Art Club | The Verge

Ghost orchid in the machine

2026-04-13T11:00:45-04:00

Perfect Lovers II | Photo: Nik Massey

Vacuum cleaners, personal massagers, electronic baby rockers, and walking pads: These are the secondhand machines Rachel Youn sources to create their kinetic sculptures. Made with artificial flowers, metal hardware, and these used electronic components, each one possesses a humanlike presence.

Slow Burn is made from an artificial orchid, a neck massager, bits of metal that clamp the orchids' petals, and a monitor mount attaching the entire apparatus to a gallery wall. A motor on the massager animates metal rods that force the orchid open and close, a visual that feels caged in its sexuality, a flower forced to furl and unfurl infinitely fo …

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How a prize-winning cartoonist brings hand-drawn comics to the web

2026-03-04T10:45:56-05:00

Jailed during the 2021 coup in Myanmar, American journalist Danny Fenster spent six months as a political prisoner. For much of his incarceration he battled boredom and fear, subsisting on meditation and podcasts on an SD card smuggled in by mail, sent by his girlfriend, Juliana.

Now, nearly five years after his release, he collaborated with his cousin Amy Kurzweil, a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist and graphic memoirist, on a long-form interactive comic for The Verge about his imprisonment. I chatted via email with Kurzweil about her role as an illustrator and storyteller in this ambitious long-form project, the responsibilities inherent …

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Every little thing she does is magic

2026-02-16T11:59:08-05:00

In a style that feels nostalgic and nascent, Bree O'Donnell is crafting her singular vision of a 3D witch named Mary. Through the tiny window of short clips on Instagram and TikTok, Mary's world seems enchanting and vast. Bree's work exudes melancholic emotion and ethereal femininity, painting the surfaces of Mary's world in the vibrating style of stop-motion animation, dappled with sparkling light and computer-generated surfaces so convincing it feels like you could pose the model with your own hands.

O'Donnell sat down with us to talk a bit about her process creating textures and her life's work making magic real.

Can you tell me a litt …

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What lies beneath: filming gators in Florida springs

2025-05-09T15:13:11-04:00

If you're like me, you've been anxiously searching for any relief from the Bad News™ and endless stream of AI slop plaguing your feed. Joseph Ricketts' breathtaking wildlife videos could be the antidote. An alligator taking a nap on the floor of a crystal clear spring. Schools of fish glittering in the darkness. A cosmic cloud of burnt orange tannic river swirling into clear blue water. A giant salamander battle on an Appalachian riverbed.

Joseph is an ecologist, underwater videographer, and alligator researcher based in Florida. He brings a calming and curious gaze to some of the more obscure underwater vistas through his work as a scient …

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Box art

2025-05-05T11:01:31-04:00

Literary journals might have a stuffy reputation. But since its conception in 1998 by author Dave Eggers, McSweeney's Quarterly has been anything but, opting instead to be an endlessly mutating delivery system for writing and art. It has been a hardcover book, a paperback, a newspaper. Once it was a bundle of mail; another time, a deck of playing cards. Imagination and capriciousness have defined McSweeney's for nearly three decades.

The latest issue, edited by Rita Bullwinkel and guest-edited by two celebrated writers - cartoonist Thi Bui and novelist Vu Tran - attempts to capture the messy and disparate nature of the Vietnamese diaspora w …

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The beautiful, retro tech of two theatrical sound designers

2025-03-20T15:41:39-04:00

When asked what they do for work, creative couple Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen should probably just say "yes." True professional multihyphenates, Char's gig history includes stints as a UI/UX designer, conference organizer, concert cellist, and Apple Genius; Neely-Cohen is a novelist, ballet dancer, and coeditor of the experimental literary journal The HTML Review. Together, they've built everything from a real-life version of Cher Horowitz's Clueless closet to the sound design of a play with over 200 original sound cues.

I asked them for a tour of the tech in their Williamsburg, Brooklyn, loft, where they regularly host literary sa …

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What can a video 100 pixels high teach us about storytelling?

2025-03-03T09:13:28-05:00

Since its founding in 2007, the Mumbai-based collaborative studio CAMP has used surveillance, TV networks, and digital archives to examine how we move through and record the world. In addition to their film and video projects, the wildly prolific studio runs a rooftop cinema in Mumbai and maintains several online video archives, including the largest digital archive of Indian film.

CAMP's first major US museum exhibition is on view now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York through July 20th and includes three video projects spanning two decades of work. The exhibit's three films repurposed private television sets into interactive neighbor …

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Chris Ware explains how to draw strangers on the bus without getting arrested

2025-02-27T17:47:21-05:00

Every month, The Verge's designers, photographers, and illustrators gather to share the work of artists who inspire us. Now, we're turning our Art Club into an interview series in which we catch up with the artists and designers we admire and find out what drives them.

Cartoonist Chris Ware's work is so precise that you might assume it was illustrated digitally - but it's all drawn on paper. One of America's most celebrated graphic artists, Ware's lines are so meticulous and the geometry is so exacting that it seems impossible a human hand made them. His latest book, the third and final installment of his Acme Novelty Datebook series, co …

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How one creator visualized AI by using very little AI

2024-12-05T08:30:00-05:00

Stormy Pyeatte is a UK-based video and photo artist who works with practical effects and projection mapping. The design team here at The Verge worked with her to create the evocative visuals in "Friend or Faux?" - a story layered with ethical and philosophical questions about the newly unfolding relationships some people have with AI chatbots.

I stumbled upon Pyeatte's work on Instagram one day when I was scrolling mindlessly through the feed - and it stopped me in my tracks. Because the tech we report on is always changing, I am constantly on the lookout for innovative ways of creating visuals for our site. I was blown away by how otherwor …

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Space Vacation’s gorgeous prints celebrate fan-favorite movies

2024-04-26T13:28:39-04:00

I first fell in love with Samar Haddad's playful yet sophisticated caricatures on Instagram, where she publishes pop-culture poster art of her favorite TV and films under the name "Space Vacation." Her exemplary cartooning skills allow her to deftly create a distinct face with only a few lines, creating an instantly recognizable trademark. Her drawings are funny and weird; …

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