Awesome Art & Design

ApolloCrowe from Carbide 3D uses one of their Nomad desktop CNC machines to slice up soda cans, and transforms them into parts for a pair of robot sculptures. There’s a lot of handwork involved after the aluminum is cut, but it’s still cool to watch the machine work its magic.

A winner of Android Japan’s Experiments: Object contest. Kosho Tsuboi’s Magic Calendar is a large digital calendar. Tsuboi’s prototype uses a low reflection display, but he hopes that in the future there will be an E-ink display that looks and feels like paper.

Aluminum and brass desktop sculptures which celebrate landmarks around the globe. Creator Konstantin Kolesov says they’re meant as a modern take on travel souvenirs, but we think they’re cool even if you’ve never visited the locations. Each comes with a wood base.

Carpenter Theo Cook shows off just how tightly and precisely two pieces of wood can be joined together, using an ancient Japanese technique called a “sunrise dovetail” joint, which avoids the need for nails or other fasteners.

A thorougly clever design for a sign which can transform from reading “open” to “closed” while fully concealing the letters which are currently not in use. You can download the designs to 3D print your own over on Thingiverse.

Shnatko shows off one of the coolest coffee tables we’ve ever seen. It’s got a matrix of 512 RGB LEDs he’s programmed to display a variety of animations, and proximity sensors which can be used to detect movement and objects, and change the display accordingly.

Lomography’s latest camera has a wide-angle 38mm (21mm equiv) f/4.5 glass lens. It’s designed to offer the sharpest pics you can get with an instant, and can focus down to about a foot. It does multiple exposures, and comes with a remote shutter release and color gels.

Henk Hesselink of the Netherlands Aerospace Centre presents a conceptual runway design, designed so airplanes can land from a variety of vectors to avoid dangerous crosswinds, as well as reducing concerns about wake turbulence caused by jets flying one behind the other.

“The fruits of human imagination freed from the task of imitating nature.” PBS’ The Art Assignment tries its best to chart the origins and define the original elements of surrealism. The movement’s call to find meaning beyond logic and norms will forever be relevant.

Researchers at EPFL looked to the soft wings of insects to create a drone that could solve one of their biggest problems. Its frame is made of 0.2mm fiberglass, which makes it soft and flexible. The rotors attach to the electronics with magnetic joints for added resilience.

Designed with Yves Behar’s Fuseproject, The Frame is an upcoming 4K TV that really looks like a picture frame. When not in use, it enters “Art Mode”, cycling through 100 4K resolution artworks. It also adjusts to ambient light and has a variety of magnetic snap-on bezels.

Those fidget spinner thingies are starting to turn up everywhere, but rather than buy some cheap mass-produced toy, our old pal Engineer BrunS decided to make some of his own. There are few things more satisfying than watching metal shavings go flying as it’s milled.

Joto is a modern take on an X/Y plotter that displays pictures, screenshots, notes and more by drawing them on a whiteboard marker, then erasing them when it’s time for a new image. With support from developers, it can integrate with apps like Twitter, Slack and Spotify.

Oliver Wilshen and Niall Quinn aka Signal-to-Noise modded an old Roland DXY pen plotter, covering its bed with strips of magnetic tape, and replacing its pen with a playback head. The result – a strange device that can play back bits of audio based on x/y coordinates.

“Like a good movie you get to the end and you still… you don’t want it to stop.” Great Big Story spoke with Adrian Fisher, who has been designing puzzles and mazes for 38 years. He’s come up with over 700 mazes using plants, buildings, water and more.

This awesome stuff is a removable adhesive tape that’s compatible with LEGO, Mega Blocks, KRE-O, and other building bricks, letting you attach blocks pretty much anywhere. You can bend it, cut it, and stick it to everything from your shoes, to your fridge, to other toys.

He’s that ninja! diegator spent about 7 months making a replica of the mask worn by Metal Gear Solid‘s cyborg ninja. The mask has light up parts and its front plates have servos to toggle them open and closed. He’s also planning to make a replica of Gray Fox’s body suit.

Appropriately named metalsmith Alec Steele starts out by welding 31 layers of steel together, then heats and repeatedly hammers them together so many times that he eventually hits one million layers. He later turned the resulting Damascus steel cube into a karambit knife.

A one-man shop that makes scientifically-accurate 3D-printed scale models of planets, moons and other celestial bodies. The models can range from 0.4″ to 7.8″ in diameter. Larger models and custom planets can also be commissioned.

Surrealist animator Cyriak’s latest clip is a playful tribute to the ultimate Italian city car – the FIAT 500. All we can say is if the actual 500 skated on tiny cars under its wheels, that’d be awesome – and we’d drive one every day.

A four-door offshoot of the AMG GT-R. And it’s a hybrid. On paper, it seems like the folks at Mercedes-AMG have lost their minds, but in this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A twin-turbo 4L V8 and an electric motor combine to give this AWD up to 805 hp.

This Old Tony was in the mood for a cup of espresso, only he didn’t have an espresso maker around. So being a highly resourceful craftsman, he decided to grab a couple of hunks of aluminum, and set to lathing and milling his own from scratch.

PBS’ criminally underappreciated YouTube channel The Art Assignment has a series of videos that do a great job of introducing great artists and contextualizing their work. This video is about the infamous and oft misunderstood contemporary artist Ai Weiwei.