Twizy Z.E. is an innovative all electric concept means of transportation that is designed for future urban mobility with four-wheel chassis, offering the passenger and driver seated one behind the other. This can concept is helping the environment by producing no CO2 emissions and assisting the users to juggle the daily city traffic with speed, efficiency and simplicity. The ultra-compact car is only 2.3m long and 1.13m wide, ensuring great convenience for busy urban use.
For its occupants, the open bodywork of the car represents highly practical solution for urban mobility through a turning required circle of only three meters and a footprint hardly larger than that of a scooter. The wheel provides easy and agile handling that ensures rarely getting stuck in the traffic, while the low center of gravity of this four-wheeler provide excellent stability.
A completely unique feature of this car is its octagonal wheel fairings that entirely cover the tires. This innovative design creates a pleasing and harmonious feeling along with its pearl-white and blue hub caps, where no one can see the wheel rotating any longer. Instead, the movements of the hub caps are only being seen, giving a silent and graceful gliding appearance along the road.
The Twizy Z.E. concept car is powered by a 20hp (15kW) electric motor that can develop 70Nm of torque, combining comfort with reactive performance at any engine speeds. It can accelerate like a 125cc bike and pulls away quickly from standstill. The car features a 75kph of top speed which may not seem a big number, but since it is designed to be used in busy traffic, it still is a fast car while cutting the traffic easily.
Designer : Renault
The LFrit Toaster is an innovative kitchen appliance design that allows the user three levels of toast through a simple button interface. Pressing the button once will set the toaster to the lightest level; pressing trice will let you have the darkest level. Pressing the button fourth time will reset the toasted back to its initial level. With the compact and attractive outlook, anyone will like to see the toasts traveling into ifrit and a transmitter mechanism takes it right to your bread plate. The toaster offers complete safety for your child and can be used anywhere at your home.
Designer : Chevy Ho
What if you could create a fairly convincing image montage in mere minutes, using an online tool that automatically does all the work for you? It sounds insane, but five students from Tsinghua University in China and the National University of Singapore have created a program that does just that.
PhotoSketch allows users to create photomontages from basic stick-figure sketches – you don’t even have to have any kind of artistic talent to convey your idea. As explained in the video below, the tool takes a simple sketch of the desired montage elements and pulls photographs that correspond to them from Google, Flickr and Yahoo.
Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.
The program then decides from a variety of matching results which ones work together the best and merges each disparate image element into a cohesive whole. It even matches them to the scene with the correct color tones and adds shadows as needed. The whole process takes about 15 minutes.
While PhotoSketch is remarkably easy to use, professional graphic designers needn’t worry about it replacing their skills anytime soon. The resulting image montages don’t exactly pass for real photographs, but could actually help designers and digital artists create quick concept images to present to clients, saving a considerable amount of time.
It doesn’t appear that the tool discriminates between copyrighted and Creative Commons images or compensates the creators of the original images in any way, which would create licensing issues unless the problem is addressed before the tool is made available to the public. But, PhotoSketch does open up a whole new world of possibilities for the Photoshop-illiterate and professionals alike.
Even More Urban Light Graffiti
Architectural light graffiti, or projection bombing, falls somewhere curiously in between.
Artistic inspiration can strike anywhere. For Swedish photographer Magnus Muhr, inspiration came from dead insects. As bizarre as it sounds, the photographer poses tiny dead flies onto paper, draws arms, legs and backgrounds behind them, and then photographs them in their new environments. The result is a hilarious series of photographs.
The pictures are simple and fun; the backgrounds are kept clean and minimalistic so they don’t interfere with the overall picture. The little arms and legs actually look like they belong to the critters. There’s no word on whether the insects died of natural causes or were killed by the artist.
The insects look at home in pretty much whatever configuration Muhr puts them in. They manage to be adorable, even though playing with dead bugs is a bit gross. Looking at them up close may inspire shudders, but they’re actually very innocent-looking compared to other insect photography subjects. In the pictures above, the text roughly translates to “It was good?” “You’ve done great with the British cuisine…it tastes like shit!” and “Guys…I have to sneeze…”
Above, the captions read “It’s the latest craze” and “Are you bi, or…?” (in Swedish, the words for “bee” and “bisexual” are similar). The configurations that Muhr puts his insects into can be alternately weird, cute, and puzzling. But they’re always interesting little worlds. Who knows where Muhr’s imagination will take the little bugs next? Muhr also creates more serious photography, which can be found in his online portfolio.
7 Black and White Monochrome Photographers
Removing colors can have a dramatic effect on an image. These creative monochrome photographers have created breathtaking photos in black and white.
Thomas Hooper is a Brit based in New York, who is doing us proud in the US of A. English born, he lives, paints and tattoos in New York City. Born in Hastings East Sussex, he moved from London to UK to pursue his goals in tattooing and art.
With books, apparel designs and album cover art all under his belt, Hooper will be a well-known artist very very soon. Check out his work and merch HERE.
Your eyes aren’t playing tricks on you. Spawn creator and fan favorite artist, Todd McFarlane, has returned to interior art in a tag team effort with current Spawn artist, Whilce Portacio. With Portacio set to draw a fill-in issue for Marvel’s Hulk comic, McFarlane decided that he would be the best man for the job to help bring Spawn to life within the pages of this upcoming issue #195, coming to stores October 21st.
The picture above is a double page spread on pages 8-9 from the issue.
Here’s a little film Charlie Inman finished last week about the Mutate Britain exhibition, which is currently on under the Westway, just off Portobello Road. If you’re in London, this is a must see show!
One of South Africa’s most exciting young visual artists, Faith47, will open her latest show in Brussels on Oct. 17th, following her participation to the ARTotale – Leuphana Urban Art Project in Lueneburg, Germany.
Within her work Faith47 makes important comments about a number of issues significant in her homeland and around the world including female empowerment, mass-media input and propaganda, inequality, violence and poverty. Despite broaching such potent issues Faith47’s style is strong but subtle, so that whilst an observer may be initially struck by the quality and beauty of her work, this is often followed by a more gradual recognition of a powerful message.
No New Enemies & Wallbreakers present ‘Epitaph’.
An installation and video presentation by Faith47, Inge Beckmann & Rowan Pybus.
Vernissage Saturday Oct. the 17th | 18:00 > 21:00 | with music by Dj Dark Matter
at MR-EGO | 29 Rue Des Pierres | 1000 BXL
Epitaph is an exploration of lost spaces entered through sounds and images to reveal the echoes of empty rooms, flakes of paints, swollen curves, fragile lines, stories hidden in the flat colors broken apart by wood and steel.
