Œillets (Carnation). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées. I think people tend to devalue carnations these days. I have always liked them, beautiful flowers.
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Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
Œillets (Carnation). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées. I think people tend to devalue carnations these days. I have always liked them, beautiful flowers.
BIG pics, do the clickin’ for full size. Cloudy today, so lovely light. And I remembered to sign it. If I didn’t have metal tip squeezies, I’d never sign anything. Acrylics on canvas, 36″ x “36”.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
Tabac (Tobacco). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
Olivier, Belle de nuit, Immortelle, Myrtle, Tabac, Laurier. J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
Not the best shot, still wet. I certainly can make a fucking mess. :D The canvas is heavily textured, I’ll get a better shot in the next couple of days. 36″ x 36″. Click for full size. ETA: For much better photos, in proper light, see here.
One thoroughly used work surface.
© C. Ford, all rights reserved.
The setup consists of 40 Nikon DSLR cameras and two large light diffusion lamps. Photo: @lovesickfrankie.
The future of avatars is here.
How exactly does one become an emotionally competent and reactionary 3D avatar of oneself? I found myself in the midst of precisely 40 DSLR cameras strapped onto poles aimed at my face, with a heavy weight atop of my head, while going through a series of emotions and sounds I wasn’t aware I was capable of. Not exactly a scene from a Tarkovsky film, but not unlike other ventures into life-like technology.
Recently, London live-event design company Immersive presented a new technology created by Expressive AI called Emotion Capture, where, as demonstrated in the above process, avatars are created to be emotionally responsive and as human-like as possible.
You can see and read all about this at The Creators Project.
The Bride of Frankenstein, 1935. Courtesy of the Kirk Hammett Horror and Sci-Fi Memorabilia Collection and Universal Studios Licensing, LLC.
Metallica lead guitarist Kirk Hammett was six years old when he first saw Frankenstein, in the late 1960s. When it was released in 1931, the film was so successful that it spawned multiple sequels, including The Bride of Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, The Ghost of Frankenstein, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein—and earned it a place as one of The New York Times’ 10 best films of the year. It also made an impression on young Hammett. It started his lifetime obsession with horror movies.
For three decades Hammett has fueled this interest—and his own creativity—with a collection of classic horror posters and memorabilia. “My collection takes me to a place where I need to be,” he says. “Among the monsters, where I’m most comfortable and most creative”.
[…]
For the Metallica guitarist, part of the reason he collects horror memorabilia is to share it—in his 2012 book Too Much Horror Business and his Fear FestEvil conventions, for example. Now, a selection of his prized posters and other memorabilia are on display at the Peabody-Essex Museum in (appropriately?) Salem, Massachusetts. Atlas Obscura has a selection of his posters, which are on view from August 12 through November 26, 2017.
Hamlet, Franz Peffer, 1920. Courtesy of the Kirk Hammett Horror and Sci-Fi Memorabilia Collection.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Lionel Reiss, 1921. Courtesy of the Kirk Hammett Horror and Sci-Fi Memorabilia Collection.
You can see much more at Atlas Obscura! I’ve loved these movies from an early age, I wish I could collect such memorabilia.
William and Frederick Langenheim, “Eclipse of the Sun” (1854), daguerreotype (courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art).
On this August 21, a total solar eclipse will be viewable across North America, a rare occurrence that will likely be greeted by a wave of iPhones and digital cameras raised to the sky. Although photographing an eclipse relies a bit on luck, timing, and preparation, our ability to document the celestial event is more accessible than ever. In the 19th century, it took years of experimentation with the newly invented photographic medium to successfully capture a fleeting eclipse.
Attempts at solar eclipse photography are recorded going back to 1842, including Gian Alessandro Majocchi’s photograph of a partial eclipse taken on July 8 in Milan (an image which has not survived). Stefan Hughes, author of Catchers of the Light on the history of astrophotography, writes on his blog that Majocchi’s daguerreotypes only caught the before and after of the totality (or total obscuring of the sun), with the ultimate eclipse just a big blank. It wasn’t until the eclipse of July 28, 1851 that the moment of eclipse was successfully photographed. At the Royal Prussian Observatory in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad in Russia), a daguerreotypist named Johann Julius Friedrich Berkowski carefully exposed a plate through a small refracting telescope attached to a heliometer. The daguerreotype revealed the moon perfectly positioned over the sun, exposing the solar corona for the first time in photography, hovering like a halo around the darkness.
You can read and see more about these fascinating ventures in astrophotography at Hyperallergic.
Thé Et Café (Tea and Coffee). I haven’t noted it before, but all of these can be clicked for full size. J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
Café looks absolutely blissed out. Now I want coffee.
PRAGUE, Czech Republic (Reuters) – Czech artist Ladislav Vlna has swapped his brush for a blowtorch as he ‘paints’ with fire to create artworks that change according to lighting.
Vlna’s self-titled metallurgic painting technique results in surprisingly delicate and detailed pieces, mostly portraits or figures, with oxyacetylene torches.
The 40-year-old artist begins by painting a draft upon a steel surface and then carves, sharpens and polishes the basic image into it before putting a flame to the engraving which alters its color, depending on the temperature. This process gives the piece its unique appearance.
“I am painting using fire instead of a paintbrush. I am extracting the colors from inside the steel with heat and fire.”
You can read and see more about this extraordinary artist at Reuters. Definitely treat yourself and have a wander at his website! Truly beautiful and unique pieces.
[Sœur] Nenuphar. (Water Lily). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
From Lizania Cruz’s series Flowers for Immigration.
From Lizania Cruz’s series Flowers for Immigration.
From Lizania Cruz’s series Flowers for Immigration.
A stunning project, so eloquent and poignant.
“Say it with flowers,” the expression goes. So, to communicate the thoughts that immigrants harbor about President Trump, artist Lizania Cruz decided to invite some of them to create bouquets for him. Her ongoing photo series Flowers for Immigration documents the resulting arrangements — quiet, beautiful manifestations of opinions that are often unspoken or silenced.
All are the creations of undocumented immigrant bodega workers who spend their days helping New Yorkers express themselves through flowers. Cruz, wanting to see the florists do the same for their own feelings, launched the project last November. Since then, she’s recruited 11 flower sellers to participate in the project. Not everyone she approached took her up on the offer, with some disagreeing with her objective and others refusing out of concern for their status. But providing a platform for those whose lives are at the center of current debates over immigration is precisely the goal of Cruz, who herself came to the city after being born and raised in the Dominican Republic.
“I hope viewers will be able to connect with the beauty and humanity of these undocumented workers and that their voices are amplified,” she told Hyperallergic. “Undocumented workers can’t go out and protest because of fear of facing legal actions. So I hope this project allowed them to have an opinion.” The participants, whom she paid for their involvement, are identified only by first names.
You can read much more about this project, and see much more at Hyperallergic, or visit Flowers for Immigration.
Guimauve. (Marsh Mallow). J.J. Grandville, Les fleurs animées.
“L’an 2000” (“The year 2000,” 1901), print on cardboard; a collection of uncut sheets for confectionery cards showing life imagined in the future (photo by the author for Hyperallergic). Click for full size.
LONDON — The 1982 film Blade Runner imagined 2019 Los Angeles as a dystopia of noirish neon and replicants, robots sent to do hard labor on off-world colonies. It’s a future in which engineered beings are so close to humans as to make the characters question the very nature of life. We’re now just a couple of years from this movie’s timeline, and although our robots are still far from mirroring humanity, our science fiction continues to envision giant leaps in technology that are often rooted in contemporary concerns of where our innovations are taking us.
Patrick Gyger, curator of Into the Unknown: A Journey through Science Fiction at the Barbican Centre, told Hyperallergic that, for him, science fiction “allows creators to look beyond the horizon of knowledge and play with concepts and situations.” The exhibition is a sprawling examination of the genre of science fiction going back to the 19th century, with over 800 works. These include film memorabilia, vintage books, original art, and even a kinetic sculpture in a lower-level space by Conrad Shawcross. “In Light of The Machine” has a huge, robotic arm twisting within a henge-like circle of perforated walls, so visitors can only glimpse its strange dance at first, before moving to the center and seeing that it holds one bright light at the end of its body.
[…]
The exhibition shows, but does not dwell on, who has been left out of a history mostly shaped by white men (there are rare exceptions on view, like the “Astro Black” video installation by Soda_Jerk that muses on Sun Ra’s theories of Afrofuturism). It would be worthwhile to spend more time on figures who broke through these barriers, such as author Octavia Butler. As discussed on a recent podcast from Imaginary Worlds, her black characters were sometimes portrayed as white on her book covers to make them more appealing to science fiction readers. The exhibition could also have a deeper context for why certain veins of science fiction are prominent in particular eras, and perhaps question why we don’t have a lot of science fiction narratives on current crises like climate change. For instance, the much smaller 2016 exhibition Fantastic Worlds: Science and Fiction 1780–1910 from the Smithsonian Libraries compared milestones like Mary Shelley’s 1818 Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus with physician Luigi Galvani’s “animal electricity” experiments on animating dead frog legs, and highlighted how Jules Verne channeled the doomed Franklin expedition in his 1864 book The Adventures of Captain Hatteras.
Nevertheless, having an exhibition like Into the Unknown at a mainstream space like the Barbican is significant, showing the art world appreciates science fiction beyond kitsch. And science fiction continues to be one of our important portals for thinking about the ramifications of our technological choices, and where they might take us.
You can read and see much, much more at Hyperallergic. Fascinating!