Cristina Mortágua has just posed topless. That wouldn’t be that big a deal–except the photo also features her being embraced by her fifteen year old son. Is this toeing the line towards incest–or is it just something us prudes should get over and accept as art? [globo.com]

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Dublin-based creative ad agency Boys and Girls put together this sweet conference table using LEGO bricks (22,742 total). View more photos here and check out a time lapse Making-of video after the jump.

[Via]

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70 Million by Hold Your Horses ! from L'Ogre on Vimeo.

“70 Million”, is a song by the Franco-American band Hold Your Horses! It takes viewers on a journey through art history reconstructing famous paintings. The look and feel is similar to our own Green Porno. It will make you smile. Mark my words.

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Good design used to be completely unheard of in the world of sex accessories — neither function nor form was particularly paid attention to, whether it was a vibrator or a pair of latex undies. Fortunately, in the last decade or so, both form and function have improved immeasurably, and we could not be happier. Now vibrators and dildos are as likely to resemble abstract art for your coffee table as they are to resemble a penis.

The newest contender in this field? New York City’s health department, if you can believe that! The city distributes 40 million free condoms every year, and they decided that the condom packaging could use an overhaul. Now, design by committee tends to be a horrible idea, and design by government agency tends to be even worse. But some smarty-pants in the health department decided to hold an online competition for a special limited edition condom wrapper, and 15,000 people voted on the entries.

The winning entry, designed by Luis Acosta, incorporates the international power-on symbol. “I wanted to associate it with something we see in our daily lives so it wasn’t taboo for people.”

“When I saw [the design], I said this is pure genius,” New York City’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas Farley said. “Everyone recognizes that symbol on their PC. People should use their own power to control their sexual health.” And as a bonus side effect? That power-on button on your laptop or iPhone will forever more inspire dirty thoughts. Thanks, department of health!

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Kottke shared this fascinating slideshow that puts faces to the anonymous model-perfect hands which grace countless “glossy magazine ads, in television commercials, and blown-up on billboards,” and in some cases as a stand-in hand for a particular beautiful actress’ toe-esque thumb. Although lotion and gloves are mentioned as part of the regiment of these models, there’s no mention of wearing oven mitts like Seinfeld’s George Costanza, when his “exquisite” hands make him an unlikely hand model for one episode.

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Jack Pierson has made a name for himself in sculpture, collage and drawings, but photography is the medium he’s best known for and keeps coming back to. His latest solo show, “Some Other Spring,” which opens at Regen Projects in LA tonight, is a collection of works on paper, sculpture and photography. The gallery hasn’t released any images, but if it’s anything his shows in years past you can expect typographically heavy sculpture and photographs of beautiful men. Or at least beautiful photographs of men and young boys, like the photo above from his early 2000 “Self Portrait” series. If you remember, none of those pictures were of himself, but of 15 different males who represented in some way 15 different pieces of himself.

Pierson is part of a group of photographers called the Boston School, which includes Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, Philip-Lorca diCorcia and Mark Morrisroe among others. As friends and associates they often took photos of each other, especially Morrisroe and Pierson, who built up a kind of mythology of self in the process, something he’s still working through 30 years later often using fictional portraiture, like the “Self Portrait” series. Explorations in physical identity in photography is certainly nothing new. Cindy Sherman has built an entire career on it. But Pierson’s work is unique in that it teeters on that precarious edge you’re bound to find yourself on when you take sexy pictures of young men but he keeps it arthouse, not Penthouse.

“Some Other Spring” at Regen Projects II until April 17, 2010. Opening reception tonight, 6-8pm.

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Werner Herzog is a lover of conflict. Whether it’s man vs. man, man vs. nature or man vs. himself, his films have a habit of pitting a man against the extremes. In RESCUE DAWN (2006) the man is Deiter Dengler (Christian Bale), a US Navy pilot who was shot down in Laos only 40 minutes into his very first mission in 1965 during the Vietnam War. Between surviving the crash, his Pathet Lao captors and his subsequent escape, Dengler confronted and triumphed over man, nature and himself.

Of course, deep in the jungle with a set of bearded, bedraggled, starving captives for characters is where Herzog is at his best. The actors, as you might expect, had to endure much of what their real-life counterparts did, namely starvation, delirium and the impossible physical demands of survival in the jungle. For example, when Dengler eats live worms and grubs and other mysterious creepy crawlies, Christian Bale actually ate them. When he’s dragged behind a water buffalo or hung upside down with an ant’s nest tied to his face, those aren’t special effects either. The result of this painstaking attention to detail is the realism we’ve come to expect from Herzog. There are no computer graphics, just real mean in a real environment reliving the real-life story of Dengler, the only US POW to successfully escape in the Vietnam War.

On Sundance Channel’s Tastemakers Series this month. Every week, watch a different award winning film from festivals around the globe. A series of contemporary hits and timeless masterpieces that define cool and defy limits. Sundays at 10PM E/P.

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• No more downcycling for plastic? That’s what researchers at IBM and Stanford claim their new development in plastic production does: the material can be continuously recycled. See the video above… (via Green Inc.)
  
  
• Wired for speed: Homebuilder KB Homes is rolling out optional pre-wiring for electric vehicle charging in its “Built to Order” new home package.
• The $5 shower monitor: The Waterpebble measures water going down the drain during your shower… and, after setting a benchmark, helps you cut back on on shower time (and water used). (via CNET Crave)
  
  
• One method of climate change adaptation: The island nation of the Maldives, which is threatened by rising sea levels, has contracted with Dutch Docklands to build it an artificial island. (via Cleantechnica)
  
  
• A swimming pool as a thermal storage system: That’s what one builder has done with a renovation of a 17th-century home in Great Britain. (via Home Design Find)
  
  
• Keeping up with the women of green business: Earth & Industry, in honor of International Womens’ Day, compiled a list of 16 women you’ll want to follow on Twitter for green business news.
  
  
• Kite-powered floating power plants: Korean researchers are experimenting with boat-based hydroelectric turbines which they believe could generate up to a gigawatt of electricity. The boats would be propelled by large kites. (via HuffPo Green)
  
  

Feel free to share your own recent green tech finds… let us know about them in the comments.

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I was surprised to learn that ECOWEEK isn’t just a one week event, it’s the actual name of the NGO that hosts the weeklong conference as well as “eco awareness” all year long. To be honest, their mission statement is a bit naive: ECOWEEK was established because temperatures are rising; the glaciers are receding; permafrost is thawing…because our children and grandchildren face an uncertain future. That’s nice, but it’s not very specific. It’s also not very current and sounds as if it was written ten or fifteen years ago – by a third grade teacher.

And that’s a real shame when you take a look at their big event, the Eco Week itself, an Athens-based conference that focuses primarily on sustainable architecture and boasts speakers from some of the biggest firms around the world. Keynote speakers include Diebedo Francis Kere, the 2009 winner of the Global Award for Sustainability and Daniel Wicke from Rural Studio, the visionary architecture program at Auburn University. In fact, the more I peruse the week’s program, the more exciting the conference seems. There’s big picture stuff, but there are also talks about structural engineering and sustainable landscape design. Unfortunately, the ECOWEEK website is one of the most confounding I’ve ever visited, and it’s nearly impossible to retrieve all this information without taking the time to dig deep into their site. A case of good intentions and poor planning? It’d be worth the trip, but good luck figuring out how to get there (they don’t exactly make it clear).

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The Armory Show has come and gone, but one image is still very much alive in my mind. Last week I wrote about the transgendered porn star Buck Angel, showing his transexual PSA here on SUNfiltered. The above image is a stunning, solid gold, life size statue of Buck created by the British artist Marc Quinn. A series of gold statues, all of pop icons, will debut in London on May 6th. The Buck statue had a sneak peak this past week.

And while I love the cigar chomping performance artist, I am equally excited about another one of Quinn’s statues set to be unveiled. The actress Pamela Anderson too was given the gold treatment. Less realistic than the Buck’s bust, Pam’s statue has her become a Siamese twin attached to her own hip. Freaky.

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