A new installation at the Amsterdam Foam gallery by Erik Kessels takes a literal look at the digital deluge of photos online by printing out 24 hours worth of uploads to Flickr. The result is rooms filled with over 1,000,000 printed photos, piled up against the walls.

There’s a sense of waste and a maddening disorganization to it all, both of which are apparently intentional.

Artist Mike Libby has created the unique Insect Lab Studio, where he remixes real insect specimens with antique watch parts and other electric components. Libby’s creations aren’t intended to actually work as electronic devices, but he says they are meant to seem as though they could.

According to Libby, the creatures meld science fiction with fact to celebration the inherent contradictions between nature and technology. Each piece is hand made and one of a kind. Libby’s sculptures, in addition to prints, are available for purchase on his website, provided you aren’t completely creeped out by the idea of dead insects retrofitted with clock parts. Check out more of his clockwork insects after the jump.

The human body has long been regarded as a work of art with renditions of the human form dating as far back as art itself. But new imaging techniques have put a different spin on the parts of the body that you can’t normally see, taking organs like the brain from secret to sensational as they are better represented in art. The first ever Brain Art Competition was held this year, to celebrate and draw attention to improved imaging techniques in addition to the abstract ways better understanding of the brain can lead to artistic inspiration.

The brain child of Daniel Margulies of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, the competition was organized by the Neuro Bureau, an online open neuroscience forum. The competition received 55 entries in four categories: 3-D brain renderings, representations of the brain’s connections, abstract illustrations and humor. Twenty judges picked the best entry for each category, and the winners were announced at an event at the National Art Museum of Quebec on June 28th. In an interview with Scientific American, Marguiles said:

“This whole thing started out as a joke in a bar. We knew of other neuroimaging data competitions in our respective fields, and we wondered, ‘What could we do that would bring everyone to the table, even artists?’”

Check out the artwork below.

How can you use rectangular bricks to make amazing curved shapes? LEGO creations that seem impossible to make without bending the bricks themselves can come together easily with a little help from your high school math class. Jeff Sanders of Portland, OR began incorporating geometry into his LEGO building when he realized that even though the bricks are made of a hard plastic, they have a little bit of flexibility.

The 1×2 and 1×3 bricks have an ever-so-slight of agive to them, which combined with a little bit of math, allowed Sanders to first build a circle, and then keep building larger and more creative curved designs. Sanders’ largest creation is a sunflower, made of more than 1,800 bricks. Sanders says he started thinking about LEGO building mathematically when he realized that he could apply the Fibonacci sequence to creating curved structures.

The winners of the 2011 Combustion Art Competition Awards are beautiful reminders that while fire can be tremendously destructive, it can also be fun and beautiful. Held at a recent meeting of the Combustion Institute, the awards, which are now in their eighth year, brought together pyrotechnic scientists to show off their art.

The above image was created by Bogdan Pavlov and Li Qiao of Purdue University. It combines several images of different flame types in a portrait they call  Dr Combustion. Taking second place in the competition, Dr Combustion’s nose, beard and hair were created by adding mixtures of nanoparticles to a flame. The eyes and mouth are made by a counterflow diffusion flame, and his hat was made using methane-air diffusion flame.

Andrea Petrachi (known artistically as Himatic) has created a series of “cyber sculptures” using discarded electronics, gadgets and toys. His recycled sculptures are both disturbing and endearing, reminding us that there are ways to re-use objects no longer of value, but also that we have so many goods to re-use because of our own mass consumption. Nothing drives home the point that we have too much stuff than a cyborg rubber ducky (who is seriously scary-looking) or really any robot-like sculpture with a disembodied children’s toy for a head.

For the first time, an authorized Time cover has been created to promote a commercial product, which just so happens to be Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The cover, seen above, depicts a destroyed Wall Street with the headline “World Stands On The Brink,” which, funnily enough, is exactly how Roger Ebert, noted video game naysayer, felt when he tweeted out that the first-ever authorized fake Time cover used to promote a commercial product just so happened to go to a video game, claiming that Time “sold its honor for a video game promotion” and it is “sad, sad, sad.”

Essayist and author Ben Greenman claims to not like charts, which is perhaps why he has created a slew of wonderful absurdist charts like the one above. The original goal of the chart-making that Greenman undertook was to understand the fictional character he was creating, who has the dubious job of being a “chart artist” or “chartist.” He writes:

For this new book and the chart artist in it, I started to make charts. The first one I thought of, though not the first one I made, was “How Well You Understand This Graph Over Time.” It seemed like the perfect self-annihilating thing, capable of both making people laugh and making them furious. This is the graph that started it all, in a sense. I have had it in my head for years. The character in my book has made this graph at some point, and it gets him thinking about what graphs really are. I think this graph has a tremendous amount to teach us, and also nothing to say.

Read on after the break for more of Greenman’s chartart, which include vital information such as the letter distribution in The Great Gatsby, and how many pennies are hidden behind a particular bar graph.

Avid Starcraft II fan known as “Constable,” posted some very impressive StarCraft II paper craft to his blog, featuring a multitude of everyone’s favorite Terran units. A Ghost paper craft is nowhere to be seen, but that probably makes sense, since I don’t see any paper craft missile turrets around. Head on past the break to check out some more paper craft Terran units.