Bruce Kurland painted this still life while he was living in the town of Curriers in Wyoming County, New York. He felt that the city offered dismal prospects for a representational painter and moved to the countryside, where he painted images that focused on simple objects “being revealed by light.” Here, the dried bone, shriveled crab apple, and rusty cup emphasize the transformation of both natural and manmade materials over time. The dark, empty background highlights the delicacy and transitory nature of these strange objects. (more over at the Lucie Foundation Center for American Art)

About Bruce Kurland:

Bruce Kurland began painting in the late 1950s and studied at the Art Students League and the National Academy School of Fine Arts in New York. He spent almost twenty years living a “nineteenth-century life” in Wyoming County, New York, where he was inspired by the dramatic open vistas of the countryside. His small paintings show still lifes in miniature and often include unconventional items, from wilting flowers to old bones and dead mice. (more)

First spotted via On the Sunny Side of the Sunny Side up

In Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet—scientists, inventors, and accomplished cooks in their own right—have created a six-volume 2,400-page set that reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food that ranges from the otherworldly to the sublime. The authors—and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab—have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes. It is a work destined to reinvent cooking. (About)

Download a 20 pages preview of the book (PDF). Learn more about the authors (Myhrvold was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft : check his wikipedia page). The 6 volumes are all sold together. They can be pre-ordered on Amazon for a meer 500$

Studio series focusing on disused electronics, as well as flora and fauna.

About Benn Innes:

Born in Knoxville, TN, Ben Innes now works, eats and sleeps in Minneapolis, MN. He gained his BFA in photography from the Minneapolis College Of Art and Design in the spring of 2009. (About)

First spotted via Coudal Partners.

Since we’re talking about photography and typology, Chrisin has many other collections such as this one : emergency only buttons, doorlocks, doors gates and entrances, etc.

First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness

The photo comes from sarcoptiform’s photostream on Flickr. Because the way those photos were taken and assemble (frontal shot, neutral gray shade) it’s reminiscent (in a way) of Bernd and Hilla Becher typology of water towers (Amazon, Wikipedia).

The two authors behind the blog Mrs. Dean, Norman Beierle and Hester Keijser, did a much more elaborated (and explicit) hommage to Bernd and Hilla Becher’s water towers series : Joghurtbecher. It’s a study ― Becher style ― of… yogurt cups. See example here. More about Joghurtbecher.

“These are not maps in any conventional sense, but rather diagramatic representations of the interconnected space of technology, capital, instrumental value, exchange value, social and environmental impact that surround the device. The first diagram focuses primarily on the physical device, and the existence of the device as an object in our world. The second examines the placement of the device with respect to the individual and society.” (more)

About Ben Millen:

“Ben Millen is a Canadian industrial designer and engineer. He is a graduate of the Environmental Design/ Industrial Design master’s program at the University of Calgary and holds a degree in Systems Engineering from the University of Guelph.” (more)

First spotted via Kottke

“This is a CT scan of an iPod. The LCD screen is seen in pink. Behind the screen and to the most cephalic extreme of the body, a gray battery pack can be seen. Various other electronic components can be visualized including the control sensor array which is arranged in a circle below the LCD screen. Note the headphone jack in the upper right part of the image proximal to the battery pack.”

About Radiology Art:

“Artist and medical student Satre Stuelke founded the Radiology Art project to explore the hidden contents and structures of everyday things. Dedicated to the deeper visualization of various objects that hold unique cultural importance in contemporary society, this project intends to plant a seed of scientific creativity in the minds of all those inclined to participate.” (read more)

First discovered via Modcult.

The Boing Boing post links back to Susannah Breslin’s personal blog which is not very informative. More information can be found about this phenomenon under the term “haul video”, “haul videos”, “mall haul” or “makeup haul”:

“Haul videos are the democratization of the home shopping network. They typically feature teen girls just back from the mall, shopping bag in hand, gushing over their purchases (or “haul”) to their webcam to be uploaded to YouTube for the world to see. […]A search for Haul at YouTube returns 105,000 videos. A spot check reveals that surprisingly few of these videos are for U-Haul or another unrelated topic. What more could a retailer ask for that enthusiastic, peer-to-peer endorsements of their shopping experiences? Retailers should be cultivating if not deliberately encouraging the creation of these videos.” (read more over at David Erikson’s blog)

Have the consumer buy form you, have the consumer work for you:

“On YouTube, there are a new set of viral videos called “Haul” videos. These are videos posted by everyday people talking about the stuff they bought on their most recent shopping spree. Some name each items with cost, some are just showing off the items they bought. Some people are showing off how much they saved. There are a few videos that get more then 200,000 viewers them. This could be a treasure trove for local businesses.” (A Guide to Haul Viral Videos)

A “haul” is a cargo. Thus “haul vloggers” could be understand as human carriers, loaded with objects, speaking about those things (or literaly through them, as in the screen capture above), existentialy concerned by all this equipment. Now two things about that :

1) In its general form, it’s not a new phenomenon. Thorstein Veblen coined the term “conspicuous consumption” back in 1899 in his book The Theory of the Leisure Classe. Veblen was a major inspiration for Baudrillard’s The Consumer Society (1970);

2) It will be a mistake to associate this phenomenon strictly with teen girls. We all brag to a certain degree about what we buy, may it be books, DVDs, CDs, tools, wine, etc. We may not do it in front of a camera, but we speak about it, we post about it, we tell friends about it (Marco Arment, the lead developer of Tumblr, is currently buying a new BMW). That may be why some are thinking Blippy ―a kind of Twitter where you post about items you just bought― could become the next big thing (it launched last December).

Image above taken from the Boobytraps series (2008):

“The last series, Boobytraps, is not photographic in nature, but has every thing to do with spread ing ter ror and cre at ing an atmosphere of invisible menace that sur­rounds us everywhere and could hit any of us any time. Taken from two US Army field manuals they show soldiers how to construct boobytraps out of literally every­thing available in the world of every day objects, including pipes, beds, couches and chocolates.” (read more)

Artist’s statement about his Boobytraps series:

“I have taken these images from two books “Boobytraps” (1965) and “Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques - References” (1966). These are two “Army Field Manuals” of the US Army. In these books, soldiers are taught to construct boobytraps out of literally everything available. The key point of these two books is not how to detect these exploding traps but how to construct them.

The basic idea of building a trap out of - let´s say - a tea kettle is to spread terror. If a simple tea kettle might be a bomb that could kill or maim me what is there left to trust. Everything might be a bomb and therefore, in the head of the potential victim,everything IS a trap.”

See the whole Boobytraps series. The complete catalog can be dowloaded in PDF (Texts German, 3.12MB). Here is Simon Menner official website.

About Mr. Deane:

“Mrs. Deane is a blog run by Beierle + Keijser, visual artists from respectively Ger­many and Holland. It is named in after a spiritistic medium from the beginning of the 20th century. For us, Mrs. Deane stands for the ambiguous and the undecidable that one finds one selfconfronted with near the borders of the perceptible and the prob­able. Here, every man has to decide for him self what he holds to be true and what not.” (read more)

Check out what Adam Voorhes has to tell show about himself. View more of the Exploded series. Read an interesting interview about the creative process he follow for the Exploded series. Visit his official website.

About Robert Doisneau:”Robert Doisneau (April 14, 1912 - April 1, 1994) was a French photographer noted for his frank and often humorous depictions of Parisian street life. Robert Doisneau was one of France’s most popular and prolific reportage photographers. He was known for his modest, playful, and ironic images of amusing juxtapositions, mingling social classes, and eccentrics in contemporary Paris streets and cafes. Influenced by the work of Kertész, Atget, and Cartier-Bresson, in over 20 books Doisneau has presented a charming vision of human frailty and life as a series of quiet, incongruous moments. Doisneau has written: “The marvels of daily life are exciting; no movie director can arrange the unexpected that you find in the street.”” (Wikipedia)

About Jacques Tati: “Jacques Tati (October 9 1907–November 5 1982) was a noted French comedic filmmaker. He was born Jacques Tatischeff, the son of Russian father Georges-Emmanuel Tatischeff and Dutch mother Marcelle Claire Van Hoof, in Le Pecq, Yvelines, and died in Paris.” (Wikipedia).