Remember Etch-a-Sketch, the brilliant red toy, which lets you draw interesting designs on a grey sand like screen by turning two white knobs?
How many people consider themselves a grandmaster of Etch-a-Sketch?
Well all those people can move aside, because George Vlosich has the title: http://www.gvetchedintime.com/set.html
I think everyone has a childhood fascination with globes. With a slight spin, the nations of the world can pass underneath one’s fingertips.
The standard globe is pretty unimaginative however. Why just depict national boundaries?
Ingo Gunther’s globe project has taken thousands of globes and overlayed particular types of information onto them.
So one globe shows not just national boundaries, but how national boundaries would be resized if more populuous nations had a larger territory and less populuous nations had a smaller territory. Another shows all nations that have the death penalty in black, another depicts nations as block shapes whose size depends on the size of their military budgets, another only depicts green where rain forests still exist and red where rain forests have been destroyed, etc. It’s worth taking a look: http://worldprocessor.com/
As much as I liked the tangible globes in Gunther’s art project, I couldn’t help but contemplate how powerful an electronic globe on which various types of information are overlayed could be. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo… happy electronic globe dreams.
I’ve completed a new painting called “the magnificent Lara”.
