What’s Happening: A YouTube contest hosted by director and 3D/VFX artist Clinton Jones, in partnership with visual effects developer Maxon, offers a glimpse of the accelerating innovation in the 3D animation space.

The Download: We’ve all been there: staring out the window or a car or train or plane, wondering if we’ll ever make our destination as the landscape scrolls by. Director and 3D/VFX artist Clinton Jones, better known as Pwnisher, thinks of this moment as an “infinite journey,” a concept that served as inspiration for a competition for designers to build a scene based on the phrase. The only other constraint? It had to feature a vehicle of some sort.

Two months later, 2,448 artists have submitted nearly three hours of scenes, and Pwnisher has picked his favorites. In first place? Animator Kris Theorin, who accurately describes his charming render as “a cross between the turret fight scene from Star Wars: A New Hope and the Luma feeding mechanic from Super Mario Galaxy.” Multimedia designer Euan Morrison took second place with a banjo-starring scene that’s more Sea Bluegrass than Seapunk. He cited the challenge as an opportunity to hone his skills with cutting-edge rendering software called Redshift. “I thought it would be a great way to get up to speed with learning how to texture and light my scenes on a personal project.”

A YouTube supercut of the top 100 renders, scored to a lovely bit of citypop by Point Lobo, shows that while many of the artists have hitched their wagons to the familiar tropes of wargames and urban ennui, others are traveling intriguing paths. Alex Farrell, for instance, folded together a landscape of corrugated cardboard in tribute to Kisho Kurokawa’s Nakagin Capsule Tower in Tokyo (RIP).

Anonymous Artist explores more troubling terrain, in a scene where a phone livestreams a subway passenger, the screen filled with abusive comments and a noose around the passenger’s head. That scene, and others depicting police abuse and environmental trauma, show that reality can be a really bad trip. Mostly, though, the scenes of giant turtles and whales floating by, of Miyazaki-esque magic worlds opening up, of wonder arriving in the most boring places imaginable, are well worth the ride. Technology is moving fast; our imaginations need to keep up.

In Their Own Words: “I hope the creative spark inside of them is lit and that this helps it grow. And, if it’s not lit already, that this helps light it,” Clinton says. “They’re a part of this big community where everyone’s learning and growing. No one knows all the answers, but as long as you are making progress, then that’s the best thing possible.”

Surface Says: These artists have quickly outpaced the output of the tiresome, and at times unethical, world of NFTs, whose makers have already begun stealing the renders to sell as their own.

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Whether it be the elegant science of racing, kinetic art’s singular hypnotizing effect, the meditative craftsmanship behind ceramics, or the intricate mechanics of timepiece design, movement shapes the world around us and beyond in ways both subtle and profound. Leading up to the globally anticipated Miami Formula One Grand Prix, Surface is excited to explore the universal phenomenon of motion with an exhibition at our gallery and showroom in the Miami Design District.

Tapping our network of artists, designers, musicians, photographers, filmmakers, and more, the “Art in Motion” exhibition, opening May 5, will showcase the beauty of nature’s most elemental force in celebration of a global marquee event.

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While the Venice Biennale so far seems to be floating past various controversies—tourism and climate change flooding the city; the ongoing Covid pandemic; the bureaucratic and political impact of the war in Ukraine—the art world has united in praise of Simone Leigh. Her U.S. Pavilion, to this country’s shame, is its first by a Black woman; to her great credit, the eleven works shown tackle, transform, and transcend history.

“In order to tell the truth, you need to invent what might be missing from the archive,” Leigh offered in an artist’s statement for the show, “to formally move things around in a way that reveals something more true than fact.” To that end, Façade tops the pavilion’s Jeffersonian structure with a West African-style thatched roof, asserting the African relationship to American neoclassicism while casting a side-eye to the racist 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition. Within, Satellite ascends in a monumental bronze figuration of the busts of women made by the Baga people of West Africa, which Picasso and others stole for their own work.

Nearby, the film Sovereignty, a collaboration with Madeline Hunt-Ehrlich, shows how Leigh makes it all happen. Luckily, For those unable or unwilling to make the Venice trek, most of the works will be shown at Boston’s ICA in 2023—in another first, Leigh’s debut survey show.

Our weekly roundup of the internet’s most preposterous headlines, from the outrageous to the outright bizarre.

He Recreated His Imaginary Friend With AI—and It Tried to Kill Him [Input]

Muting Your Mic Reportedly Doesn’t Stop Big Tech from Recording Your Audio [TheNextWeb]

Even Mild Covid-19 Can Cause Your Brain to Shrink [National Geographic]

After a Two-Year Ban, Hugs Are Back at Disneyland [The New York Times]

Crazed Disney Fans Desperate for Merchandise Use Fake Babies to Get Around Item Limit [Mirror]

Ecology Professor Theorizes Loch Ness Monster May Just Be Whale Penis [The Huffington Post]

After opening in locations throughout California, LA, Miami, and the Bahamas, sushi hotspot Katsuya finally arrives in New York City, with an outpost in Midtown’s Citizens Food Hall at Manhattan West. The Rockwell Group interiors are maximalist, as one might expect from founder David Rockwell, who literally wrote the book on Drama.

After entering via swoops of lacquered lintels, guests can sample Chef Katsuya Uechi’s signature crispy rice or site-specific preparations of maki and wagyu, in various rooms separated by red and vermillion portals. A communal table awaits under a calligraphic custom chandelier, as do Hollywood banquettes and private tables separated by ombre glass screens referencing shoji paper. Arrive early for a powerfully inventive cocktail or two by Yael Vengroff, spiked with ingredients like aloe vera and umami bitters.

In “Severance,” the limited tragicomic series written by Dan Erickson and directed by Ben Stiller, a company town called Kier serves as home to the eerie Lumon Industries. Lumon’s employees live in drab masses of company housing, and work in a mirrored monolith surrounded by a regimented maze of company parking. Outside, cast-members including Adam Scott exist, shattered by grief and other symptoms of life, in dimly-lit small-town simulacra; Scott and others undergo a strange new kind of brain surgery that separates their consciousness from time spent on and off the clock. Inside, he and cast-members including John Turturro and Britt Lower perform strange data tasks in a minimalist fantasia on corporate Modernism, unaware of what goes on beyond business hours but supervised by oddball all-stars like Patricia Arquette and Christopher Walken.

Severance’s sci-fi storytelling is grounded in familiarity: Eero Saarinen’s iconic—and recently restored—Bell Labs building in New Jersey plays the part of corporate HQ. Production designer Jeremy Hindle found clues to how companies established authority using architecture and design via another Saarinen project, the rugged Cor-Ten complex he designed with Kevin Roche for John Deere in Moline, IL. At Lumon, whose aesthetic inspiration comes from the Lars Tunbjor book Office about liminal Swiss office design of the ’80s and ’90s, the floor plan isn’t so much open as uncertain, with a four-pack of cubicles—a $100,000 set piece dubbed the diamond desk by producers—sited on carpeting as green as cheap backyard artificial turf in vast fields of white space.

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Neal Aronowitz is a self-taught sculptor who finds inspiration in the natural world and the dynamic forms within it. After years of running Neal Aronowitz Stone & Tile, a successful stone and interiors business in New York City and Portland, he launched an art and design studio that focuses on hand-crafted bespoke furniture and lighting. The studio’s work continues with a passion for daring forms, material experimentation, and simple beauty. Aronowitz’s designs blur the lines between art and furniture, with pieces that feature surprising shapes and silhouettes.

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