Nathalie Miebach: Storms as Sculpture as Music (Video)
Via TED Talks:
Artist and TED Fellow Nathalie Miebach takes weather data from massive storms and turns it into complex sculptures that embody the forces of nature and time. These sculptures then become musical scores for a string quartet to play.
Moebius Has Silver Surfed Elsewhere …
The many worlds he created live on. Artinfo writes:
Jean Giraud, best known by his pen name Moebius, died on Saturday after a long illness. He was 73. The French illustrator created comics set in the American West and was especially admired for his wildly inventive science fiction and fantasy worlds. Giraud published his first comics in several children’s magazines during the mid-1950s. In 1963, he created the character Mike “Blueberry” Donovan, a hard-boiled American lieutenant, who appeared in the comic “Fort Navajo,” which was co-created by Giraud and Jean-Michel Charlier.
In December 1974, Giraud co-founded the French comics magazine Métal Hurlant, whose American version, Heavy Metal, was launched in 1977. Moebius debuted the character Arzach in the pages of Métal Hurlant, creating a story without words, in which the hero rides a pterodactyl-like creature through alien landscapes that evoke dreams and the subconscious. While Blueberry and Arzach remain his most famous creations,…
The Extreme Environment Love Hotel
Japanese erotic hotels famously offer themed fetish rooms that transport guests to the oddest of locations. Artist Ai Hasegawa hopes to go further by creating plans for an Extreme Environment Love Hotel with rooms that simulate physically impossible locales — are these the honeymoons of the future? She explains:
The Extreme Environment Love Hotel simulates impossible places to go such as an earth of three hundred million years ago, or the surface of Jupiter by manipulating invisible but ever-present environmental factors, for example atmospheric conditions and gravity.
How might our bodies change, struggle or even adapt with varying conditions around us? Recent figures speculate that around 10% of children are now conceived by In Vitro Fertilisation. The world around us and our reproductive technologies have given rise to new ideas of what sex is or could be and where it stands between our biologically-programmed needs and inclinations and our human fetishes and desires. Perhaps…
Dreaming of Electric Sheep
In this column for Toronto Standard, Emily Keeler asks, “Are Dystopic literary visions becoming the way of the world?” Call me Henry Case, but i think she might be on to something.
Okay, it’s true: I tend to prefer fiction to fact. Though some journalists (and essayists) who work with what you might call “reality” get my gears going, I typically think stories are better, if only because they offer a window to a different, much less banal world. I learned early that novels are a place to run to, islands of respite from the endless rowing across the boring and tedious ocean between birth and death. It’s a place, to abuse a phrase associated with one of fiction’s loudest champions, where I can go to get away from being already pretty much away from it all. Stories relieve me of myself, from the blandness of my mostly apolitical and largely…
A War In Outdoor Space: Banksy Versus Advertising
The art world’s most intriguingly anonymous character, Banksy, is known for appropriating all sorts of outdoor and arguably “public” spaces. Who else does that? The advertising industry of course. I think one has to agree with his sentiments, albeit with a wry smile given his own predilection for placing his art in places our eyeballs can’t avoid. Here’s his statement:
A Guide To Getting Lost
Maps and directions are virtually worthless, as they have become ubiquitous. But what about the incomparable sensation of being lost? Much harder to come by. That’s where this guide comes in. (Eventually taking you back to where you started.) Via Pop-Up City:
Recent Chelsea College of Art & Design graduate Dan Cottrell has created a guide for the sole aim of getting lost. Pyschogeography is nothing new, but AWOL provides a beautifully simple design approach to the subject.
AWOL comes as a pack, consisting of a compass that doesn’t work, a simple poster and and a map that feature algorithmic walks, which always lovingly return you to your departure point – ensuring you can explore your surroundings worry-free.
A 12-Million-Person Imaginary City Created By An Autistic Savant
Beautiful renderings which took 20 years to complete: the complete plan of a massive European city that does not exist, revealing the fruits of unrestrained dreaming. Via Brain Pickings:
For the past 20 years, French autistic savant Gilles Trehin has been devising and developing this fanciful megacity, from the remarkable architectural detail to the thoughtful cultural context rooted in real world history. Urville gathers 300 of Trehin’s meticulous, obsessive drawings and sets the door ajar to this complex and intricately woven alternate reality.
Envisioning London’s Water Level In 1,000 Years
A portrayal of how our world may be changed: Plunge is the title of an installation created by Michael Pinsky scattered at sites across London. Halos of blue LED lights mark the water levels across the city one millennium into the future, if/when sea levels rise due to temperature increases.
‘Forgotten Man’ Painting Shows President Obama Trampling Constitution
The Forgotten Man by Jon McNaughton
Peter M. Vilo reports on the currently raging controversy for CBS Las Vegas:
In front of the White House a man is sitting on a park bench in the throes of depression. He is surrounded by all 43 presidents. In the forefront, purposefully ignoring the depressed man is President Obama, whose right foot is stepping on the Constitution. James Madison is next to Obama, pleading with him to stop.
This tableau is called “The Forgotten Man”, a painting by Jon McNaughton, an artist who is known for his politically-charged work.
The painting, which uses objects such as discarded dollar bills as symbols and scraps of paper with individual constitutional amendments scrawled onto them, has been making the rounds across the Internet.
The painting was initially released in 2010 and has resurfaced, causing a stir when it appeared for a caption contest on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow’s blog.
The responses have ranged…
Crafting With Human Hair
Victorian Hair Wreath
During the 19th century it was fashionable to incorporate human hair into brooches, watch chains, wreaths, and other objects that could be worn or displayed. Victorian Gothic explores the lost art of sentimental hairwork:
Mrs. Hamlin of Omaha, Nebraska left a rather curious heirloom to her descendants—an intricately woven bouquet composed entirely of human hair. Buried deep inside, each of its flowers is numbered with a tiny label corresponding one of fifteen names written on a separate index card; those of herself and her loved ones. More than a century ago, each of these people offered up their locks of brown or gray—literally, pieces of themselves—to provide the material for what would become a lasting symbol family unity.
The weaver need not have been the eccentric that one might suppose. On the contrary, she was likely to have been a conventional middle class lady going about her fancywork. She may have included a…
The Sinister Vision Of Street View
9eyes is one of the best collections of Google Street View screenshots, providing a haunting glimpse of the world we live in, culled from all seven continents and presented without context. Are all of these real? Some of the strangest entries can be confirmed as legitimate.
By Popular Demand: The Cure For What Ails You
A little over a decade ago, disinformation published its first book, the now out of print anthology You Are Being Lied To (superseded by You Are STILL Being Lied To). We didn’t really know much about publishing books at the time, so when the book industry’s biggest annual trade show in Chicago came around, we needed help to stand out from the crowd. Enter Thomas Negovan, who was, and is our standard bearer in Chicago. Proprietor of the amazing art gallery Century Guild, Tom “found the others” for us.
A Renaissance man, Tom is also an accomplished musician who has done something truly unusual and, to my mind so compelling, that if you are anywhere near Los Angeles this week, you should go to the most unique of record release parties. I asked Tom to explain for disinformation:
It’s Sunday night, I’m up in Topanga in my friend Ysanne’s cabin, and as I experience no internet, no cell phone, and a…
‘Union of Opposites’ Ritual Occult Performance
Brian Butler featured in the disinformation TV series and is Kenneth Anger’s main collaborator. His latest work, ‘Union of Opposites,’ is an experiment in ritual magick, combining the use of sound and light with the intent of creating a collective out-of-body experience. It will debut at Art Los Angeles Contemporary on Saturday, January 21, 2012. Brian told disinformation:
Aleister Crowley defines magick as “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.” This statement provides the magickal formula in a very simple yet powerful way.
Union of Opposites is a public ritual performance that explores how the principals of magick operate in the astral and physical worlds. It is a live experiment with the participation of an audience. I have designed this working to activate the chakras in a specific order that is very unconventional. Given the advancements in science and technology since Crowley’s lifetime the rituals must be constantly revised in order…
Seeing And Hearing In The Future
In an interview with the Believer, key performance artist and electronic musician Laurie Anderson traverses a lot of ground. But one intriguing portion concerns her thoughts on sensory enhancement as the big advancement to come. If we can view, hear, and touch better and more intensely, will we be more alive?
Five thousand years from now — let’s say we didn’t find the God particle. We’re still looking. I think we probably won’t be making things of the nature that we are now. I think we’ll just be trying to appreciate things more. Maybe we’ll design better ears. I mean, our hearing’s crappy. We’ll have huge ears and we’ll be able to tune in to Mars, or we’ll have a hundred lenses through which we can look onto the surface of Mars with our so-called “bare eyes,” or look through our hands. We’ll be able to be in the present more effectively.
Walter Potter’s Taxidermy Wants to Swallow Your Soul
Walter Potter’s collection of anthropomorphic taxidermy included cigar-smoking squirrels, athletic toads, and a kittens’ tea party. Victorian Gothic writes:
While the preservation of hunting trophies may be the best-known use of the taxidermist’s art, fans of Walter Potter’s anthropomorphic tableaux can attest to the fact that it has its other, more silly uses. Potter (1835-1918) was a self-taught taxidermist who grew up in the rural community of Bramber, Sussex, at a time when stuffing dead animals was considered to be a suitable hobby for young boys. For technical assistance, he would have had any number of popular manuals at his disposal. For inspiration, he had his younger sister’s illustrated nursery rhyme books and the Great Exhibition of 1851, where anthropomorphic taxidermy was first displayed to the British public.
His first major contribution was an elaborate diorama depicting the death and burial of Cock Robin, which he began at age 19 and took seven years to…
Man Jailed For Creating Mutant Taxidermy
Guilty of imagining a vivid, strange world that doesn’t exist, and trying to bring it into creation. The Daily Mail writes:
Like a modern day Dr Frankenstein, Enrique Gomez De Molina creates hauntingly stunning hybrid sculptures made from the stuffed parts of dead animals. But it…could land the Miami artist in jail for up to five years and see him forking out $250,000 in fines.
He pleaded guilty to illegally importing parts from endangered species to make his beloved mythical creatures. He smuggled in the parts, skins and remains, from whole cobras, pangolins, hornbills, and the skulls of babirusa and orangutans from areas all over the world including Bali, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and China.
Giant Emocon Reflects The Mood Of The City
Installed in Lindau Island, Germany, the Feel-o-meter sums up the populace’s collective consciousness. Pass by with a frown, and you could slightly dampen its smile. (You wouldn’t want to do that, would you?) Via Information Aesthetics:
Fuehlometer (Feel-o-meter) by Richard Wilhelmer, Julius von Bismarck, and Benjamin Maus is a light installation consisting of a giant smiley face that reflects the average mood of the people living in the city. The average emotional value is calculated through the computational analysis of the faces of people passing a camera located in a specific part of the city.
Extreme Futurist Festival 2011
Picture an event where the bridge between the counterculture and academia is finally crossed. From live tech demonstrations to futuristic presentations to provocative performance art to live music we will take you off the grid as we explore a new kaleidoscopic wonderland. If the original Burning Man was to meet the Singularity Summit, you would have Extreme Futurist Fest 2011.
The dance for the realization of the future begins in the corridors of art, literature, and culture. Only by connecting together the greatest visionary minds with the most innovative and rule-breaking forms of artistic expression and cultural mind-melding can we unlock the full potential of the Future and bring it into the Present. We offer you the bold new interdisciplinary movement of the 21st Century. A place where the right brain and left brain merge into a new “Undivided Mind”.
The future is all around us today. The explosion of the Internet…
Photographs Of Black Sites
Via We Me Make Money Not Art, a conversation with artist Trevor Paglen, who acts as a modern-day discoverer, travelling the globe attempting to photograph the last “uncharted territory” — classified locations such as the CIA’s rendition sites:
For his Limit Telephotography series, Paglen used high powered telescopes to picture the “black” sites, a series of secret locations operated by the CIA. Often outside of U.S. territory and legal jurisdiction, these locations do not officially exist, they range from American torture camps in Afghanistan to front companies running airlines whose purpose is to covertly move suspects around.
Paradoxically Paglen’s images deepen the secrecy of their subject rather than uncover it. Limit-telephotography most closely resembles astrophotography, a technique that astronomers use to photograph objects that might be trillions of miles from Earth. Paglen’s subjects are much closer but also even more difficult to photograph. To physical distance, one has indeed to add the…
