Art Bits II
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010 at 12:13 pmI’m piling up tabs full of eye candy and eye poison and curios, and Firefox is getting slow. Time to drop them here. (Forget bookmarks, my bookmarks are the black hole of Calcutta.)
Homunculus, a short movie by Hydra — “Homunculus is a dark and twisted fable of spontaneous generation and untrammeled id. Taking its title from the Latin word for “Little Human”, the piece is an associative mashup between the two concepts behind the word: The first being middle-age alchemical beliefs that “little men” could be spontaneous generated from dead or decaying matter. The second being Carl Jung’s usage as a personification of pure id.” Little furry men emerging from the decay of a vanitas painting and…but I won’t spoil it.
A crochet coral reef that illustrates hyperbolic space (as does coral, and sea slugs and lettuce; but apparently no one knew what hyperbolic space might look like until mathematician Daina Taimina had the idea of crocheting it). One of the originators of the reef, Margaret Wertheim, talks about the project and its mathematics here. (As one of the commentators points out, she might not be correct in saying that “the most famous postulate in all of mathematics has been proven wrong.” But I think that’s a minor quibble in the overall awesomeness of crocheting hyperbolic coral.)
A kinda-sphinxy siren by Antony Micallef. I love both the image itself and the painting technique.
The body bakery of Kittiwat Unarrom, a Thai artist who makes hyperrealistic sculptures of rotten dead body parts out of bread. All edible!
Carmen Lozar’s glass art. Her flameworked, painted pieces are gorgeous. Although the website calls them “diminutive celebrations of the everyday”, they also celebrate the imaginary. She also makes glass couture — glass garments with nobody (or invisible bodies) inside them.
Weird illustrations by Léonard Sarluis for Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension (1912) by Gaston de Pawlowski. I dig the things on the stairs.
February 3rd, 2010 at 12:42 am
The body bakery is great.
And people are telling ME that I’M morbid.
Obviously, they know nothing.
February 3rd, 2010 at 5:56 am
Also, just watched the homunculus thing. I love when they start thudding into the fourth wall, although I was a little disappointed that the homunculi weren’t stop-motion.
February 3rd, 2010 at 1:45 pm
D — you’re still quite morbid, though…
Emera — I’m so pathetic, I wanted them to stop gobbling each other. (Maybe only masochists do stop-motion now?)
February 4th, 2010 at 11:40 am
The dragon thing (ninth from the top in the Weird Illustrations bit) looks like it should be flopping up on the docks of Ashamoil any minute now IMO. And the body bakery is awesome.
February 4th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Oh damn, I should have watched the Homunculus video before I commented, thus saving gratuituous posts. But that video is pretty damned awesome. The homunculi look like the bastard offspring of Pan’s Labyrinth’s Pale Man and the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. They act like it too.
February 4th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
Dragon thing flops up on docks, homuncumallows run out and eat it. And I’m having deja vu with this comment, only the deja vu scenario is more complicated, involving extra bits that could only come from a dream. Very odd.
February 11th, 2010 at 1:19 am
Can’t BELIEVE you didn’t create a link to the new Megadeth album… What?! That wasn’t one of the tabs you had open?
February 17th, 2010 at 6:13 am
Your ploy to make me look it up on YT succeeded. Nice to see Mustaine is still angry after all these years. Now this old geez is going back to her chanting Tibetan monks.
February 28th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Wow…I decided to Google your name this morning to see if you had released any books that I’d somehow missed (The Etched City is one of my all-time favorites I’ve pushed several copies onto friends!)…so I as quite happy to find your site! Not only do you have a wonderfully witchy way with words, you also have great taste in art!
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:58 am
Nope, I’m a slowcoach.
Thanks for dropping by, and much gratitude for the pushing!
Sometimes I have bad taste in art, but I try not to show it too much