Designers in Mumbai Show Off their Work Using the Inside of City Cabs as Their Canvas

Taxis in India, particularly in Mumbai, are not only the most convenient form of transport but have also become an iconic piece of culture. Although much attention is given to each taxi by its driver, very little thought is given to the fabric used on the seats. The designs that cover the taxi seats are often functional and forgettable and with the outstanding design talent Mumbai has to offer, this shouldn’t be the case. Designer Sanket Avlani, put two and two together and created "Taxi Fabric", a project that connects designers with taxi drivers and the public, by upholstering the interiors of the city's taxis with their designs. Avlani has recently launched a Kickstarter campaign hoping to raise money so she can continue to help emerging designers in Mumbai to showcase their work.

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Hilarious Poster Campaign Helps Beloved Brooklyn Deli Fight Skyrocketing Rent

Jesse’s Deli has been a fixture of Brooklyn’s Boreum Hill neighborhood since 1984. Recently the store’s landlord decided that he would raise the rent from $4000 to $10,000 per month forcing owner Mohamad Itayim to close the family business. Designer Tommy Noonan decided to do something about the problem and together with Doug Cameron, creative director and founder of the small ad agency, DCX, they created a series of hilarious mock advertisements to plaster across Itayim’s storefront. “We wanted to make a statement, but also get people talking,” says designer Tommy Noonan. “We decided to take the graphic language of old supermarkets—the big starbursts, the hot colors—and marry that with artisanal copy.”

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Fascinating Photo Series Documents the Legend of the Moss Men of Bejar

Corpus Christi is a popular festivity celebrated in villages all over Spain. One of the most amazing ways of celebrating this day in the town of Bejar, Spain, is the procession of the men of moss (hombres de musgo in Spanish), where a group of men and women walk the streets covered from head to toes with moss. Art director Gem Fletcher and photographer David Vintiner, decided to investigate this strange tradition, documenting the laborious process of wrapping five men and one woman in heavy layers of moss. ” It sounds something like a cruel punishment, but in fact being chosen as one of the Hombres is a huge honour." Gem explains, “Rumour has it that they are selected because they have prayed for something which has then become a reality.”

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Creative Workshop Teaches the Basics of Graffiti to Seniors in Neighbourhoods Around Lisbon

Developed by Coworklisboa in partnership with the Wool - Urban art of Covilha Festival, LATA 65 (lata means “can” in Portuguese), is an urban art workshop that teaches the basics of graffiti to seniors in various neighbourhoods around Lisbon, Portugal. Through the workshop attendees learn a variety of graffiti techniques, working directly with some of the best urban artists, ultimately incorporating their work in murals across the city. The goal of the project is to stimulate creativity in all elders outside of the context of traditional art venues, bridging the gap between generations and banishing ageist stereotypes.

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Photographer Immortalizes Paris Demonstrators with an Image that Closely Resembles a Delacroix Painting

Currently doing the rounds of several European publications is this amazing image of demonstrators in Paris' Place de la Republique taken by French photographer Martin Argyroglo during Sunday's march against terrorism. The photo evokes Eugène Delacroix's most influential and most recognizable painting, "Liberty leading the People", which was created to commemorate the July Revolution of 1830. Just like the painting, the photo is inspired by contemporary events to invoke the romantic image of the spirit of liberty, except that in this case the insurrection guns have given way to pencils and pens.

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The World's Strangest Museum: A Look Inside Viktor Wynd's Mind-Bending Cabinet of Curiosities

Mermaids, scientific instruments, two headed lambs, blood squeezed from a stone, shrunken heads and occult paintings are just a few of the curiosities and oddities on display at the The Viktor Wynd Museum in East London. Arranged with the sensibility of a 17th-century Wunderkabinett, the museum displays and sells an eccentric and seemingly random collection of objects curated by eccentric aesthete and self-proclaimed dandy Viktor Wynd. Via the website, "By placing the rare and the beautiful on the same plane as the commonplace, banal & amusing this museum seeks not to educate but to subvert, to show the world not in a grain of sand, but in a Hackney basement."

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Rollercoaster Ride Takes Potential Buyers Through a House for Sale in the Netherlands

Dutch brokerage firm Verder Met Wonen has come up with the best way to spice up those boring house viewings and turn them into a true experience. With the help of creative agency, Wefilm, they created a promotional video showing potential buyers riding on a wooden rollercoaster through a house for sale in Ermelo, Netherlands. The ride which is accompanied by a narrated audio tour for extra information, starts off with a nice quick descent into the basement, takes us up the stairs, through the rooms on first and second floor and ends with a thrilling fast downhill ride from the balcony into the garden.

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Disabled Tortoise Gets a DIY Wheelchair Made from Lego Pieces to Help Him Get Around

After losing the use of his legs, due to a growth disorder that caused his limbs to become so weak, he couldn't hold himself up, a tiny tortoise was fitted with a DIY device made from Lego pieces to help him scoot around on four wheels. The ingenious contraption was created by Vet Dr Carsten Plischke with the help of a few Lego pieces borrowed from his son's collection. Dr Plischke said: "For people there are walkers, rollators or prostheses but for animals there are no companies that produce something like that. "The size variation of animals means they can't establish uniform products. So you have to come up with creative solutions; every animal needs its own treatment. "

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Campaign Aims to Turn Abandoned Bicycles' Saddles into Outdoor Planters

Every year over 2 million bicycles are abandoned on Tokyo streets. Left to decay, these bicycles go largely unnoticed sitting in the same spot day after day. COGOO, an organization which aims to create cleaner cities, decided to do something about the problem and together with TBWA \ hakuhodo, they collected dozens of abandoned bicycles and transformed the saddles into planters. The project titled ‘Saddle Blossoms’ aims to create a series of artistic interventions to arouse the curiosity of passersby and make the bicycles noticed.

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Hundreds of Exotic Fish Take Over an Abandoned Shopping Mall in Thailand

New World shopping mall, located in Bangkok, Thailand is a four story former shopping mall that was closed in 1997 after it was found to have breached building regulations. In 1999 a fire left the building without a roof and the basement floor became submerged under several feet of rainwater. At some point in the early 2000′s, in an effort to get rid of a major mosquito problem, an unknown person introduced a small population of exotic Koi and Catfish species. The small population of fish began to thrive and the result is now a self-sustained, and amazingly populated urban aquarium.

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Soviet-Era Bootleg Recordings of Banned Western Music Pressed on Discarded X-Ray Plates

Before the availability of the tape recorder and during the 1950s, when vinyl was scarce, people in the Soviet Union began making records of banned Western music on discarded x-rays. With the help of a special device, banned bootlegged jazz and rock 'n' roll records were "pressed" on thick radiographs salvaged from hospital waste bins and then cut into discs of 23-25 centimeters in diameter. "They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole," says author Anya von Bremzen. "You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan — forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens."

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Palestinian Woman Uses Hundreds of Spent Tear Gas Grenades to Plant a Flower Garden

A Palestinian woman in the village of Bilin, near the West Bank city of Ramallah, has planted a garden full of flowers, each growing from used tear gas canisters collected in clashes with Israeli soldiers during protests against the West Bank occupation. The garden marks a patch of land that Palestinians were able to reclaim two years ago after a court battle to re-route Israel's controversial security wall. The flowers with their unusual pots are a powerful statement about the seemingly never-ending violence on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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Giant Art Installation in Pakistan Targets Predator Drone Operators

With the help of locals, an artist collective, including the french artist JR (previously) installed a massive portrait of a drone survivor facing up in the heavily bombed Khyber Pukhtoonkhwa region of Pakistan, where drone attacks regularly occur. In military slang, Predator drone operators often refer to kills as ‘bug splats’, since viewing the body through a grainy video image gives the sense of an insect being crushed. The project titled "Not a Bug Splat" aims to give civilian casualties in US drones attacks a human face. Now, when viewed by a drone camera, what an operator sees on his screen is not an anonymous dot on the landscape, but an innocent child victim’s face.

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Artist Creates a Monumental Sculpture of a Crashed Satellite Using Industrial Waste

As part of the 9th Bienal do Mercosul, artist Aleksandra Mir created a large crashed satellite installation made from industrial waste collected from local factories. Partially buried on the banks of the Guaiba River in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the crashed satellite invites for close inspection and underscores both material and scale, leaving part of the reconstruction work up to our own imagination.

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Abandoned Car Overtaken by Nature on a Street in China Becomes a Social Media Sensation

Images of an abandoned car engulfed by overgrown ivy plants in Huayang village, in China's Sichuan province, have gone viral after police responded to complaints from the local residents and were forced to tow away the vehicle. In China, abandoned cars are known as “jiangshiche” or “zombie cars”, but the Huayang example, resembling a giant-size Chia Pet has quickly become the most popular zombie car in China, taking the social media world by storm.

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Astronaut Creates Toy Dinosaur for Her Son Using Materials Found on the Space Station

Astronaut and aspiring crafter Karen Nyberg, who since May has been working as a flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, has created a stuffed toy dinosaur for her son using the velcro-like fabric that lines the Russian food containers found on the ISS and stuffing made from an old t-shirt. Nyberg posted a photo of the finished dinosaur floating in zero gravity on her Pinterest account with a caption that says, "Made in space! I made this dinosaur for my son last Sunday, September 22."

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New York City's Hidden Museum of Found Objects

New York City’s "Museum" boasts an assemblage of assorted collections from around the world. Hidden inside an abandoned freight elevator located in Cortland Alley, on the edge of Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood, this quirky venue showcases obscure objects that have been collected over the past 10 years. The eclectic collection features ordinary objects including toothepaste tubes, New York City tip jars, found credit cards and various ephemera. Alex Kalman, one of museum’s three founders says, “Life exists around us, and the proof of our existence is both beautiful and absurd. Our footprint, which is often overlooked, dismissed, or ignored, is intriguing, and always worth exploring."

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Kenyan Company Turns old Sandals into Colorful Toys

Kenya's Ocean Sole sandal recycling company collects discarded flipflops that were previously polluting waterways and coastlines and transforms them into colorful handmade toy animals. The magic happens through craftsmanship, as talented artisans from local communities earn an income transforming the collected waste into wonderful flipflop creations. The company recycle 400,000 kilos of rubber waste a year and create masterpieces for sale across the world. The recycled flipflop creates awareness of our human footprint.

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Colorful Graffiti Revives a Concrete Building in Panama City

Using a vibrant color scheme and the help of local residents, Spanish urban art collective Boa Mistura painted the gray facade of a housing block in the neighborhood of El Chorrillo (Panama City) to convey the message “Somos Luz” (We Are Light). The message aims to inspire passersby as well as neighbors, reminding them that every person is invaluable, regardless of where they live. The project was sponsored by the Bienal del Sur in Panama, and is part of the CROSSROADS series, for which Boa Mistura created a series of participatory urban art interventions.

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Photographer Captures the Nomadic Life of Train Hoppers

Traveling across more than 50,000 miles through 46 states, Arizona-born photographer Mike Brodie documented the nomadic lifestyle of freight train hoppers and squatters. Brodie, armed with a simple Polaroid camera, captured his companions through intimate portraits set against ever-changing landscapes. His photographs reveal the raw reality of his travels: the dirt, the blood, the struggles and, ultimately, a community of travelers who share the challenges and triumphs of life on the road. The project, titled "A Period of Juvenile Prosperity""is currently on show at The Yossi Milo gallery in New York until April 6, and also at The M+B Gallery in Los Angeles from now until May 11

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