This past Saturday, Trump supporters and counter-protesters from the left clashed violently in liberal Berkeley, all while one intrepid street painter captured the scene live on canvas. As reporters filmed and photographed the chaos, John Paul Marcelo biked his mobile painting station into place.

At Least 15 Arrested Amid Violence At Alt-Right Rally And Counter Protest In #Berkeley https://t.co/AC1uxsV9HT pic.twitter.com/TpPFilrz3l

— SFist (@SFist) April 15, 2017

https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/826980737446391808

The alt-right rally organizers and their opponents arrived ready for a brawl, variously equipped with shields, helmets, wooden poles, pepper spray and other weapons. “By mid-afternoon,” reports Blake Montgomery, “the dueling protesters were screaming insults at each other over a flaming pile of trash and using a dumpster as a battering ram.” In the end, dozens were arrested on both sides.

https://twitter.com/shane_bauer/status/853370341246226432

But in the midst of the mayhem (or at least: slightly off to one side) was perhaps the most unexpected sight of all — Bay Area street artist John Paul Marcelo standing his ground and calmly painting the chaotic scene as it unfolded before him.

My favorite Berkeley riot moment: the street artist who strives to capture the conflict between alt-right and black bloc, pepper bombs & all pic.twitter.com/Lqam1Ccasi

— Paige St. John (@paigestjohn) April 15, 2017

Marcelo is a fixtures of the San Francisco community, a fifteen-year resident who can be found painting ordinary street scenes as well as timely and tragic still lifes, like: a building just after a fire, burnt out and abandoned.

His artistic gear collapses on demand, folding neatly for transportation by bike to events unfolding in around the Bay or calmer, more everyday still-life subjects (below: Morning on Broadway and Telegraph in Oakland as seen in Cafe 817).

John Paul Marcelo studied graphic design and advertising, then started painting the urban decay of Chicago streets and decided to “reject modern technological mediums” and “paint exclusively en plein air, and migrate to the majestic California coastline.” And although he reports being “very content with painting existing idyllic scenes like Big Sur and Marin, past expeditions have brought him to places like post Katrina New Orleans and Cabrini Green housing projects.” His influences “include Claude Monet, James Nachtwey, and Ai Wei Wei.” (Images via AP, SfGate & KQED)

The world’s first live tattoo projection mapping event turned tattoos from static works into performance art, creating dazzling animations from inked body artworks.

Filmed in Lisbon by Oskar & Gaspar, the above video highlights the infinite possibilities of this approach, from filling in details and colors to completing partial tattoos or even animating them in living color.

Like the future tattoos from William Gibson’s book The Peripheral, the result can seem like organic behavior, with faces coming to life and snakes slithering across a body’s surface.

Remarkably, the entire film was made without any post-production – what you see as the viewer of the short film above is exactly what the audience saw on the day of the event. We still may be a ways away from embedded nanobot tattoos, but when we get there, this will be an excellent source of inspiration for the tattoo artists of the future.

While nothing is set in stone as yet, the city of Tokyo has plans to build a road through this residential plot, forcing architects working on the site to craft an ingenious future-proof solution for potential partial destruction.

Faced with a long history of earthquakes, Japanese architecture has a long history of ephemerality, but this challenge is of a more controlled nature: an expanded street is slated to eventually slice at an angle through the property, hence a home designed to break into pieces.

Japanese architects Starpilots call their creation Housecut, a direct reference to this core dilemma. The house-and-office they crafted for the site is composed of three structurally independent volumes, anticipating the possibility that one or two may be demolished.

The family runs a funeral home, lives in the structure and wants to maintain a business and domestic presence in the remaining space should part of their live/work building be removed. While the warehouse, break room and other elements may go, their goal is to at least maintain a reception area for clients if the city does eventually proceed with its plans.

For now, two residential areas border a central entry and are lofted above the business below. Everything is designed with dual endgames in mind, at once spacious and open but able to be reconfigured to make maximum use in a scenario where much of the building vanishes.

Swimming pools, private suites, flat-screen televisions, medical facilities and luxury lounges – all these amenities cannot be yours, but can be enjoyed by your pets (or pigs or horses) at the new AFK airport terminal just for animals.

Opening next year alongside JFK international airport, over 70,000 animals of all kinds are expected to pass through ARK annually. This 50,000,000-dollar, 178,000-square-foot space will be the “world’s only privately owned animal terminal and USDA-approved, full-service, 24-hour, airport quarantine facility for import and export of horses, pets, birds and livestock.” 

Your best (canine) friend can enjoy more comforts than you can imagine, including pawdicures, massage therapy and even a swimming pool shaped like a dog bone, while you close feline companion climbs through dedicated jungle gyms or cat TV. Horses will enjoy food, water and rest while basking in daylit stalls that can be individually climate-controlled. You can also watch (and envy) your critters, large or small, via remote webcams on demand.

All animals have access to a veterinary hospital equipped for general health, emergency care, advanced diagnostics and with surgery suites, providing healthcare but also helping to streamline checks and certifications required for overseas travel.

The ARK will replace VetPort, a small 10,000-square-foot onsite facility (effectively a glorified kennel) with meager amenities that still requires a separate offsite quarantine system located miles away.

If this sounds like a luxury affair from a front-of-house perspective, consider all of the work architecture firm Gensler has put in to make the place function, like cleaning up 5,000 pounds of waste produced by up to 180 head of cattle per day. Clever architectural solutions are needed to deal with the sheer volume of animals passing through as well as their species-specific needs.

Responding to the movements of visitors passing through the space, this immersive work of installation art puts you in a private bubble in the midst of dense hanging garden – except this remarkable bubble that moves with you.

The Floating Flower Garden by TeamLab, a Japanese art collective, is on display in Tokyo, having been extended due to popular demand. Suspended from above, the plants are pulled up or dropped down to both envelop visitors but also given them hemispheres of personal space amid the floating foliage.

The idea is to make each guest part of the installation, allowing them to separate from friends and experience it alone or to move in groups and see how the computer system responds in realtime.

Meanwhile, the digital setup is not the only piece that changes things over time: “these flowers are alive and growing with each passing day. Each flower has a partner insect and the scent of the flowers becomes stronger at the time that the insect is most active, as a result the scent of the air in the garden space changes according to the time of day, morning, noon, and evening.”

TeamLab believes technology elevates art, but their work also places into pre-modern knowledge and ancient ideas of spatial awareness originating in Japanese philosophy and religion, including Zen gardens. More from the artists: “When a viewer gets close to this flower-filled space, the flowers close to the viewer rise upwards all at once, creating a hemispherical space with the viewer at its center.”

“In other words, although the whole space is filled with flowers, a hemispherical space is constantly being created with the viewer at its center and the viewer is free to move around wherever they want. If many viewers get close to one another, the dome spaces link up to form one single space. In this interactive floating flower garden viewers are immersed in flowers, and become completely one with the garden itself.”