The dance group performing this beautiful dance are from China. The most amazing characteristic is that all the dancers are deaf.

An awesome video portraying over 500 years of women in art from the colours of Leonardo and other masters

“For the past fifteen years, Theo Jansen has been creating (growing?) “beach animals” made from commonly available tools like plastic tubing, cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, hose, tape, and all sorts of other stuff. Wired News did a pretty good article on Jansen earlier this year:- http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2005/1…

Jansen is evolving an entirely new line of animals: immense multi-legged walking critters designed to roam the Dutch coastline, feeding on gusts of wind. Over the years, successive generations of his creatures have evolved into increasingly complex animals that walk by flapping wings in response to the wind, discerning obstacles in their path through feelers and even hammering themselves into the sand on sensing an approaching storm.

It’s hard to know where to begin in talking about what’s so cool about Jansen’s beach animals. They’re evolved for one thing; he worked out the optimal 11-piece leg using evolutionary algorithms on a computer but now prefers to race his animals on the beach and “breed” the most successful ones together, taking the best bits from each to make their offspring better. His animals have legs, muscles (pneumatic pistons within the plastic tubing), stomachs (plastic bottles for storing air), and nerves (collections of on/off values that work pretty much like logic gates).”

BTW - the first clip is a current BMW ad. - I deleted their tag as it seemed pointless. Theo Jansen is currently working on a movie - sketchy details on his site http://www.strandbeest.com . More info at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strandbeest

“Theo Jansen, artist, studied science at the University of Delft Holland. The first seven years being a artist he just made paintings. Then he starts a project with a big flying saucer, which could really fly. It flew over the town of Delft in 1980 and brought the people in the street and the police in commotion. Since about ten years he is occupied with the making of a new nature. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic matierial of this new nature. He makes skeletons which are able to walk on the wind. Eventualy he wants to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.

The main attraction of this year’s Sexpo Australia was ‘Pricasso’, a portrait painter who uses his penis as a brush. Pricasso, whose real name is Tim Patch, claims to be the only artist he knows of who uses his manhood to paint.

Keywords: art, experimental, painting, funny

An elderly couple in Bosnia have covered their VW Beetle in more than 20,000 handmade small oak pieces which were glued to the bodywork and then varnished. The car can be driven legally.

Keywords: customised, cars, volkswagen, vw beetles, unusual, wood, projects, decorated, patience, pride.

A group of snow sculpture enthusiasts from the Croatian town of Karlovac tried to cure the post-holiday blues by building a five-metre phallic sculpture in a suburban park. “We actually started building a snowman, but it was too thick at the bottom, so we somehow decided to make this,” said Dino, one of the seven young locals who made the snow sculpture.

Keywords: art, design, winter, funny, quirky, odd, amusing, culture, teenagers.