Studio visits with Black Panther designer Emory Douglas, poster artist Frank Kozik, and others

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Snowflake artist at Maker Faire Detroit

Edward L. Platt describes himself as a "a web developer, maker, artist, recovering physicist, and neuroscience fanboy." I met him at Maker Faire Detroit, where he had an exhibition of his geometric snowflake drawings, called "penflakes." He told me he draws one by hand every day. He uses hex grid paper as a template, laying a piece of plain paper over it.

I asked him why he does this, and I *think* he told me that once he saw a drawing of an 8-sided snowflake, and decided to draw a 6-sided one as a way to correct the error. He found the activity so rewarding that he has drawn one every day for the last couple of years. I find his drawings beautiful.

Edward has created a Web-based application that allows people to draw their own snowflakes. I prefer Edward's old school pen-and-paper method, but the app is fun to play with! It's called FlakePad.

Hand-drawn snowflakes by Edward L. Platt

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Ai Weiwei, artist and dissident, rips into Chinese gov in post-prison op-ed

Newsweek magazine has published a "scathing attack" on the Chinese government from artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, who was detained in extraordinary and dehumanizing conditions as an apparent political prisoner. In the op-ed, he describes Beijing as "a city of violence."

Beijing is two cities. One is of power and of money. People don’t care who their neighbors are; they don’t trust you. The other city is one of desperation. I see people on public buses, and I see their eyes, and I see they hold no hope. They can’t even imagine that they’ll be able to buy a house. They come from very poor villages where they’ve never seen electricity or toilet paper.

Every year millions come to Beijing to build its bridges, roads, and houses. Each year they build a Beijing equal to the size of the city in 1949. They are Beijing’s slaves. They squat in illegal structures, which Beijing destroys as it keeps expanding. Who owns houses? Those who belong to the government, the coal bosses, the heads of big enterprises. They come to Beijing to give gifts—and the restaurants and karaoke parlors and saunas are very rich as a result.

Beijing tells foreigners that they can understand the city, that we have the same sort of buildings: the Bird’s Nest, the CCTV tower. Officials who wear a suit and tie like you say we are the same and we can do business. But they deny us basic rights. You will see migrants’ schools closed. You will see hospitals where they give patients stitches—and when they find the patients don’t have any money, they pull the stitches out. It’s a city of violence.

(via Reuters)

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