Link About It: This Week’s Picks
Just Salad’s dating website, human hair sunglasses, animated tattoos and more in our weekly look at the web
1. Ai Weiwei: New York Photographs 1983 to 1993
Through August 14th, the Asia Society Museum in NYC will be home to Ai Weiwei’s solo show “New York Photographs 1983 to 1993.” On view for the first time outside China, the exhibition includes 227 photos of the 10,000 he took while living in the East Village and LES.
2. Constance Hockaday’s Boggsville Boatel
A floating hotel and theater built in the Neutrino tradition, Constance Hockaday’s Boggsville Boatel is inspired by Ms. Nancy Boggs, who would move her floating brothel to either side of Portland’s Willamette River to evade the law. The five boats moored off NYC’s Far Rockaway rent each weekend night for $50-100.
3. ImagineNations
Known for her work transforming toilets into custom works of art, Wendy Gold has now moved on to a more worldly canvas, beautifully decoupaging original artwork onto vintage globes from her San Francisco studio.
4. Beats, Rhymes & Life
A New York Times Critics’ Pick, Michael Rapaport’s documentary “Beats Rhymes & Life” features the influential ’90s hip-hop group, A Tribe Called Quest. The film explores Q-Tip and Phife’s sticky relationship and their huge commercial success, while set to their impossibly catchy tunes.
5. Custom Mast Brothers Chocolates
As a gift for his Venezuelan girlfriend, interaction designer John Sullivan Hamilton designed five Mast Brothers chocolate bars inspired by the beautiful scenery of Venezuela, resulting in equally attractive packaging.
6. Aston Martin x Colette
Commissioned by French fashion authority Colette and hand-crafted by Aston Martin Works Tailored, the new 2011 bespoke “Cygnet & Colette” city car has you navigate the streets in small but luxurious style.
7. Percolate
Percolate is a new platform that merges your friends’ links on Twitter with the stories in your Google Reader as a way of bringing the most relevant information to you to the surface. Like coffee, it takes a minute for your filter to brew, but once ready you’re in for a full pot of useful news.
8. James Corner’s High Line Park
Once a derelict and unkempt railway, The High Line Park is now an intriguing architectural landscape for residents and visitors in NYC. In the wake of its newly opened second section, park designer James Corner opens up about its creation.
9. Electronic Instant Camera
Niklas Roy’s new Electronic Instant Camera creates images using a combination of an analog black and white video camera and a thermal receipt printer to simultaneously take and print an image, a process similar to the way a Polaroid camera works. The only downside to this amazing project is that subjects have to sit still for about three minutes for their portrait!
10. Human Hair Sunglasses
Masterly disguised, the 100% biodegradable sunglasses designed by two innovative RCA grads are made out of actual human hair.
11. Salad Match
If you’re tired of typical dating questionnaires, check out SaladMatch for a different approach to online matchmaking. Created by Just Salad, the site takes note of your personal salad preferences and searches its databases to match you up with someone similar. After all, the secret to a perfect love connection could very well be in the greens.
12. Animated Tattoo
Tattoo artist Karl Marc of Paris’ Mystery Tattoo Club recently created the first animated tattoo by inking a smart phone-scannable bar code onto a client. He filmed the process, which took a total of four hours, and streamed it live on Facebook so users could observe and submit comments in realtime for a uniquely interactive tattoo.
