British street artist and designer INSA recently collaborated with American artist Madsteez (aka Mark Paul Deren) to create “The Largest GIF-ITI in the World” for the Pow! Street Art Festival in Taipei, Taiwan. The pair had to paint the eight story mural four times over five days to animate the GIF. Each painting was photographed in sequence to build the frames for the final image.
After spending a week in Barcelona not so long ago, I can sympathize with local residents who wish that their city was not quite so popular with tourists. With nearly 8 million annual visitors to the city, the streets are often jammed ass to elbow with tourists.
Barcelona filmmaker Eduardo Chibás has captured local sentiment about the flood of visitors in his documentary Bye Bye Barcelona.
There’s no denying the fact that American travelers in Europe benefit from the widespread European proficiency in English. But after visiting most countries in Europe, I can testify that the advantage of being a native speaker of the 21st century’s lingua franca is definitely not evenly distributed throughout the EU.
Czech linguist Jakub Marian has created this helpful map (see below) describing the levels of conversational English proficiency in most of the European Union nations. Marian based his map on data collected by the 2012 “Special Eurobarometer 386” report.
Having traveled in both Spain and Hungary recently, I can attest that being a monolingual English speaker continues to be problematic in both countries at times. Although having resided in areas of the U.S. with large Spanish speaking and Hungarian speaking populations, I seem to have learned a lot more Spanish than Magyar by some form of linguistic osmosis, because it’s always easier to communicate in Spain than in Hungary.
Image © Jakub Marian
Even infrequent visitors to TBTP know how I feel about the brilliant Spanish street art collective known as Luzinterruptus. So, it’s about time to catch-up with the anonymous crew of environmental pranksters. Last month they used thousands of discarded plastic bottle and bags to create a “labyrinth of plastic waste” for the Katowice Street Art Festival in Poland.
The maze was built with plastic bags filled with bottles, illuminated by individual LEDs and suspended from metal racks. Once again dramatically demonstrating our growing consumer waste problem and the ever burgeoning bottled water business.
Images © Gustavo Sanabria
So many places to see and so little time. Now we can do our vicarious sightseeing via drone to just about every corner of the planet. All we need to do is visit TravelByDrone a very cool new website created by Swiss drone aficionado Jan Hiersemenzel. The site aggregates user submitted aerial drone videos from around the world. But beware, it’s easy to while away an hour or two on these amazing videos.
Standing incongruously amidst the graves and memorials of the Jüdischer Friedhof Krems are three wooden bookcases. This library was created ten years ago by artists Martin Guttmann and Michael Clegg as a memorial to the destroyed Jewish community of Krems, Austria just an hour west of Vienna.
The artists created the bookcases in the approximate shape and size of grave stones. The glass door fronted bookcases contain a carefully curated library of books on Jewish history and philosophy in German, English and Hebrew. Visitors are encouraged to borrow books, add to the collection or contribute to the library fund.
According to Martin Guttmann:
“The most important issue here that once upon the time there was a Jewish community here and it had a synagogue and the Jewish community doesn’t exist here anymore and then there is a question of so what happens then with this place; does that mean that it will have to be forgotten, does it mean that it has to be abandoned; and the answer is: not necessarily, but in order to put life into it you really need a special kind of involvement and sometimes art can really bring with it the kind of involvement that creates things like that.”
The restored 19th century cemetery also has another memorial to the local victims of the Nazis—a 140-foot long metal sculpture with the names of local Jews murdered by the Germans during World War II or shipped to death camps.
Call Me Ishmael is an intriguing new way to share your love of books and reading. The concept behind the project is quite simple: Step # Call Ishmael’s phone number 774.325.0503 . Step #2 Listen to a brief message. Step #3 Leave a voicemail about a book you’ve read and its impact in your life. Visit the website to hear personal messages about books.
Icelandair recently premiered a clever new in-flight safety video. Instead of following convention, they decided to take the opportunity to produce a film that not only underlines the importance of safety, but that also engages passengers with a sense of curiosity about Iceland’s natural attractions.
Inspired by the awesome beauty of Iceland itself, the new safety video includes Iceland’s nature as the stunning backdrop to the typical safety message presented to all airline passengers. For example, emergency lighting is compared to the northern lights, and assuming the brace position becomes a calm and collected maneuver when waking up after a long relaxing slumber by the peaceful shore of a lake.
The safety video was written and produced by Islenska Ad Agency and directed by Pegasus. Showcasing Iceland’s hot spots of nature and beauty, filming took place on location around Iceland, including Jokulsarlon, Thkgil canyon, Fjadrargljufur gorge, Thorsmork National Park and Eyjafjoll, close to Eyjafjallajokull.
H/t to Bibliodiverisidad for these pics of wonderful book benches in Istanbul.
I’m a big fan of timelapse videos and a bigger fan of Budapest, so I had to share this amazing short film. Created by cinematographer Joe Simon, Budapest is a heady mix of 4k footage, timelapse and hyperlapse video. Enjoy :
Travel Between The Pages 