Jansen’s kinetic creatures have evolved quite a bit since then, and as of this month, the wonderful 3D printing company Shapeways has made a small version of Animaris Geneticus Parvus, available for purchase through their site.
These wee baby Beests, born from one of Jansen’s original behemoth windwalker designs, are “printed already assembled and [work] right after birth from the machine! No other production method can do this!” (Is 3D printing technology trippy, or what?) Apparently there are more Beests in development as well.
All art lovers have had those revelatory moments when visual art just blows our minds. It’s surprising, beautiful, provocative, painful, confusing and every kind of emotion at once. I think that’s what the small child in this video is feeling when he wanders into one of Yayoi Kusama‘s infinite dot rooms, installed in Pittsburgh’s Mattress Factory. Also, it’s SO CUTE.
Designed and built by the architecture team of Tonkin Liu and completed in 2006, this award-winning sound sculpture called The Singing Ringing Tree stands atop a plateau in the Pennine mountain range overlooking Burnley in Lancashire, England. It’s one of a series from the Panopticons arts and regeneration project.
Galvanized steel pipes of various sizes are bound together in a nine-foot-tall, spiraling configuration. Depending on where and how the wind strikes it, The Singing Ringing Tree creates discordant choral sounds over a range of several octaves. Tonkin Liu tuned the pipes “according to their length by adding holes to the underside of each.” The eerie music created as a result is capable of ringing out across great distances.
What happens when dialog taken from MTV’s “Jersey Shore”, the nadir of current American culture, is filtered through the lens of Oscar Wilde, one of the greatest wits the world has ever seen? Magic, that’s what. Playbill — with the help of Santino Fontana and David Furr, current cast members of Wilde’s most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest — presents a grand experiment: “Jersey Shore” Gone Wilde. This is, perhaps, the best thing I have seen this year.
Before finding these illustrations I had never heard of the Slovak illustrator, Albín Brunovský. It was unsuprising to learn that he was quite well-known, and well-regarded, in his own country. This series of women with fantastical heads pieces, some of them growing out of their owners’s heads, features a perfectly surreal juxtaposition of the absurd and macabre.
The draw of Lucas Camargo’s work, I think, is its density. Packed into each drawing is a cacophony of tiny details, jostling to make themselves known. They’re almost like those once ubiquitous Magic Eye images, at first they’re a mess of lines until, suddenly, their long-faced subjects unveil themselves.
Nadya, Zo & Mer as the Star, the Moon and the Sun Tarot cards illustrated by Bethalynne Bajema
The Coilhouse editorial team is honored to be part of the beautiful Black Ibis Tarot Deck, conceived and illustrated by artist Bethalynne Bajema (previously on Coilhouse here and here).
The Black Ibis Tarot Deck is a companion to Bajema’s Sepia Stains Tarot Deck, and both decks exist to accompany a nine-book graphic novel series that Bajema is currently working on called The Black Ibis. Book I, The Secret London, will be available on May 27th. More about this project, from Bethalynne Bajema’s Kickstarter page:
The Black Ibis is a graphic novel told in nine books. Each book takes you a little deeper into a dark fairy tale that is based upon my own love of the idea that there exists a world beneath the world. This idea that sometimes a door is not just a mundane door but an entrance to someplace we reserve for our dreams. The story, at its heart, is a simple one. It revolves around one sister trying to find her sister who has become lost. She must follow the same path her sister has set out on going a little farther into this underground world of dark cabarets and strange theaters as she attempts to catch up to her sister, who is falling faster down this path in her desire to finally find a performer known as the Black Ibis. The story is absurd at times, illustrated in my particular style and filled with my legion of wonky characters and enigmatic performers.
Bajema has launched a Kickstarter project to support the printing of the first book and the Tarot Deck. Although Bajema has already reached her modest goal of $2K, the fundraiser still has 3 days left to go. Pledge rewards include signed metallic prints, graphic novels, decks, original sketches, handmade deck boxes, pages of artwork from the novel, and even a chance to appear in one scene in a cabaret scene in the final chapter of the graphic novel.
As the fundraiser continues, Bajema has been revealing more and more cards from the deck on Twitter. Follow her for the latest!
“Puppets always have to try to be alive. It’s their kind of Ur-Story on stage– that desperation to live.” ~Adrian Kohler
“[…] It only lives because you make it. An actor struggles to die onstage, but a puppet has to struggle to live, and in a way, that’s a metaphor for life.” ~Basil Jones
In 1981, partners Basil Jones and Adrian Kohler co-founded the Handspring Puppet Company in Cape Town, South Africa, with two other graduates of the Michaelis School of Fine Art. Thirty years later, the two of them continue to run the company, staging theatrical collaborations in theaters worldwide with a cadre of downright empathic puppeteers.
The concerted group effort that goes into designing, building and performing these puppets ensures that they do live. In fact, the illusion is so complete at times, it would be almost frightening, were the creatures not presented so lovingly.
The Handspring Puppet Co.’s inspiring TED talk brings “the emotional complexity of animals to the stage with their life-size puppets.” Their horse, in particular, is a miracle of engineering, art, and soulful expression.
The company’s latest production, War Horse, opened in New York at Lincoln Center last week. Are any of our New York readers going to go see it? Please, by all means, report back in comments!
Our Creative Director, the indelible, unstoppable Courtney Riot, is a quarter-of-a-century old today. It’s been an eventful and revolutionary year for the Most Badass Graphic Designer of Her Generation, so let us take a minute to mark the occasion of her birth with solemnly raised fists, and this animated panda gif:
Should ye be feelin’ extra sinister, you can continue to celebrate Courtney’s relentless Reign of Amazingness with a Coilhouse-curated collection of Riotcentric YouTube clips, embedded below.
We love ya, Art Star. Can’t wait to show the world what you’ve got in the works for Issue 06. Have a fantastic day.
