The City and the Light

Downtown Sydney Transformed by Light for 'Vivid Sydney' Through June 9th, the city of Sydney is hosting an annual exhibition of light and music called Vivid Sydney. Dozens of light sculptures and projections will be viewable throughout the downtown area as well as in the Sydney Harbor in an event that is completely free to the public. Looks like a lot of fun.     Beautiful Fordite Stones Created from Layers of Automotive Paint are a By-Product of Old Car Factories These beautiful "stones," called Fordite or Detroit agate, are actually a byproduct of the city's automobile manufacturing legacy. Back in the day, old automobile paint would drip onto the metal racks that transported cars through the paint shop and into the oven. The paint was hardened to a rock-like state thanks to high heats from the baking process. The modernization of car plants has made Fordite a beautiful, yet poignant reminder of the industrial past.     Eerie Photos of North Brother Island, the Last Unknown Place in New York City Just a ten minute boat ride from the Bronx sits North Brother Island, once the home of the notorious Riverside Hospital. Constructed in the 1880s to treat patients with highly communicable diseases such as typhus and scarlet fever, the hospital and the island have been abandoned since 1963. Christopher Payne's new photo book documents the ghostly wreckage of what he calls "the last unknown place in New York City."   Landscape Light Installations by Barry Underwood Drawing inspiration from early theatrical training, and influenced by methods of staged photography and set design, artist Barry Underwood transforms ordinary landscapes into something out of science fiction. The artist utilizes LED lights, luminescent material, and other photographic effects to create fleeting abstract landscapes that are influenced by both accidental and incidental light.   A Perpetually Melting Sculpture by Takeshi Murata Created by digital artist Takeshi Murata, this rippling, reflective sculpture was unveiled at Ratio 3 gallery as part of the Frieze art fair. Titled Melter 3-D, the sculptural animation is technically a zoetrope, and only achieves the illusion of motion with the help of a strobe lights or perfectly synchronized still images captured with a camera.   The Metropolitan Museum of Art Releases 400,000 Images Online for Non-Commercial Use The Metropolitan Museum of Art has released a vast archive of 400,000 (mostly) hi-resolution digital images online that you can download and use for non-commercial purposes. Here are our picks from their photography section.   New in the Shop: "Diaethrea Sequence" by Rafael Araujo We are thrilled to announce that the Colossal Shop now carries exclusive prints by Venezuelan artist Rafael Araujo. In the midst of our daily binge of emailing, Facebooking, Instagramming and Photoshopping, it's hard to imagine how anything was done without the help of a computer. For Araujo, it's a time he relishes. At a technology-free drafting table he deftly renders the motion and subtle mathematical brilliance of nature with a pencil, ruler and protractor. Araujo creates fictional fields of three dimensional space where butterflies take flight and the logarithmic spirals of shells swirl into existence.