position: absolute - Design resources and inspiration.

“On May 3 we will attempt advertising history once again. As planet earth turns over 21 different time zones, we will mobilize all the top creative directors—the leaders of the ad world—to carry out the largest advertising portfolio review in the world. Thousands of juniors will receive valuable face-to-face time with the best creative directors in the world.”

Portfolio Night 5 is just around the corner, and they’ve really rounded a lot of creative folk. Ticket prices vary from city to city, but they’re all very affordable and likely a worthwhile investment. Sounds like a great opportunity!

Here’s an interesting chance to get your art out in the open, make a little money with it and maybe even win a prize. MAiLmeART.com is a project that your postman will enjoy: they collect artwork done exclusively on envelopes and packages. Quoteth:

Submissions can be envelopes or packages which have been drawn on, painted, dipped in acid, covered in paper mache (anything you want really) but they must look amazing and they must have traveled though the post with the postman able to see the work, so you can’t paint a canvas and wrap it up and post it to me. The wrapping is your canvas or in most cases an envelope.

Your work will be posted on the website, and according to founder Darren Di Lieto, there will be an exhibition where your work might be put on display and sold. Artists receive a cut of 70%, the rest goes into covering the exhibition costs. In the meanwhile, all submissions take part in a monthly contest: judges pick a monthly favorite, to which a random prize is awarded.

There’s already some very beautiful art (and some tasty prizes), so go have a look, get inspired and submit something.

I will post the submissions of position: absolute readers right here, so let me know if you take part! I know I will be sending in some art, how about you?

I usually try not to have two videos on the front page at the same time, but this one I just couldn’t leave out. Quoteth Phil Hansen:

30 different people that influenced my life were painted one on top of another on my torso. I either painted a picture of the person or an object that represents the person.

(“Influences” on YouTube)

Phil says he “spent about 20 hours painting” while standing in front of the camera. Very talented and persistent! For those interested, he explains why he drew certain motives on his website.

Artist Jen Stark takes regular multi-colored construction paper to the third dimension in a portfolio of stunningly beautiful layered paper cut artwork. If she ever does a gallery here in Germany I need to know! (via)

Give some graffiti artists a laser and see what they do with it? Tag buildings, of course! The Graffiti Research Lab is, in its own words, “dedicated to outfitting graffiti artists with open source technologies for urban communication”. And they’re coming up with some really cool stuff, such as L.A.S.E.R. Tag, LED Throwies (a must-see) and Drive-In GIF Theater.

Pixel art with rubik’s cubes: sounds like an obvious connection, that, until now, no one has really pulled off. Well, here it is. RUBIKCUBISM – a logical exhibition by French artist Invader featuring mosaics, video installation, and both small and large-scale sculptures. For the past five years, Invader has conducted worldwide “invasions” with custom site-specific mosaic pieces based on the 1978 video game “Space Invaders” created by Toshiro Nishikado; the streets of Paris, Tokyo, New York, London, and Los Angeles (among many others) have become components in his public art planetary invasion.
(Text taken from here, along with more images).

Amateur photographer Alexandre Duret-Lutz is putting together an inspiring portfolio of spherical panoramas. The series, appropriately called Wee Planets, features panoramic photos stitched together in a way that they appear to be very small planets. Reminds me of the cover for The Little Prince.

This fun little stop-motion video was created by Ljudbilden & Piloten for electronic artists Minilogue, done completely on whiteboard. Very entertaining!
(Thanks, Spreeblick)

Neave.tv by Paul Neave is a full screen TV station in your browser, showing some of the most creative, artistic videos right off of YouTube, Blip.tv and Google Video. Definitely worth a look, really nice way to phase out for a few minutes in your lunch break and gather some inspiration. Also check out Paul Neave’s website, which offers a few other very impressive and beautiful flash experiments.

I’ve seen the Google Maps API used for a lot of things until now, but nothing this fantastic. Markus Dreßen gives us a glimpse of his book table, in this beautiful gallery of book design. You can navigate it as you would Google Maps, albeit sans zooming.

Markus Dreßen is also the designer behind another nice site, spector cut+paste. (Thanks, neckCNS)