"The Institute For Figuring is an educational organization dedicated to enhancing the public understanding of figures and figuring techniques. From the physics of snowflakes and the hyperbolic geometry of sea slugs, to the mathematics of paper folding and graphical models of the human mind, the Institute takes as its purview a complex ecology of figuring.

"Our activities include lectures, publications and exhibitions."

Charles and Ray Eames' grandson is placing plaques around the world detailing the history of an alternate reality.

"<br />
Ghost Diagrams is a program that takes sets of tiles and tries to find patterns into which they may be formed. The patterns it finds when given randomly chosen tiles are often surprising."

Compilation of all the images posted to 4CP.

The self-narrated audiobook of Barack Obama's autobiography cut up and reformed into something quite different.

Make a Commodore 64-style graphic out of any image.

Kaleidoscopic Google Maps.

A Möbius Strip-shaped gear.

Illustrators' art t-shirts.

Spectacular collection of title and "The End" cards from a century of film.

The true story behind the Starbucks logo.

A whole lot of b&w clipart.

Beautiful hand-made metal puzzle cubes. Some are absolutely terrifying to consider assembling.

Intense blog of "Alice in Wonderland"-related art and photography.

Nice collection of, well... random information.

Gallery of some of the best designed subway stations in the world.

"When... "legitimate" systems of communication fail individuals or groups in a society, people often turn to illegal ways of communicating with both each other and the system attempting to control them.... I'm going to discuss four historical examples here; Paris in May 1968, Nicaragua in the late 1970s, South Africa in the early 1980s, and finally Argentina from 2001-04."

" The Japanese word "yokai" (妖怪) broadly means "supernatural or unaccountable phenomena”, but is more typically used to describe various supernatural or magical creatures from Japanese folklore. Below are a few picture scrolls, or emaki, featuring yokai. All were painted some time during roughly the 16th to 19th centuries."

"In Bb 2.0 is a collaborative music and spoken word project conceived by Darren Solomon from Science for Girls." I'm a little surprised that he doesn't mention Terry Riley, though; I mean, even the name is a tribute to "In C".

Will the general public be kind enough to help little robots to reach their destination?

"Classic records lost in time and format, remerged as Pelican books. Just for fun." A beautiful idea.

Sheep + LED vests + sheepdogs = has to be seen to be believed.

A remarkable textual and visual encyclopedia of Our Outer Space Future, with masses of info on science fiction concepts and science-fiction-like-things in real life. There's hours and hours of entertaining reading here.

Concept art "for a Judge Dredd film from the producers of 28 Days Later... the Dredd concept needs to be redeemed from the 1995 Stallone movie". zomgzomgzomg!

An astonishing collection of 20th century (and occasionally even older) painted cigarette advertising from across the world.

Beautiful work.

One man's very funny and creative illlustrations for his t-shirt line.

This guy photographed himself every day for seventeen years. An amazing project.

" Telemegaphone Dale stands seven metres tall on top of the Bergskletten mountain overlooking the idyllic Dalsfjord in Western Norway. When you dial the Telemegaphone’s phone number the sound of your voice is projected out across the fjord, the valley and the village of Dale below." Kind of like the Silophone in Montreal, but in reverse. Sorta.

Artist Alexandra Mir: " The idea is based on the fact that Westerners often complain that Tokyo has no street names and that you can’t find your way around without a guide who innately knows the logic of his own city. I always thought that was such a superb form of local resistance—no key! So I felt it would be interesting to start naming the streets of Tokyo with names from Western culture and society, to help us around. I am sure the people of Tokyo will like it too! "Needless to say, Tokyo is large and I will need thousands and thousands of names, even for the central area.. I have started by asking my friends for help by providing me with a short list of names on any coherent theme, which I will apply to the streets."

"Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes."

I have to admit, this rethink of Coke packaging is really, really attractive.

This guy built a camera-and-goggles rig so he could see himself in the third person, like playing a video game. Add a totally ridiculous character costume for the win! (Doing this is not recommended for those with a history of mental illness.)

Best motorbike EVER.

Photorealistic 3d head sculptures. Uncanny.

Atari 2600 classics! "Magna Carta", "Every Sport Ever (In Pong Form)", "Motorbike Kid Vs The Hot-Rod Menace", "Salvador Dali's Pinball Thrills", and many, many more.

Fantastic site with MP3s and beautifully (and funnily) illustrated copies of the gigantic paranoid rants of a deluded man who distributed them as leaflets for years. Almost like the evil twin of Dr. Bronner. Utterly compelling.

"An Online Repository of Works Printed in English Between the Years 1477 and 1799".

Online version of the Book of the Exposition.

CD covers made by combining a random Wikipedia article title, the last four words of a random quote, and a random image from Flickr's "interesting" stream. Very funny.

"the Kitāb Gharāʾib al-funūn wa-mulaḥ al-ʿuyūn, known as the Book of Curiosities... an anonymous work compiled in the first half of the 11th century in Egypt and contains an unparalleled series of diagrams of the heavens and maps of the earth."

Amazing collaborative art space with continuous additions from micro to macro size.

Tom Phillips painted on the pages of a Victorian novel, leaving only occasional words of his own choice peeking out, transforming the original book into something entirely new.

"The A/V Geeks Film Archive is an ephemeral film collection curated by Skip Elsheimer [of] over 18,000 films gathered from school auctions, thrift stores, closets and dumpsters. "

Very talented guy who does beautiful drawings (like reproductions of famous paintings) in the dirt on car windscreens.

Amusing meaningless, absurd or satirical signs put up by some Hungarian pranksters.

The Codex Seraphinianus. My dad has this; I spent hours "reading" it as a kid.

An exhibition by Invader, the French artist who makes those little mosaics of Space Invaders and other computer/VG symbols you see scattered around London, Paris and other places. Featuring art made entirely of Rubik's Cubes.

lots of stupid animated GIF ASCII-art

some amazing trompe l'oeil murals

Teicoku Syounen is a talented Japanese artist. Check out the astonishing cityscapes in the "work" section (帝国少年作品集).

"This board is for quiet and beautiful scenes. I found this is better expressed with the Japanese word 幽勝 (yuushoh)"

Groovy metal and wood sculptures: Hamiltonian Path On Soccer Ball, Weaving Around A Cube, Knotted Hamiltonian Path...

"This web site is about making new creative works out of old ones, whether it be fine art or pop culture."

"This project aims to broadcast simultaneous 'live' soundscapes from various locations around London. This is made possible using laptops to stream audio over the internet using 'Wifi' networking."

"It is almost impossible to open unless you know the exact step by step procedure."