Watch as Australian Artist Yiying Lu hand paints beautiful women as carnivorous plants in which QR codes are artfully embedded, combining fine art with digital technology. By using a QR code reader to read the paintings, the viewer is then directed to watch the process.
Yiying Lu is the artist behind the fast-becoming world wide known Twitter Fail Whale, the friendly aqua blue, white and orange image that appears on the social networking or microblog site, twitter.com when their servers are down.
above: original fail Whale artist, the adorable Yiying Lu
As you can imagine, any icon that symbolizes 'failure' quickly gets mocked or altered as a result of creative frustration- and too many artists with cyber downtime on their hands. There have been contests like the Fail Whale Pail Ale label contest, there are flickr groups and you can buy "official" Fail Whale tee shirts and products on Zazzle.
What I wanted to share with you are some of the creative works inspired by the Fail Whale from fine art and cupcakes to lego versions and real tattoos. As well as some of the beer bottle label entries for The Fail Whale Pale Ale label contest. While there are hundreds, probably thousands, of funny 'modified' Fail Whales out there, here are just a few of the clever, talented and amusing homages and take-offs I enjoyed.
Sean O'Steen of The Fail Whale Fan Club 's Twitter Fail Whale on his Peggy (which is like lite-brite):
and he made a cute little felt and string Fail Whale mobile: on flickr
Unfortunately I have no idea who won and the original site no longer seems to function.
Some people love the Fail Whale so much, they're willing to go to their grave with it. Tom Rowe and Ryan Goff get tattooed by Hunter Spanks with Fail Whales in Baltimore:
Critter, also known as Korneliuz on Flickr, got himself a permanent fail whale:
Here's video of David Hoang drawing his "I Luv Fail Whale":
Believe it or not, Yiying was not paid directly for the image of the sweet looking whale being lifted from the ocean, tethered by birds - she originally posted the image to iStockPhoto.com where the Twitter people fond it, purchased it and turned into a cultural icon. The illustration blog, Drawn, interviewed the artist, which you can read here.
Yiying Lu is a full-time artist who runs her own illustration and graphic design studio. She is also a design lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia.
her personal siteher flickr photostream
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