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As regular SHFT readers know by now, we sort of have a thing for art and photography that explores the area where the natural and the manmade intersect. And Los Angeles-based creative Brooks Salzwedel, whose work we discovered on Faith is Torment, navigates that zone as beautifully and interestingly as anyone. Salzwedel's mixed media works are made using hand drawn graphite on Duralar, which is......read more
We're loving these strange, surreal works from the portfolio of Tristram Lansdowne, a Toronto-based painter who depicts floating spaces that range from impossible landscape forms to haunting urban zones. His newer paintings and etchings, collected in a recent show entitled Fata Morgana (defined as a complex mirage that seen in a narrow band right above the horizon), explore landscape,......read more
One of Spain's most prominent artists, Joan Fontcuberta is known for exploring the ground where illusion and reality meet. For Landscapes Without Memory, Fontcuberta co-opted computer software developed by the military to render map data into 3D geographic images. But instead of inputting maps into the Terragen software, he fed fragments of landscape works by Turner, Cezanne, Dali,......read more
Matthew Albanese's landscapes are so real looking, it's hard to believe they're not photos of real life scenes. The New Jersey photographer creates meticulous small-scale models that are as dramatic as any Romantic landscape painting. The strikingly realistic images are achieved through the use of various household materials - cotton for clouds, salt for waterfalls, tile grout for......read more
Deep in California's Mojave Desert, construction is well underway on a solar power plant that may eventually generate enough electricity for 140,000 homes. When it's completed next year, the $2.2 billion, 3,600-acre Ivanpah solar thermal plant will be the largest of its kind in the world, with nearly 350,000 mirrors reflecting light onto boilers, creating steam to power turbines and generate......read more
For his latest series of images, Chinese photographer Zhang Kechun traveled along the Huang He, the world's sixth largest river, known to us English speakers as the Yellow River. Rising in the Tibetan Himalayas, the Huang He winds 5,000 miles through northeastern China before emptying into the Gulf of Bohai. Armed with a large format camera, Zhang set out to capture life along the river,......read more
For our money, there's nothing like some good satellite or aerial photography to shift our perception of this planet we call home. Looking like abstract paintings, these images offer stunning views of the arid landscapes in Iran's largest desert, the Dasht-e Kavir, or Great Salt Desert. The word kavir is Persian for salt marsh. The essentially uninhabited zone -- covering an area......read more
On Friday, General Electric announced plans to build a $300 million solar panel plant in Colorado. The factory, near Denver, will be the largest in the U.S. The announcement is a strong show of confidence for the solar industry, which has been rocked by a string of bankruptcies and falling prices. GE, a global leader in wind turbine manufacturing, is entering the solar panel business at a......read more
This week, Google announced a $280 million investment in SolarCity, the California-based solar startup company founded by Elon Musk (the man behind Tesla Motors, Space X, and Paypal). The deal is Google's largest clean tech investment yet. SolarCity offers solar leasing, which alleviates the somewhat intimidating upfront costs of buying solar panels and allows homeowners......read more
General Electric has announced plans to build the largest solar panel manufacturing plant in the United States. The project is estimated to cost around $600 million, and will deliver about 400 megawatts of production of thin-film solar.The company hopes that by going bigger on the production side they can deliver economies of scale and make solar panels more affordable for the masses.......read more
