The 6 buildings on the shortlist for the RIBA Stirling Prize 2008 were announced recently here.

One of the buildings is the Nordpark Cable Railway by architects Zaha Hadid with Patrik Schumacher. I really love the lines and shapes and work that Zaha’s company is producing. In a recent quest to find people with an artistic vision that could only be accomplished by having the technological know-how, I continuously ran into people who (had) worked for her, and out of that group, I was completely inspired by the gang at wework|4her. [They also give props to my friend Robert Hodgin – which earned them another gold star from me. ]

Hopefully they will share the story about how the three dimensional shaped glass was created. Did they model it on the computer? Was CNC machining used to create a cast? Was the glass molded into this shape?

He was sent to war in Ethiopia and southern Sudan; one among thousands of children taken from their homes to fight.’ - Last.fm

‘His second album, Ceasefire, was released in September 2005 and includes a re-recording of “Gua”. This album is a collaboration with the well known Sudanese Muslim musician Abdel Gadir Salim and brings together opposing sides of the conflict, and different music traditions, to a common ground of the wish for peace in Sudan. The collaboration represents a vision for the future, as two Sudanese men, a Christian and a Muslim, unify and pave the way to overcome differences peacefully. Both musicians endured unimaginable adversity to become important figures, not only in music, but in the future of a country. They accentuate the differences between them and their musical styles, as a symbol of co-existence. The album preaches in four languages, encompasses every type of music in one, in an effort to transform the sound of hope into musical form. “Ceasefire” is not only the sound of two men collaborating on a musical project, but more symbolically, two halves of a divided nation learning to trust each other.’ - Wikipedia

Why is that so provocative? Is it because his art often lives in the street and is painted on the walls of a real-world dystopia rather than in the safe confines of an uptown art gallery? Is it because of the subject matter – which treats with contempt at times – multi-national corporations? Is it because his artwork sheds light on war, politics and sex by intelligently juxtaposing images that should not belong together: like the man with a mask throwing a bouquet of flowers instead of a hand grenade or a painted hole in the wall between Israel and Palestine the reveals a beautiful blue sky on the other side?

Unlike Vanilla Ice – who claimed to be from the ghetto and a gang member before it was revealed that he grew up and went to school in the suburbs – Banksy has intentionally tried to remain anonymous and even his worst art has a depth to it that Vanilla never had. Banksy – anonymous or not – has something important to say and we need to listen to it and respond and reflect on it intelligently.

Good luck Banksy.

banksy. Originally uploaded by matsury.

Banksy’s beaten up Buddha. Originally uploaded by greenwood100.

Banksy @ Revolver. Originally uploaded by Hellblazer!.

Best & Banksy, Brighton. Originally uploaded by Herschell Hershey.

Banksy artwork, Beit Sahour. Originally uploaded by Hannah Wright.

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He’s been called a freaky genius, and yes, it can be hard to follow the color analytic and visualization concepts when Dr. Woohoo is describing the next version of In The Mod (ITM). But it’s his artist spirit that drives him to sculpt the long streams of code that convert abstract thoughts into practical color applications, tools that liberate artists to realize their vision.

ITM (In The Mod) allows digital artists and designers to create instant color palettes of one-to-thousands of colors from a variety of sources — Flickr, your WebCam, images on your computer, or choose from a collection of (in)famous paintings — to use in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.

Dr. Woohoo recalls the geneses for each of his four ITM editions:

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ITM: WebCam in action from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

ITM: WebCam Edition
When I first began the quest to find beautiful color palettes, one of the original objectives was to capture colors as quickly as possible so as not to disrupt the fleeting creative process. One day I was in my office inspired by the colors of my red t-shirt and smoky gray pants and I wanted to capture them right away and begin to design with them without having to take a picture, transfer it to my hard drive, ahhhh! lol. With the ITM: WebCam Edition, you can capture one-to-thousands of colors from your webcam directly into this app and save them as Swatches for Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator CS3 or as an XML file for Processing.
More Info | Buy Now | Try Now | FAQ

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ITM: Your Images Edition in action from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

ITM: Your Images Edition
I was on a road trip in northern New Mexico with my daughter as the sun began to lift over fields filled with tall cream-colored grass and purple haze hills. My daughter snapped a photo and then, boom! it hit me; There must be a way to transform the beautiful colors that surround us every day into a digital color palette. That led to creating ITM, Your Images Edition, which allows you to drag-n-drop an image into the app and extract one-to-thousands of colors into Swatches for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.
More Info | Buy Now | Try Now | FAQ

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ITM: Flickr Edition in action from dr woohoo on Vimeo.

ITM: Flickr Edition
How can you not be inspired by the tribal energy of Flickr’s global photo gallery — it is a playground of color palettes. While I was creating a version of ITM that brought the website directly into Adobe Illustrator, I knew I had to connect the dots! That led me to the brilliant programmer Kelvin Luck — the developer of Flashr, a tool that allows Flash files to communicate with Flickr. We combined it with ITM to search and retrieve Flickr images and extract one-to-thousands of colors into Swatches for Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.
More Info | Coming Soon!

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The ITM: Online Edition
While creating Brushes.Paints.Stencils. — a painting application that emulates natural media — my creative flow was interrupted each time I integrated a new color palette. While traditional painters mix-n-match colors in a natural rhythm, the computer task is laborious and right brain. The epiphany struck me as I stood in front of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting: I visualized extracting every point of the canvas and its associated color and then I tried to organize them based on their hue, saturation or brightness and all of the colors fell to the ground in disarray. That fueled ITM: Online Edition, which allows you to search its database by the artist’s name, view the painting and a visualization of the extracted colors and save the colors into Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator CS3 or Processing.
Try Now

Made proudly on a Mac using Adobe Flex Builder, AIR, SwitchBoard and the entire Adobe Creative Suite.

Federico Aubele with Natalia Clavier - Postales

Federico Aubele LIVE @ The Sound Garden pt 2

More info on Natalia.

Natalia has release her first album on ESL Music and it’s wonderful:

The music of Federico Aubele:

The music of The Thievery Corporation:

and ESL Music.

this has been a public service announcement.

With SwitchBoard (SB), the AIR applications we create can now establish two-way communication with applications within Adobe’s Creative Suite like Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. I simply can not stress enough how significant this release is: if you are like me, prior to this release you had to hack and hack away in order to get your AIR applications to communicate (in)directly with the target Adobe Creative Suite application of your choice… but now… it’s as easy as writing an ExtendScript to communicate with Photoshop, Illustrator and/or InDesign assuming you’re comfortable using Flex Builder or the FB SDK. [As a disclaimer, due to my mad scientist experiments late last year – thanks to John Nack – I had the distinct privilege of kicking the tires on SB and truly admire the work that Bernd Paradies has done with it.]

From a designer perspective, this essentially enables a much larger amount of developers to begin to create the next generation of plug-ins that can automate your workflow and enhance what we are currently capable of creating. I optimistically look forward to seeing what grows from this new tool.

More info on SwitchBoard is here.

Stay tuned to my blog… I will be making another announcement very soon.

woohooooo!