Alexey Brodovitch (Алексей Бродович; 1898 –April 15, 1971) was a Russian-born photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar from 1938 to 1958. I truly admire his work, I love the imagination that goes into each one of his layouts and photographs. His play of form is so delicate and the way that he translates and mirrors the form and shape between the text and the image is absolutely beautiful.
The Gentleman's Magazine, first published in 1731, in London
The Gentleman’s Magazine, first published in 1731, in London, is considered to have been the first general-interest magazine. Edward Cave, who edited The Gentleman’s Magazine, was the first to use the term “magazine”, on the analogy of a military storehouse of varied materiel, originally derived from the Arabic makhazin “storehouses”.
The oldest consumer magazine still in print is The Scots Magazine, which was first published in 1739, though multiple changes in ownership and gaps in publication totaling over 90 years weaken that claim. Lloyd’s List was founded in Edward Lloyd’s England coffee shop in 1734; it is still published as a daily business newspaper.
I thought of him while reading a recent press release sent out by publisher John Wiley & Sons, creator of the iconic black-and-yellow For Dummies series of reference books. Pitched to “those frustrated and hardworking souls who know they’re not dumb” but lack technical knowledge, this hugely successful series of books—150 million in print; more than 1,000 topics—has ventured deeper into the realm of eco-building with Green Building and Remodelling for Dummies, written by Eric Corey Freed, a LEED-accredited architect.
This useful book helps navigate the reader through the onslaught of “green” building materials and systems, covering everything from water and heating to energy conservation to selecting “green financing experts.”
up in Canada, more than $17.3 billion was spent in 2007, with 39 per cent of all homeowners taking on a renovation project in 2007, according to Statistics Canada. Across North America, homeowners are staying put and fixing up, not moving on.
Selected 2009 Cost vs. Value Report Statistics – Average Nationwide Return on Investment:
Deck addition — 80.6%
* Emerging energy-efficient technology
* Sustainable, green building products
* Economic environment
* Seasonal/availability prices of construction materials (for example, a few years ago the price of concrete spiked while China was experiencing a construction surge.)
* Time of the year (remodeling contractor fees can vary; outdoor projects in the winter vs indoor projects during the summer, etc.)
* The cost of electricity, natural gas, and heating oil
The Gallery of Opy Zouni, his work is extremely interesting to me. He does artwork in both 2D and 3D and his use of geometric form is quite interesting. His play use of color is very consistant and he doesnt explore too much out of the box but his use of line makes your eyes play all over the place as it manipulates and you attempt to find where the lines meet and end. I personally love illustrations that play with optical illusions and his structures are really something else with the added color use.
Osmose, a virtual reality created by new media artist Char Davies. This is a walk-through video of the interior environment that she had created 1995 for the purpose of virtual experience. Below is an explanation of the project Osmose.
Osmose (1995) is an immersive interactive virtual-reality environment installation with 3D computer graphics and interactive 3D sound, a head-mounted display and real-time motion tracking based on breathing and balance. Osmose is a space for exploring the perceptual interplay between self and world, i.e., a place for facilitating awareness of one’s own self as consciousness embodied in enveloping space. Immersion in Osmose begins with the donning of the head-mounted display and motion-tracking vest. The first virtual space encountered is a three-dimensional Cartesian Grid which functions as an orientation space. With the immersant’s first breaths, the grid gives way to a clearing in a forest. There are a dozen world-spaces in Osmose, most based on metaphorical aspects of nature. These include Clearing, Forest, Tree, Leaf, Cloud, Pond, Subterranean Earth, and Abyss. There is also a substratum, Code, which contains much of the actual software used to create the work, and a superstratum, Text, a space consisting of quotes from the artist and excerpts of relevant texts on technology, the body and nature. Code and Text function as conceptual parentheses around the worlds within.
Through use of their own breath and balance, immersants are able to journey anywhere within these worlds as well as hover in the ambiguous transition areas in between. After fifteen minutes of immersion, the LifeWorld appears and slowly but irretrievably recedes, bringing the session to an end.
The user-interface is based on full-body immersion in 360 degree spherical, enveloping space, through use of a head mounted display. In contrast to manually based interface techniques such as joysticks and trackballs, Osmose incorporates the intuitive processes of breathing and balance as the primary means of navigating within the virtual world. By breathing in, the immersant is able to float upward, by breathing out, to fall, and by subtlety altering the body’s centre of balance, to change direction, a method inspired by the scuba diving practice of buoyancy control.
The public installation of Osmose includes large-scale stereoscopic video and audio projection of imagery and sound transmitted in real-time from the point-of-view of the individual in immersion (the “immersant”): this projection enables an audience, wearing polarizing glasses, to witness each immersive journey as it unfolds. Although immersion takes place in a private area, a translucent screen equal in size to the video screen enables the audience to observe the body gestures of the immersant as a poetic shadow-silhouette.
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