In 1995 Larry Clark released Kids, a startling movie about the reckless lives of skateboarders and their circle of teenagers in New York City. Magdalena Wosinska, then 13, remembers being influenced and disturbed by the film as a skateboarder in Arizona. At the time, her days were spent skating in 118° weather. After meeting Harold Hunter, Anthony Korea, and Todd Jordan, who were a part of Clark’s infamous film, Wosinska picked up a camera to document her friends, and began her life as a photographer and musician. While on tour as the guitarist with Green & Wood, a band she started six years ago with renowned skateboarder Ethan Fowler, Wosinska has created an intimate body of work that has an honest attitude, much like the artist herself.

“I love what I shoot, it’s my real life, it’s my breath. I couldn’t ask for anything more” Wosinska tells PLANET. Perhaps this is what enables her to breathe life into ad campaigns for street-approved brands like Converse sneakers. Although Wosinska’s background is unusual and a bit wild, her personality is infused with professionalism. Still, she insists on using simple point-and-shoot cameras, maintaining spontaneity. “Just give me a camera and let me shoot,” she says.

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Mellow beatmasters Soulsavers team up with Depeche Mode’s Dave Gahan for their fourth long-player, The Light The Dead See. The duo of Rich Machin and Ian Glover has been featuring complementary vocalists on its last few albums. The contributors have ranged from Mark Lanegan and Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce to Faith No More’s Mike Patton and Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Hanes. This most recent collaboration with Gahan hits the jackpot. Soulsavers max out their soundtrack expertise to create an emotive bed of music over which Gahan lays bare his soul. There is something about the earthbound instrumentation billowing and crashing around Gahan’s overly familiar voice that is bringing out all the skeletons in his closet. He hails in a choir to back him on “Longest Day” and calls on a higher power on “Presence Of God” while dramatic washes sweep him away on “Take Me Back Home.” It starts sounding like the same song on repeat towards the last third of The Light The Dead Sea, but that may be due to Gahan lamenting about similar topics. Nevertheless, the coupling, or rather, tripling, is made in heaven—or it is hell?

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Tom Sachs first traveled to the moon in 2007, in a rocket made from plywood, foam-core, and hot glue that never actually managed to leave its launching pad, the Gagosian Gallery. For the next three weeks, Sachs brings to the Park Avenue Armory SPACE PROGRAM: MARS, a sweeping installation including life-sized spacecraft, exploratory vehicles, a Mission Control, and the surface of Mars itself, all made by hand.

Sachs and a crew of thirteen are inhabiting the Armory for the duration of the show, where they will perform the survival tasks necessary for long flights and scientific investigation using equipment created by Sachs. The crew both demonstrates and trains visitors in these techniques; the exhibit is entirely interactive and, hopefully, transporting. In Sachs’ hands, the mysterious soaring notion of space travel becomes a series of rituals and survival techniques, irrefutably grounded. The majestic craft are rendered in common found—one might say “earthy”—materials, reminding us where we come from as we aspire to greater lengths.

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On his website home page, San Diego architect Kendrick Bangs Kellogg says this about his work: “Large or small, Since 1957, Anywhere on earth or moon.” For those familiar with his buildings, dense structures forged from expressive, otherworldly forms, these assertions seem right on. They’re a succinct expression of Kellogg’s sweeping, elemental architecture.

While Kellogg was trained as an architect, it’s probably more accurate to think of him as a master builder, like the anonymous Medieval masons who raised the cathedrals. He’s less interested in the rules of design than in potentials of craft and construction. A friend, artist James T. Hubbell, remembers the construction of one of Kellogg’s first buildings, which had steep roofs. When the head carpenter refused to cut rafters at an unorthodox angle Kellogg asked for the saw and trimmed them himself. He’s a licensed contractor and has executed several of his own buildings. The design-build ethos comes natural to Kellogg, who says it’s “a process that has been around since humans were able to move rocks in a cave.”

To those who know him and have worked alongside him Kellogg is something of an idol. His work steers clear of trends, and springs instead from an indelible personal vision. Another friend, architect Wallace Cunningham, remembers first meeting Kellogg in the 1970’s: “He was the established, brilliant architect on the scene, the San Diego Man.”

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Robert Delpire is an exceptional figure in the international photography, design and advertising world. As a publisher, curator, editor, art director and film producer, he has championed the cause of some of the most notable and iconic image makers of the last century. His career began in 1950’s Paris, as a young medical student he was presented with the opportunity to produce the school’s bulletin which led him into the world of image making. Early success transformed his journey and he never looked back. With an innate aesthetic sense and an incisive understanding of design and graphics, he championed the career of many of the world’s master photographers, including Joself Koudelka, William Klein, Duane Michals, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier Bresson, Guy Bourdin, Paolo Roversi and Sarah Moon.

Within a few years he established what became one of the most important graphic design and photography publishing companies of the time: ´Editions Delpire. Early on Delpire published the first monograph of Brassai, and several books with Magnum photographers including Cartier Bresson, who would remain a life long friend and collaborator. In 1958, when an American publisher proved difficult to secure, Delpire published Les Americains, Robert Frank’s radical and sometimes controversial photo essay. An honest depiction of American life, it was widely celebrated and considered one of the most important monographs of the 20th century. He also produced the ground breaking William Klein monographs of Tokyo,

There has been a fair amount of hot air circulating across the blogosphere in recent weeks about wind energy after certain media outlets erroneously reported that wind turbines actually contribute to global warming. To set the record straight, the study they cited from the University of Albany showed evidence that pockets of warmer air can exist in the vicinity of wind farms – no big surprise since temperature is tied to the speed at which molecules move. The leap to worldwide warming trends is a giant one and what would appear to be a false one at that.

This controversy is only the latest instance of blowback against one of the more promising forms of renewable energy. Whereas many reports tend to emphasize the limitations of wind technology, it’s worth highlighting the potential improvements being developed within the industry. The standard three-blade design, which rotates on a horizontal axis, has existed since an early model was built in the 1930’s USSR, and that turbine essentially relied on the same concept utilized when windmills first produced electricity decades earlier. Wind power in the 21st Century is shaping up to look a lot different, though. Here’s an overview of some unconventional new approaches.

Just a few weeks ago, Dutch designer Dirk Vander Kooij presented the latest iteration of his graduation project, Endless Flow, at Milan Design Week. His furniture, a collection of ergonomic, hollowed-out chairs and tables all made of the same candy-colored ribbed plastic, appears minimal but thoughtful, designed with the human body in mind. But the Endless process is really a globally-minded step towards sustainability. Vander Kooij employs a repurposed industrial machine to three-dimensionally print each chair, table, and lamp one by one, squeezing out a thin string of liquid plastic in layers like a soft-serve machine. Every piece is made of a single, coiled, “endless” string.

The practical benefits of the Endless process are many: there’s no casting mold involved, so there’s no discarded material. The chairs are made one at a time, so mistakes aren’t replicated across batches. And perhaps most importantly, the method uses 100% recycled plastic (Vander Kooij’s preferred medium is used refrigerator interiors). But from a designer’s point of view, the grace note of Endless Flow is that it allows the printer to watch a piece of furniture coming into existence, and to tweak it even as it is being created. Material waste is, after all, the product of a misplaced idea – Vander Kooij aims to cut down on intellectual waste as well.

This New Zealand collective has Jamaican blood pumping through its veins. The fifth album from the Black Seeds, Dust And Dirt, maintains the group’s signature reggae-lite sound. Dust and Dirt moves at a leisurely pace that gives it a ready-to-use quality. The grown-up pop, soul touches, and funk sprinklings strung throughout the reggae structure make Dust and Dirt almost easy listening reggae for non-reggae aficionados. The title track with its familiar reggae-by-numbers rhythms exemplifies the Black Seeds’ ethos. This is punctuated by some non-island-accented vocals that bring an unexpected, but welcome, mainstream flavor to Dust and Dirt. This low-key mood persists for most of Dust and Dirt, hitting particularly relaxed tones on “Wide Open.” Just when you’re getting comfortable with the slow grooves, “Loose Cartilage” explodes with a raunchy guitar intro. This falsely works up the listener’s energy which it then drops to a relaxed ‘70s funk swing. “Rusted Story” works similarly with thrusting horns tempering the crunch of the guitars. The Black Seeds may not be breaking any barriers with Dust and Dirt, but they are providing an excellent excuse to lie around and do nothing all summer but listen to them soundtrack the season.

Are the Internet and social media making us more, or less social? Smarter or dumber? Are you going to make it through this review before clicking over to check your email, Twitter account, Facebook page, or blog site? How many people “liked” your status update today?

Artist Rachel Lee Hovnavian is fascinated by the social transformations wrought by the virtual world. Mud Pie, her new show at the Leila Heller Gallery, is all about how we seem increasingly happy to forgo real experience in favor of the virtual and artificial. This could be a dry, heavy-handed message, but Hovnavian delivers it with such sly humor and visual panache that even the most committed technophiles might have to admit she’s on to something.

Take the show’s centerpiece, a supposedly romantic dinner for two. A long dining table is elegantly set with all the expected signifiers: flowers, candles, wineglasses. But the couple itself is virtual, represented by two LCD screens. The man and woman on the screens don’t speak to each other. Instead, each seems perfectly satisfied to interact with a mobile device while beeps, trills and the Angry Birds soundtrack punctuate the silence. Oh, and those flowers? They’re artificial. Naturally.

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It has been suggested that the Rings of Saturn – fragments of dust, ice crystals and meteoric debris that rotate the sixth planet from the sun – once formed a moon that wandered into the planet’s gravitational pull, was shattered by its tidal effect, and set consequentially into a perpetual orbit.

German-born writer W.G. Sebald’s most well known work follows a similar course – an accumulation of dispersed fragments, a spiritual homelessness that accompanies his pursuit for the location of the self in space. Transplanted to the east coast of England in 1970 – it was in the Suffolk countryside where Sebald formed his work of meandering, elliptical power.

Documentary filmmaker Grant Gee, best known for his film Joy Division, celebrates Sebald’s journey in his new work Patience (After Sebald). “In Sebald’s book Austerlitz, a character compiles old family photographs, images of places and locations in his past, in the hope of unlocking the secret of his trauma. He does this playing a game of patience – or solitaire, in English. I connected to that idea, using structure and montage in order to unlock something.’’