Artist Benjamin Verdonck Literally Nesting in a Rotterdam Tower

File this under awesomely weird: artist Benjamin Verdonck has created a man-sized nest and perched it high above the city of Rotterdam, clinging to the side of the Rotterdam Weena Tower. He calls this art project ‘The Great Swallow’ and to give you an idea of just how weird it gets, there is indeed an egg in there. What’s in it or what the artist aims to do with it isn’t clear. The picture alone makes this afraid-of-heights girl want to cling to something solid for dear life.

Neatorama has it:

A nest is hanging high from the Rotterdam Weena Tower. Feathers fly around it. There’s a man in the nest. He nested there only four days ago. He stretches his arms out wide open, as if he wants to fly. But it also seems like he is trying to stay upright (losing his feathers). Some people even think that the man wants to embrace them.

If you’re wondering what the hell that nest is made out of, it’s apparently the crowns of twenty-three silver birches, one birch, one willow, two straw bales, one bucket of spit (um, what?), three bags of sand, twelve buckets of glue and nineteen cans of polyurethane foam. So, they collected enough spit to fill a bucket? Whoa.

Well, props to Benjamin Verdonck for getting a lot of people to think, “huh?”

You can see the YouTube video clip here.

Link [Neatorama] + [The Great Swallow]

Houses Covered in Gold: When Kudzu Attacks

Earlier this week, we told you about kudzu, the ‘scourge of the South’, a vine that spreads like crazy and has now been found to have quite a few promising uses. It’s being looked to as a possible source of renewable energy, plus it has the ability to leach chemicals out of contaminated soils and has additional food and medicinal uses.

Well, that would mean that these folks are sitting on (or, rather, under – if anyone can even get in the house) a veritable gold mine. This is the sort of thing I see often driving from North Carolina down to my home state of Florida: structures totally taken over by kudzu.

Photographer Jack Anthony has some amazing photos of what he calls ‘natural sculptures’, including an awesome series showing the progression of the kudzu growth over four seasons. No doubt, the owners of this land were unhappy when the kudzu invasion started, but maybe they feel better after the recent kudzu-loving news. Before they know it, they might be standing outside their fences protecting this stuff with shotguns against would-be poachers!

Link [JJAnthony] via [Neatorama]

Photo credit: Jack Anthony