoing project “Ear On Arm”. {via Surly Amy}
Continuing in this vein [haha- vein… wut?] L’Oreal is working with Organovo, a San Diego bioprinting company, to print huma skin, “using 3-D bioprinters that will spit out dollops of skin into nickel-sized petri dishes.” The immediate positive result is that they would cease testing on animals. A longer-term goal is that skin would be manufactured for burn victims. This could be a faster process than their incubated tissue-engineering product Episkin.
In comic book news: Marvel Studios Recruits Teen Girl Scientists With “Ant-Man Micro-Tech Challenge”.
The 22 Greatest Disaster Movies of All Time — so says Bilge Ebiri and it’s a very fun list with interesting commentary.
This certainly is a skin-tastic group of Quickies. Now tattoo artists can practice their skills on synthetic skin with The SkinBook. Whoa. That’s kind of like a horror movie Moleskine, but for the forces of good.
Do you work in an office? With people you actually dig? You might want to try this. Coworkers add their heads to animals on each other’s desktop backgrounds. Super adorable! Find more at Desk Safari on tumblr.
At College of Curiosity: Mystery Object 269: Fearsome Face. Can you guess what this is?
Learn Ten Ways to Direct the Eyes of Others to Your Countenance. (#6 Avoid Eye Traps!) Creepy fashion tips from the Duggars’ Christian homeschool cult curriculum.
Bonus Cultural Thing 1: Every Label Made on My Label Maker Before It Broke (2003-2015) by Colin Stokes. So good.
Bonus Cultural Thing 2: I don’t know how I feel about this, but it’s certainly noteworthy. The Unclaimed Baggage Center is America’s only lost luggage store. I’m all for recycling—especially repurposing. giving things a new life is a beautiful thing. But would I want to run into someone who was wearing what I thought I had packed in an ill-fated suitcase?