Chinese creative Wang Qingsong clearly has a vision of the world crumbling around him. For much of his work, the Beijing-based artist uses a camera to photograph and freeze themes of capitalism, war, commercialization and human history into contemporary still lifes. People are plagued and alienated in much of Qingsong’s work, trapped in a web of consumer debris, huddled for warmth under throwaway consumer brands or stacked like commodities in a cold warehouse. [via fabrikproject]

The turntable and its purist followers long resisted digital updates. In recent years, however, CDs, hard drives and even DVDs have been tamed by the familiar platter controller. A touch screen turntable serves as the centerpiece of Australia’s “Contemporary Media Lounge” inside Queensland Art Gallery’s Museum of Modern Art. A joint project of museum multimedia designer Aidan Robertson and Dan Treichel, an interactive designer from post-production company Cutting Edge, the interactive display is built around the Numark HDX deck and an “intuitive” touch screen. Users touch and manipulate a range of filters, reworking and remixing MP3 tracks fueled by the deck. [via thecoolhunter]

By layering hundreds of thousands of crayons, Ohio artist Christian Faur creates textured artworks that are part painting and sculpture. Filling wood frames with the crayons, he uses the colored wax tips as “pixels” for images of people and objects, which undulate and change when viewed from different angles. For his crayon art, Faur looked back on his childhood and early art memories he formed working with the colored wax.

His inspiration? A youthful suffering we can all relate to:

“Using the first crayon from a new box always gave me a slight pain,” he writes on his Web site. [via picdit]

If you have the chance to see the Echo dance performance at Teatro Sociale di Como in Italy, you’ll actually be witness to a double performance. Mirroring the movement of Mimbre dancers on stage, are digital backdrop projections captured by advanced 3-D cameras and displayed real-time. The performance was originally commissioned by Vamp for a staging at the Tate Modern, and is expected to tour internationally later this year. [via fabrikproject]

For his upcoming West Coast exhibition, Philadelphia artist Alex Lukas took pigment to paper and flooded skylines and urban landscapes with water, creating barely visible underwater worlds. Rooftop gardens barley escape drowning, while fires and elemental forces take down humanity’s progress in the paper series, which fuses apocalyptic “Blade Runner” landscapes with “SimCity”-styled imagery. Lukas earned a BFA in illustration from RISD in 2003, and used silkscreen, ink and acrylics for the “And Another Shall Rise to Take Her Place” collection, which will be on display March 14 through April 3 at San Francisco’s White Walls Gallery. [via picdit]

French photographer Gilles Alonso has thrown his expert eye towards urban life and taken to the streets of Paris with a cadre of beautiful women. Shot on the street, inside parking garages, rooftops and select interior spaces, Alonso’s gritty photographs blend setting and pose to present a distinct personality from each of the models, who are each stunning, but appealingly non-bombshell. [via fubiz]

Czech designer Daniel Pirsc has a new vision of how interior wallpapers should look. Nothing short of cool, his unique porcelain 3D wallpapers are a flexible solution that adds life to even the most sober walls you’ve seen. Available in airplanes, rain drops, crosses shapes or otherwise, his collection is definitely a daring example that triggers new emotions in a home that was stale before them. And since V-day is coming and we’re a bunch of romantic Stylecravers, we can only imagine how a room full of a thousand scarlet roses would look like. [via Fubiz]

While many may argue about its cause, the fact remains that global warming is a real phenomenon. With that in mind, a group of subversive British artists came up with an ingenious campaign that is trying to inspire the public toward a planet-friendly path. Watermarks is a public art project that uses official UK government predictions and a series of large-scale projections to show just how high the water could climb. Focused on buildings throughout different cities in the UK, Watermarks is a somber reminder for our own involvement with our environment.  For now, the Watermarks caravan is in Bristol, but it would be interesting to see what would happen in other big cities throughout the world.  A great campaign with a well defined purpose… we’d love to see this one come stateside. [via FabrikProject]

Tiny hobby figurines come to life, working and playing in a micro world of texture often missed by cursory human glances. Carpet becomes grass for motorcycle treks, brush bristles transform into rows of vegetation and rolls of paper towels serve as snow for little sledders in Vincent Bousser’s quirky still life photos. Check out the galleries of his work over at Fubiz and freak out when you realize what your Lego men get into when you’re asleep. [via picdit]