Be passionate about Legos

The Curiosity Project brings you Legos today. Yeah, you know what Legos are...we know. But these projects push the limits of craziness with creative uses of these beloved building blocks.

Above, a video by rymdreglage called 8 Bit Trip combines Legos with one of my favorite things ever - stop motion. It will blow you away! It took 1500 hours to make which makes perfect sense - this is insane!

Below is the Munchausen Lego Kitchen - an IKEA counter covered in Legos by two Paris designers. This makes me want to cover something in my apartment with Legos.



















Lego has recently released famous architecture buildings in lego form including Falling Water by Frank Lloyd Wright (seen below) as well as the Guggeheim Museum in NYC also by Frank Lloyd Wright, and the Farnsworth House. They also have a landmark building series that includes favorites like the Empire State building, the Willis (Sears) Tower, the Hancock Tower, and the White House. If they weren't quite so expensive, I'd have one of these for sure.















Next up is the DispatchWork, an international project to patch up cities with Legos. Not sure what the ultimate goal is other than smiles and awesomeness, but I know I'd sure love to see one of these around NYC
























Still want more Lego fun? Here's contemporary skyscrapers made of Legos, an actual architecture model made out of Legos by the amazing firm BIG, or the pinnacle of Lego love - LegoLand

Be inspired - make something from Legos :)

Be passionate - April fool's joke from Google

How many of you got fooled yesterday? I know I sure fell for this one. I even have the instructions downloaded on my computer. Here's Friday's big joke released from Google about an extraordinary new way to control Gmail with your body :


video from http://mail.google.com/mail/help/motion.html

Furthermore, google.com is playing another joke between Helvetica and Comic Sans. As we know that Helvetica is a significant typeface that being widely used on almost everything: signage, subway, advertising and so on. On the other hand, Comic Sans looks cheap and it is a font that designers always avoid to use. However, if you googled "Helvetica", the font on the google page will all turned into Comic Sans.

more reading: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/promos/motion.html
http://www.pennlive.com/midstate/index.ssf/2011/04/april_fools_day_joke_for_type.html

Be passionate & obsessed with chocolate :)

Is there anything that everyone likes in the world? Chocolate is always the answer.
Let's start with the first part of our classy sweet movie, "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"(1971):



Later in 2005, another adaption movie from Willy Wonka was directed by Tim Burton, "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" had a big smash as well.



Here's a music video made by stop motion called "Chocolate" from a song of Jesse&Joy. This amazing music video was made of 90 handmade cookies, sugar, milk, flour, chocolate, eggs and dough.


Jesse & Joy- "Chocolate" from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.



Behind the Scenes of "Chocolate" from Carlos Lopez Estrada on Vimeo.

Be Passionate about Peeps?

These are photos from the Washington Post Peeps Diorama competition. Each year Peeps and crafting enthusiasts submit dioramas using the Peeps as the main character. Last years winner was "Eep" based off of Pixars "Up."

This year's deadline just passed, meaning there will be a new batch of dioramas coming soon!

Themes for theses dioramas covers a tremendous range, from a giant snow ball fight in downtown DC to hundreds of inmates doing Thriller in the prison yard, to scenes from movies and just general comments on culture.

See all of 2010's winners here with videos of the top five finalists here. Also look carefully at 2010's winners - #23 just so happens to be my entry (also see it below - Mardi Peeps :) ) Peep Show III in 2009's winners are here, 2008's here and the original Peep Show of 2007 here.

Here's the rules - start planning for next year? :)

Be Passionate about the day to day

Daily projects have become popular among designers and nondesigners alike. Taking a photo, making a painting, drawing an image, keeping track of certain data, or just simply writing down what you did. All of this creates the ability to compare one thing to another, reveals patterns, goes beyond human memory and pushes you to stick-to-it for a certain amount of time. These are just a few...there are so many who have done some seriously cool stuff :)

Here's a few that are really amazing:

Kate Bingaman-Burt
Obsessive Consumption
Kate is a designer/illustrator who draws something everyday that she has purchased. She's been doing this since 2006.
















One of the most popular daily projects right now is taking a picture every day - this one puts them all to shame

Jamie Livingston
Photo of the Day
Nineteen years of one photo a day, 1979-1997 starting while he was in college, and ending the day he died at age 41.

Blog post with some good info about the project.

Nicholas Felton
Feltron Annual Reports
Sort of the reigning king of daily life documenting coupled with information visualization


















Stefan Bucher
Daily Monster
Blows ink onto paper and creates a monster out of it :)

Be passionate-body motion

"Art Expands" was a project designed the company Eyeball for Target. By using Target's outstanding logo and working with choreography and movement, this video became a powerful work of art and is full of elegance and beauty.



Target - "Art Expands" from LAIR.tv on Vimeo.

Ok Go is a popular rock band originally from Chicago. When it comes to music videos you know theirs with be great - always full of creativeness and excitement. This music video, "Here It Goes Again", released in 2005, was one of their best works. It is so successful and only cost $10 by just dancing on the treadmills.



OK Go - Here It Goes Again from OK Go on Vimeo.

Be Passionate about Language

This mind-blowing TEDTalk by Deb Roy called The Birth of a Word shows his project recording his family's life in their home for 5 years and how he was able to track the language development of this newborn son as he learned to speak. Roy also uses spectacular mapping techniques to show various clusters of words and movement throughout the apartment.

Its a long video, but well worth your time.



Development of words beyond single individuals is still occurring every day. New words are created in our society, and sometimes adopted as official words. There are even Word of the Year competition based on their use or creation within that year. Here's Urban Dictionary's 2010 Word of the Year Top 10. They are more just funny popular sayings...but you get the idea.

















Studies have shown that the use of color words in language develop in similar orders no matter where or when this occurs. If a language only has two words for color, it will always be for black and white. If they have a third word, it is always for red. After that, the most common color words are for green and yellow. Sometimes however, a remote tribe in the desert might have 5 words for the color red before ever having a word for the color green.

A fun project by the Oxford Dictionary is called Save the Words. Its an initiative to get some words back into common language that have faded out of use. You can pan around the page to see all these crazy words you've never heard of (if you sound is on, you'll hear that they are in fact begging you to choose them). If you click a word, you can see its definition. You can also create an account and adopt a word. You must swear "to use the word in conversation and correspondence as frequently as possible to the best of your ability" :)

Be passionate-from the eye of photographers

A young French photographer Erica Simone, is launching her exhibition"Nue York: Self-Portraits of a Bare Urban Citizen" at The Dash Gallery in New York. The exhibition will be held on April 14th-28th. In this series of nude pictures, she photographed herself experiencing daily life as if she was not undressed. She takes the pictures of herself using a remote trigger. She says that this series is not about sex, and she is trying to convey a concept of how people represent themselves with clothing and fashion. She took 20 pictures for this exhibition, including scenes of taking the subway, shoveling snow, and buying things at a street vendor.

All pictures from http://www.nue-york.com/

continue reading:

http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2011/03/25/photographer-erica-simone-bares-all-on-new-york-city-streets-for-new-exhibit/

http://gothamist.com/2011/03/23/next_month_photographer_erica_simon.php

Be Passionate - colors in sports

Passion can be revealed through color. When truly loyal and passionate sports fans support their teams with thousands of other fans all wearing the same color, something powerful happens. A simple red tshirt becomes something more when 80,000 other people are wearing the same colored shirt.

Below, teams knows for hyper loyal fans show support through color. Nebraska in red, Clemson in orange, LSU in yellow, Penn State in a whiteout & UK in blue.

Colors are used to show passion and support outside of the world of sports as well - pink for breast cancer research or yellow for Livestrong, etc. The possibilities are endless.

Be Passionate - with technology in fashion

From my understanding, a fashion show is an art show involving design, art, performance, music, and beauty. Nowadays fashion shows/designers are also working with different types of technology, in order to enhance visual effects and create a sense of impact. The most important thing in the show is no longer only the clothing and the models, but instead its about the whole "performance."

Below is fashion designer Hussein Chalayan's 2007 spring/summer collection. This stunning show successfully conveys the cooperation of new technology and fashion design - and this is 4 years ago. Hopefully there will be more efforts like this again



To see more about Hussein Chalayan's work, go check his website and blog.

Technology can be found in fabric/clothing/costuming outside of the runway as well. For the costuming of Michael Jackson for his "This Is It" show, he was going to wear an outfit able to light up with any RGB color that could pulse/dance to any rhythm.



Technology can now be found in mainstream fashion as well in products like this year's line by Uniqlo called HEATTECH - "Clothes that create and retain warmth" and Columbia's Omni Heat Jackets. Both are winter weather clothes, Uniqlo's clothing creates it own warmth (for a shockingly low price - never heard if these actually work) while Columbia's jacket amplifies warmth from your body using small reflective dots. This commercial below was part of their campaign this past winter.

Be Passionate - with the details

Brilliant video concept and execution by Hollerado. I love the idea of humans creating the basic pixels of the video and just think how long it must have taken to get all this choreographed. The whole video is a single continuous shot. While shooting the video, Americanarama was slowed down by 400% in order to give the 24 stage hands enough time to complete all of the sequences, meaning Hollerado performed their song four times slower than its normal rate, taking thirteen minutes to complete the entire video in one take.

This video reminds me of another project I've seen that uses a similar but more advanced idea. In August 2010, The Standard Hotel in NYC was taken over by an installation, funded by Target, and created by Mother NY & LEGS. The (in)famously clear glass floor-to-ceiling windows of the hotel reveal an extremely complex light show with dancers in the rooms as well.





For a longer version showing the whole show, watch this video.

Thanks to Eric for showing me the music video & more info on the video found here.

Be Passionate-the future technology?

How to hack video screens on Times Square by YouTube user BITcrash44

This guy hacked the screens in Times Square with this crazy technology. Well, at least it seems like he did. No one seems entirely sure if its real or fake, but millions of people have checked out the video for themselves. Racking up 2.8 million hits in just over a week, this guy has certain gotten people interested. He recorded himself on an iPhone and then was able to link to the video feed on his phone using some little device that has the ability to take over any screen it is near. It certainly is an interesting use of technology and a pretty brilliant way to introduce it - theres no bigger stage for jumping around on video screens than Times Square.

Read more:

http://gothamist.com/2011/03/14/video_how_to_hijack_video_screens_i.php

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-20044373-1.html

Video screenshot by Eric Mack/CNET