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Video of the Day: A Stunning Murmuration of Starlings

By Alison Nastasi on

A flock of starlings is what’s known as a murmuration — one of the most beautiful words we’ve ever heard and a breathtaking phenomenon that finds thousands of the small birds forming swirling clouds that swoop across the sky. Sophie Windsor Clive and her traveling companions were canoeing across the River Shannon in Ireland when they floated right into a dense murmuration. Luckily their chance encounter was captured on video. Apparently the birds can reach up to 20 MPH in flight, and the murmuration builds in size over the course of the day as the starlings look for a place to congregate at night. Click past the break to marvel at this natural wonder. … Read More

Photography

Photo Gallery: Inka and Niclas’ Watching Humans Watching

By Emily Temple on

Watching Humans Watching, an ongoing project from Stockholm-based photography team Inka Lindergård & Niclas Holmström, is a beautiful, slightly oddball look at human tourism and the way that we interact and merge with the sights we travel to look at. As they’ve written,

The photographs in Watching Humans Watching depict archetypal human expectations and actions in nature. Groups and couples move in seemingly predetermined patterns and dress in similar clothes that mimic the colors of their unfamiliar surroundings – captivating representations of tourist paradigms. Through the documentation of these patterns, we explore how humans appear in the landscape, and how their presence affects our perception of the landscape. By detaching ourselves from the natural environment and from the groups and individuals we find there, we are able to approach our subjects with the same distance a nature photographer applies to animals.

Shh. Tourists in the wild. Click through to see some of Inka and Niclas’ wonderful photos and then head over to their website for even more quirky cool photography. Plus, we’ve even heard a rumor that the pair has a book in the works, so keep an eye out for that. … Read More

Photography

Gallery: Textural Aerial Photography by Stephan Zirwes

By Emily Temple on

If you live and work in a big city, you’re probably always looking for small ways to escape, however momentarily, from the daily grind. We’ve been feeling particularly embedded in city life recently, so when we caught a glimpse of Stephan Zirwes’s amazing aerial photography over at But Does It Float, we were immediately blown away. Zirwes’s photography slips between simple, if beautiful, aerial shots of landscape and something more akin to textural portraits of space, the points of recognition blurring until all the viewer sees is movement and color. So if you’re looking for an escape, you’ve found it: go straight up. Click through to see some of our favorites from his portfolio, and be sure to check out his website for even more (we recommend full screen viewing). … Read More

Art

Portraits: American Animals Near Extinction

By Paul Hiebert on

Everyone likes animals. At least, we like looking at pictures of them. In a new book from National Geographic photographer Joe Sartore, Rare: Portraits of America’s Endangered Species, the nation’s most vulnerable plants and animals are put on display (69 of them, to be exact). The book is a collection from Sartore’s 20 years traveling across the country, capturing photographs of creatures disappearing from America’s landscape. It’s worth noting that one of the featured animals — the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit — actually went extinct while the book was being made. … Read More

Daily Dose

Daily Dose Pick: Mark Jenkins

By Shana Nys Dambrot on

Street-installation artist Mark Jenkins uses unlikely juxtapositions to shake people loose from their day-to-day expectations.

The streets of world cities aren’t just the backdrop for Mark Jenkins’ sculptural interventions; they’re also an integral part of the work itself. His clear-tape and more realistic mixed-media sculptures of animals, babies, and scraggly, Robert Gober-esque transients incorporate edifice walls, bent poles, and even garbage piles into site-specific subversions of the norm. … Read More

Art

Once Again, Let’s Save the Jetty

By Kelsey Keith on

Pop quiz: what is 1500 feet long, 15 feet wide, coiled into a counterclockwise spiral deep in Mormon territory, and made of mud, salt crystal, and rock? If you’ve ever taken ARTH101, you know the answer is Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a seminal piece from the Land Art movement constructed in 1970 in the Great Salt Lake in Utah. In the 39 years since its installation, Spiral Jetty has faced a number of threats to its existence, from natural erosion to proposed oil drilling by Amoco. Last week Modern Art Notes reported on a new industrial challenge to the site, as Great Salt Lake Minerals hopes to expand its operations by 91,000 acres, essentially evaporating the lakebed upon which the earthwork… Read More