2012 is knocking on the door. Confronted with the New Year, you’re probably fed up with various analyses, hotlists and summaries of the year past, but then again, you gotta admit, there’s something to be said about statistics and summations.
Ergo, even comeandcheck.it couldn’t resist a little analysis of the waning year. Our annual report covers 2011 through the prism of the Croatian creative scene, along with various events and individuals who marked it.
Today we’re featuring a sum-up of the Croatian creative scene’s most popular topics you had the chance to encounter on comeandcheck.it throughout the past 12 months as well as the most read, shared, clicked-on and ‘liked’ articles. And we present your TOP 15.
15 – ALCOHOL AS ART
There’s never enough hedonism to go around, so right at the start of 2011, after last year’s holidays, you were captivated by the article on microscopic shots of alcoholic beverages. Incredible visual properties, shapes, forms and color schemes of alcoholic delectables look quite impressive when magnified. Click here to check out what a zoomed-in Tequila, champagne or Piña Colada look like.
14 – A CHRISTMAS TREE DECORATED WITH PLASTIC BOTTLES
No sooner than Christmas passed, your Christmas trees probably still standing, than an article from early December about an unusual, ecologically aware Christmas tree made a major impact on a large number of our readers. The city of Kaunas in Lithuania wasn’t known up to now, but that’s where the installation of 40.000 plastic bottles was set up. That was probably the most ecologically aware Christmas tree worldwide. Click here to check out more details on the project.
13 – YOUR RAINBOW PANORAMA
Out of all the spatial installations we wrote about in 2011, you clicked the Like button for the most surreal among them, Your Rainbow Panorama, set up at the top of the AROS Museum in the Danish city of Aarhus. The author of the fantasy installation, representing the whole specter of rainbow colors, is Olafur Eliasson. Click here and check out this amazing installation.
12 – RETRO FACEBOOK AND TWITTER
In spite of the fact that these social networks have been around for a while now, the expansion of Facebook and Twitter importance and presence in all spheres of life reached its maximum in the past year, while predictions for 2012 seem even a bit daunting. Thus it’s no surprise that the article on a Brazil agency’s campaign proposing what Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Skype would have looked like had they existed in the 1950s was among this year’s most popular. You can check out the article here.
11 – A REFRIGIRATOR AS A PORTRAIT OF A PERSON
Can a refrigerator portray a person? Photographer Stephanie de Rouge’s portraits state it’s possible and our readers obviously agree with her! This photographer made parallel portraits of people and their refrigerators, in an attempt to illustrate what a refrigerator says about its owner. If you believe the saying “tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you who you are” then click here to check this project out.
10 – PHOTOGRAPHY AND NOSTALGIA
A fair amount of our articles that evoke nostalgia in any way, shape or form, seem to be a hit with our readers, thus the Argentinian photographer Irina Werning’s project “Back to the Future” really seemed to resonate with a lot of our readers. The author flirts with the past in a very simple way, photographing her relatives and friends on the same locations and same clothes, simulating their group portraits shot during the seventies or eighties. Click here for more on the Forever Young project. A similar photography-and-nostalgia topic earned even more of your ‘Likes’, as seen through the lens of Taylor Jones in his project ‘Dear Photograph’. The young Canadian initiated a site where he set up a photograph from the past but taken today, at the very same place. In a short time, his site became a real success with over a million hits a day. Click here for more on the project.
09 – THE HORROR OF FACEBOOK
The inevitability of Facebook and all its advantages often disguise the blue network’s more dangerous side, which a lot of us tend to blithely disregard. We hope that the article on this excellent Internet project will set you straight on the importance of regulating your Facebook privacy settings. We hope its popularity will be in proportion with your paying attention to the importance of being vigilant about who is prowling your Facebook page. If you have no clue as to what we’re talking about, quickly check this out.
08 – SPRINGTIME. READY STEADY… GO!
Although we won’t be seeing either dandelions or springtime anytime soon, maybe this article will be able to warm up your cold winter days. Swiss artist’s Regina Ramseier’s subtle installation held your attention big time. Click here for more on the simple yet impressive installation.
07 - PAINT ME DANGEROUS DISEASES
Only you know why the article about illustrations on some of today’s most serious mental illnesses ended up among the top ten most read posts. Check out the simple yet smartly illustrated obsessive-compulsive disorders or agoraphobia, and all the ways Winnie the Pooh is tied to schizophrenia and depression as seen by Graphic Patrick and Mathew Wilkinson. Click here if you’re interested to check out what we’re talking about.
06 – ILLUSTRATIONS OF HISTORICAL FIGURES’ LIVES
It seems like the simple yet intelligent illustrations are slowly but surely winning out, as you really ‘Liked’ the article on witty pictograms by the Milan Studio H-57. The Typodesign Projects are posters where the lives of historical or pop icons, such as Jesus, Darth Vader, Marie Antoinette or Michael Jackson are portrayed with basic illustrations and an ironic detachment. Click here to check out the whole article.
05 – MOTHER NATURE AS A PERSONAL TRAINER
The top five of the most read articles in 2011 (on projects and individuals outside Croatia), starts with the article published exactly today a year ago in 2010, but drew in an impressively large number of readers in 2011. The incredible visual product of an even more incredible undertaking bears witness to the amazing perseverance of young Robert Gill. Gill physically transformed himself for the needs of a student project, but not in the usual ways of contemporary body buffing, rather opting for the “help” of nature and everything it has to offer. His project is a criticism of sorts directed at the fitness generation. Click here to check out this eccentric idea and its realization.
04 – AN OLD BYCICLE AS A CITY’S ICON
You’re bound to read about the cyclers’ initiative in our report on the most important events from the Croatian scene in the past year. The popularity of this article where we told you how one city transforms street trash into a tourist attraction showed us that you’re very much inclined towards cycling and cyclists. This is ‘The Good Bike Project’ from the streets of Toronto, where abandoned bicycles are turned into art installations. Click here to check out how good bicycles have turned into a city’s icon and signal code.
03 – A VERTICAL FOREST IN MILAN
Out of the multitude of architectural projects we presented throughout 2011 it seems that the Vertical Forest Project really made an impression on you. To be more precise, the green skyscrapers built in Milan according to Stefan Boeri’s project. The project is about metropolitan reforestation that contributes to the regeneration of the environment and urban biodiversity, without implying expansion of city limits. Bosco Verticale is a model of vertical “inclusion” of nature in a city that is attempting to establish new policies of creating forests within metropolitan areas. Click here to check out further details on the project.
02 – TRASH TURNED TOURIST ATTRACTION
Another trash-related article made an even bigger impression on you than the “saved” bicycles one – the article on trash turned tourist attraction. Click here to view how nature took humankind to task and created the most original beach on earth, full of pebbles and colorful glass bits and pieces, from decades’ worth of glass bottles chucked in the sea.
01 – THE ART OF CLEAN UP MOST POPULAR
We’re not sure whether we should be worried or happy that one of the most read articles in the past year, with over a thousand ‘Likes’, turned out to be the article entitled “Love and Passion for Orderly Organization.” We’ve written about the obsessive-compulsive disorder transformed into design or photography on numerous occasions, but it seems that our presentation of the book “The Art of Clean Up” stirred up most interest. The “before and after” photos by the Swiss artist Ursus Wehri, collected in the “The Art of Clean Up” creates order out of chaos, at the same time depicting exceptionally witty and visually attractive images. Click here to check out more photos.
If there’s an article you thought should have made our 2011 ‘Most Popular List’ and it’s not included in our list of fifteen most popular articles, please feel free to comment.
We’ll be presenting the most important, most popular and most read articles on Croatian cultural events, individuals and projects tomorrow!
