While the architectures of yesteryear are often blamed for urban decay, today's buildings could be responsible for its renewal. 

Jutting from the ground like two giant stalagmites, the latest design from UK architecture firm Chetwoods is going to blow the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa, out of the water—and save the world while it’s at it. Standing a full kilometer (3,281 ft) tall, the structure might be the key to solving China's catastrophic pollution problem on every level. Bestowing upon the project the hopeful moniker, ‘The Phoenix Towers,' Chetwoods hopes to resurrect the Chinese city of Wutan from its ashes. 

By using a complex mechanical system to simultaneously filter Wuhan’s air and water, collect solar, wind, and hydrogen power, provide produce from a massive vertical garden, harvest rainwater, house restaurants and businesses, boil biomass, and generally aim to solve every major ecological crisis faced by central China's "Fourth Pole," the Phoenix Towers just might live up to their name. “It doesn't just stand there and become an iconic symbol of Wuhan, it has to do a job,” founder Laurie Chetwood said in an interview with Dezeen. “We've applied as many environmental ideas as we possibly could to justify the shape and the size of them."

Aside from their super-sustainable abilities, one of the coolest things about the Phoenix Towers is that Chetwoods designed them to resonate with local religion and philosophy. The towers link Western technology and architecture to the Chinese myths of the phoenix; two towers represent the dual gender the legendary bird has in Chinese iconography, and the spirit of rebirth is spread throughout all eight hectares of the the half-mile high towers. With these spiritual considerations in mind, the firm makes a peace offering to the the somewhat rocky history of Western insensitivity when it comes to development in China. The towers also aim to attract eco-tourism, with profit margins further extending that olive branch.

Over the next three years, the Phoenix Towers will move from concept into construction, at which point the city of Wuhan will be ready to retake flight.

h/t Dezeen

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Esther Honig is exploring beauty on a global scale. A freelance journalist and social media manager by day, Honig is frequently subject to manipulated photos across the web, and came up with the idea to varying interpretations of aesthetics from culture to culture. In a photo series titled Before and After—which is has gone viral and is getting covered all over the web—she made a simple request to graphic designers from 25 different countries:

“Hi my name is Esther Honig and I would like you to enhance this image [of me] using Photoshop. I trust you to take whatever steps you see necessary. Make me look beautiful.”

The results from each country’s designer are stunningly different. Eye color, clothing, hair, even the shade of her skin were subjected to the digital scalpels of the world’s graphic artists. Unsurprisingly, Pakistani Honig, Serbian Honig, and Filipino Honig look wildly different. Each detail may reveal something about the culture where the designer comes from—or maybe just his or her personal valuation of beauty. "Even though there were over arching themes to beauty," Honig told us, "individuals, no matter their culture, had different perspectives of what the word beautiful means."

The brain (and face) behind this project spoke in depth to The Creators Project about the process of being intimately reinterpreted more than 20 times over, the influence of Photoshop in modern society, and what she’s learned from the process.

The Creators Project: What inspired the photo series Before and After? Was there any photo spread or clearly-Photoshopped project that set off the spark? 

Esther Honig: I wanted to insert myself into the conversation and use my own image as a baseline for the experiment. New stories and image collections that examine the implications of Photoshop pop up online constantly. I wouldn’t say there was one particular story that inspired me, rather I realized there was a way for me to be a part of that conversation literally. I’m an avid reader and digital consumer so I’ve read plenty about how Photoshop generates images of unobtainable beauty. What hasn’t been discussed is how standards of the unobtainable vary from person to person, and culture to culture.

The idea came to me at my day job I worked as a social media manager for a local startup. My boss introduced me to Fiverr, an international freelancing platform that allows you to hire freelance workers from around the world to complete anything from graphic design, voice-overs, animations to translations. He asked me to use the site in order to contract cheap work for whatever projects I might be assigned.

I familiarized myself with the platform and stumbled upon hundreds of individuals from more than a dozen countries offering their services in Photoshop. It occurred to me that in this pool of workers, each individual had an aesthetic bias. If I sent a few of them the same image they were bound to alter it in contrasting ways, influenced by their cultural and personal concept of beauty. The relatively recent introduction of outsourced freelancing sites would make an experiment like this possibly for the first time.

I began by sending my image out to maybe four or five freelancers at a time and in every instance I received intriguing products. Though I did not see the patterns or the presumed archetypes of beauty that I had expected, I decided to make this into a project examining how the standards of unobtainable beauty vary across cultures on a global level.

Can you tell us about the conversations you had with the global collaborators? Was it as simple as the request "make me beautiful with Photoshop" or did you give them a broader prompt? How did you choose the participants?

This was the request that I sent them initially:

“Hi my name is Esther Honig and I would like you to enhance this image using Photoshop. I trust you to take whatever steps you see necessary. Make me look beautiful.”

In a few cases the freelancer wanted me to send them an image that they could use as an example. I told them to imagine how my photo would be altered for publication in a fashion magazine in their country. I wanted my request to be as open ended as possible in order to give them complete creative freedom. I wanted their work to be authentic with as little influence as possible.

I chose the freelancers at random. Many of their profiles on Fiverr show images from their “portfolio” but some of those images must have been pasted from other websites. It was hit or miss. I would contract someone to Photoshop my image- one person would add a filter and a little airbrush while others really went all out. I’ve chosen the images that were more manipulated to publish for my collection. I wanted to get a broad representation, and work with individuals in as many countries as possible. Every time I spotted a freelancer from a country I hadn’t collected from, I’d nab them. 

How do you feel about the project now that it's complete? Did it turn out as you imagined? 

No, it didn’t turn out at all like I planned. I didn’t see the patterns that I had expected and I almost walked away from the project altogether. Then I started to look at it from a different angle; these individuals were not only pulling from their cultural bias of beauty but also from their personal aesthetics. It started me thinking that even though there were over arching themes to beauty, individuals, no matter their culture, had different perspectives of what the word “beautiful” means.

What was the most challenging part of the project? How did you deal with language barriers? Did anybody have difficulty creating what you wanted from them?

I do think language was a barrier in the creation of these images. When you’re communicating over indirect messaging you can’t really be sure what the other person understands. For the most part I was able to write in English with each freelancer, though in some instances I’m pretty sure they were using Google translate. 

I had some people send me images that they hadn’t altered much at all. They might have applied a filter or had done some clone brushing, but I still view those as valid representations of this project, they are just less interesting to look at.

Has this project revealed or highlighted any cultural differences or varied perceptions of beauty from around the globe that you didn't expect? Did the results reinforce any preconceived notions you might have had about how people across the world value aesthetics? Did an image from any country in particular surprise you? 

It's important to remember that each photo has been altered by an individual. It's hard to know what is cultural and what is personal—that's what's so intriguing, sorting out the possible influences. Many of the photos seem to draw upon different eras—stuck in certain times or modes—airbrushed 70's or glam rock 80's. It starts to reveal when different ideals of beauty reached different places on our planet, and then how they got co-opted and morphed.

Do you have any favorite altered images of yourself? Why? What about least favorites?

Morocco sent the most dynamic image. The creator’s choice to dress me in a Hijab introduced a new element to the notion of beauty and religious customs I hadn’t really considered. In turn the image I received from the U.S. (with the blond hair) made me shriek when I first opened it. It has been manipulated so radically that I felt like I was looking in the mirror but didn’t recognize the face.

What have you personally learned from the project? Do you feel it’s changed your perception of yourself? 

Flipping through the collection of Before and After, one may spot trends in models of beauty that represent each designer’s culture of origin, but that is entirely based on one’s own interpretation. Overall what I’ve learned from this project is that Photoshop allows us to achieve our unattainable standards of beauty. When we compare those standards on a global scale, achieving the ideal remains all that more elusive. It almost neutralizes the belief in a universal beauty. 

To be honest this project has, in some ways, affected my perception of myself. I voluntarily sought out this opportunity and was pleased with how it turned out, but it did make me more aware of certain things like the uneven tone of my skin, which was touched up by nearly every editor. It also reminded me that my eyebrows are thicker than normal as they were often thinned and colored. 

Before and After was a very different process compared to my reporting work. I’ve found a special spot between self reflection, social commentary, and photo journalism that is made for social media channels. In the future I’d like to translate more of my work as a journalist on to these expanding platforms. After all, this seems to be the future of how we interact and discover information.

What ideas are you playing with for your next project? How has Before and After influenced your future plans?

Every hour strangers send me a dozen new images where they’ve taken my original photo off line and reworked it for me as a ‘courtesy.' The original purpose has been compromised for the most part, as the new alterations have a foundation to build off of within the articles posted about the project. This does not negate the additions as they are still interesting and insightful in their own right. The people sending the new images may have even taken a more in depth look into their own cultural and personal views of beauty.

There’s definitely the potential to expand on this project. I’ve considered how I might restructure the project to include say an image of someone else or with Photoshop professionals as opposed to the amateur freelancers I found online.

SEE ALSO: These Photoshopped Portraits Show How People Define Beauty In 19 Different Countries

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The community surrounding ‘The Beautiful Game’ is huge, and is a unifying force for countries all over the world. All that soccer requires is a ball, a couple goals, and some players—that’s part of what makes it so brilliant.

As many cities in the World Cup's current home country are occupied by the most famous soccer players in the world, Brazilian photographer and journalist Renato Stockler’s photo essay Terrão de Cima captures the pure democratic essence and simplicity of the soccer fields ensconced in Sao Paulo neighborhoods.

Stockler says in the project’s description that the fields he photographs, “Are a breath for the hard daily life of those who live in the outskirts of Sao Paulo. These fields show the urgency for public and communal places to practice sports, a portrait of those who fight for leisure in a city as Sao Paulo.”

The reddish dirt and uneven patches of grass that make up most of the fields are a harsh contrast to the soft greens that soccer fans are accustomed to watching. All the same, Stockler says that when the hard day’s work is at an end, it’s easy to find tight knit communities of players, friends, and family gathered around the sparse field to blow off steam.

Terrão de Cima, which loosely translates to, “The Ground from Above,” is a love letter to the rugged fields of Stockler’s home, which are fast disappearing due to land speculation.

Aerial photography is the perfect medium for the task, since it shows the incredible variance in color, shape, and texture of local soccer fields, yet also captures the players as a single unit—a culture, rather than just a bunch of people. We’re still not sure we’d want to slide tackle anyone on these fields, but we’re more than ok with ogling them from above.

SEE ALSO: 30 Photos Of The Pickup Soccer Fields That Produce Brazil's Best Players

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Nextoffice has created what could only be described as a remarkably flexible house. Based on the make-up of theatrical stages, floor car exhibitions, and the shipping industry, sections of Sharifi-ha House's can suddenly jut out like a turtle's head from it's shell. In other words, the facade of the structure can transform from 2D to 3D at your choosing.

All seven floors of the luxury building have been directly designed around the changing nature of its exterior wall, offering a variety of spatial reconstructions that fit different seaonal climates. The house's main concept was intended to directly reference traditional Iranian houses, which offer both winter and summer living rooms. 

The architects explained to ArchDaily, In summertime, Sharifi-ha House offers an open/transparent/perforated volume with wide, large terraces. In contrast, during Tehran’s cold, snowy winters the volume closes down, offering minimal openings and a total absence of those wide summer terraces." 

The configuration of the house works through the "displacement of turning boxes that lead the building's volume to become open or closed, introverted or extroverted." It sits on moveable beams and a 100 foot revolving platform that's mostly situation under the living rooms, allowing the house to shift like a particularly modern dresser drawer. 

Sharifi-ha House is based in Darrous, Tehran, but a foldable house sounds beyond desirable for any city subject to rapidly-shifting temperatures or constant rain. Are all the plants on your Seattle patio getting drenched? No worries, this house can hide from the weather.

SEE ALSO: Step Inside Napster Cofounder Sean Parker's New $55 Million Mansion

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Yesterday, Narratively published a lengthy profile by Dusica Sue Malesevic on inventor Dr. David Edwards, a scientist whose recent hi-tech food experiments are following in the molecular gastronomical steps of foam forerunner Ferran Adria's elBulli.

But whereas the legendary Catalan chef focused on the food itself, Edwards is re-imagining the tools and processes used to consume the food.

In his case, Le Whaf and whaffing: a technology the Harvard professor invented that creates food vapor which is inhaled through a special, truncated straw.

Created in 2012, whaffing "utilizes ultrasound technology to create pressure waves that produce a vapor interspersed with droplets."

Patrons are then able to "sip" from glasses filled with the smoke using the straw. For the introductory exhibition, Edwards invited four chefs to try his technology, yielding "immaterial sushi and duck l'orange." We've heard of vaporizing food essences before, but never an entire meal. We assume the standard etiquette was sip, sip, pass. 

The profile goes on to detail Edwards' other mad science-like inventions that flip commonly understood notions about making a meal on their culinary head. There's Le Whif—a light pastel canister that emits food particles without any calories—and AeroShot, a caffeine inhalant that was eventually banned in the States. 

Edwards has also designed WikiPearl, a biodegradable food coating that doesn't use plastic, and mentored the creators of oPhone—the scent messaging system we covered back in June. He even created a spray that makes users feel intoxicated for a flash second. We're surprised he hasn't ventured into Willy Wonka territory and tested his hands at some Three Course Dinner Chewing Gum.

According to Malesevic, "Edwards believes molecular gastronomy is much more than a passing trend, and he is bringing his products not to elite restaurants, but to the commercial market." We definitely would like to stop by our local bodega and buy a spray that tastes like some Michelin Star-level beef bourguignon, but we have to ask: even if sipping or inhaling your food tastes great, will it actually fill our ever-grumbling stomachs? 

Head over to Narratively to read more about Dr. David Edwards and his futuristic food tinkering.

SEE ALSO: The 25 Most Important Inventions In Food And Drink

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Over the years, Kyle McDonald has 3D printed pure sound, gone undercover with a surveillance lamp that tweets, and tracked President Obama with Google Maps.

Meanwhile, Lauren McCarthy crowdsourced OkCupid interactions, manipulated our moods, and hacked faces to bust a move to a Michael Jackson groove.

Now, these two savvy social hackers are digitizing coffee dates and analyzing the awkward algorithms of collegiate reunions with their newly developed, co-designed app, pplkpr. 

Pplkpr’s primary purpose is to give individuals statistical insights into their social interactions. Users pair a Bluetooth-enabled wristband with GPS and heart rate monitors within the iOS app to manually record their emotional reactions and measure their physical responses to personal relations. By analyzing the balance between the data from users' sympathetic and parasympathetic responses, it gives feedback on “heart rate variability.” Finally, using open data algorithms developed over the past year by researchers, clean-cut mathematics simplify messy emotions into easy-to-read icons.

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One day, we will leave thi​s planet and find a new home on another space rock. And when we make the move, we’ll need new dwellings to fit the décor of our galactic habitat—and protect us from radiation and flying meteors and suffocation and all that stuff.

So long as the dream of interplanetary emigration is still a while off, architects of our future space homes don’t have to worry too much about those kind of practicalities. Yet. Welcome to the far-out world of speculative space architecture.

The Comet Runner

New York-based architects Clouds Architecture Office put together a  serie​s of concept images for a “comet runner”—a space station that would effectively “hitch a ride” on a comet while using its raw materials to convert into in-flight resources. Des​ign site Dezeen explains that the concept was inspired by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, the target comet of the European Space Agency’s Rosetta mission.

The Comet Runner station would include a greenhouse, a lab, a processing plant, and storage tanks, and equipment onboard would turn dust from the comet into 3D-printable material to build temporary homes on the rocky surface.

3D-Printed Lunar Home

3D printing is a popular tool in our imagined space bases. Working with ESA, UK architects Foster + Partners have developed a  concept for lunar h​omes made of inflated domes covered in 3D-printed Moon dust. In their hypothetical mission, the architects posit a lunar base in the near-perpetual sunlight of the Moon’s south pole that would be built by roving 3D printer robots. The resulting dwelling even includes that contemporary architectural staple: a skylight.

Other Moon Structures​

Lunar buildings are a popular theme for space-oriented architects, perhaps because the fact that we’ve actually put humans on the Moon gives these conceptual designs some degree of plausibility. There are designs for inflatable ​habitats, luna​r mining facilities, and who could forget the feat of otherworldly engineering imagination that bro​ught us the Luna Ring, a plan to wrap the Moon in solar panels to power the Earth?

Mars Colonization

German-based firm ZA Architects proposed this organic-looking ​Mars cave. The base would be excavated under the Red Planet’s surface by robots drilling around supportive pillars. Not unlike the 3D-printed lunar home, the idea is that it would make use of local materials, in this case basalt. “Basalt is good material to make a protectional cave on, to produce insulation, and basalt roving, which is stronger than steel,” the architects write, adding that Martian soil might even be suitable for growing asparagus.

Design features include some kind of spiderweb-type netting “that will be used as spaces and construction to hold domestic and technical facilities.”

Floating Venus Habitat

Space agencies themselves aren’t immune from a little speculative design work, as this speculative image of a floating habitat around Venus attests. NASA researchers ​came up with this concept ship, which acts as vehicle and temporary home for a couple of astronauts as they explore the cloud-shrouded planet. This one might look particularly fantastical, but as Motherboard’s Daniel Oberhaus and Alex Pasternac​k write, the Venusian dream might actually have a lot going for it. 

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We've all found ourselves elbows deep and hours in, combing through cartoonized versions of Hollywood and the Wild West to locate that recognizable red-and-white striped hat, glasses, and walking stick combo that says he's been located.

While a large part of the fun of the Where's Waldo? books exists in the lesser-hidden characters and situations you'll inevitably discover while seeking out the books' titular wanderer inside Martin Hadford's beloved illustrations, sometimes you just want to be able to put your finger down and say "There he is!" 

I've spent many an hour dividing Where's Waldo pages into quadrants in order to speed up the process of finding him, but if only there was a way to maximize the search by knowing where to look. Well, thanks to the work of computer scientist Randal S. Olson, now you can.

The quickest route to finding Waldo, courtesy of Randal Olson. Data maps via

After finding one popular strategy lacking, the computer scientist set out to use "every machine learning trick in my tool box to compute the optimal search strategy for finding Waldo." Using data that supplied the character's 68 locations in from each page of Hadford's seven Waldo books, Olson began to break the problem down using the traveling salesman problem. He quickly discovered that this approach might be biting off more than he could chew:

"Those 68 points can be arranged in ~2.48 x 1096 possible ways. To provide some context, that’s more possible arrangements than the number of atoms in the universe. That’s so many possible arrangements that even if finding Waldo became an international priority and the world banded together to dedicate the 8.25 million computing cores from the world’s 10 largest supercomputers to the job, it would still take ~9.53 x 1077years—about 6.35 x 1067x longer than the universe has existed—to exhaustively evaluate all possible combinations."

Instead, using something called a genetic algorithm, Olson found a near-perfect route to improve your hunting speed. For prospective Waldo-finders, Olson offers three lessons: 

1. The bottom of the left page is a good place to start. If Waldo isn’t on the bottom half of the left page, then he’s probably not on the left page at all.

2. The upper quarter of the right page is the next best place to look. Waldo seems to prefer to hide on the upper quarter of the right page.

3. Next check the bottom right half of the right page. Waldo also has an aversion to the bottom left half of the right page. Don’t bother looking there until you’ve exhausted the other hot spots.

Ultimately, Olson still believes that, "barring a situation where someone puts a gun to your head and forces you to find Waldo faster than their colleague," the pleasure of locating Waldo is "in the journey, not the destination," it's still fascinating to think that even storybook characters can't hide from Big Data.  

Head over to Randal S. Olson's website to learn more about how he maximized finding Waldo.

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This photo has been reposted to Instagram over 20 times, but it's only a quarter of the way through photographer Peter Ashton's destructive new experiment, I Am Sitting In Stagram. Ashton documented a portrait of composer Alvin Lucier as it decayed over the course of a 90-round Instagram reposting spree.

Each time a photo is uploaded to the site, it loses some quality—but the effect isn't really obvious the first time, or the second time, or even the third time around. 90 screenshots and reposts later, however, the resulting blob of desaturated image artefacts is a stark visual representation of just how limited technology can be. 

Ashton named the experiment I Am Sitting In Stagram as a throwback to Lucier’s 1969 experiment I Am Sitting In A Room, which involved the artist recording himself, then recording that recording over and over until all that he could hear was indecipherable noise, just like Ashton's own mess of a final photograph.

See Ashton's process and the results of a follow up experiment with a new photo in the images and video below.

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For Above The Clouds & Undulating Hills, the latest installment of his ongoing AIR photo series, Vincent LaForet, who in the past showed us Las Vegas from 10,800' in the air, uses his cutting-edge stabilized camera system to capture aerial snapshots of San Francisco from 7,200 feet above ground. "Flying over San Francisco is daunting," he writes in a blog post. "Unlike New York City and Vegas that have clear borders, this is a city that never seems to end. And I frankly think I've only scratched the surface so far." 

Alongside the release of AIR's third installment, LaForet has announced a book in which you'll be able to check out all of his glowing skylines. Grab it on presale here, soar over San Francisco in more of LaForet's transfixing images below, then go behind the scenes of the photoshoot: 

The full set of Vincent's photos of San Francisco can be seen here on Storehouse. You can also sign up to pre-order a book on Vincent’s Air series, or sign up to be notified when Air comes to your city. 

SEE ALSO: Incredible aerial photographs of New York City taken at an astounding height

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It’s Wikipedia and it’s physically under one roof thanks to Michael Mandiberg, publishing site Lulu.com, and Denny Gallery New York. Michael Mandiberg co-author of Digital Foundations, Collaborative Futures and editor of The Social Media Reader, has just dropped his most ambitious project yet, Print Wikipedia.

The project transforms the world’s largest collection of knowledge into book form by writing software that parses the Wikipedia database in English and lays out thousands of volumes, complete with covers, and then uploads them for print-on-demand.

"This project has two correlated sectors, one of which has utility, and one that does not," Mandiberg tells The Creators Project. Not only does printing out a portion of the largest accumulation of human knowledge in history help us visualize how truly vast it is, but the artist values the format's ability to put otherwise unrelated words together in irrational ways.

"Seeing the words that show up on these covers, like 'Aqua Teen Hunger Force' to 'Humanitarianism in Africa' and that's the volume on humanism. And there's two examples of the failure of humanism. So there's a lot of value in it poetically." The book consists of 7,471 volumes of entries amounting to 5,244,111 pages of text, plus a 36-volume index of the almost 7.5 million named contributors.

The fascination in making Wikipedia into tangible reference guides is not new. In 2014, a similar project to Print Wikipedia titled Pediapress crowdfunded to print the online database to fit into approximately 1,000 books, with 1,200 pages each. Each project values the importance of the quantity of online information but their approaches do differ. Mandiberg's attempt is conceptual and revolves around the rhythm of technology. 

A gallery performance composed of the uploading process of Print Wikipedia to Lulu.com will take place over 11 to 14 days. The gallery will remain open for all to see in recognition that the computer itself works continuously. 

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When the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden began leaking classified documents in 2013, it became clear that Western intelligence agencies were monitoring online communications with profound fluidity.

Whether by email or Skype conversation, the mass surveillance programmes revealed have placed privacy rights at the forefront of the digital age, questioning how much of what we say online is confidential.

Now, there’s a font with an answer.

Project Seen is a typeface that automatically redacts keywords that the NSA looks for in determining potential threats—parallel to initiatives actually practiced by the agency, like Echelon. Created by Slovenian designer Emil Kozole, Seen uses approximately 300 "trigger words" to deduce whether the user is susceptible to surveillance.

Based on a list released by the US Department of Homeland Security in 2011, suspicious words range from "explosive" and "gangs," to "relief" and "exercise."

Working on the project during his Masters studies at London’s Central St Martins, Kozole tells the The Creator’s Project, “So my question was: could the font understand the words that we’re writing and notify us when we write one of the ‘trigger words’?”

A font is a software similar to any other program running on a computer. By implementing a code, certain letters or words can be swamped with symbols, or crossed out entirely. Seen demonstrates how the ambiguity of some of the trigger words run the risk of taking threats out of context. While this could allow users to self-censor in order to avoid monitoring, for Kozole, it's about stimulating conversation.  

“Perhaps the typeface can spark new debate in an undefined field of language versus data, and gesture towards new evasive techniques that can protect people's privacy,” Kozole says.

Mimicking censored documents, Seen currently comes in three different styles including Strikethrough, Blackout and Underlined. Try it for yourself by downloading Seen here.

SEE ALSO: AT&T helped the NSA spy on huge amounts of US internet traffic

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Earlier this week, rumors began swirling that Banksy was building a theme park called Dismaland, after images popped up on Twitter and Facebook depicting shadowy art installations.

Now, it’s confirmed: Banksy is building Dismaland, and he’s already banned Disneyland’s lawyers from entering.

The likes of Damien Hirst, Pussy Riot, David Shrigley, Run the Jewels, and more are helping to launch Banksy’s warped, dystopian nightmare land.

It’s located in Weston-super-Mare, United Kingdom, on “four acres of walled seafront compound,” that Banksy describes in a Juxtapoz exclusive as resembling a “neglected prison yard”; a look he supposedly has tried to preserve.

All told, 50 artists, Banksy included, will transform their works into Dismaland attractions. As Christopher Jobson of Colossal's photos of the burnt-out Magic Castle and abstracted gas truck suggest, the artworks should be mind-bending, indeed.

Describing it as “an art show for the 99% who would rather not be at an art show,” Banksy says that Dismaland aims to be a reflection of the generation; that is, “scrappy, incoherent and self-obsessed.”

Over the last couple of years, there were a couple of warning signs that Banksy might go in this direction: That time he and Thierry Guetta (aka, Mr. Brainwash) walked into Disneyland in Anaheim, California to put a Guantanamo Bay detainee doll by a roller coaster, resulting in a ride shutdown and Guetta’s subsequent interrogation by park security, for example. Or when Banksy’s stooges drove a cargo truck around New York City, opening the back door to reveal a surreal, small-scale take on the demented sunshiny happiness of theme parks.

And, yet, it’s quite another thing to actually witness Banky taking these pranks to their ultimate conclusion; to what is perhaps the ultimate prank on global capitalism. If Disneyland is a dreamlike reality designed so that people people can forget war, pollution, police brutality, famine and so on, then Dismaland is its dark mirror image, showing all that Disneyland attempts to hide.

The "bemusement park" is open for five weeks only, starting Friday. And, as the site states, it "contains uneven floor surfaces, extensive use of strobe lighting, imagery unsuitable for small children and swearing." Oh, why can't it just stay open forever?

SEE ALSO: 25 of Banksy's cleverest works

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Mike Tyson once said, “I just want to conquer people and their souls,” and while he’s definitely got the people part covered already, thanks to the Living Word Sanctuary in northern Ohio, the heavyweight boxer might be closer than ever to making that "soul" part of his dream a reality.

Tyson will undoubtedly go down in history, if not for his impressive boxing career, then certainly for a personality both in and out of the ring that has permanently cemented his status as a pop culture icon. But one aspect of Tyson’s tainted legacy is about to get a spiritual makeover all thanks to a church that’s decided to transform the fighter’s sprawling 58-acre former mansion into a center for prayer.

The estate, located in Southington, Ohio, was owned by Tyson in the 80s and 90s during the peak of his success, but was hastily sold in 1999 due to financial issues. The house was then passed down through a number of owners, none of whom ever actually inhabited the space, resulting in a mansion covered in graffiti and left in a serious state of dilapidation. However, the building’s newest owner, Rob Hemelgarn, a health club entrepreneur who purchased the residence from a sheriff’s sale for $600,000, has some heavenly plans for the cavernous dwelling. Hemelgarn donated Tyson’s home to the Living Word Sanctuary with the intention of converting it into a megachurch.

At the moment, Tyson’s former abode stands in pretty serious disrepair; the mirrors ominously reflect an anarchy sign spraypainted across the marble and gold jacuzzi, a boxing glove-shaped pool stands half empty and festering, and floorboards show the first signs of buckling beneath a heavy coat of dust. Johnny Joo, a 25-year-old photojournalist from Ohio, was able to enter the 13,500 square foot space and capture these evocative, derelict scenes before the church came in to make any major renovations.

The photographer told The Huffington Post, "It was just kind of weird knowing that he lived there […] of course it gets you thinking about every room: What was this room used for, what was that room used for, what did he do here, you know?" But Joo’s interest wasn’t just sheer voyeurism, he hoped to also convey a sense of futility and uncanniness through his work, inspiring people to ask themselves, “Why are we leaving all of this abandoned? Why is nobody caring? How do we not know that this is just sitting right here, right in front of our eyes?”

Since Joo captured these images, the Living Word Sanctuary have already begun fixing up the space, filling in the pool which will one day serve as the central worship room, with plans to use the house’s existing features such as the basketball court for picnics and vacation bible school events.

The metamorphosis of the place where Mike Tyson once hung up his gloves at night into a holy House of God won’t necessarily offer any salvation for the soul of the former world champion athlete, but considering the man once claimed to step into the ring with the intention of actually murdering his sparring partners, Tyson could probably use all of the prayers he can get.

Learn more about Johnny Joo's photography here and you can purchase his book Empty Spaces here. 

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Meet the hawksbill sea turtle, your new favorite animal. Divers in the Solomon Islands discovered that this amazing creature is the only known reptile to exhibit bioluminescence, the enchanting phenomenon of a creature transforming the ocean's blue light into red, green, or orange light. It's basically a swimming disco ball.

National Geographic explorer and marine biologist David Gruber made the discovery, shouting "We found a bioflourescent turtle!" in a video with the glee of a child who finding a treasure chest of candy. "The turtle was just hanging out with us, it was in love with the lights," recounts a giddy Markus Reymann, TBA21-Academy director and Gruber's diving buddy. "It was just hanging out with us, and it was glowing neon yellow."

With the amazing footage you can check out below, Gruber and Reymann gave the human race the knowledge that glowing sea turtles exist. What did you do with your weekend?

Learn more about the critically endangered hawksbill sea turtle on the National Geographic website.

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Depression Pond. Suicide Bridge Road. Disappointment Island. Just a few names from the depressing world of Instagram's @sadtopographies, an account that features the locations of some of the saddest places on earth. 

At first I thought it was a joke. Who the hell would live in a place called Dead Dog Island, or Misery Bay? But nay, these are real places, with real people. 

You can find them all on Google Maps—why not spend an afternoon on Shades of Death Road, or take a Sunday family picnic on Bloody Dick Peak? There's even a business area called Uncertain, and Mamungkukumpurangkuntjunya Hill, South Australia, a word which translates to "where the devil urinates," according to sadtopographies. 

I was born in Bobeldijk. People always visit to laugh. Because it sounds rustic, I think, and very small. Bobeldijk is both, and I think that's fine. I mean, it could be worse:

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Google Docs is basically nothing more than Microsoft Word online, in the cloud and shareable. But what if its 'share' function could be subverted for to create a global interactive art project that could be freely tweaked by anyone? That’s the idea behind Art Squad, a Google Doc that features a combination GIFs, text, graphics, gibberish and... Bob Ross.

Unleashed by artist Matthew Britton, creator of the collaborative Microsoft Paint-esque drawing site PaintByUser.com, Art Squad is an attempt to create a community in a single document using tools that have been available to users for over a decade.

“Art Squad began as a kind of silly idea that never seemed to go away—the idea of creating a document on Google Docs that could be shared with the art world (or even the world), that could be added, edited and deleted by anyone,” Britton tells The Creators Project.

“Certainly, well it kind of follows on from PaintByUser.com,” he adds. “I've been interested lately in creating virtual environments in which participants can have an ephemeral exchange of ideas and expressions. I intend to make participants think about how they are using the web page and the tools at our disposal.”

Click here to get in on the action. See more of Matthew Britton’s work on his website.

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Marcos Zotes' P-Cube uses the industrial everyman material of scaffolding and combines it with semi-transparent fabric to create a temporary installation at Moscow's Polytechnic Museum.

By day the structure has a spectral presence and at night geometric projections make it pulse gently with digital life.

The public can walk inside the near 30-feet by 30-feet temporary pavilion, walking up a stairway to a viewing platform where they can look over the site and are immersed in the grid-like morphological projections mapped onto its skin, along with the interplay of color and shadows.

Like many of Zotes' projection-mapped structures, as well as being economical, resourceful, and easily assembled, the piece provides a meeting point for people inside an architectural animation. 

The piece was accompanied by music from Pixelord, a Moscow-based musician. 

To see more of Marco Zotes’s artwork check out his site Unstable.

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When Marc Benioff started Salesforce back in 1999, he pledged to donate 1% of the company's annual revenues, 1% of its employees' time, and 1% of its product value to nonprofit organizations every year.

The company has held steadfast to this pledge as it's grown to become the fourth-largest software company in the world, with more than $8 billion expected in revenue this year. 

But Benioff's social interest extends beyond that pledge. He's been a vocal critic of state legislation that could be used to discriminate against LGBT people, threatening to withdraw business from Indiana and Georgia when they passed such laws.

He's also a huge presence in San Francisco, where he grew up and where Salesforce is based — he and his wife Lynne donated $200 million to the University of California San Francisco (a medical school and hospital) to build a children's hospital, and Salesforce has "adopted" 20 public schools in the city, donating $14 million and 10,000 hours of employee time. 

We talked to Benioff (No. 4 on the BI 100: The Creators) about the origins of the 1-1-1 pledge, the state of capitalism, and more. A lightly edited transcript of our conversation is below.

Matt Rosoff: A lot of people right now look at growing inequality right now and they think capitalism is the enemy, or isn't working. There are two successful anti-establishment presidential campaigns going on right now based on that idea. As a successful businessman, do you have an obligation to change that perception, and how do you do it?

Marc Benioff: The antidote to inequality is equality. The question is how do you achieve equality? I believe that for business, which is where I can speak, we have to shift from shareholder maximization to stakeholder maximization. And when we only focus on our shareholders, that's when it becomes very limiting and that's when we can draw fire from other stakeholders.

It's not so unusual for me to have a week of meetings that includes not only my employees, not only my customers, not only media, but could also include principals of local K-12 schools, it could include non-governmental organizations or nonprofit organizations, or members of the community. I have many different stakeholders that I have to answer to. 

We're tightly integrated between Salesforce and our community. That's the key..

I view that as a critical part of my business. That's why when I started Salesforce, on day 1, we put 1% of our equity, 1% of our product, and 1% of our time into Salesforce.org. 

We're tightly integrated between Salesforce and our community. That's the key. The bigger and more successful Salesforce becomes, the more we'll invest in our public schools, the more we will invest in homeless, the more we will invest in public hospitals, the more we will invest into NGOs. 

Also, we do matching grants for our employees. We will provide $10 million to our employees this year in matching grants, which is a total of $20 million in additional philanthropy. Half of that goes to faith-based organizations, half of that goes to traditional nonprofits and NGOs.

This is really how I look at it, business is a very important driver of a successful society. Businesses cannot be extricated or disintermediated from the communities they serve. Businesses who do that will do that at their own peril. They will draw fire. And companies who are integrated will be lauded by their communities and not draw fire. In San Francisco, rarely is Salesforce called out as somebody who's doing something against the city. We're working to make the city better.

Rosoff: How did the 1-1-1 pledge come about? Where did you get the idea for that when you were building a startup?

Benioff: It really came out of a conference I attended chaired by Colin Powell, now on our board of directors, who said that a business has to do more than make products and sell them. It has to take care of the people in their local communities. This was in 1997, it was called the President's Summit for America's Future, it was part of his America's Promise organization. He had the 500 largest companies there, I'm still not sure how I got there, and he got on stage and said "in your quest for market domination of your industries, don't forget about doing something for other people."

At the time I didn't know what the specific answer would be, but General Powell has been a huge motivating factor in my career for almost 20 years.

Rosoff: How do you deal with criticism? You get a lot of flak for some of your stands, like the ones you've taken against anti-LGBT legislation in Georgia and Indiana.

Benioff: I'm grounded in the values of our company. Those values are trust — nothing is more important than the trust of our customers and also employees. Two is growth, and we're a very fast-growing company. Three is innovation, and we're consistently ranked as one of the most innovative companies in the world, and four is equality. These four values are where I ground myself and if I am going to make a comment, or if I'm going to make a statement, I'm really mostly discussing things in those four areas. 

That's where I am. A leopard can't change its spots, I can't really become something I'm not, I'm just basically acting out of my experience in business. I'll be 52 years old this year, I've been in business since I was 15 years old, and I know from my perspective what I need to be doing as a CEO which is build a great company that makes the world better.

Rosoff: You grew up in San Francisco, and you mentioned that a lot of the critics don't mention Salesforce when they talk about what's wrong with the city. But they do talk a lot about the tech industry coming in and raising housing prices, ignoring the local community, and so on. What would you like to see the tech community do to overcome that?

Benioff: Well I'd like to see them adopt the 1-1-1 model. We have now almost 1,000 companies who have joined that pledge 1%.

I think it's very important that every CEO gets out there and adopts a public school. We don't have that many public schools in the United States, and every CEO and every company needs to adopt a public school.

 In San Francisco, we have a formalized program called Circle the Schools, where we are trying to get every CEO to adopt a school. One reason we're seeing higher attendance rates and better educational outcomes in the San Francisco public schools is that over the last 5 years we really have had a more focused public approach in the schools.

Just this week, I had meetings with Oakland principals and San Francisco principals, and that is a very important but also very fulfilling part of my job that I can see it's actually working. 

A leopard can't change its spots, I can't really become something I'm not, I'm just basically acting out of my experience in business.

Rosoff: How do you split your time? What percentage of your time do you spend on the foundation versus the business?

Benioff: The vast majority of my time is spent on operating my business. I am running a company that has 22,000 people and will do $8.3 billion in revenue this year. That's growing at a high rate. That becomes all-consuming, but as part of running my business these things are also important. 

Rosoff: Last year, you noticed that women were making less than men at Salesforce. How did that go down? Who pointed it out to you?

Benioff: Gender equality remains a major issue, not just in the technology industry but in a lot of industries — you just have to watch Patty Arquette's Academy Award speech. Two women, one our head of HR and one who ran our women's group said, "Hey, we're paying women less than men at Salesforce." I didn't believe it at the time, when we actually looked at the information we were actually paying women $3 million less than we were paying men for the same amount of work, and so we made an adjustment to how we pay women.

Rosoff: How do other companies address this kind of inequality? 

Benioff: On that one it's very easy. Every company has an HR system, every company knows their salaries, that's obviously how they pay people, and all a CEO has to do is push a button and look at, "Do I pay women the same as men?" Most CEOs are afraid to push that button.

Rosoff: Do you have any practices that help you stay centered, stay grounded, stay on top of things?

Benioff: There's two things. I have a mindfulness practice and I try to practice mindfulness formally a few times a week. Like yesterday I did attend a mindfulness seminar that we had at Salesforce with 500 employees, where we had a mindfulness teacher come in.

Rosoff: Mindfulness, what is that, like meditation?

Benioff: It's a meditation type practice, just being able to sit quietly and spend time trying to let go of the stress that I collect during the week running a big business. 

Number two, on a regular basis I do the same thing with my business: I ask myself five questions.

What do I want?

What's important to me? Including, like we talked about, corporate values in terms of trust and growth and innovation and equality, that's what we want. Also my own personal values of what I'm trying to do with myself.

Then how I'm going to get those things, that's the third question. 

The fourth question is understanding the obstacles.

The fifth is the measurements. And trying to have some kind of awareness around those five dimensions.

Rosoff: A lot of people are feeling overwhelmed by technology these days. People feel like they always need to have their phones on them, always need to be posting, always sharing. How do you overcome that stress?

Benioff: I posted something about that on my feed on Twitter today, which is a study from the Journal of the American Medical Association that basically said we're all spending too much time on our phones and we need to delete a few apps. I deleted my Facebook account completely. I found it was just overwhelming me — exactly the word you used. I'm only on Twitter, I'm on SalesforceOne, which is my internal one for work, I'm on email, and that's it. And I'm limited to that. 

I'm trying not to take on more stuff. I was with a friend this weekend, he's got his Twitter, his Facebook, he has his Snapchat, he's got all these — too much. 

Rosoff: Do you have a designated downtime, like you're putting your phone away for an hour? 

Benioff: I do, but not as much as I should.

Read more stories about the 100 business visionaries who are creating value for the world.

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Recently, a video surfaced of a massive light organ installation that artist Atli Bollason built for the Harpa Music Hall and Conference Centre in Reykjavik. The installation went up in February, and we finally have some real footage of how users played the building’s glass facade like it was a musical instrument. An organ was placed on the fourth floor balcony of a steel and glass facade designed by Olafur Eliasson, with an exceptional view of downtown Reykjavik.

Standing in front of the organ, viewers look up at the building’s honeycomb front wall and watch as entire sections light up in sync with the notes they play. As the user hits different keys, columns of the building’s facade light up in synchrony. Bollason’s light organ functions in a similar way to the Prius Piano installation from our Future Forward event, or this Wurlitzer light installation that was made for the Montreux Jazz Festival.

The organ is housed in a glowing box equipped with midi keyboards and a laptop that connects the instrument to the music hall’s built-in lighting rig. The keyboard triggers the light installation through what Bollason describes as two voices: a pad and a piano. Bollason tells The Creators Project that the pad produces a "pool of light," while the piano fires "bullets of light" across the buildings facade from bottom to top. The color scheme produced in a particular performance is based on a reading of the harmonies played. The pitch of each note decides the light’s placement, while the velocity at which they’re played governs the brightness.

To the right of the keyboard is a pitch-bend sensor that let players tweak their sound as well as the hue wheel, in real time. HAL 9000, the insidious AI computer from Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, influenced Bollason’s design of the dome-shaped tool. Bollason says, "The by now retro-futurism of 2001 seemed like a nice fit for the ever-progressive yet very outdated idea of a light organ and I thought the cassettes really underlined the DIY spirit of the project."

Bollason reminds us of the color organ’s long history: "It goes back to the 18th century. At its core it's basically an attempt to reproduce synesthesia artistically. It was popular with some of the modernist composers in the early 20th century and again during the psychedelic 60s and 70s." Synesthesia is a type of neurological phenomenon where one sensory stimuli, like sound, triggers an automatic or involuntary experience in another sense, such as sight or taste. The term is most commonly used when describing people who see colors when they listen to music, or vice versa. Bollason continues, "Harpa is built specifically for the performance of music and it was very tempting to look towards these old ideas and introduce a musical, expressive element to the lights. That way, the organ comes to function as a very simple yet powerful tool for the people of Reykjavík to interact with what is an extremely monumental and very controversial building. It's a public structure and it's only democratic for it to be able to reflect the way we feel and for us to be able to have fun with it."

This isn’t the first installation Bollason created using the music hall’s luminous facade. Back in August of 2014, in co-operation with creative programmer Owen Hindley, the artist converted the building’s front wall into a massive game of PONG. You can check out this short doc about PONG here.

Learn more about Atli Bollason on his instagram, here.

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