The Pink and Blue Project by JeongMee Yoon

Yoon on her project:

My current work, The Pink and Blue Projects are the topic of my thesis. This project explores the trends in cultural preferences and the differences in the tastes of children (and their parents) from diverse cultures, ethnic groups as well as gender socialization and identity. The work also raises other issues, such as the relationship between gender and consumerism, urbanization, the globalization of consumerism and the new capitalism…

Many toys and books for girls are pink, purple, or red, and are related to make up, dress up, cooking, and domestic affairs. However, most toys and books for boys are made from the different shades of blue and are related to robots, industry, science, dinosaurs, etc. This is a phenomenon as intense as the Barbie craze. Manufacturers produce anthropomorphic ponies that have the characteristics of young girls. They have barrettes, combs and accessories, and the girls adorn and make up the ponies. These kinds of divided guidelines for the two genders deeply affect children’s gender group identification and social learning.

Read more…

These are my new REM Sleep Wave pillows now available in my new Zazzle store. Check it out for more Thinx-inspired designs.

Show your Valentine how happy she makes you with these dopamine and serotonin necklaces by Anatomology. You can find them in my Thinx Gifts shop.

The Blur Building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro is intended to be the antithesis to sensory overload.

About the project:

The Blur Building is an architecture of atmosphere - a fog mass resulting from natural and manmade forces. Water is pumped from Lake Neuchatel, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through 35,000 high-pressure nozzles. A smart weather system reads the shifting climatic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction and regulates water pressure at a variety of zones. Upon entering Blur, visual and acoustic refereences are erased. There is only an optical “white-out” and the white-noise” of pulsing nozzles. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for visual fidelity in high-definition with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition. In this exposition pavilion there is nothing to see but our dependance on vision itself. [It] is an experiment in de-emphasis on an environmental scale. Movement within is unregulated. The public can ascend to the Angel Deck via a stair that emerges through the fog into the blue sky. Water is not only the site and primary material of the building; it is also a culinary pleasure. The public can drink the building. Within, is an immersive acoustic environment by Christian Marclay. 

Finally, someplace to keep all those Christmas cookies! The Phrenology Head Apothecary Jar from Plasticland

Images from Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century by Carl Schoonover

About the book:

Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century (Abrams, November 2010) follows the fascinating exploration of the brain through images. These beautiful black-and-white and vibrantly colored images, many resembling abstract art, are employed daily by scientists around the world, but most have never before been seen by the general public. From medieval sketches and 19th-century drawings by the founder of modern neuroscience to images produced using state-of-the-art techniques, readers are invited to witness the fantastic networks in the brain.

Each chapter in Portraits of the Mind addresses a different set of techniques for studying the brain, and each is introduced with an essay by a leading scientist in that field of study. Extended captions provide detailed explanations of each image as well as the major insights gained by scientists over the course of the past twenty years. The result is a peek at the mind’s innermost workings, helping readers to understand, and offering clues about what may lie ahead.

No matter what ails you (even if it’s nothing), Darren Cullen has a remedy for it in his Etsy store.

About Placebo:

Proven to be as effective as the leading homeopathic treatment.

Placebo Max Strength has been shown to be effective in the treatment of pain, depression and large variety of illnesses.

Placebos work by harnessing the power of the mind. Knowing that you have taken what appears to be an effective medicine helps boost your body’s own healing process. Since the effectiveness of placebos have been shown in countless medical trials, taking a Placebo Max Strength should work for you too.

About Nocebo:

“A nocebo reaction or response refers to harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable effects a subject manifests after receiving an inert dummy drug or placebo. Nocebo responses are not chemically generated and are due only to the subject’s pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug will produce negative consequences.” - Wikipedia

Now for the first time, Nocebo is available for sale direct to the general public! Despite containing no active ingredients whatsoever, Nocebo can cause a wide range of undesirable effects, from nausea to diarrhea, that is because its potency lies entirely inside the human brain! Nocebo merely suggests that it is bad for you, your brain and body does the rest!

Try Nocebo today! You’ll almost certainly regret it.

Sleep Art is a planned project that will involve a few selected individuals who will have their sleep monitored in one of five Ibis Hotels. The bed’s sensors will measure sound, heat and pressure from the sleeper to produce works of art by a robot.

Hardcoded Memory by Troika

Memory is closely linked to forgetting. Before the digital era, forgetting was easy, for better or worse, not only is it biologically in-built to forget, the analog world around us cannot guarantee that recorded memories will last forever. Photographs fade, film footage can be lost and media out-dated, thus remembering was the exception and forgetting the default. Now in an age of endless digital image reproduction there is no longer a need to remember. We externalise our memories by handing them over to the digital realm enabled through digitization; inexpensive storage software, ease of retrieval and global access, blurring lines of ownership and making virtual forgetting close to impossible.

In the installation, Low-resolution portraits are projected onto the gallery wall, generated by a hardcoded mechanical structure, which in the nature of its construction limits the selection of available images.

‘Hardcoded memory’ is a reflection on the moment, and on time itself, standing as a metaphor for the human search for meaning and continuity, while celebrating forgetting in the digital age.

Half-Drag by Leland Bobbé is an interesting look at the fluidity and performance of gender.

What Have You Got In Your Head? by Sara Asnaghi. Mmm…brains

Beauty isn’t easy. Ask any peacock who has to lug around all that heavy and extravagant plumage. In Laurel Roth’s series Peacocks, their plumage is borrowed from our own human adornments.

About the work:

These peacocks borrow human mating plumage, anthropomorphically showcasing our adaptations and natural orders as their own. They are made of fake fingernails, barrettes, nail polish, false eyelashes, and jewelry to represent the choices involved in biological processes that are unique to humankind.

Work by Jan Fabre from his exhibition Chimères 

(h/t Alec Shao)

Plates from the X-ray Atlas of the Skull. 1918

Color Blind by Roy Nachum

About the project:

Color Blind is a series of circular canvases based on the Ishihara Color Vision Test, which is used to diagnose color blindness. In each the image is formed by a field of colored circles that function as “pixels”, and in each a Braille message is written as a circle within the circle. To a colorblind viewer these images would be visible but relatively hidden, demonstrating that human perception is variable and considerably subjective.