X
March 31, 2014 Marina Galperina

ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, Ekaterinburg-based urban intervention and street artist Tima Radya talks about Figure #2: Game — a giant, dynamic sculpture welded from steel, lifted by cranes and exploding with two billion ruble bills. (Translated from Russian.) I wanted to show the project […]

Read More…

February 19, 2014 Marina Galperina

Earlier today, Nadya Tolokonnikova, Maria Alyokhina and others were brutally attacked by Cossacks in Sochi, 20 miles from the Olympic Park, while performing a Pussy Riot action. The Cossacks are part of Sochi’s internal security force, beefed up for the Olympics. Shortly after, the IOC denied violations of the Olympic Charter as it was a “local” Sochi issue […]

Read More…

February 18, 2014 Marina Galperina

A few hours ago, Pussy Riot’s Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alekhina were walking down the street in Sochi when they were detained by the police for alleged hotel theft. Along with several activists and journalists who recently arrived to the Winter Olympics site, they were roughly shoved into vans. “We are not resisting arrest; they […]

Read More…

February 17, 2014 Andy Cush

The very bad Jamaican bobsled team has a very good promotional video courtesy of their country’s tourism board and the legendary music producer Sidney Mills, who has worked with the likes of Steel Pulse and Boogie Down Productions. Set to a bouncy reggae-flavored tune by Mills, we see 8-bit versions of the team cruising down […]

Read More…

February 14, 2014 Marina Galperina

Yevgeny Vitishko, geologist and outspoken critic of the Sochi Winter Olympics’ devastating impact on the region’s environment and biodiversity, is being jailed for three years in a penal colony. In 2012, the 40-year-old environmental activist spray-painted ‘The forest is for everybody” on a corrugated metal fence around an illegal construction zone inside Sochi’s national park. Behind […]

Read More…

February 11, 2014 Marina Galperina

Artist London Kaye envelops the Olympics logo with LGBT pride in Brooklyn. (Photo: @London Kaye) […]

Read More…

Andy Cush

Shaun White, America’s Great Tomato-Colored Hope for Olympic glory, placed fourth today in the men’s snowboarding halfpipe event. Iouri Podladtchikov, of Switzerland placed first, with Ayumu Hirano and Taku Hiraoka, both of Japan, in second and third, respectively. Hirano is 15 years old. The good people of Twitter, as you might imagine, aren’t happy about it. Here are […]

Read More…

February 10, 2014 Marina Galperina

The Winter Olympics are in full swing in Sochi. ANIMAL is relaunching MedalCount.com, the micro-site that tracks the news that really matter — who is winning? But this year, we’re using our high-profile piece of internet real estate to aggregate and disseminate news that really really matters — all the stories that cover the enforcement of Putin’s discriminatory “anti-gay […]

Read More…

February 7, 2014 Andy Cush

In a show of protest against Russia’s oppressive anti-gay laws, Toronto is flying a rainbow above its city hall during the Sochi Winter Olympics, along with a host of other Canadian cities. Mayor Rob Ford, who never saw an issue he couldn’t make an ass of himself over, is upset about it. “This is about […]

Read More…

February 6, 2014 Andy Cush

The New York Times created these beautiful, fantastical renderings of what a New York City Winter Olympics, and, well, it looks a lot better than Super Bowl Boulevard. Pictured above is an imaginary downhill course in Central Park that begins at 59th Street at twice the height of the Empire State Building, then slopes downward as it […]

Read More…