Danielle Nicole Hills is a metalsmith based in Brooklyn, NYC. This week, photos of her wicked “Predator Rings” (for sale in her Etsy shop at $900 per five-fingered pair, or $200 per digit) have been making the rounds on the interwebs.
Predator Rings by Danielle Nicole. (All photos via her Etsy store or personal site.
Dig a little deeper, and it quickly becomes evident that there’s much more going on in this woman’s creative life than these gorgeous claws. Check out the artist statement posted on her personal website:
The impulse to adorn and improve the body in some way is an instinctual commonality throughout the world. The cultural motivations for personal adornment are innumerable, but the way in which people do this is fundamentally the same. I focus on creating a codependent relationship between adornment and the human form in which they both redefine the other. Each piece, when worn, removes the body from the context of modern society, emphasizing instinctual decorative practices.
Surgical Mask
By creating an aggressive dichotomy between subtle, elegant forms and vicious primal instinct I am able to transform the frame of reference the wearer is displayed in. The extravagant theatrical nature of each piece makes the concept of ritual and ritual adornment fundamental to the work.
Dang! Talk about heavy metal. Several more fierce pieces by Hills after the jump.
G’morning, loves. Forgive me, for my eyes are bleeding and my brain is fried, and all you’re getting for breakfast is N2O:
This image just mysteriously showed up on my portable hard drive. No idea where it came from. It appears to be vintage packaging for nitrous cannisters, ostensibly used for whipping cream. But judging by the blonde’s glassy-eyed, idiotic stare, the gas may have been used for more, um, unsavory recreational purposes.
Kim Beaton and her digitigrade leg extensions. Photo by Dionwrbear.
The booming film industry here in Wellington, New Zealand (a.k.a “Wellywood“) has attracted phenomenal talent from all over the world. Creatives come from as far away as Los Angeles, London, Johannesburg, Vancouver and Tokyo to work on films like District 9, Avatar, and the LotR series. One such transplant is Kim Beaton, a multi-talented artist/inventor from Seattle who was recently hired by Weta Workshop to do conceptual design work on the upcoming Hobbit films.
Kim is a vibrant, intensely focused person who always seems happiest when she has multiple projects in development: large scale sculptures, community arts outreach programs, armor design and production, you name it! She’s also an accomplished inventor. In fact, many of you may already be familiar with one of her patents– last summer, two YouTube videos were posted of Kim striding through downtown Seattle in a pair of startling, stilt-like “reverse leg” extensions. The clips quickly went viral.
Upon arriving here, Kim was encouraged by Richard Taylor (5-time Academy Award winner and co-owner/co-director of the Weta Companies) to continue honing the digilegs’ design in the workshop. After several months of development and fine-tuning, the company is selling Kim’s professional design, now christened Weta Legs, for $945 U.S. dollars a pair. From the official site: “Weta has made many pairs of digitigrade leg extensions in the past for stunt men and creature performers in the movies and on the stage, but this is the first time we can offer [this] leg to anyone.” In fact, it’s the first time any company has put a line of digilegs into mainstream production.
A heads up to performers, costumers, burners, party monsters, cosplayers, designers and filmmakers– this is big. I’ve had the opportunity to test Kim’s prototype myself. They’re incredible. They’re comfortable. They’re FUN. I mean, really, really fun. Watch this instructional video (featuring Kim and a woman who has never been in stilts or extensions of any kind before in her life) to hear and see a bit about why her particular adaptation of the digitigrade concept is so unique and easy to acclimate to wearing.
As far as I know, there’s nothing else remotely like them available on the market. It’s very exciting news for Kim, for her company, and best of all, for all of the non film industry folks out there who can finally own a pair of these. Recently, Kim spoke with me at length about the history of digilegs, as well as her past community collaborations and several other upcoming personal projects. I hope you’ll enjoy getting to know this incredible woman and her work as much as I have.
Please describe the Weta Legs. What sets your invention apart from other kinds of stilts or leg extensions?
They have been called the Holy Grail of costuming. How do you build a device that will give a person the backward leg of a dog or horse? They are referred to by all sorts of names: digilegs, digitigrades, faun legs…
What does digitigrade mean?
A digitigrade is an animal that stands or walks on its digits, or toes. But this is not easy to say unless you like tongue twisters, so it was shortened to “digileg”. They’ve also been called “dog legs” or “reverse stilts”. Originally, we called them leg extensions, because they’re not really stilts, but we want to give them one name that is pretty easy to say. Hence, Weta Legs.
Via Jo Weldon‘s fascinating Formspring page comes this lo-fi snippet of Dada neo-burlesque, courtesy of the cheekily brilliant “reigning Cheese Queen of Coney Island” a.k.a. “The Girl With The 44DD Brain”, Miz Nasty Canasta:
(NSFW, and if hysterical cackling and/or car alarms set your teeth on edge, better skip it.)
The Brooklyn-based Canasta, who’s an inveterate pop culture geek, first came to my attention when io9 covered one of her gigs as a co-producer and performer in the whip-smart Pinchbottom Burlesque, which regularly features theatrical nudie shows based on sci fi to Biblical to classical literary references from Doctor Who to Dickens to Star Trek. Whenever she takes the stage, Canasta strives to “create a dazzling spectacle of perplexing proportions.”
Perplexing to say the least! And irreverent, and sexy, and hilarious. If you think the car alarm steez is outre, wait until you get a load of her signature Groucho routine! (For the sake of our darling worker bee readers, it’s after the jump.)
These astonishing macros of snoozing insects covered in dew were shot by amateur photographer Miroslaw Swietek, askbetween 3am and 4am in a forest near his home in the village of Jaroszow, Poland. Swietek only took up photography two years ago, at 35 years of age. Using a flashlight, he “hunts out the motionless bugs in the darkness before setting up his camera and flash just millimetres from them.” More beautiful images of diamond-like, dewy bugs at MailOnline.
The Floria Sigismondi wet dream that is iamaiwhoami (Jonna Lee?) has finally taken the next step in her personal YouTube evolution, from feral avant garde video antihero to fully-fledged electro chanteuse, and she is lovely.
It’s fairly straightforward –albeit spooky– electronica. The song’s driving melody is even a bit reminiscent of those daffy chugging synths Limahl used for the Neverending Story theme song, with an added dash of Deep Breakfast. And yet? “o” is putting the same loamy glow in my bones that initial exposure to Goldfrapp, Julia Frodahl, Karin Dreijer Andersson, Björk, Julee Cruise and female surrealists like Dorothea Tanning and Leonora Carrington once did. I remain intrigued as ever.
Leeds-based musician Brett Domino and his buddies have been up to YouTube shenanigans for a while now, but this Justin Timberlake medley performed by Domino and Steven Peavis takes the cake, especially in terms of video editing and complexity of arrangement. Instruments featured: Stylophone Beatbox, iPod Touch (using the DigiDrummer Lite app), kazoo, thumb piano, egg shaker, stylophone, cowbell, recorder, ukulele, theremin, spoons, and Roland AX-Synth. NERD UP.
Yes, I know, damn it– every time we post a StoopidPetVideo, it “lowers the meaningful discourse.” Sorry, purists. Sometimes it can’t be helped; MUST POST OR HEAD WILL EH-SPLÖD. If you’re offended by unseemly displays of silly cat memes on Coilhouse, please avert your eyes now. May I recommend David Forbes’ latest rigorous serving of sci fi critical theory, located directly under this post? It’s a spicy meat-ah-ball.
For the rest of you, there’s this:
Which is, of course, of a riff on this. As longtime Coilhouse reader Tequila puts it: “Well, that’s it. There can be no greater win than this. Thank you, Internet, it was fun… time for you to rest now. Back to cave paintings for us all!”
First of all, just a quick announcement to say, we know we promised to post our 2010 Media Kit and some exciting news about Issue 05 here on the blog today, but, quelle surprise, it’s taking us a little bit longer than anticipated to tabulate the results of last week’s survey. Please do check back tomorrow for the stats and our big Issue 05 announcement. Also, warm, wet, sloppy thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out the survey. You’re wonderful. It’s been an honor to learn a little more about you. Especially your underwear habits. No, seriously. *filthy chortle*
And now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Damn, is Florence Welch one seriously glorious culture vulture in this video, or what?
Directed by Georgie Greville and Geremy Jasper. Edited by Paul Snyder.
From the production team’s official press statement: “Florence is the shamanic leader of a surreal orchestra where spiritual elation explodes into smokey psychedelic anarchy. Each musical element of the song is personified by a group of colorful characters that combine 60’s girl groups, Hinduism, gospel choirs, drum circles, paganism and pyrotechnics. Florence is a painted primal force of nature that whips a religious experience into a riot.” Yep. And those blue and gold Andorian Motown beehive girls definitely take it to the next level.
Major media outlets in the United Kingdom have been agressively touting Florence and the Machine‘s output for a couple of years now. More recently, Welch began capturing hearts around the world by touring internationally. Pairing her enormous voice with a rather intimidating bevy of musicians and couture wardrobe stylists, the art school dropout also exudes an earthy intelligence that’s both endearing and disarming. Currently, Welch et al are working on a second full-length album that she says is a lot heavier than their first record, Lungs. “A bit more fuzzy, a bit harder. If the first album was animal and anatomical, I think this one is chemical and elemental.” She’s also touring the UK next month.
Just for contextual kicks, here are some more tidbits that the cultural grab bag style of “Dog Days” is either vaguely (or directly) reminiscent of:
Who here likes pronk* music? Who here even knows what pronk means? I didn’t, until Cardiacs blew my feeble mind.
Pronk = progressive + punk. Formed in 1977, the UK-based band (led by gibbering genius Tim Smith) is one of those “what the holy fucking shitballs is going on here” bands that 99.3% of humanity will have no idea what to do with, and the remaining .7% will want to kiss with tongue and worship and marry and make little psychedelic math rock babies with forever and ever, amen.
*To be fair, Smith dislikes his music being pigeonholed as Pronk, preferring a label of “Psychedelic” or “Pop”. Forgive me, good sir, Pronk’s just so fun to say! Pronkity, pronk, pronk, pronk.
Click on one of those grimacing visages above to watch the official “Tarred and Feathered” music video… if you dare. Read more about Cardiacs here.
