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What Superman, Tim Burton and 1,000 South Korean Children have in common.

There’s a reason why creative types often envy the imagination of a child, with its boundless freedom and its anything-is-possible vision. Some artists take that envy and turn it into creative fuel, using the whimsical world of children’s imagination as inspiration. Here are our top picks for child-centric art.

THE MONSTER ENGINE

Oh, those days when a piece of a paper and a pen or…imagine that…a crayon was all we needed to create fascinating stories and magical characters that could rival some of Hollywood’s most blockbustery output.

In The Monster Engine, NJ-based artist Dave DeVries takes those whimsical doodles and drawlings, and recreates them “realistically” with a grown-up artist’s eye.

The best part is that he only adds graphical sophistication and 3D realism to the images, without altering the child-artist’s creative vision.

This being said, some of the renditions interpret elements of the child’s drawings in peculiar ways, adding a new creative layer to the artwork. Like the fish flying out of this witch’s hand, a far stretch from the original doodle, which makes the image all the more interesting.

The Monster Engine is also available as a 48-page coffeetable book, covering the backstory of the 7-year project and featuring interviews with the children who inspired Dave’s artwork.

>>> via shape+color

WONDERLAND

Korean artist Yeondoo Jung explores a different translation of children’s art. In his photoseries Wonderland, which you may recall from our Re:Perception issue, he takes those simple shapes and colors, and transforms them into high-impact, surrealist fashion photography.

The project is based on a the drawings of 5-to-7-year-old South Korean children, reconceived with live models, dramatic costumes and flamboyant colors.

Besides the stunning art direction, we’re somehow drawn to that eerie grownup-child wold the images create, a place where wonder and magic are only limited by how we choose to perceive our subjective reality.

TALES OF THE UNEXPECTED

The creative link between the world of children and high fashion emerges once again in the December issue of Vogue UK’s with the Tales of the Unexpected editorial: a tribute to Roald Dahl’s, one of the most celebrated children’s book authors of the 20th century.

Starring the infamous Tim Burton and a slew of celebrity actors and musicians, the editorial recreates scenes and characters from some of Dahl’s most famous stories.

Shot by legendary fashion photographer Tim Walker, the spread brilliantly captures the very escapism that only high fashion can offer — an aspirational costume that outfits us for our grand dramatic performance in a staged world more beautiful and imaginative than our mundane reality.

Staycation takes to the sky, NASA’s gift for your next dinner party, how legends spend the summer, and what 15,000 optical fibers have to do with high fashion.

CLOUDS, CAMERA, ACTION

Summer has come and gone, and Americans are already filling their scrapbooks with photos from their 2008 staycation — you know, the stay-put vacation alternative enforced by those notorious gas prices. And while some have tried to make lemonade with it all by re-discovering and re-appreciating their home states (one has to wonder what a two-week appreciation of, say, Wisconsin entails), others have gone the other way: thinking up fun, creative stuff that can be done just as well in Manhattan as it could in the Maldives.

Case in point: Flickrer hb19’s sky play photo set, using nothing but the sky and a simple object to create clever scenes that take us back to those magical childhood days when clouds were dragons and unicorns and exotic fishes.

Our favorites: the brilliant smoking pinkie, the timely Space Needle as the Olympic torch, the subtle brush stroke, and the Luke Skywalkerish finger light sabers.

Proof for our conviction that there’s little better than the combination of free time, a camera, and human imagination.

>>> via Photojojo

NASA 1, MAGIC 0

Before you get too enchanted with the heavenly magic of the skies, let us be the kid who told you there was no Santa Claus: NASA has finally discovered what causes the wonder that is the aurora borealis.

A year and a half after the start of the THEMIS mission (that’s Time History of Events and Macroscale Interactions during Substorms… what, it’s the government, they’re no catchphrase pros), a fleet of five satellites probing Earth’s magnetic field, scientists have pinned down the reason why the Northern Lights dance their magic dance: magnetic reconnection, a sudden burst of substorms, brightenings and rapid movements that occur when stressed magnetic field lines suddenly “snap” to a different shape, much like snapping open an overstretched rubber band.

This phenomenon, it turns out, is common throughout the universe and in our particular case happens about a third of the way to the moon.

So think of us next time you share this at a dinner party to boost your smart-cool factor, will ya?

COUTURE FOR THE EYE

That fascination with the summer sky seems like something Flickr amateurs share with the photographic legends of our time.

This summer, legendary duo Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott shot legendary model Giselle Bündchen for W Magazine’s “Kiss The Sky” editorial, styled by the legendary Alex White. (See? We mean business with all that legends stuff.)

Besides the oddly brave use of seemingly safe color, we’re mesmerized by the enchanted play with light.

Stuff of legends, indeed.

>>> via Fashion Nation

GEEKS FOR FASHION UNITED

Keeping with the theme of clouds, fashion and scientific geekiness, there’s a different kind of cloud extracting oohs and ahhs from its observers: the smart kids at MIT have built the Fiber Optic Cloud, a mind-blowing sculpture made of 15,000 optical fibers, each individually addressable and responsive to human interaction through hundreds of sensors.

The 13-foot cloud, constructed of carbon glass, contains over 40 miles of fiber optics and expresses context awareness — which means that when admirers interact with it through touch, it reflects emotion and behavior through sound and lightness-darkness signaling.

The cloud lives in Florence and launched as an ongoing project to rethink the fashion trade show concept on an interactive, sensory level.

We just hope it’s not nearly as moody as the divas of haute couture.

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Why a pair of green laces will make you cool and the planet cooler.

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We’re still astonished at how Lance and team managed to take a charity and transform it into a cultural badge, a fad of astronomical proportions, through the simple LIVESTRONG yellow wristband back in the day. Say what you will about the questionable motives of those wearing the wristband because of the fad, not because of the charity it stood for, but the fact remains: it all served its fundraising purpose brilliantly.

These days, the cultural concern du jour revolves around sustainability issues — a concern well-grounded in our increasingly warming reality. Which is why we have high hopes for environmental newcomer GreenLaces — a nonprofit aimed at promoting personal responsibility towards the planet through a simple badge: a pair of green laces.

The idea: you make a personal pledge to make one small, actionable change in your day-to-day MO that will benefit the environment. You then get yourself a pair of green laces, which serve as a constant reminder of your pledge and ignite the word-of-mouth engine as friends notice the (rather cool-looking) accessory on your kicks.

Founded by Swedish professional soccer players Joanna Lohman and Natalie Spilger, GreenLaces was originally promoted mainly through athletes. The laces and the cause, however, seemed to resonate with “the general public” and took on a life of their own. Barely 6 months after it launched, GreenLaces already has 1000+ people sporting the laces, plus over 50 Olympic athletes strutting them around Beijing.

Their goal is to get 1 million pairs on people’s feet by 2009. That’s 999,999,997 to go — we just bought 3 and vowed start making the 10-foot trip to the recycling bin instead of trashing everything under the desk. Join us, we can be lace buddies. Plus, trendsetting anyone? This has the potential to be the next LIVESTRONG, reaching critical mass with hipsters and posers alike.

But, as long as the environmental purpose is served, we won’t judge. Plus, the laces go great with our new Simples. (And we already know 34 scientifically proven ways of tying them.)