Steven Kraan sits at home in Rotterdam drawing weird comics every day. The comics are about Kung Fu cats, Smoking Carrots, deformed spider children and, erm, Nicolas Cage. When he’s finished drawing his comics, he puts them up on Facebook for the world to see. And the world is absolutely loving them.

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Film director Harmony Korine (Gummo, Trash Humpers) is working on a new film called God’s Joke. This time his film will be financed by crowd-funding through Cinema Reloaded, a project hosted by the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Formed in New York and now based in Rotterdam and Berlin, SMAQ is a collaborative studio for architecture and urbanism by architects Sabine Müller and Andreas Quednau. Here they have created an interesting installation called Bad (bath) in the Solitude Palace Gardens in Stuttgart with the premise of creating a usable sculpture which entwines a 1000 metre long garden hose throughout a timber structure. At one end, the hose is filled by a hydrant with enough water for a bath, and is then pushed through the length of the hose, entering a high surface area shape where it is heated by the sun. It is then entered back into the structure for a warm bath and then further along to be spread through the gardens as irrigation. It’s a fascinating demonstration of inventive sculpture that both tells a story and performs a function.

Just a few days ago, Benjamin Verdoncke climbed out of the human-sized nest he’d been residing in for the past seven days. The Belgian artist took six weeks to build the nest, which hung fifty metres high against a skyscraper in Rotterdam. To build the nest he apparently used twenty-three silver birches, one birch, one willow, two straw bales, one bucket of spit (take note, nest builders), three bags of sand, twelve buckets of glue, nineteen cans of polyurethane foam, and a partridge in a pear tree. And no, he did not get laid.

Photographer Desiree Palmen takes some pretty amazing photos of people that have been camouflaged in their surroundings. It’s a simple concept, and not necessarily radical, but the Rotterdam-based artist does it well enough for the resulting images to be rather striking.

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On the harbour in Vuurplaat, Rotterdam, a proposed Urban Cactus rises from the usually boxy Dutch architectural landscape. Responding to the natural setting of being on the harbour, UCX Architects envisage a housing project that is green with stacked undulating floor plates, giving large outdoor terraces to each apartment and allowing for light penetration. Details of eco attributes have yet to be released but a cactus starting point could be a good sign.