After 16 months of construction, a spa hotel built on the Lule River in the northern province of Lapland Sweden is now open to travelers. Called Arctic Bath, the 12-room hotel features six elevated land cabins and six cabins that float when the river thaws. In the center is a circular structure with saunas, hot baths around the perimeter, and a large ice bath at its core. For the buoyant rooms and main structure, architects Bertil Harström and Johan Kauppi took design inspiration from timber floating methods used by loggers to transport felled trees downriver. More

Inspired by a wildlife documentary he saw as a child, Paris-based photographer Jonk (Jonathan Jimenez) travels the world in search of man-made structures that have been abandoned and reclaimed by nature. A jungle fills a dilapidated theater in Cuba, roots snake through a mansion in Taiwan, and a wild garden sprouts in a former greenhouse in Belgium. A reflection of his ecological consciousness, Jonk’s photography shows that in the power struggle between man and nature, nature always wins. More

For young striped eel catfish, there really is safety in numbers. A recent Instagram post shares a video by Marie-Laure Vergne of about one hundred juvenile fish moving across the bottom of the ocean. The Abyss Dive Center, a scuba diving school located in Amed, Bali, explains in the post that until the fish are fully grown and gain all of their deadly capabilities, they protect themselves by swimming in dense groups. More

For years, Nicole Larkin has been capturing the ocean pools along the coasts of New South Wales in a project titled The Wild Edge. Mostly constructed as public works endeavors more than 80 years ago, the geometric spaces often are nestled in Australia’s rocky shorelines, surrounded by crashing waves and filled with jewel-toned waters. In a statement about the project, Larkin described the swimming sanctuaries as offering visitors “intimate encounters with the landscape.” They are largely opportunistic interventions that exploit the natural topography of the rock platform to make a protected and convenient swimming area. More

An ongoing series by artist Jim Darling depicts many of the scenes you probably miss while you’re napping on a lengthy flight. “Windows” mimics that of an airplane view, depicting lush landscapes, rocky gorges, and dense urban areas from a 35,000 foot view. Since we last wrote about the Los Angeles-based painter, Darling has produced more cityscapes, glimpsing pockets of skyscrapers and lengthy freeways as the viewer swoops overhead. More

Breaking free from urban life is no easy feat for the main figure in “Le Silence de la rue,” or “The Silence of the street.” The monochromatic film produced by Miyu Productions, which is led by Emmanuel-Alain Raynal and Pierre Baussaron, details the stark dichotomy of spending time in unaltered natural spaces and in a dirty, bustling neighborhood. Opening with a blooming flower, the gloomy film turns to a black being who struggles to stay afoot in the dense streets as a horde of anonymous figures push by. More

By gathering and piecing together small twigs, London-born Chris Kenny crafts collections of dancing figures, abstract portraits, and even a small baby. As Kottke explains, the artist’s sparse creations rely heavily on the human desire to see objects or patterns in inanimate objects, a term called pareidolia. Kenny shares many of his constructions on twigsaints, an Instagram account he dedicates to likening singular twig figures to saints, like St. More

What’s a road trip without checking out the scenery? Chris Helzer, aka The Prairie Ecologist, has put together a new guide for those who want to know a little bit more about the wildflowers they see along the roadside but don’t want to leave their moving vehicles. What about the silent majority who prefer to experience wildflowers the way General Motors intended – by whizzing past them in a fast, comfortable automobile? More

Through hazy lines and obscured faces, Joshua Flint (previously) reflects on the blurriness of in-between states in his most recent paintings. “Big Earth” shows a group of kids reaching up toward red- and pink-hued orbs that are set on a shadowy backdrop, while “Memory of Nature I” features a portrait of a man with a nondescript face as an enlarged hummingbird flies so close that it appears to be drinking from the man’s mouth. More

Your days of expensive piano lessons are over. Master the foreboding notes in Jaws, a nursery rhyme often repeated by kids, and of course,”Für Elise,” with this straightforward diagram from Christoph Niemann (previously). In his riff on Beethoven’s classic,  “How to Please Elise” provides simple instructions on how to play the first 51 notes of the German composer’s masterpiece with ease through a diagrammed sequence similar to an old-school instructional dance chart. More

Sydney-based illustrator and graphic designer Vlad Stankovic (previously) has a gift for crafting playful animated scenes. His recent “Piccalilli Moths” project—which was commissioned by Preen, a Los Angeles-based design and architecture firm, for a Culver City restaurant—features sparkly moths that are surrounded by insects and beetles with fluttering wings, twinkling mushrooms, and muted plants that sprout in the background. Created with watercolors and colored pencil before being transferred to Photoshop, the whimsical gifs “were printed using lenticular printing, a technique where the image gives an illusion of depth and movement when viewed from different angles,” the artist said in a statement about the project. More

Artist and musician Steve Parker’s latest interactive projects invite viewers to feel the music⁠—literally. Activated by touch, “Ghost Box” plays randomized audio segments on a loop, including the ticks of Morse Code, the chorus of spirituals, and the blows of the shofar and Iron Age Celtic carnyx. Each time someone makes contact with a part of the wall sculpture, a new noise emits. Inspired by WWII era short wave radio, the mounted piece is constructed from a mix of salvaged brass, tactical maps, paper musical scores, wires, map pins, electronics, audio components, and an instrument case. More

Born in Kirov and now based in Moscow, photographer Aleksey Myakishev is adept at capturing the simple moments of life and transforming them into alluring black-and-white images. Taken mostly throughout Russia, his projects tend to focus on unassuming subjects as they navigate their daily lives. In one photograph, three figures walk over a snow-covered landscape away from a lit firework, and in another, Myakishev creates an uncanny juxtaposition between a hilly horizon and a man swinging a child by his hands as a winter boot flies from his foot. More

Lacking the traditional sport and tournament themes of previous years, the official posters for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic and Paralympic Games are taking a different approach to championing the celebrated contests. Organizers gathered work from Japanese and international artists with a range of styles and methods, from calligraphy to photography and manga to cubism, saying the posters are “regarded as the icons of their age.” Some pieces gesture toward the renowned competition more explicitly—“Olympic Cloud” by graphic designer Taku Satoh features rings in red, blue, yellow, green, and black that mimic those in the olympic logo—while others, like Tomoko Konoike’s “Wild Things – Hachilympic,” considers human subjectivity in an evolving world with a multicolor portrait that fills nearly the entire work. More

For three electrifying weekends in 2012, 2014, and 2017, Dlectricity brought thousands of people into Midtown Detroit to experience 40 luminous projects by local, national, and international artists. This ambitious nighttime festival is back again with an expanded footprint, September 25-26, 2020, to transform Detroit with site-specific installations of light, video, performance, sound, interactive engineering, and nonconformist architecture. From lasers and 3D mapping to dance performances and large-scale video projections, we want to see what you create. More

Russian artist and photographer Slava Semeniuta (aka VISUAL SCIENTIST) retouches digital photographs of puddles to create vibrant compositions of “REGULAR RAIN.” Every color of the light spectrum is reflected in neon on the smooth surface of water as it falls and sits on the asphalt. The macro view of wet streets creates a cosmic feeling for common terrestrial scenes. Semeniuta tells Colossal that he was inspired to create the photo series a couple of weeks ago in Sochi. More

London-based artist Daisy Collingridge layers amorphous blobs of fabric and textiles to form wearable pastel-colored body suits. With names like Burt, Clive, and Lippy, each member of Collingridge’s family has a personality that matches his/her form. Inspired by human anatomy and infused with elements of fantasy and impulse, the artist says that the costumes are an exercise in “pushing quilting to the absolute extreme.” Each new character begins with the construction of the head. More

There’s a well-known saying that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. For Guy Laramée (previously), though, a books’ contents aren’t the only important aspect either. The Montreal-based artist repurposes encyclopedic volumes and series of dictionaries to create topographic carvings that dip into and excavate the pages, framing the physical object as a work of art in itself. Laramée’s latest projects include a piece with minuscule carved steps scaling a mountainside and another with moss-covered ridges jutting up from low valleys. More

Illinois-based Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland have a knack for creating miniature—and slimy—worlds just big enough for their tiny acquaintances to glide through. The creative duo is known for constructing realistic domestic settings featuring plastic covered furniture and a messy painting studio occupied by snails for its stills and short films. Now, though, the artists are pushing the critters beyond their comfortable homes for a fun night out. The snails are shot sliding up to a limo, basking under the glimmer of a disco ball, and gobbling up a cheeseburger in a quaint diner. More

For Cinta Vidal, everything depends on how you look at it. The Barcelona-based artist is known for her gravity-defying projects that manipulate architecture and household objects to create inverted environments dissimilar to daily life. Like her smaller-scale inverted works, Vidal’s murals are concerned with human subjectivity and feature both peculiarly arranged architecture and objects like books, chairs, and even a canoe floating through the air. They cover walls throughout Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Barcelona, among other cities around the world. More