Artist Jenny Holzer is known for making public statements that can’t be ignored, and her latest project brings stark messages about gun violence to the facades of New York City’s Rockefeller Center. For “VIGIL,” a three-night installation that took place October 10-12, Holzer projected poems by teenagers impacted by school shootings, texts from the compilation “Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence” and stories from “Moments That Survive,” a collection by Everytown for Gun Safety.

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Presented in collaboration with the public arts organization Creative Time, “VIGIL” leaves onlookers no choice but to absorb and grapple with these messages and testimonies. The project aims to center the voices of those directly affected by gun violence, shifting away from using faceless statistics to emphasize the human toll.

“Projected onto one of the most iconic landmarks in New York City, VIGIL speaks to the massive impact gun violence has not only on individuals, but the very fabric of communities and cities,” reads Creative Time’s curatorial statement on the project. “The text encroaches on the facades and windows of these buildings, surrounding the viewer and enveloping the city in messages of light. Through the project, the city itself is transformed.”

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“The scrolling words of Holzer’s projections demand that the audience reads them. This strategy denies passive engagement, as viewers internalize these messages by hearing the text in their own voice. It is not possible to let these words just wash over. Since 1991, Holzer has used this technique to address such issues as domestic violence, war, and the corruption of power. Throughout her career, she has aimed to bring to light that which is hidden. In her ongoing project It Is Guns, trucks equipped with LED screens share pointed texts by the artist similarly addressing gun violence. Holzer expands upon these issues in VIGIL, magnifying her messages from the street to the cityscape.”

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See more photos of the installation at Gothamist.

Photos by Lauren Camarata

Why scrap a decommissioned tank or self-propelled gun when it can easily be re-purposed as playground equipment, asked nobody ever. ALMOST nobody, that is.

This pair of colorful ex-Soviet Army tanks are permanently caught in the crossfire, so to speak, in front of the Great Patriotic War Museum in Kiev, capital of the Ukraine. The orange tank is a T-55, produced in the tens of thousands between the end of World War II and approximately 1980 while the blue tank appears to be a T-72, first produced in 1973. Flickr members Colin Bourgeois (Colin Edmond) and Paul Honig snapped the popular (with kids, especially) display in 2010.

Can you “spot” these former war machines? Somebody sure did – these images from Flickr members Jason Risley and plutogno date from July and November of 2013, respectively, shortly after the tanks received a cosmetic makeover.

Spit & Polish

You’d think Poland, where tanks battled time and time again during the Second World War, would be awash in disused tracked vehicles. Then again, rebuilding a nation’s economy requires plenty of scrap metal. Evidently the small village of Holubla in eastern Poland’s Masovian voivodship didn’t rate an actual tank so local playground builders had to fashion one of their own. Flickr member porrectus caught this sharp-looking playground fixture in June of 2012.

Tanks for the Memories

There’s no shortage of tanks in Israel after fighting major wars in 1948, 1956 and 1967. The multicolored tank at top is a T-34-85, likely captured from invading Egyptian Army forces during the Six Day War in 1967. The colorfully painted tank at top, snapped in 2005 by Flickr member Loupiote, has open hatches that allow children to enter the turret and even swivel the gun using a hand crank – Soviet engineering at its finest. The second image of two pastel-tinted self-propelled guns was taken in 2008 by Flickr member matull. One for the girls and one for the boys?

Ominous in Omsk

This smartly painted T-34 tank dominates a playground in the village of Chernoluchye, near the city of Omsk in southwestern Siberia. I triple-dog-dare anyone to touch their tongue to this old warrior’s skin on a wintery day. Flickr member Bron Pancerna captured the retired war machine in May of 2016.

Omsk became a major tank-producing center after Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941. The city’s location straddling the Trans-Siberian Railroad was ideal for the distribution of new tanks to the front lines hundreds of miles to the west.

Not all tanks left Omsk, however – or perhaps, a few returned to their birthplace after being retired (re-tracked?). These hulking playground fixtures were snapped by Flickr member Stephen Powell (The Axarquian) in 2008 and by the website English Russia in 2012.

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If your business involves getting fired, going off half cocked or triggering bankruptcy, you just might be one of these 10 closed and/or abandoned gun shops.

“Chet” sold guns (and gun accessories) in Highland Park, Michigan for a very long time – his weatherbeaten but still-legible store sign appears to predate the neon era. Eventually, economic conditions and crime got so bad in Detroit that even a gun shop couldn’t make ends meet. Remarkably, Chet’s Gun Shop has been reborn into the world of online gaming – you can find it (or a representation thereof) at Second Life, for instance.

Guns & Butches

Someone better buy Butch’s Gun Shop (just $499,000!) before the rest of the letters decay. One has to wonder why Butch’s couldn’t cut the mustard… maybe it was just too wild & woolly for today’s Seattle. Then again, who wouldn’t want to get a haircut at a combo gun shop / pawn shop?

House Of Gunja?

When Washington state’s started taking applications for retail marijuana stores, prospective operators found they had to clear a number of regulatory hurdles. One of these was a requirement that such stores had to be more than 1,000 feet from day care centers and similarly classed facilities. As the Trike Stop Infant Care Center was just 381 feet (as the crow flies) from the former House Of Guns, an application to open a “pot shop” in the abandoned gun shop was rejected. Selling guns less than 400 feet from a day care center was perfectly OK, though.

Last Meal

Was the “Hollywood” in Grants, New Mexico a gun shop or a diner… OR BOTH?? Flickr user Robby Virus came across the tattered remnants of the odd old establishment’s sign while traveling through Cross County in December of 2010. What would it have been like to enjoy a meal at the Hollywood? It seems we’ll never know but one thing’s for certain: it was probably the WORST place to try a dine & dash.

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There is almost no industry left untouched by 3D printing, from cars to houses, but now things are really heating up with everything from stunning outfits and home-printable arsenals. These two extreme examples show just how diverse the adopting user groups have become – the technology has become untethered from hobbyists and is now found everywhere from the realms of high-fashion fans to anonymous freedom fighters.

Francis Bitonti & Michael Schmidt (images by Albert Sanchez and Jeff Meltz) have collaborated on a stunning dress for dancer Dita Von Teese, fully 3D-printed nylon from laser-fused plastic polymers. Stiff components are strung together in a flexible mesh making the resulting outfit fully wearable and definitely breathable. The entire creation was modeled on the body of the wearer, making for a perfect fit.

More on the concept: “Mr. Schmidt, in conjunction with Mr. Bitonti, applied the spiral formula to the computer rendering of the dress, in a mesh that would undulate around the body in the most feminine way possible. For this reason, Mr. Schmidt tapped longtime friend and muse Dita Von Teese, whom he deems as the consummate classical beauty. While the shape was built over a nude silk corset, most of the architecture of the silhouette, from the voluminous shoulders to the cinched waist, is the result of the hardened nylon powder. The floor-length gown moves and expands according to Ms. Von Teese’s body contours because of the netting pattern.”

Meanwhile, in the limelight for very different reasons, Cody Wilson is launching Defcad, a search engine for 3D-printable designs including  medical devices, guns and other objects sites like Google and MakerBot can’t or won’t tackle.

From the site: “With 3D printed firearms, pharmaceuticals, automobiles, drones, and medical devices, the stakes will suddenly get much higher. Because 3DP is not about reviving manufacturing jobs or competing with assembly lines on cost. It is not about disrupting manufacturing. It is about disrupting copyright, IP, and regulation. It is about printing items whose prices have been set to infinity. It is about disrupting man-made forms of artificial scarcity. It is about DEFCAD.”