Honestly? With all of the human rights problems that China has, people are worried about whether or not there are some bits of metal or remote controls implanted in a few goldfish? They don't appear to be in any distress, and I don't see anything wrong with this, whether they were trained, manipulated, or controlled.
The design isn't actually cut all the way through the leaf as a laser would; the leaf material is scraped away so it's just much thinner in the areas where the leaf is white (note that it's translucent in step 6 of the how-to PDF at the link). The picture above doesn't quite show this - I thought it was just white paint around a stencil.
Interesting - I was just in Kyoto this summer, where there are old townhouses (machiya) arranged the same way (narrow front, long house), for a similar but somewhat different reason: property taxes were assessed based on street frontage!
Cool work, but why do artists like this go on and on making up crap about the philosophy behind it? "Re-things" blah blah intangible blah blah alchemy blah blah blah. Can't the piece just speak for itself?
Looks like a fun idea, but after the first few shots of the two mini copters, it looks like the rest is completely CGI. Anticlimactic for sure. If they really want to make some buzz they should debut it at something like TED live on stage.
I'm not surprised to see that someone's already put up a counterpoint web site. Their point isn't that "two thousand [and] ten" is correct but that it doesn't matter WHAT you say as long as people know what you mean:
http://www.2000nottwenty.com/
As far as naming the decade, I just hope "noughties" doesn't stick. Blech. I prefer "two thousands" or "oh's" since those probably correspond best to what people used conversationally throughout the decade.
Why do we have this urge to divide history neatly into decades, anyways? George Michael said it best in 1990: "Now everybody's talkin' about this new decade / like you say the magic numbers / then just say goodbye to the stupid mistakes you made..."
http://izismile.com/2009/06/18/cool_optical_illusion_1_gif.html
There's plenty of others like it out there but I like the caption at the bottom of this one.
http://www.2000nottwenty.com/
As far as naming the decade, I just hope "noughties" doesn't stick. Blech. I prefer "two thousands" or "oh's" since those probably correspond best to what people used conversationally throughout the decade.
Why do we have this urge to divide history neatly into decades, anyways? George Michael said it best in 1990: "Now everybody's talkin' about this new decade / like you say the magic numbers / then just say goodbye to the stupid mistakes you made..."