Writer, traveler, and kidnapper of Nazi generals, Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor -- Paddy to friends and fans -- is dead at 96. A silver lining: his biographer Artemis Cooper reports that the long-awaited final installment of his trilogy recounting a year-long walk across Europe as a young man in the 1930s, "has existed for some time, and will be published in due course."
posted by villanelles at dawn on Jun 10, 2011 - 41 comments

Johnny Selman: "I will design a poster a day for 365 days in reaction to a headline on the BBC news website and update this website everyday with the poster and the accompanying news story."
posted by OmieWise on Oct 5, 2010 - 37 comments

Mark Wallinger has won the Turner Prize for 'State Britain' his recreation of Brian Haw's Parliament Square peace protest. [more inside]
posted by fearfulsymmetry on Dec 5, 2007 - 12 comments

Top Two News Words (By Hour). "Top news sources are parsed by a computer every hour and the two most frequently used words are determined and printed out on a continuous sheet of paper." An art project by Rick Valentin, better known to late-80's & mid-90's indie-rock fans as the lead singer of the Poster Children. An updated-hourly RSS feed is also available.
posted by melorama on Sep 3, 2007 - 14 comments

Universe is the newest project from Jonathan Harris, who was also behind the amazing WeFeelFine, and the Yahoo Time Capsule. Here's a talk he gave about his projects at TED 2007.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken on Jul 25, 2007 - 20 comments

Fazal Sheikh's photographs have documented the plight of refugees in camps across Central and East Africa and the Middle East. However, his photographs are distinctly different from the images of refugees we commonly see in printed news articles. Sheikh's photographs implicitly assert that the individual refugees share humanity with their oppressive rulers. He does so by depicting the individuals in portraits rather than as victims of a social and political drama. Sheikh, an American citizen, was just awarded the Grand Prix International Henri Cartier-Bresson.
posted by matteo on Jun 24, 2005 - 5 comments

Miracleman is arguably one of the finest superhero comics ever made, but it has been dogged by legal disputes even in its pre-post-modern, pre-Alan Moore days, when it was called Marvelman. But the many fans and would-be fans of the modern comic have suffered greatly as a result of a big rights dispute which kept the existing work from being reprinted, so enthusiasts and interested parties have had to pay big bucks for the existing copies out there or console themselves with companion books (which also go out of print!).

But there is an end in sight! Neil Gaiman, one of the parties in the dispute, has good news to report.
posted by sninky-chan on Feb 28, 2005 - 15 comments

A couple months back, there was a cool flash-based front-end to Google News that displayed topics and their relative importance based on size. Now comes another visualization that's a little bit more abstract, but can be used in the same way, to get "a picture" of what the world considered news on any given day (and it has archives). Slick stuff, rollover all the colored boxes to see topics and click to see archived data.
posted by mathowie on Jun 9, 2004 - 9 comments

PopSculptures.com is a site offering "a new type of news media: 3D News." Their mission is "to provide a 3D portal to the latest Pop Culture events. Our sculptures provide a new visually stimulating way of remembering current and past world events." Ethically, their most recent sculptures range from the sick, to the really sick. Anyone wager a guess that Jeff Koons is somehow behind this?

Bonus: they will make custom sculptures of your friends and family. Looks like Irony's back in town, baby.
posted by dhoyt on Apr 20, 2003 - 6 comments

Man Beheads (statue of) Margaret Thatcher. His "sense of 'satirical humour' left him no choice but to carry out the attack" on the £150,000 Maggie as 'artistic expression and [his] right to interact with this broken world.' Jury fails to convict and a retrial is scheduled. Perhaps there is a creative solution to replacing the head?
posted by Shane on Dec 18, 2002 - 17 comments

Cleaner dumps £5k art -- Mistook rubbish for... well, rubbish.
posted by frednorman on Oct 19, 2001 - 11 comments