Here’s the first paragraph of the new article:

Matt Jones contemplates activity by architecture affective sculptures that abort to carbon it. A alum apprentice in art at Stanford University, his investigations accept led him, a part of added things, to use an air compressor to breathing a respiratory arrangement ancient from old bike close tubes, and to motorize a carpeting of zip ties abstemious with LEDs to almost a pulsing, acclaim respiring, bristling hide. His goal: to aggravate out the basic aspect that makes the active live.

Debate over which version’s writing is of higher quality will undoubtedly have the comments section hopping for months, so I’ll keep my own judgments to myself. I’ll bet, though, that the magniloquent program behind this recreation would interest Italo Calvino, who stuck a word-counting, genre-analyzing computer into his novel If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. It’s probably child’s play for Philip Parker, who has turned automated internet searches into hundreds of thousands of books for sale on Amazon, and claims he’s working on software that will generate romance novels.

I landed an article on this giant UFO in the pages of MAKE magazine. Gail Simpson and Aristotle Georgiades of Actual Size Artworks built it in Wisconsin with wood from an old dairy barn they transformed into their house. Then they drove all 500 pounds of it to Philadelphia and put it in a tree. It sounds like this was half the fun for them, especially because they got to interact directly with people seeing their work.

Aristotle: It was a beautiful form in sections. When we shipped this thing across the country there were these two half-UFOs on the trailer. Every time we stopped, someone would ask, “Hey what’s that?” Gail usually said, “It’s a flying saucer,” and they’d say, “Oh, obviously.”

Gail: As though that was a perfectly legitimate explanation.

Aristotle: During the installation, the same thing happened. We enjoy that spectacle that the public gets from looking at the artwork and responding to it. And that was particularly evident in the process of moving the thing out there.

Here it is on the trailer:

Another favorite of mine is the Trojan Piggy Bank they installed in Chicago. Unfortunately, it’s not there anymore. I think a tree fell on it.

Why shouldn’t art be funny? If you like this still photo of In Natura (Coitus Bizzarus) by Krištof Kintera, see the odd coupling caught on video.

Kintera’s a real do-it-yourselfer’s artist; he builds sculptures out of appliances, bicycles, electricity-producing potatoes, and other stuff found out in the land of instructables and science projects. He’s also the kind of artist who doesn’t like to explain his work outright and give away the punchline. Scroll through Kintera’s website, and the jokes pile up like the sacks of cement he used to build a 23-foot leaning tower.

While Kintera would rather make a dirty joke with the master’s tools than try to tear the master’s house down, jeweler and sculptor Stacey Lee Miller, tears down the tools themselves and rebuilds them out of pennies:

It takes a lot of concentration and patience to cut all those coins and solder them together, which is part of the point — Webber’s tool pieces are a heartfelt homage to work, so investing hours in their creation makes conceptual cents. (Whoooooie. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Here’s a closeup. Look at the detail!

But her work isn’t all serious, either. On Webber’s website there are images of altered quarters and nickles with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson sporting crowns. And Webber’s working on some screwball projects. Literally.

Click these links for stories I have out now on Webber and Kintera in volume 15 of Make magazine.