Looking for the perfect Valentine’s Day card for your loved one? Well grab your closest paper cutter and make your Valentine one of these pixel heart cards. Perfect for showing your loved one you care and… you know… all the romantic jazz. Get their pixel heart pumping and download the cutting files and all the instructions here. If you’ve somehow misplaced your paper cutter, the instructions also explain it the old fashioned way.

P.S. We started convoke in February 2009 with a post about left 4 dead Valentine’s Cards, if you’re feeling nostalgic.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s been ages since you’ve gotten a post out of us. We’re sorry; sometimes life gets in the way of living.  Or blogging.  Or whatever.  Maybe we’re just lazy.  But none of that matters.  What matters is, I’m back and I’ve brought a peace offering to show just how much I care.

That offering, my friends, is a freakin’ geodesic dome made out of fluorescent lights.  B. Fuller is probably looking down on this and saying, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Michal Maciej Bartosik made this and some other pretty awesome light installations, but there’s more.  After this, Bartosik went right to work outfitting another dome with tesla coils. That’s right: TESLA COILS.

And that is what we call critical success.

While EVOL might not have the same recognition as an artist like Banksy, he wields the stencil with just as much flair.  His work falls into two categories: incredibly simple, or exceedingly complex.   While the latter is interesting in its own right, using no less than six stencils to produce the piece illustrated above (on cardboard!!!), it’s his simple ideas that really shine.

See what I mean after the break.

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This hyper-patriotic gig poster makes Bioshock Infinite’s Columbia look like Red Square.  It’s got everything: eagles, arrows, both stars and stripes, the Illuminati, and like 11 different fonts!

I’ve got a soft spot for hand-drawn type, and Jon Contino really nails it in his work. The roughness and imperfection of the letters really sells these turn of the century styled designs.

A while back, someone at NASA came up with a crazy experiment to test the toxicity of drugs; give them to spiders and see what kind of webs they spin. I guess the idea was that the more toxic the drug, the more deformed the web would be. The results are a bit surprising, with caffeine, one of the most commonly ingested drugs, yielding one of the most disturbed web structures.  But this is all old news.

Fast forward 15 years, and this dude (Guillaume Le Houx), made bowls out of them. No, not that kind of bowl.

Now I’m just going out on a limb here, but a vessel that is 90% empty space is going to have a hard time holding things, which just happens to be a bowl’s primary function. The results are pretty cool looking, but unfortunately they’re just concepts for now.

If you’re looking for some more scientific reading here’s the NASA article.

There’s been a lot of anamorphic art circulating lately, and impressive as it is, the process is usually pretty simple.  A fixed viewpoint is established, and paint or materials are added to the scene until the illusion is complete.  This picture by Georges Rousse is the first time I’ve seen someone do the opposite, which is to say actually subtract material from an existing structure.  The result, while structurally unsound, is far more impressive.

More of Rousse’s work at butdoesitfloat and today and tomorrow.

Danny Kuo has come up with a brilliant idea to turn vertical space into storage space. His staircase shelving unit is part cuiro, part step stool, allowing you to access the top shelves easily, and without the need for those cumbersome, rolling library ladders.

A sleek, staggered shelving unit like this would be a welcome addition to my pad even if you couldn’t climb on it; being able to scale your cabinets like King Kong is just icing on the cake.

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A truly epic homage to 80s cartoon intros by animator Will Goodan aka the Prime.  I guess that explains the “Primetime, all the time” slogan at the end of the video.  Now if only I could explain everything else.

Believe it or not, this is a time-piece.  What you’re looking at is 4 clocks telling the exact same time, joined at the hands.  As the time changes, so does the pattern of interconnected parallelograms.  Dubbed The Parallel of Time Clock, this piece by Clarke Hopkins Clarke Architects is a pretty abstract take on telling time.  Sure, it looks great, but I really hate to think about having to adjust this bad-boy during daylight savings.

One more image after the break.
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Just twenty four hours ago, I would have been hard-pressed to imagine the love child of the Michelin-Man and a Chia Pet.  Now, thanks to Lucyandbart, I don’t have to.  If it’s not already obvious, the pieces above are actually two photos of the same piece, titled Germination.

Call the collaborative work of Lucy McRae and Bart Hess strange or grotesque, but it is undeniably fascinating.  With works more sculpture than fashion, the duo have been transforming the human body with surprisingly low-tech media like bath bubbles, balloons, and construction paper.