This ad came on my television this morning and it made me stop and look. I can’t remember the last time I actually watched a commercial… It’s a campaign from July of last year made by Art.com, an amazing website selling fine art prints of the best, most beautiful kind. You can even choose a living room that looks like yours to see what the prints would look like in the space.
In the commercial, the framed Art.com poster works as a portal into masterpieces turned three-dimensional, emphasizing how different a room feels when there’s a painting inside it. The three-dimensional part is kind of mind-blowing, it volumizes the paint, transforming the works of art into a really incredible Pixar movie the we float through one at a time. The whole thing is set to the upbeat rallying sounds of “I Could Go” by Oberhofer.
Bridge Over a Pond of Water Lilies, Claude Monet 1899
Andreas Nicolas Fisher goes by ANF online, and he’s an artist working on a whole other level. He makes things that make art, using generative systems and visualizations of data to create graphics, sculptures and installations.
He lives and works in Berlin, and all of his pieces have a simplicity to them that makes them look sleek and organic, like a piece of perfection picked up from the earth. These data waves show boring information in the most beautiful way possible – the message behind the data is lost, but the aesthetic created makes it worth it.
He made these graphics through an original computer program that converts data into long elegant strings of color. The strings almost look like hair swimming in water, like seeing a magnified view of a mermaid’s luscious, multi-colored locks.
His website reads that ANF “concerns himself with the physical manifestation of digital processes and data through generative systems to create sculptures, videos, prints and installations.” He holds an MA from the Berlin University of the Arts, and currently has work on view in Paris and North Carolina.
These lovely lettered butterflies were created by a 25-year-old graphic design student who used a different font for each. He goes only by guusan, and on loftwork, the Japanese portfolio site where these images were uploaded, he said, “I imagined different fonts as butterflies and then created a specimen book based on that.”
These typographic butterflies use the shape of the letters to decide whether each wing will curve or point, and “I’s” and “J’s” stretch up to form antennas. The color schemes correspond to the severity of the letter’s shapes – Helvetica Light is black, gray and yellow, Futura Medium is green and turquoise with a hint of red, and Garamond Bold is mostly black with splashes of orange, red and yellow thrown in. Each wing is the mirror of its opposite – jumbled letters that are given shape, color and a significance that might let them fly away.
