How amazing is this latest version of the popular board game -Scrabble!
Scrabble Typography is a limited edition version of the classic game, and comes with a beautiful storage case, matching six-panel magnetized gameboard, as well as tiles that carry different and exciting fonts—all of which are made from solid walnut.
Manufactured by Winning Solutions, the same brand behind other classic Hasbro boardgames such as Monopoly and Clue, the set will include a signed and numbered certificate of authenticity.
Scrabble Typography will be available come August but you can pre-order one now at a price of US$199
This latest piece of work by Ryan McGinley has been floating around for a few weeks now, but has stuck in my mind so figured I would post it anyways.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Ryan McGinley, he is an American photographer living in New York City. He first started taking pictures in 1998, and by 2003, at the age of 25, he was one of the youngest artist to have a solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. He was also named Photographer of the Year in 2003 by American Photo Magazine, and in 2007 McGinley was awarded the Young Photographer Infinity Award by the International Center of Photography.
His latest work is for EDUN, a fashion house created by Ali Hewson and her husband Bono as a for-profit fashion brand with a mission to encourage trade with Africa and raise awareness of the possibilities there. For his shoot, McGinley used six species of butterflies, allowing their flight paths to determine where his camera would go. He told NOWNESS: “I was interested in how the body could reveal the butterfly, how it could fly out of the models’ mouths, hands or pants in its unfurling glory.”
To see more of Ryan’s work be sure to visit his website at RyanMcginley.com.
At the end of last year one of London's best new coffee shops opened its doors. Located in the heart of Shoreditch, you will find Protein by Dunne Frankowski. Occupying the front half of 18 Hewett Street, the sparse modular coffee bar is manned by London coffee aficionados Rob Dunne and Vic Frankowski, previously featured on EPIW here.
Their ethos is simple - quality over quantity. It is all about coffee served right, served simply, and impeccably well. They offer a rotating selection of the best beans, and run weekly cupping classes with hard to get beans from around the world. The space also features a live data installation that displays daily and weekly coffee consumption trends.
So basically if your in London, and are any kind of self-respecting coffee drinker, make sure to check out Protein by Dunne Frankowski.
I love these photos by Russian biologist Alexander Semenov.
Semenov graduated in 2007 from Moscow State University’s zoology department where he studied invertebrate animals. He now works as the chief of his diving team at the White Sea Biological Station, where he has had the opportunity to captured some of these extraordinary jellyfish photos.
A friend pointed me in the direction of this amazing set of photos by Harry Kaufman this morning. I was immediately struck by the way Kaufman has captured two sides of China – contrasting the large, beautiful buildings that line the horizon with the small, dilapidated structures crumbling at their feet. The photos were taken in Shanghai and Chongqing, two of the five National Central Cities, a plan to urbanise China.
Last month I was introduced to Christian Dillon, the creator and owner of East London Furniture, so decided to go check out the shop and find out more about concept behind their 100% recycled furniture.
The idea behind their furniture is really quite simple - yet completely brilliant. They design and make furniture from materials they find on the streets of East London. Currently based in a shop on Hoxton street, everything is made from materials they have reclaimed from local waste. This varies from pallets and aged Victorian pine they find when a house is being renovated, to excess ply sheeting from building sites and offcuts from building merchants. They don't just limit themselves to timber though, but try to utilise any useful materials they find.
Check out the video above to find out more about the East London Furniture's ethical approach to furniture making.
About a year ago I was hit by a car while cycling to work along a cycle path in central London. All things considered I was quite lucky and escaped with only a minor concussion and a couple of stitches. I was determined not to let this accident stop me from cycling, so the next morning I got up early and cycled the very same route through Russell Square into work.
Over the last few months I have watched the City of London make a number of 'improvements' to the roads along this busy cycling route. However, these ‘improvements’ have actually made cycling worse – less safe, less convenient, and quite frankly make me question whether it is actually safe to be cycling into work any more. After being hit by a car along this very route, it has been disappointing to watch the city rip out what little cycling infrastructure there was to keep cyclists safe.
The grotesque disregard for cyclists safety is not just happening around Russell Square...It is a citywide epidemic. London’s roads urgently need to be made safer for cyclists and all other road users. It was for this reason'Bikes Alive,' a new direct action campaigning group, was started. They aim to counter the lethargy of transport for london, and its prioritising of london traffic flow over the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. January 9th saw the first of a series of direct action traffic calming gatherings at king's cross designed to pressure TfL into more urgent action over the deadly junction. This coming Monday (January 23rd), cyclists and others will once again forcibly, but non-violently, calm the traffic at Kings Cross for an hour - in opposition to Transport for London's policy of prioritising vehicle speed above the safety and health of everyone else on the streets.
Bikes Alive is still very much in its infancy, and needs as much support as possible to help spread the message. For this reason Everything Popular is Wrong has teamed up with Bikes Alive to run a small design competition. We are challenging you to create a logo that we can use on flyers and posters to create awareness of the group. The winner will have their work featured on Everything Popular is Wrong, and will hopefully receive a puncture kit or other cycling related kit (I am still sourcing prizes).
We are in a cultural rut. A monotonous repetition penetrates every facet of our lives. While this may seem very cynical, it is a concept that I continually end up returning to in my work. Earlier this week I came across a brilliant article by Kurt Andersen in Vanity Fair entitled "You Say You Want a Devolution?" which explores the depth of this rut. Although he offered no solutions, he raised a number of interesting points summing up the problem stating:
"I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.
Why is this happening? In some large measure, I think, it’s an unconscious collective reaction to all the profound nonstop newness we’re experiencing on the tech and geopolitical and economic fronts. People have a limited capacity to embrace flux and strangeness and dissatisfaction, and right now we’re maxed out. So as the Web and artificially intelligent smartphones and the rise of China and 9/11 and the winners-take-all American economy and the Great Recession disrupt and transform our lives and hopes and dreams, we are clinging as never before to the familiar in matters of style and culture.
We seem to have trapped ourselves in a vicious cycle—economic progress and innovation stagnated, except in information technology; which leads us to embrace the past and turn the present into a pleasantly eclectic for-profit museum; which deprives the cultures of innovation of the fuel they need to conjure genuinely new ideas and forms; which deters radical change, reinforcing the economic (and political) stagnation. I’ve been a big believer in historical pendulum swings—American sociopolitical cycles that tend to last, according to historians, about 30 years. So maybe we are coming to the end of this cultural era of the Same Old Same Old. As the baby-boomers who brought about this ice age finally shuffle off, maybe America and the rich world are on the verge of a cascade of the wildly new and insanely great. Or maybe, I worry some days, this is the way that Western civilization declines, not with a bang but with a long, nostalgic whimper."
The more monotonous the present the more the imagination must seize upon the future. The percivity of the present should be replaced by the activity of an imaginary future. However, in this interminable present we find ourself doing the exact opposite. We are looking to the past to seek comfort, and becoming trapped.
This weekend I discovered the work of London based artist, Mark Powell. I particularly liked Powell's use of old envelopes as the canvas for his portraits of the elderly. Rendering the portraits with nothing but a standard bic pen, the envelopes really add another dimension to his work. You can check out more of his work here.
One of my favourite photo blogs has to be The Atlantic’s In Focus. The editor, Alan Taylor, uses images to tell various stories from breaking news and historical topics to culture high and low. Sometimes, it's just showcase amazing photography.
A few weeks ago, In Focus posted a series of the best volcano related photos from the past year, and there are some seriously beautiful images. The first image was taken from Puyehue volcano near Osorno in southern Chile, the middle photo from Nahuel Huapi Lake in Villa La Angostura in southern Argentina, and the last image is also from southern Chile. Pretty crazy stuff. Check out the full series here.
