In 1959, I worked as a scientist at Allied Research Associates in Boston. The company was an MIT spinoff that originally focused on the effects of nuclear weapons on aircraft structures. The company received a contract with the acronym GLIPAR (Guide Line Identification Program for Antimissile Research) from the Advanced Research Projects Agency to elicit the most creative approaches possible for a ballistic missile defense system. The government recognized that no matter how much was spent on improving and expanding current technology, it would remain inadequate. They wanted us and a few other contractors to think “out of the box.” When I first became involved in the project, I suggested that Isaac Asimov, who was a good friend of mine, would be an appropriate person to participate. He expressed his willingness and came to a few meetings. He eventually decided not to continue, because he did not want to have access to any secret classified information; it would limit his freedom of expression. Before he left, however, he wrote this essay on creativity as his single formal input.

Short film by Tobin Yelland on Bobby Puleo and his art in the spring of 2005.

And I say, "Why don’t you pick?" And he goes, “What do you mean?” I go, “Look through my phone, here go ahead,” and he goes, “What do you mean?” I go, “Look,” and I show him the pictures, and his eyes were the biggest they’ve ever gotten. I go, “I have hundreds of girlfriends, just pick. You want me to get married so bad, I can’t pick any of them. This one is really good at sucking dick, this one does this for me, this one sucks my dick and then makes me dinner, this one can hold a conversation, this one’s really funny. I don’t know, I can’t pick one, but you really want me to get married.” I’m like, this is crazy, I’m having a real talk with my dad. So he goes, "This is crazy," and I go, “You know what, this feels fucking good.” So since Thanksgiving, I don’t lie to my parents anymore.

ANSI (and ASCII) art dominated online communication for a short time. However, in that small window the medium evolved from a necessary function of early online systems into an art form on its own. Sixteen Colors was created to keep a history of the art form as seen from the production of the underground art scene that began in the 1990′s and continues today. Learn what it takes to compile hundreds of thousands of pieces of artwork and how that artwork has changed over two decades.

As professionals, the "eBoys" seem to have found the holy grail of graphic design. Their work is instantly recognizable and consistently relevant. It’s paid off, too; the group’s client list reads like a primer in 21st-century consumerism: Coca-Cola, the New York Times, Paul Smith, MTV. When I met them for the first time in Berlin last fall, they were working on a campaign for Xbox. In the world of digital design, their mark has been indelible. "eBoy are the originals," says Jürgen Siebert, CEO of FontShop, a Berlin-based typography company that the eBoy founders collaborated with in the early 1990s. "Of course there are some more pixel wizards, and there had been before eBoy. But eBoy developed that discipline to perfection."

For a whole year, a Chilean artist using the name Fried Potatoes (Papas Fritas) planned his revenge. Saying he was collecting material for an art project, the 31-year-old visual artist sneaked into a vault at a notorious private, run-for-profit university and quietly removed tuition contracts. Fried Potatoes – whose real name is Francisco Tapia – then burned the documents, rendering it nearly impossible for the Universidad del Mar to call in its debt – which he claimed was worth as much as $500m (£297m). "It's over. You are all free of debt," he said in a five-minute video released earlier this month. Speaking to former students, he added: "You don't have to pay a penny."

In the beginning, Ryan McGInley was an outsider. He used his band of beautiful friends to create photographs - rarely not naked but never quite sexy - that he now calls "evidence of fun." But in the past decade, McGinley's vision has evolved and expanded into a tidal wave of influence, affecting the look of art, advertising, music videos, film, even Instagram - and making him arguably the most important photographer in America.

Much has been written about the heroin-linked death of Jean-Michel Basquiat. But one voice was missing—that of the wildly talented, wildly extravagant painter himself. Anthony Haden-Guest interviewed America’s foremost black artist in the last stages of his blazing trail, as he careened between art dealers and drug dealers.

Adam Magyar is a computer geek, a college dropout, a self-taught photographer, a high-tech Rube Goldberg, a world traveler, and a conceptual artist of growing global acclaim. But nobody had ever suggested that he might also be a terrorist until the morning that he descended into the Union Square subway station in New York. At the time, Magyar was immersed in a long-running techno-art project called Stainless, creating high-resolution images of speeding subway trains and their passengers, using sophisticated software he created and hardware that he retrofitted himself. The scanning technique he developed—combining thousands of pixel-wide slices into a single image—allows him to catch passengers unawares as they hurtle through dark subway tunnels, fixing them in haunting images filled with detail no ordinary camera can capture. Magyar set up his standard array of devices—camera, scanner, voltage meters, blue and black cables, battery pack, tripod, laptop—and waited for a train to roll into the station.

When America met Leo Fitzpatrick in the 1995 cult classic Kids, he was playing the adolescent prince of downtown, swinging his shoulders across the Lower East Side in oversized clothes and yelling taunting curses through the streets. Today, at 36, the actor who was discovered when photographer and director Larry Clark saw him skateboarding in Washington Square Park — he was the loudest, angriest kid Clark had ever seen — still identifies as a sort of misfit. As a co-owner of the teeny Lower East Side gallery Home Alone 2 with the artist Nate Lowman, he is trying to create a DIY antidote to what he sees as the snooty attitude dominating the New York art scene.

In this talk, artist Trevor Paglen discusses his work attempting to “see” the various aspects of the secret state. In examples ranging from tracking spy satellites to foraging through the bureaucratic refuse of CIA front companies, Paglen will discuss methods used to identify and exploit structural contradictions in classified programs which render them visible, and comment on the aesthetics and politics of attempting to “see” secrecy.

There is a black market for stolen artworks, and according to the head of the F.B.I.'s art-crime team, Bonnie Magness-Gardiner, their prices are inevitably a small fraction of the works’ legitimate value. Some estimates put the average at 7 to 10 percent of perceived open-market value. A painting doesn’t need to be sold at auction to hold value. Even if it stays forever on the black market, it can be used as a kind of promissory note in a weapons or drug deal. Career criminals also believe they can extort a ransom from insurers or use the stolen work as a bargaining chip. A prison sentence, for instance, might be reduced in some jurisdictions in exchange for a criminal’s help in retrieving a missing Monet. In effect, an unframed canvas, easier to move across borders than its equivalent in cash or drugs, acts as a high-value and extremely pretty bank note.

Damon Lindelof, the ubiquitous ­screenwriter-producer whose name seems attached to all of Hollywood’s biggest blockbusters, is doing his damnedest to get small. This summer, he miraculously pulled Brad Pitt out of the mass grave that was World War Z’s zombocalyptic original third act and restored the regular-guyness that made Pitt’s character work. He also resisted the temptation to threaten Earth’s existence (yet again!) at the end of Star Trek Into Darkness, focusing instead on a personal vendetta—albeit one enacted via a dizzying mile-high pursuit across a 23rd-century cityscape. But, hey, you have to give something to get something.

SModcast is a weekly podcast featuring filmmaker Kevin Smith and his long-time producing partner Scott Mosier. Released each Sunday night/Monday morning, the episodes are generally one hour in length and feature Smith and Mosier discussing current events and other non-sequitur topics. In this Episode we hear tales of art, comics, sex, Facebook and all vices are explored to excess and we learn how boring our lives really are. With Special Guest artist and podcaster David Choe.

Stéphane Breitwieser is a Frenchman notorious for his art thefts between 1995 and 2001. He admitted to stealing 239 artworks and other exhibits, worth an estimated US$1.4 billion (£960m), from 172 museums while travelling around Europe and working as a waiter, an average of one theft every 15 days. The Guardian called him "arguably the world's most consistent art thief."

Top-Fußballer wie Cristiano Ronaldo, Lionel Messi oder Wayne Rooney zahlen bei Spielen in Deutschland mit ihren Mannschaften keine Steuern. So will es das Bundesfinanzministerium. Der Erlass gilt für Spiele aller Mannschaftssportarten im Rahmen europäischer Vereinswettbewerbe.  Künstler und Sportler werden im Steuerrecht gleich behandelt. Doch der neue Erlass ist nur für den Sport gültig, nicht für die Kultur.

Decked out with a game room, a radio station, and a remote control tire swing, David Choe's Los Angeles warehouse studio is a testimony to the "bonus level" that he has reached in the art world. As a wildly popular and widely recognized international artist, Choe is also known for his reality TV show, the art he made while detained in a Japanese prison, and the mural he painted for Facebook, valued at over $200 million in Facebook shares. Inside his studio, the painter, muralist, and graffiti writer talks frankly with Alia about the new freedoms and challenges he's facing at this new stage in his practice.

A University of Washington graduate whose football team had the best defense in the country at the time, Costacos came up with the idea of making a "Purple Reign" T-shirt to honor the team, featuring a lineman in a purple jersey falling from a cloud in the sky. Costacos printed up the shirts, traveled to a road game at Stanford one fall weekend and sold them in the parking lot. The idea was brilliant. By the end of the first week, he later estimated he had sold 20,000. An idea was born. Along with his older brother, Tock, he parlayed those T-shirts into series of sports-themed posters that, like that first T-shirt, played on pop culture. Together, they created one of the most influential businesses in the history of sports marketing. Its lasting impact eventually would extend all the way to a New York City art gallery, where, 25 years later, those posters were viewed as art and sold for thousands. At one show Ultimate Fighting Championship president Dana White bought the entire gallery collection.

Exclusive Footage of KAWS tearing it up on the streets of NYC and Tokyo in 1997. This is his first bus-stop in NYC, a bunch of pieces in Tokyo, along with some great commentary by fellow artist Ron English.

Exclusive Footage of KAWS tearing it up on the streets of NYC and Tokyo in 1997. This is his first bus-stop in NYC, a bunch of pieces in Tokyo, along with some great commentary by fellow artist Ron English.

Perhaps no other living director has done as much for the art of the title sequence as David Fincher. The filmmaker’s work inarguably helped kickstart the title design renaissance of the 1990s, a revival that the medium still enjoys to this day. From the slumberous doom of Alien³ and the meticulous grotesquery of Se7en to the dreadful reminiscence of The Game, the electrical inner workings of Fight Club, and the majestic imposition of Panic Room, the director’s title sequences are as distinct from one another as they are distinctly the works of Fincher.

Awesome, Mindblowing, Unbelievable, Impossible. Some of the words used to describe what this piece of code from demoscene gods Future Crew did on 1993-era PC hardware. Even by today's standards, what this program can do without relying on any kind of 3D graphics acceleration is impressive. As if the graphics weren't impressive enough, it can even playback in Dolby Surround Sound.

The first thing I do when I get up, I have breakfast. I have two protein shakes made for me by my doctor - they have a chocolate taste and no sugar, of course — and steamed apples. That's all. I don't like anything else in the morning. I never drink anything hot; I don't like hot drinks, very strange. I drink Diet Coke from the minute I get up to the minute I go to bed. I can even drink it in the middle of the night, and I can sleep. I don't drink coffee, I don't drink tea, I drink nothing else.

having just closed a 4-concert tour in tokyo, japanese pop star hatsune miku is among the most successful contemporary japanese performers, but she is also virtual: an avatar with a computer-programmed voice, who sings songs compiled of lyrics written by her fans.