Oddity Central |
- Holland’s Repair Cafes Breathe New Life into Broken Objects
- Chinese Artist Lives on a Scale to Lose Weight in Public
- The Gun Powder Drawings of Cai Guo Qiang
| Holland’s Repair Cafes Breathe New Life into Broken Objects Posted: 23 Mar 2012 05:08 AM PDT
Got something in your home that needs fixing? Take it with you on your next trip to Holland. They have a 'Repair Café' there, where you can get almost anything fixed. The concept café, sponsored by the Dutch State, is the brainchild of former journalist Martine Postma. She felt that the Dutch people tend to throw away too many things, even the ones that can be easily fixed. Moreover, in modern times people have lost the ability to fix simple things, she says. So as an environmental initiative, she started the Repair Café in Amsterdam, with the intent of bringing together the people who can fix things, and those that need them fixed. Postma basically believes that people would rather not throw away their stuff. And she sure did turn out to be right. What started off as a local initiative became an overnight success. Today, there are about 20 Repair Cafes across the Netherlands, and another 50 are being planned. A Repair Café Foundation was set up in 2010, where Postma now works full time. The foundation provides volunteers with information on how to set up their own café. The frequency of the cafes range from once a month to twice a week, and are held at a rented workspace. There's literally nothing you can't get fixed at the Repair Café. Be it clothes, furniture, electronic and electrical appliances, or even toys, you will always find an expert willing to lend a helping hand. Books on various repair subjects are available. People who have nothing to be fixed can also hang out at the bar. Sounds like a neat community initiative where people help each other out based on their skills. For a video of what exactly goes on at a Repair Cafe, check out this link (unfortunately the embed feature doesn’t seem to be working). Photos Repair Cafe via Inhabitat Holland’s Repair Cafes Breathe New Life into Broken Objects was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| Chinese Artist Lives on a Scale to Lose Weight in Public Posted: 23 Mar 2012 03:35 AM PDT
Chinese artist Wang Jun is going to be spending a whole month at the Yitel and Yi Hotel in Beijing. Not in any of the luxury rooms, but as a display piece in an art project called "Keep Fit Deal – 15". He's going to be spending the whole time on an electronic weighing scale, not even leaving to eat, drink or use the restroom. A live video stream will be tracking his every move, broadcasting it online. Wondering why in the world he would do such a thing? Well, I found it kind of confusing myself, but it appears that he's trying to accomplish several things at once. The most important, of course, being weight loss. Wang Jun says he's 15 jin (that's about 7.5kg) overweight and he'd like to lose it all in the public eye. So people can always see on the scale how much he's lost (or gained). Well, the lack of movement alone will make it hard for him to lose weight, but maybe he’s also planning to do some exercise right on the scale. Apart from shedding the extra pounds, he is also interested in using his body as a media outlet. He wants to experience the physical and psychological limits of connecting with a public space. Jun calls his experiment 'artistic'. Now, that just makes me laugh, how people can call sitting put for a whole month, art. But according to Jun, his project is of an ascetic nature, intended to highlight the social realities of greed and pleasure-seeking, while criticizing the craze in society for the 'so called-popular' things. Wang Jun plans to end his little project only after he loses the 15 extra jin, which might take a while. It might seem stupid, but the man really is testing his physical and psychological limits by just sitting on a scale while broadcasting the whole experience. Unfortunately, we haven’t been able to discover the web address where you can stare at the artist doing absolutely nothing, 24/7. It’s ok, you don’t have to thank us for not wasting your time.
via ChinaHush Chinese Artist Lives on a Scale to Lose Weight in Public was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
| The Gun Powder Drawings of Cai Guo Qiang Posted: 23 Mar 2012 03:15 AM PDT
Also known as China’s most explosive artist, Cai Guo Qiang uses gun powder to create some truly unique works of art. His technique of igniting gun powder on a paper canvas is considered a new medium of contemporary artistic expression. Fire and explosion seems to be a very popular art theme these days. We’ve recently covered the works of Radya Timofey, a 23-year-old artist who paints with Molotov cocktails, and Rob Tarbell, who guides the smoke of open flames to create detailed artworks, so Cai Guo Qiang fits right in. The famous Chinese artist started using gun powder as an art medium in 1989, when he used fuse lines to create explosions that lasted between 1 and 15 seconds, for public audiences. But his works has evolved a great deal since then, and he now uses modern technology to create much more detailed works, and even aerial explosions supervised by experienced pyrotechnicians. According to artknowledgenews.com, “together with the explosion events to which they are conceptually linked, Cai's gunpowder drawings convey his central idea of mediating natural energy forces to create works that connect both the artist and the viewer with a primordial state of chaos, contained in the moment of explosion.”
The Gun Powder Drawings of Cai Guo Qiang was originally posted at OddityCentral.com  |
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