Cool Hunting

Saskia Olde Wolbers
by Laurice Parkin The video art of Saskia Olde Wolbers is transfixing to watch not only for the dreamlike fluidity accompanied by surreal narrative, but also to see the intensely complex handmade models that the artists films. These miniature sets combine both the architectural space and uniquely constructed parts to bring the artist's imaginative landscape to life. Unpopulated and desolate, the worlds are beautiful, strange...

Bananagrams
Bananagrams is a multiplayer anagram word game that uses tiles with letters. Each player constructs their own freeform group of words at the same time, drawing or exchanging tiles as needed until someone has used all of their tiles. That person wins the round, which can take as little as five minutes to play. The Nathanson family loves word games, and came up with...

We're a Webby Honoree!
We're proud to announce that our video series was voted an honoree in both the Music and Documentary categories of the Webby's second annual Online Film and Video competition. With online video hitting full stride over the past couple of years, we were up against some well-respected contenders and are honored to participate and to be recognized as being in the top 15% of...

Mika Rottenberg
For our final video taking a closer look at this year's Whitney Biennial, we travel to the Harlem studio of video artist Mika Rottenberg. Known for videos depicting women engaging in elaborate systems of production that often harvest their own body, Mika shows us the set of her latest piece (and Biennial installation), "Cheese" and tells us the backstory of making the video. We...

Mock-Ups in Close-Up
Working in design retail, one of my favorite job perks was visiting architecture firms and sometimes catching a glimpse of building models. Beyond architect biopics, I have little recollection of seeing building models used in film, though apparently there's a wealth of footage available. Architect Gabu Heindl and film theorist Drehli Robnik recently compiled such footage (a curated selection of 80 clips) into an...

Periodic Rings
Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife team, Itsnoname, bring some sexy back to the periodic table of elements. While the solid platinum version might be a bit too costly for most, the sterling silver ring should enable anyone to put their gangster nerd stamp on foreheads—or at least make it seem that way.via Computerlove...