This morning rebel/activist/dissident/badass Chinese artist Ai Weiwei released a heavy metal single and music video on his website. The video and song, entitled Dumbass, features re-creations from his 81 days of detention. Also portraying the rock star fantasies he imagines his guards having, Ai Weiwei told the Guardian that his country was one of "crazy menace and inhuman conditions" and that the video shows an "inch-accurate" recreation of the cell, down to the wallpaper. "...stand on the frontline like a dumbass, in a country that puts out like a hooker. The fields are full of fuckers, dumbasses are everywhere... Fuck forgiveness, tolerance be damned, to hell with manners, the low-life's invincible." - Dumbass

This morning, the World Wide Web is winning. Artist James Harvey has proposed and is organizing a project seeing the complete re-telling of Otomo Katsuhiro's manga classic Akira using characters from The Simpsons. Inspired by fellow artist Ryan Humphrey's drawings, James is enlisting the help of 768 people to each create 6 pages each of all six volumes. The submission period is almost over but you can see the huge array of awesome submissions on Tumblr and try and squeeze yours in before the deadline! See Ryan Humphrey's drawings after the jump...

Adrian Landon Brooks' drawings are beautiful and nightmarish, utilizing the simple combination of gouache and pen on paper to create haunting illustrations of idols, icons and strange figures. Brooks is drawn to sacred art that emphasizes a "savior," and he speaks of his creative power as such, something that has brough him "freedom and redemption from everything that ails me." Brooks' handling of gouache gives his figures a glowing, almost lava-like appearance, propelling them through fields of dark space as if full of fire. These imaginings have a mysterious and powerful message, yet what that is feels slightly out of reach-- we recommend looking even closer, spending some time with these lovely drawings. 

Erdal Inci is an Istanbul-based filmmaker, graffiti artist, and photographer who has been experimenting with cloned motion in video since 2004. He has been converting these videos into GIFs and posting them online for our viewing pleasure! Take a look at some of them after the jump...

This morning we take a look at a series of photographs by Berlin-based, New York City-born photographer Mustafah Abdulaziz. Memory Loss was captured throughout the United States and "explores the social identification and how our ideas of self representation create instances of cultural disconnect."

Cayce Zavaglia is back with some new and impressive embroidery work. Done in a hyper-realistic for with incredible layered detail, Cayce uses crewel embroidery wool and has taken the qualities of oil painting by mixing her thread colors to mimic brushstrokes. Amazing.

We are enjoying the work of Kiersten Essenpreis this morning. Kiersten works as a freelance illustrator and gallery artist.

Another Ricky Powell event just opened, in perfect timing with his feature in our Beastie Boys issue that is on newsstands now. David Kesting Presents "Ricky Powell", a collection of photographs from the artists archives reflecting the urban artistic and music references between these two times and cultures. Curated by Tono Radvany a longtime friend of Powell known for cataloging, exhibiting and printing Powell’s work.

Steve Powers aka "Espo" just opened a new solo show on May 18, 2013, entitled “Visual Blues” at Alice Gallery in Brussels. In Powers’s own words, “I’m in awe of the power and the reach of music. To compete with the majesty of music, I make paintings that are visual blues. I distill my everyday experience into paintings I call Daily Metaltations. They are painted very fast, fresh from the epiphanies that inspired them. The larger paintings draw from those metaltations and go to a deeper understanding of the transactions we make everyday to live our lives.”

Queens of the Stone Age have been pumping the promotion of their new LP, ...Like Clockwork, all over the web over the past month, and we have been excited to see one of our favorite artists, Boneface, get the attention he deserves. The artist created the album cover artwork for QOTSA, and now has over 15 minutes of animation going along with Queens' new music. Epic.