Winner of the 2012 Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film, William Joyce and Brandon Oldenburg’s The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore tells the story of a young man whisked away (along with the rest of his town) by a great wind. In a desolate, gray landscape he is lead to a library full of living, flying books and becomes its caretaker, all the while writing a book of his own.
Beautifully told without words, the Lessmore has both the look and mannerisms of a Keaton-esque silent film star. The books, too, are imbued with a fantastic sense of life, despite their limited ability to emote. Lessmore’s main, Humpty Dumpty-like companion is especially well done, the flipping of illustrated pages allowing it to portray more complex emotions. Along with an understated score, it’s a lovely, sweet story. I had meant to watch this before the Oscars, and seeing it now, I find it most deserving of its honors.
Seo Young Deok’s work utilizes chains of various sorts (though, most commonly, bicycle chains) welded together with painstaking precision. His figures are superb, they have a fluidity that shows a deep understanding of the human form. They also scream volumes about weight. Many of them are bent underneath it, seem to be in danger of being crushed by a heaviness equal to that of the materials they are comprised of, their faces — if they have one — seem to hint at some great inner turmoil. It’s a stark, often grim collection of work, but beautiful nevertheless.
Many of us remember Andrew Huang‘s DIY sci-fi short, “Doll Face“, which went viral on YouTube in 2007, boosting the USC graduate’s professional career. Huang’s most recent work, this short film called “SOLIPSIST“, is nothing short of a vibrant, sensual revelation. It earned him and his team the Special Jury Prize for Experimental Short at Slamdance 2012.
Bartholomäus Traubeck, a German designer, artist, and inventor, has crafted a modified record player that takes wood slices from trees and creates music out of scan data gathered from the inner rings:
The Traubeck tree turntable pairs a standard record turntable with a PlayStation Eye Camera attached to the (motorized, moving) arm. In lieux of a tangible needle locking into the grooves of a piece of vinyl, the slowly panning, stylus-mounted Eye Camera reader scans a disc of wood as it rotates below, then passes the data on to computer running an Ableton Live program, which Traubeck has specifically installed with algorhythims that match distinct keyboard notes to various scan density levels.
The resulting music is surprisingly lucid, conveying –quite literally– the internal rhythms of the life of an individual tree. Breathtaking and melancholy.
A breathtaking combination of time lapse and 3D optical illusion by California-based multimedia artist Jeff Frost:
“Over 40,000 high resolution still images were shot on Canon DSLR cameras for this film. I roamed the deserts of California and Utah looking for abandoned structures in the same manner that my Grandpa, Alfred, explored the Four Corners area looking for ancient Native American dwellings. This film is dedicated to him.”
A stunning series of anatomical cross sections by artist Lisa Nilsson, made using paper filigree, coiled strips of paper (in this case, Japanese mulberry paper). Using photographic references, Nilsson’s pieces are beautiful to look at, the rolled paper adding another level of detail to images already brimming with them. You can read about how she made them here and here.
That might as well be the title of Decoder, a German film that came out in 1984. Unreleased in the United States and forgotten until the Internet recovered it in recent years, Decoder is a fascinating relic of the early industrial ethos.
Written by Klaus Maeck, directed by Jürgen Muschalek, and based on The Electronic Revolution by William S. Burroughs, the film focuses on a lone audiophile who discovers that multinational corporations are controlling populations through muzak. By playing the mind-controlling, sedative non-music in elevators, fast food joints, lobbies and stores all over the country, corporations such as the evil H-Burger are able to produce a docile population of consumers. To combat this, our protagonist turns to industrial noise, and inspires a legion of “cassette terrorists” to covertly swap muzak tapes for sounds that are much more subliminally sinister, inciting riots all over Germany.
The film’s score was a collaboration between F.M. Einheit (Einsturzende Neubauten) and Dave Ball (Soft Cell), with contributions from Genesis P. Orridge and Alexander Hacke. In addition to scoring, F.M. Einheit, a.k.a Mufti, also plays the film’s protagonist. Other characters include cult film actor, scholar and artist Bill Rice, playing a sad-faced security official on a mission to foil the cassette terrorists’ plot, and inadvertent heroin-chic style icon/musicianChristiane Felscherinow, playing an amateur herpetologist/go-go dancer who looks eerily similar to Rooney Mara’s Liz Salander. Cameo appearances include Genesis P. Orridge and William S. Burroughs. The film is sprinkled with many other references to items you might find in a 1980s-era RE/Search publication, such as the appearance of a Brion Gysin Dreamachine inside a secret nightclub belonging to an industrial cult, as well as a giant Survival Research Laboratories logo on the wall of the protagonist’s studio.
One of the film’s most stunning features is the color palette. “Lensed by Johanna Heer,” writes Samantha Anne Scott, ”the film’s blunted, monochromatic color schemes — primarily red, green, and CRT blue — demarcate character, mood, and motivation … while doused with art house affectation, Decoder delineates a relatively cohesive narrative of corporatism, control, and the power of noise.” The full film is posted above.
“In ictu oculi” is a somewhat loaded Latin phrase that translates roughly as “in the blink [or twinkling] of an eye”. It’s also the title of a famously (and beautifully) grotesque Baroque painting created in Spain in the 1670s by artist Juan de Valdés Leal. Said painting depicts a skeletal Death, coffin tucked under its arm and clutching a scythe, hunched gleefully over a smorgasbord of earthly spoils.
With her video/photo-documented installation by the same name, modern-day Spanish multimedia artist Greta Alfaro –seemingly familiar with the layered meanings of the Latin shorthand and well-aware of the ensuing painting– has found an elegant, rather startling way to revisit many of the same themes Leal did. Alfaro was hidden from view mere meters away as she shot this footage of vultures descending on a feast she had prepared for them.
Alfaro has crafted several video/photo-documented installations in recent years, all of them fastidiously produced, to stark and haunting effect. She states:
“I work about the hidden and the unexpected. We live our lives governed by rules created in order to control chaos and vulnerability, but I am interested in the facts we try to hide or repress, in the differences between the private and the public, in the visibility of our everyday life hypocrisy.”
I had never heard of Swedish duo Niki & The Dove before this, but their new single, “The Fox”, has won me over with its loping, electronic beat and lovely vocals. The video, created by Seattle-based WINTR is, perhaps, more technically impressive than thematically. The constantly shifting mask and geometric shapes are beautiful (the night time scenes near the end being especially impressive) and work well with the song, but there is not much more to it than that. Regardless of your feelings on the visuals, however, the song itself is well worth a listen.
“She makes visible that heartbreaking invisible place between the appearance and the disappearance of things,” wrote Richard Avedon about photographer Lillian Bassman, who died at 94 in her home at Manhattan last week.
Like her contemporary Irving Penn, who passed away last year at age 92, Bassman worked on her art until the very end of her life. The photo above, titled “It’s a Cinch,” was taken for Harper’s Bazaar in 1951. At that time, model Stella Tennant, who appears in the shot below (part of this shoot for Vogue Germany), wasn’t even born yet – and wouldn’t be born for another 19 years.
Bassman lived an extraordinary life. The daughter of bohemian Russian-Jewish immigrants living in Brooklyn, she moved in with her husband, fellow artist Paul Himmel, when she 15. Together they survived through the Great Depression: Bassman worked as an artists’ model, while Himmel taught art. They were involved in political strikes of the era, and Bassman once picketed in the nude to protest arts financing cuts. Soon, she got a job co-art-directing Junior Bazaar, one of the most creative and experimental teen girl magazines that ever existed. Junior Bazaar failed because it was too out-there, but it launched Bassman’s fashion photography career, landing her gigs for Harper’s Bazaar.
Over the years, Bassman’s painterly, impressionistic style fell out of fashion. Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow famously said to her during a shoot, “I didn’t bring you to Paris to make art; I brought you here to do the buttons and bows.” Fed up with fashion photography, Bassman famously destroyed most of her negatives in the 60s. It wasn’t until the early 90s that a fashion historian urged her to revisit the few negatives she had left. Bassman began experimenting anew, and re-emerged as a force in fashion photography. She embraced new technologies, discovering Photoshop when she was 87.
After the jump, a collection of Bassman’s work, past and present.
