L'Hospice [Gilles Barbier via Nerdcore]

FilthyLuker creates whimsical sculptures and installations, with pieces that include anthropomorphized trashcans and easy chairs, adding eyeballs to bushes and trees, and giant banana peels placed in the middle of the road. His "Octo" installations are perhaps the most inspired, offering all the fun of a B-movie with none of the property damage.

FilthyLuker's DeviantArt [via WebUrbanist via Neatorama]

Octopied Building

B-Movie in the Sun
Octo Street
Tragic Bus
Octo
Mutate Britain

At least, that's what artists Christy McCaffrey and Sara Newey did, turning the Machine Project gallery space into a woodland forest that will flourish for the entire month of April. Along with a team of volunteers, McCaffrey and Newey converted this boxy room into what truly looks like an enchanted wood.

They built it using wood, ropes, tape, glue, and a healthy dose of actual tree trunks and soil. Throughout the month, they'll be holding events in the indoor forest, including lectures on bigfoot and elves, as well as screenings of spooky vampire movies.

Though their work is pure whimsical beauty, it has a kind of Silent Running feel to it, as if all the forests of Earth have become nothing more than a tame artwork that people construct in a gallery. It's a bit sad to contemplate that forests in 100 years may be exactly like this: Remnants of great trees, stored indoors.

via Machine Project (you can also see the schedule of events here too)

Munro’s inspiration for the light installation was a trip through the Australian red desert. The roadside campsites where he stayed often featured statues of surreally large plant and animal life – bananas, pineapples, sheep – as if to overcompensate for the absence of life around them. He also noticed that, after a hard rain, flora would burst from the once barren desert floor. Looking to recreate that sense of surprising and spontaneous life, Munro designed artificial plants that seem to come to life only as darkness falls. By day, the field appears to be an ordinary knoll of grass, but by night, it is transformed into an otherworldly environment:

Field of Light, like a giant surreal camp-side banana, is an alien installation in the midst of nature. And like dry desert seeds lying in wait for the rain, the sculpture’s fibre optic stems lie dormant until darkness falls, and then under a blazing blanket of stars they flower with gentle rhythms of light. ‘Field of Light’ is about the desert as much as the roadside campsites- and like much of Munro’s work is characterised by an almost mystical passion for nature teamed with a robust sense of humour.

“Field of Light” is currently on display on the grounds of the Eden Project, an environmental complex that houses the world’s largest greenhouse. Because it is best viewed during the darker winter months, the installation will remain at the Eden Project until the spring.

[Dezeen via Inhabitat]

"Children think it's all real," the guy behind the counter at Banksky's Greenwich Village installation Marty Abrahams said. We watched a young girl no older than eight scrunch her eyes at the two McNuggets. She knocked on the glass.

"It's the believability that dictates the response," Abrahams told me. "If you believe that it's alive, it is."

In one corner of The Village Pet Store (and Charcoal Grill), two cameras perched on a tree branch stare at another larger camera higher on the branch (right). A camera crouches onlooking in the corner. And in cages for reptiles and fish, sausages wriggle towards water and have what appears to be consensual intercourse.

The squirming and bobbing of McNuggets into barbecue sauce is the main attraction in the front window, but the staff favorite is the seated chimp watching himself on National Geographic 24/7. "It's the way his eyes move," the Grill's shopkeeper Anne Broecker said. As Banksy's press release put it, "New Yorkers don't care about art, they care about pets. So I'm exhibiting them instead."

Past the television, the animatronic chimp can see a leopard print jacket wagging its tail on the long limb of a tree.

You never feel entirely confident about a piece of art when its creator says, "I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and sustainability of factory farming but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing," but the concept is well executed, with walls of supplies — fish fillets, fake shrubbery, pet wipes — perched frustratingly away from the consumer's reach.

For some there is still an economy, and it's not all fun and games for the Pet Store's creator, the man born Robin Gunningham . Several Banksy items bombed at a recent auction, and he consistently warns fans to be on the lookout for fakes. But for Banksy — a man who once walked into the Louvre and hung his own painting there — creating buzz is the more pressing task. After all, Banksy spent a good chunk of his career burnishing his reputation in a good economic time, and then traded on that reputation in a bad economic time. The best laid plans!

"I wouldn't even know what he looked like," someone said, staring at the plate glass. Perhaps unfortunately, we do know what he looks like.

Despite this, Banksy still has his customers: a forcefully-dressed woman with long blond hair asked if there were somewhere she could register...would someone let her know when the fish sticks swimming around the bowl and the items on the wall were for sale? Above her hair, Banksy had built a lettered list of prices on a posted menu. It reads, in part, "Milkshake 1.25, Hamburger 2.35." Someone will stroll in this week looking for lunch at those prices.

The exhibition will amuse passerby through Halloween. Of course there are those who are always children in their heart, as the end of this clip proves.

Say the artists:

The fabrication processes used to make the natural brown surfaces are in the lineage of those Gehry employed in his legendary "Easy Edges" line of furniture in the 1970's. Expanding on this knowledge enabled us to create architecturally scaled cardboard structures and introduce double curvature. We used the properties and limitations of the material - determined through building full scaled mock-ups during development combined with a parametric digital interface - to shape the cardboard "ribbons." The project required laminating over 20,000 strips (weighing approximately eight tons) of curved, industrially die-cut corrugated cardboard in twelve days. Incredibly strong and capable of supporting the weight of several people, the cardboard laminates operate as semi-monocoques with an intermediary plywood armature.

Rice Canyon [Ball-Nogues Studio]

Here is a pair of safety goggles that would be great for a squirrel:
And a complete safety setup, with Red Cross tent, biohazard outfit, and radiation suit:
And what bunny doesn't want a nice bullet proof vest that fits snugly?

You can see more of Bill Burns' work on his website, The Safety Gear Museum.

It's an art installation by Tony Heywood, called Super Algal Bloom. Covered in jewels, the algae is inspired by microscopic pictures of the same kinds of algae that killed seals in California. Don't worry - no animals were harmed in the making of this freaky macro-micro scientific art. Photo by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images.