I seem to have completely missed this upon its release (and it may have been better posted around Christmas), but Cool Hunting has a short profile of Lou Nasti, whose studio, Mechanical Displays, who has done animatronic installations all over the world. His most famous might be various Christmas displays for storefronts on Manhattan’s 5th Avenue. Nasti (whose resembles Disney’s version of Mister Geppetto to such a degree that one would be forgiven for thinking it intentional) is the perfect type for this sort of piece: earnest and in love with his work. He oversees a shop stacked high with tools and parts, and toys. Admittedly, I have a penchant for these sorts of spaces, with their towering, organized clutter. They have a character all their own, often as interesting as the people who work in them.
If ever there was a thing that needed to happen it is the theremin duel between Barry Schwam and Coilhouse’s very own Meredith Yayanos going down in my mind’s eye at this very moment. Seriously, you guys should see it. There are fog machines and lasers and rotating platforms. It’s just beautiful.
Take one part Hieronymous Bosch and sprinkle liberally with bright, rainbow colors and you’re about halfway to describing the work of Jonas Burgert. Here is a world in which people inhabit barren wastelands and nameless nowheres, outfitted in the vivid hues of their particular tribes. I really like the interplay of these two elements; the color trying, and failing, to act as a camouflage for the decidedly bleak subject matter. The colors splattered and scribbled all over, it’s like some child’s coloring book of Hell — both unsettling and beautiful.
A bizarre series by Slovakian photographer Tono Stano, White Shadow is actually a series of printed black and white negatives. In this case, however, Stano has gone to the length of painting his models with the idea of printing the negatives so that they would appear to be positives. It’s an effect that is not entirely successful — you won’t mistake these for a regular black and white print — but Stano seems to understand the limitations of the trick and plays with them.
Using bits and pieces of other negatives he tapes eyes over the eyelids of his subjects, fills their mouths with photograph denture. The end results are surreal portraits of some of the more interesting denizens of the uncanny valley. Hit the jump for a (nsfw) video (as well as a few more, nsfw images) in which Stano gives a behind the scenes look at the process.
Switched to a YouTube playlist because the VICE video would auto-play. You can see the full-length version at the link at the end of the article.
Perhaps not the best thing for the week of Christmas, but history cares not about holidays. Last Saturday, as I’m sure you all know, Kim Jong Il, the iron handed dictator of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, died from an apparent heart attack at the age of 69. The past week has seen a continuous outpouring of grief (some real, some staged) from within the Hermit Kingdom, while the rest of the world seems to look on with trepidation, waiting to see what his heir apparent, Kim Jung-un, will do.
Less than a week before Jong Il’s death, VICE News ran another of their fascinating looks into North Korea. Shane Smith, accompanied by freelance journalist Simon Ostrovosky, traveled to Siberia to investigate North Korean logging camps located deep in the forests. Here, North Korean citizens are contracted as laborers for up to 10 years, during which time they are housed, fed, and paid a pittance for their work. The North Korean government, meanwhile, was paid handsomely for what basically amounts to slave labor.
Smith’s interest seems to be twofold: to expose these camps, and to try to talk to North Korean citizens, a feat nearly impossible in his visits to the country itself. If you’ve seen Smith’s past work, then you’ll know what you’re in for. The reporting is solid, but there is a Gonzo aspect to it as well. A decent chunk of the forty minute documentary is spent on a crowded, sweltering train where the only thing to do to numb the boredom is drink. Unsurprisingly, it turns out to be rather difficult to get near these camps, but he and his crew manage to at least talk for a bit with some of the laborers.
Regardless of your feelings on the style, VICE has done a stupendous job exposing yet another facet of the horror that was Kim Jong Il’s regime. In the closing minutes of the piece Shane reveals that much of the scrutiny they found themselves under was no doubt due to the fact that the Dear Leader was visiting the same area of Russia at the time to meet with President Dmitry Medvedev and broker another labor deal, to sell more of his people. If that isn’t evil, I’m not sure what is.
In case you weren’t sure if there was a contest for everything, Metropolis TV is here to assure you that yes, indeed there is. The above preview of their new season on masturbation spotlights Masanobu Sato who one both the 2008 and 2009 Masturbate-A-Thon, held by the Center for Sex & Culture in San Francisco. Both times he set a record, the current being 9 hours and 58 minutes, a time that sounds as impressive as it does painful.
In an especially surreal moment we get to watch Soto begin his day with a 2 hour “practice session”. There he sits, cross-legged on the floor, peacefully watching the news while his girlfriend sews, all the while casually working an artificial vagina over his turgid member. His girlfriend, for her part, sees this as a hobby, not unlike her sewing, She even helps him “train” by timing him, a decidedly different reaction than I would probably get from my girlfriend if I decided to jerk off on the couch in front of her every morning. There is also a harrowing moment in which their cat climbs on his leg to investigate, running the risk of being pulled into the thresher like vortex created by Sato’s inexorable pumping.
Things turn even weirder, though not unexpectedly, when we accompany Soto to his favorite adult video store. Here he explains his particular taste in pornography: specifically adult anime, explaining that a “real female” can be both smelly and/or dirty, whereas, conversely, the women in anime are nice and clean. Which is true, but really, it’s not something we should be saying out loud. Just let those dirty, stinky women live in ignorance. Better to suffer in silence like a gentleman than complain aloud like a man best known for stroking his dick for nearly 10 hours at a time.
Credit where credit is due, though. A lesser man than Soto would no doubt collapse around the one hour mark, exhausted, frustrated, and horribly, horribly chafed. There are worse things, I suppose, than being known as the world’s premiere practitioner of the autoerotic arts. Better to be recognized for a talent than have none at all.
La Mer de Pianos, a charming short film by Tom Wrigglesworth and Mathieu Cuvelier, focuses on one Marc Manceaux, the current owner of Fournitures Generales Pour le Piano, the oldest piano shop in Paris. Having been there as either employee or owner for almost 30 years, Mr. Manceaux gives us a glimpse into a cluttered, chaotic world of pianos and there parts, stacked to the ceiling and harvested for their “organs”, in a manner far less delicate than one might assume. It’s a great, claustrophobic mass of keys, pedals, hammers, and wire which the agile Manceaux navigates with the kind of confidence one would expect after nigh on three decades, scampering across piles of parts that a lesser man would cause to collapse. This is the kind of shop they would use as the setting for a heartwarming animated film about a family of anthropomorphized rodents, is what I’m trying to say. It’s that charming.
I’ve been dreading this, the moment when one of my overseers decreed a theme week. Finding items of interest on the internet is one thing, but I never do well when sent to find a specific thing. It could be some sort of blogging performance anxiety. Set with a specific task I am so preoccupied with getting a superlative result that in the end the whole experience arrives limp and unsatisfying to all involved. It’s terrible. It is with that in mind, then, that I submit to you this search result, extracted from YouTube in a fit of panicked desperation; a video clip of Harry Potter making out with a female centaur while, I believe, Hitler looks on from a hiding place behind a dresser, done in The Sims. Believe me when I say that I am just as disappointed in me as you are.
PROTEIGON, created by Steven Briand and Luca Fiore (with some help) during a two month internship at a production company called Partizan, is one of those pieces that worms its way into your brain more because of the “how” and not so much the finished product. Which is not to say that it isn’t good, because it is. Set to a thumping, bass-heavy track, it is entertaining, but what has me watching multiple times is trying to understand what must have gone into making that piece of paper go through all those various contortions. I can only hope that they release some behind-the-scenes footage at some point.
Sometimes I forget just how wonderful a thing this Internet is. Were it not for the internet, sales how many of us would have been able to experience the glory of this footage from some unnamed talk show, circa 1984? What a tragedy it would have been to not behold this man, with his perfectly groomed moustache, bouncing mullet, and Detroit Pistons sweatshirt. What fairness would there have been in the world if only those lucky members of the studio audience that day were able to gaze upon his hirsute visage, twisting and contorting with emotion or, perhaps, the effort of trying to keep from shitting himself, as he belted out the smoothest grooves ever heard?
None, I say. The people there that day, spellbound, their mouths agape, no doubt told stories about that day, but unable to properly convey the sublime magic of those few, short minutes, their words were most likely met with disbelief and skepticism. And really, who could blame them? Such accounts must have seemed ludicrous, the product of feeble minds. Now, though, we can see and hear for ourselves, and we too can be put under that same, powerful spell.
Yes, it truly is amazing, this internet. I will not take it for granted again.
