There is actually an organization out there that was willing to dole out a grant for a project based around a Lil Wayne song, and, amazingly, that is not the most impressive thing about the resulting video. Watch it and find out what is after the jump…

Everything about “Let the Beat Build” from Nyle, Brooklyn’s “friendly neighborhood MC,” is wild. The entire video is one take and its audio is live. It took ten hours, thirty tries, and the effort and coordination of over twenty performers, including the only hot girl to ever play the banjo, to get right, but WOW did they get it right. In a cinematic magic trick performed by director Chadd Harbold, Nyle builds his beat by pulling musicians, singers, dancers, and a “homeboy choir” seemingly out of thin air. This kind of expertly executed creativity is much more than impressive. Watch out Lil Wayne, Nyle is formidable.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Circle Square’s video for “Dancers” is where the music video meets the avant-garde.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This Joy Divisionesque trip through the dance-art continuum is as refreshing as it is impressive. Robert Longo’s iconic series, Men in the Cities, is brought to life in a way that few other works of modern art have ever been. Stylish, sexy, hypnotic, and astoundingly true to the original imagery, it is as if director Bienvenido Cruz found a hidden play button on Longo’s work and pressed it. Dancers Miles Farber, Vincent Noiseux, Julie Chapple, and Alison Denham also impress. Their vocabulary of movement is of a language that few are inventive or daring enough to speak.

Via Our Young Art and Boompa.

In this eerily other-worldly series, James Pomerantz captures the intersection of two very different earthly realms.

Tourists splash, play, and float in Mexican waters once used by Mayans for sacrificial religious offerings. The single shaft of light in the images is created by a cenote, a geological formation that sounds rather fancy, but is basically just a sinkhole that drops sunlight on a subterranean swimming pool. Mayans believed cenotes were portals to the after-world, but these vacationers, all of whom are shown reacting naturally to the space, just seem to prefer the light over the darkness. Who can blame them with all the spirits swimming below?

via Rachel Hulin.

JR is the biggest photographer in the world, or at least on GoogleEarth. “Women Are Heroes,” the newest and most ambitious project from the French graffiti artist and photographer – “photograffiteur,” if you will – is so big it can be seen from space.

Where the project is making its biggest impact, however, is in the African slums where it is produced. JR travels through some of the poorest areas of such countries as Sudan, Kenya, and Sierra Leone photographing women who have been the victims of violence and sexual exploitation. He says of working with the women, “They all wanted to share their story…when you hear the story you’re like, ‘Woah, maybe the person has died inside,’ but then when you ask her to do a face, then you can see life.”

Next, the pictures are blown up and posted in the women’s neighborhoods on things like busses, buildings, loading docks, and trains. JR takes women with the ugliest of stories and most degrading of reputations, finds and extracts their beauty, and then shows it to their communities. A woman who poses for JR suddenly finds herself celebrated by the very people who made her feel victimized and forgotten, thus renewing her self-image and transforming her societal role.

In Kibera, Kenya, is where “Women Are Heroes” goes intergalactic. In this slum, one of the largest in Africa, JR posts the photographs on his subjects’ rooftops using water-resistant materials to protect their delicate homes during the rainy season. Over 2,000 square meters of rooftops are covered, making the installation large enough to be captured by satellite imaging.

via Wooster Collective & DailyMotion

I write from Brooklyn, New York, where I currently live, but am from West Palm Beach, Florida. Tiger is my middle name. If you don’t believe me you can come find me on the steps at Union Square and I’ll show you my ID. The only things I consistently do on a daily basis are sit there and people watch and eaves drop, listen to Billy Joel’s “Vienna,” drink wine, write, and obsess over art. I, obviously and sadly, never do them all at the same time because drinking in public is illegal.I do, however, share Leo Tolstoy’s definition of art, that it is “a human activity…to evoke in oneself a feeling one has once experienced, and having evoked it in oneself, then, by means of movements, lines, colors, sounds, or forms expressed in words, so to transmit that feeling that others may experience the same feeling…and that other people are infected by these feelings and also experience them.” Sometimes when I read that I get chills.

The rest of my time is devoted to my mission to try everything once, but I am concerned I have become a bit too open to new experiences. After recently seeing an ad on craigslist searching for a kidney donor, I thought, “Hmm. Never imagined doing that, so maybe.”

Anyway, it’s very nice to meet you.

Truly,

Paige Tiger