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This past month the Amsterdam Light Festival (previously) opened its seven year, inviting visitors to observe 29 light-based works by international artists, designers, and architects along the canals and throughout the historical center of the city. Artworks were inspired by this year’s theme, a quote from media scientist Marshall McLuhan: “The medium is the message.” Installations such as British artist Gali May...

Completed in 1994, Dromeas or “The Runner,” is a 40-foot-tall public sculpture created by Greek artist Costas Varotsos. The densely layered work is formed from thousands of jagged shards of greenish-grey glass which are stacked around iron in the formation of a runner in motion. Originally the piece was installed in the Athens’s Omonia Square, but fear that it would topple from...

A twisting set of floating copper staircases intertwine at the main entrance of Copenhagen’s new science and technology center, the Experimentarium. The museum, and its four-story Helix staircases, were designed by Danish architecture studio CEBRA who wanted to create a subtle nod to the institution’s science-based curriculum. The design is an abstract version of a DNA strand’s composition at an extraordinary scale....

The Art Institute of Chicago recently announced the release of tens of thousands of images from their collection to the public domain, providing high resolution access to the thick paint strokes of Van Gogh’s “The Bedroom,” the eerie light of Edvard Munch’s “The Girl by the Window,” or the pointillism used in George Seurat’s famous “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte —...

Founded in 2013 by 18-year-old (at the time) inventor Boyan Slat, The Ocean Cleanup is a nonprofit organization that’s working to clean up our oceans by removing plastic. After five years of rigorous design and testing, the Cleanup’s cleaning apparatus, called System 001, has been deployed off the coast of California. System 001 is a passive collection apparatus that works by moving...

French-Argentine artist and designer Pablo Reinoso has been designing and fabricating sculptural benches since he was just 15. Throughout his nearly five decades as an artist he has explored several iterations of both seating and sculptural forms, including his two most recent series Spaghetti and Garabatos. Each work is a bench at its very core, but its structure has been elongated and twisted into...

Projected onto the ceiling of Saint-Eustache Church in Paris, Voûtes Célestes is a work by Miguel Chevalier that turned the ancient chapel into the backdrop for a constantly morphing sky chart produced in real time. Cycling through 35 different colored networks, the ceiling glowed with each successive pattern, highlighting the grand architecture that laid below the swirling universes above. The work, accompanied by musical improvisations played...

Seven towering sculptures comprised of brightly colored facets have recently landed on the streets of Boston, courtesy of Okuda San Miguel. The multi-disciplinary Spanish artist, best known for his colorful interventions in and on buildings around the world, installed the series of seven sculptures called Air Sea Land in Boston’s seaport corridor. Okuda’s creations range from eight to twelve...

Once only used to illuminate a painting or photograph, light is now commonly used as the medium itself—glowing brightly from neon tubes, programmed as an interactive installation, projected to create an intangible feeling of warmth, or flashing as an LED spectacle. In her book Lust for Light published by Gingko Press, Hannah Stouffer culls the practices of a variety of artists such as Liz West, Miguel...

Ana Martins, who works as Aheneah, recently reflected on the relaxed freedom of youth and captured that feeling in a cross-stitched intervention on a wall in Vila Franca de Xira, Portugal. The work is along a popular route to a local school, and is comprised of over 2,300 screws and nearly 760 yards of yarn. The 22-year-old artist isn’t far from...