I had the opportunity to visit Shanghai this past January (2024) and couldn’t miss the chance to fly a FPV drone around the 3 tallest towers in the city. Shanghai Tower stands at an impressive 632m (2,073 feet), making it the tallest building in China and the third tallest in the world behind the Burj Khalifa and Merdeka Tower.

Shanghai Tower with the Shanghai World Financial Center (492m), and Jin Mao Tower (421m) dominate the city skyline. I also flew around the Oriental Pearl Tower and was able to catch the window washers who dangle by ropes every morning cleaning the glass.

(Direktlink, via Book of Joe)

(Direktlink, via The Awesomer)

https://twitter.com/_arnocao/status/1509540382467633162

My hometown is all farmland, there are no factories. During the winter there is nothing to do so people work elsewhere. Now everyone has left to go find work. No one farms anymore. It’s rare for me to get a chance to go home. Sometimes I don’t even go back once a year. When my son was younger, around 7 or 8 years old, I came home and he refused to call me ‘Mom’. He didn’t recognize me because I hadn’t been home for 3 years. I take each day as it comes. I haven’t thought too much about the future.

(Direktlink, via Kottke)

(via Tibor)

Cai Guo-Qiang is a New York based artist and one of the furthermost celebrated contemporary artists originating from China. He is known for a remarkable new kind of fireworks spectacles which he calls “explosion events.” He has taken gunpowder, one of China’s Four Great Inventions and led the way in a new impressive form of art that is substantial and metaphorical. His fireworks represent nature, culture, life, and death.

Cai’s captivation with pyrotechnics had origins in weaponry and physics, evolving into an affinity with traditional Chinese brush painting. Thus the violent explosions are transformed into a tool of art, creating a masterpiece in the sky, a masterpiece that only has a short lifetime, and fades away. Cai’s daytime “explosion events,” intimates classical brush painting. Cai involves organic vegetable dyes as opposed to just gunpowder, the smoke from these “explosion events” gradually blurs in the air almost as ink from a brush stroke is absorbed by rice paper in traditional painting. His daylight skywriting signifies his deep traditionalism and his modernism all at once.

Cai’s work in front of the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, China is eight minutes of colors filing the sky, in a ritualistically sincere elucidation of the ‘death of nature’. The show personifies the natural world with remembrance, looking back on the past and the transitory nature of time through a display of colorful smoke. The smoke fades away until nothing is left, no reminiscence of the beauty that once was, just like everything that exists in nature.

(Fotos mit freundlicher Genehmigung von Public Delivery)

(Direktlink, via this isn’t happiness)