Hasta La Ideas

L: Photo by Annie Leibovitz for Vanity Fair; R: Sotheby’s

About a month ago, we couldn’t help but take notice of the Jony Ive / Marc Newson-designed custom desk, which anchors the upcoming (RED) Auction alongside the Leica M that made rounds that week. At some point in the past four weeks, Sotheby’s has published the full catalog of the 44 art and design objects in the charity auction, and it’s quite a star-studded list. Besides Ive and Newson, the roster includes works by the likes of Azzedine Alaïa, Ettore Bugatti, Achille & Pier Giacomo Castiglioni (not pictured) and Damien Hirst (who curated the first edition of Bono’s auction in 2008), to name a few.

From left: Typewriter by Ettore Sottsass, boots by Christian Louboutin, armchair by Dieter Rams

I’m partial to the Dieter Rams pieces myself—along with the Vitsœ 620 and 606, there’s a Braun Hi-Fi—and the Cinelli Laser remains something of a grail bike for me (vintage ones command close to the $15,000–20,000 estimate for the 2013 Laser Nostra in the auction).

Not to scale

As for the (RED) desk, the Neal Feay-produced beauty comes in at a solid $300,000–500,000; only the Leica M comes in with a higher estimate at $500,000–750,000. (A Steinway grand piano and a Takashi Murakami trunk filled with 33 alligator leather Louis Vuitton handbags come in next at $150,000–200,000.) Ive/Newson diehards who miss out on the big-ticket items might have to settle for the sculptural NASA space shuttle window ($100,000–150,000).

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Who knew that a half-century before they produced their first car, the Peugeot family was making coffee grinders? And would continue to, for over 100 years? In 1840 the Peugeots produced their first moulin a cafe out of a combination of metal and wood. The beans were inserted into the metal hopper up top; metal gears were turned by a wooden-knob-capped metal crank; and the blade-cut grindings fell into a pull-out wooden drawer in the bottom of the housing.

The first models were utilitarian affairs, purely form follows function with little in the way of decoration. But later models began to display some craft confidence, as you can see in these shots from the Peugeot Museum in France, where the corners have received a style treatment.

Dates are tough to come by, but at some point they also began experimenting with cast-iron models as the Industrial Revolution took hold.

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When bubbles of the financial or personal dreams variety burst, it isn’t a pretty sight. But when actual bubbles burst, it’s completely beautiful. Particularly when they’re the gi-normous ones made by a company called Shanks FX, who collaborated with PBS Digital Studios to show you how it’s done. In the following video, they not only reveal their “recipe” for making huge bubbles, they also show you how to construct the spawning gear, and a wicked “bubble control wand” that allows you to manipulate the bubbles in space using fans:

Nutty, no? It almost looks as if a liquid is transformed into a solid that then explodes into a gas.

Via Colossal

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“Road”

Images courtesy of the artist and xpo gallery

With his simple black-on-white line drawings, France-based artist Vincent Broquaire provides subtle, clever commentary about the modern-day world.

“Life Control”

“Error”

And his animations are even better, demonstrating an intriguing concept for how the universe might work. Check out his “Progress Bar:”

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Here’s an unforeseen application of televisions going from CRT to flatscreen: Thin as they are, you can now place two of them back-to-back. And then mount them on a spindle. And rotate them really, really fast. Why? To achieve an amazingly clever 3D display:

Called Full Turn, this project is by Benjamin Muzzin, a student of Media & Interaction Design at ECAL / University of Art and Design in Lausanne.

With this project I wanted to explore the notion of the third dimension, with the desire to try to get out of the usual frame of a flat screen. For this, my work mainly consisted in exploring and experimenting a different device for displaying images, trying to give animations volume in space. The resulting machine works with the rotation of two screens placed back to back, creating a three-dimensional animated sequence tha t can be seen at 360 degrees. Due to the persistence of vision, the shapes that appear on the screen turn into kinetic light sculptures.

While the light sculptures are undeniably cool, the appearance of the ballerina around 1:10 shows that Muzzin’s creation can have representational, not just artistic, applications.

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