Meet the machine of the moment: the DreamVendor, a set of four MakerBot Thing-O-Matics that sit behind glass and 3-D print your tchotchke of choice.

The DreamVendor is the brainchild of Dr. Chris Williams, Director of Virginia Tech’s DREAMS Lab, and student Amy Elliot, who led the design. “We wanted an experience where someone could walk up and use a 3-D printer without having to worry about anything besides loading a file and selecting ‘Print,’” says Williams.

 (via The Future of Stuff: Vending Machine That Prints in 3-D | Wired Design | Wired.com)

The image above is one-hundred percent fake. It has no connection whatsoever to the world of things. I created the bolts, lights, textures, and everything else in a free, open-source, relatively easy-to-use software package called Blender.

It’s easy enough that even a novice user like me is able to make a pretty convincing image. If you are a photographer that makes a living shooting still-life photos, this should scare you.

(via Photographers: You’re Being Replaced by Software)

Interesting.

In a show opening in London, the contents of women’s handbags – crumpled receipts, the roll-up tobacco, shoes – are spilled out into glass cases. But isn’t it intrusive, displaying such personal items in a public art gallery for all the world to see? “Oh God, of course,” said gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones cheerfully. “But it’s fascinating isn’t it?” Hans-Peter Feldmann Serpentine gallery, London W2 3XA Starts 11 April Until 5 June Details: 020 7402 6075 Venue website The six bags and their contents are new works by the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann at the Serpentine gallery as part of a major retrospective of his work from the past 40 year. 

There’s definitely an “art is anything you can get away with” quality to this — similar imagery has flooded Flickr for years and years. (Hey, remember Flickr?) And there are many blogs/Tumblrs collecting such things.

Even so, there’s just enough gloss added here to make this worth … linking to?

(via A handbag? Surely you’re joking, Mr Feldmann … | Art and design | The Guardian)

The work from the Brooklyn-based artists Eva and Franco Mattes, also known by their web alias 0100101110101101.org, consists of stolen chips of significant works. The exhibit, entitled Stolen Pieces, will display fragments of masterpieces discreetly stolen by the artists over a two-year period from museums all over the world.

They include a label peeled from the Jeff Koons’ equilibrium tank, a length of shoelace from a Claes Oldenburg soft sculpture, a blob of lead from an installation by Joseph Beuys and a tiny chip of porcelain from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain.

(via Gallery exhibits stolen art pieces - Telegraph)

The show features 50 miniature coffins from artists all over the country including pieces by wood block artist Dennis McNett and ceramics designer Charles Krafft. While each individual piece follows a common theme, the personality and taste of each artist is vibrantly apparent. De Armas explains, “The idea of using the coffin as a personalized vessel to showcase who a person was as opposed just a box made me think, ‘Why not give other artists a chance to see what a coffin means to them?’” 

Boxes of Death

new-aesthetic:

broken kindle - Flickr: Search, submitted by everythinginthesky

unconsumption:

Scissors confiscated by the TSA welded into spiders 

Austin-based sculptor Christopher Locke, mentioned previously on Unconsumption here, constructs creepy-yet-cool-looking spider-creatures from TSA-confiscated scissors, Swiss army knives, and the like. (via Colossal)

To learn how Christopher makes them, check out his blog here.

Nakayasu, 33, is a professional collector. He buys items for his collection and sells them like a business, but also works a part-time job in a call center. He collects toys from Japanese anime and live action special affects (tokusatsu) TV shows, soundtrack CDs, printed materials and video games. At the time of this photograph, he had been collecting for eight years and had amassed a collection worth about $20,000. He has 200 toys alone. Photo: Androniki Christodoulou.

(via Otaku Spaces Shows Off Collectors’ Riches | Raw File | Wired.com)

Transparent Gadgets and Creative Designs. A roundup.

At first I was skeptical of what was described as an effort to “make a product a day for the entire year of 2012.” Why do that? That sounds awful!

But the reality turns out to be a bit different:

So it’s a silly idea but a challenge for me to make an object a day for the whole of 2012…. I’m going to try and transform everyday objects in someway (cause that’s what I do) then post the results

A “product” and an object made of pre-existing objects, transformed: To me that’s two different things. The latter is more fun.

#80. Going down the toilet? | Everyday objects #, via SwissMis

junkculture:

One brand object painted white everyday, for 100 days.

(via CoreToon: My Life In Shirts - Core77)

This seems like a good time to introduce a new tag I’ve been meaning to add: Nonfiction Comics.

“All I Own” is a simple yet compelling project by Swedish photographer, Sannah Kvist where she asked friends (all born in the 1980s) to make a pile of everything they own – from furniture, records, computers, clothes — and bring it into the frame for a single shot. The resulting images are a visual testament to our modern lifestyle and throwaway culture. 

Photographs Document Millenials With All Their Possessions @PSFK