Michael Hansmeyer’s incredible construction. Via E. Stephen, thanks!

Fast Co Design has posted a fascinating article and slideshow called The World’s Most Complex Architecture: Cardboard Columns With 16 Million Facets. An intrepid builder named Michael Hansmeyer has been using complex algorithms invented by Pixar and jaw-dropping handicraft to create a cardboard column that looks a bit like a cross between a honeycomb and a Beksinski painting and a Dubai skyscraper and the most fractalicious, psychedelic fever dream imaginable:

When people mistake photographs of your physical prototypes for computer renderings, you know you’ve achieved something amazing. That’s exactly what happened when Michael Hansmeyer showed off his “computational architecture” column, created by iterating a subdivision algorithm over and over again and then fabricating it out of cardboard.

Hansmeyer’s column stands nine feet tall, weighs about 2000 pounds, and is made out of 2700 1mm-thin slices of cardboard stacked on top of wooden cores. It contains somewhere between 8 and 16 million polygonal faces — too complex for even a 3D printer to handle, according to Hansmeyer. “Every 3D printing facility we spoke to turned us down,” he tells Co.Design. “Typically those machines can’t process more than 500,000 faces — the computer memory required to process the data grows nonlinearly, and it also gets tripped up on the self-intersecting faces of the column.”

But Hansmeyer’s prototype is very real — in fact, it can even support weight, and the designer wants to experiment with more robust materials so that he can actually start building real structures with his “computational” architectural forms. So how did Hansmeyer actually get this thing out of his computer and into the real world? Take a look at this slideshow to find out.

Gynoids. Pleasure models. Fembots. Bionic women. Borg queens. Stepford wives. Sometimes they’re hot. Sometimes they’re fierce. And yet sometimes, they all start to look the same.

When’s the last time you saw a female robot who didn’t appear to have a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.7? Other than Rosie, the robot maid from The Jetsons. This powerful portrait of London-based plus-size model Bea Sweet by digital artist Benedict Campbell (previously on Coilhouse) confronts that question head-on.

It’s great to see a sexy, strong robotic woman who isn’t rail-thin, to imagine a future where robot designers craft something other than Barbies and Kens, or one in which robots design themselves in a way that discards the expectations of their human forbearers. And yeah, loving this doesn’t mean letting go of a deep adoration for Bjork’s All is Full of Love, or, for that matter, Takashi Itsuki’s bruised bondage robot amputees. There’s room for all those things.

A few quotes from Donna Haraway, author of The Cyborg Manifesto:

• “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short, we are cyborgs.”
• “A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction.”
• “The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.”
• “Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive, not on the basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked them as other.”
• “It is no accident that the symbolic system of the family of man – and so the essence of woman – breaks up at the same moment that networks of connection among people on the planet are unprecedentedly multiple, pregnant, and complex.”
• “The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self. This is the self feminists must code.”
• “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess”

I’m not sure how Hulu works in countries outside the US at this point. My apologies if you cannot watch this, it’s one of the reasons I try to avoid sites like Hulu.

It’s Friday, people, which means that there’s only a few more hours until you can stick a fork in another soul-crushing work week. Allow the FAM to help that time pass a little more quickly with this week’s presentation of Don Bluth’s 1982 classic The Secret of NIMH, starring, among others, Mary Elizabeth Hartman (in her last role before her suspected suicide), John Carradine, Dom DeLuise, Aldo Ray, and Wil Wheaton.

An adaptation of Robert C. O’Brien’s 1971 children’s novel Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, the movie tells the story of Mrs. Brisby, a widowed field mouse, whose son falls ill with pneumonia and cannot leave the house for three weeks. At this time, Spring plowing is set to begin on the farm the Brisbys live on and Mrs. Brisby, knowing she cannot stay where she is, visits the Great Owl who directs her to a group of mysterious rats who live in a rose bush and are led by a wizened old rat named Nicodemus. Brisby learns that the rats, along with her late husband Jonathan, were part of an experiment performed at the National Institute of Mental Health which boosted their intelligence to human levels at which point they made their escape.

The Secret of NIMH was a favorite of mine as a child and recent viewings have done little to dampen my enthusiasm for it. Bluth and his partners, most of who had defected from Disney with him, were fixated on what they perceived to be the decline of animation as an art form. The Secret of NIMH, then, was a collection of expensive and, even at the time, outdated animation techniques. The glowing eyes of Nicodemus, for example, were created by back-lighting colored gels. Characters had different color palettes for individual lighting situations (Mrs. Brisby alone had 46). It’s a veritable showcase of animation and it all makes for a beautiful film. Still, it came at a price, and the film came in so over the original budget that Bluth and his co-producers had to collectively mortgage their homes to finance some of it. There was even a problem with their diminutive protagonist’s name:

During the film’s production, Aurora contacted Wham-O, the manufacturers of Frisbee flying discs, with concerns about possible trademark infringements if the “Mrs. Frisby” name in O’Brien’s original book was used in the movie. Wham-O rejected Aurora’s request for waiver to use the same-sounding name to their “Frisbee”, in the movie. Aurora informed Bluth & company that Mrs. Frisby’s name would have to be altered. By then, the voice work had already been recorded for the film, so the name change to “Mrs. Brisby” necessitated a combination of re-recording some lines and, because John Carradine was unavailable for further recordings, careful sound editing had to be performed, taking the “B” sound of another word from Carradine’s recorded lines, and replace the “F” sound with the “B” sound, altering the name from “Frisby” to “Brisby”.

In the end, there are really two things that make NIMH stick out: its tone and its protagonist. The mood of the film is exceedingly foreboding, especially for a G-rated feature intended for children, without crossing into the historical seriousness of, say, Grave of the Fireflies or the political allegory of Watership Down. When I think of it, the images that come to my mind are bleak, eerie, and filled with fire. Likewise, its heroine is unlike anything one would have seen from Disney. Mrs. Brisby is no princess. She is a middle-aged mother and widow. Her quest is not an epic struggle between good and evil, it is to save her family. She doesn’t fall in love with a dashing male lead, she is not even looking for it, the love she had for another is in her past, before we are even introduced to her. Is she one of the great feminist characters in film? No. But she is a refreshing change from the typical Barbie doll pap most peddle.

Watching The Secret of NIMH it is perhaps most evident that it is a labor of love, both for its story and for the medium it is presented in. It is not a stretch to say that they don’t make them like this anymore. After all, who would be crazy enough to try?

Portrait of Chantal Menard

Some lovely portraits by Sean Cheetham, view whose blog can be found here. Cheetham grew up in the Bay Area, pilule and studied painting in Pasadena under Michael Hussar. Similarly to New York painter Steven Assael, see who created iconic portraits of people from the heydey of the nightclub Mother, Cheetham has a gift for presenting alternative-looking people in a very formal, classical way.

Chantal Profile

If you like folksy, bluegrassy, skifflepunky, lyrically deft and tenderhearted wonderfulness, you need to give Marcellus Hall’s new solo record, The First Line, a listen. It’s out this week. This is Marce:

I first met the accomplished musician/writer/illustrator at the Mercury Lounge in NYC in 1998 after my shambolic, sloppy-drunk gig opening for The Gunga Din. Honestly? NOT the best night… until Marce found the dark corner I was hiding in, said “Hey, I like your style,” and asked me to play violin with his band. Something about the guy made me say yes without blinking. Maybe it was because he reminded me of Conan O’Brien’s younger, more soft-spoken brother: tall, thin, fair, somewhat ageless, he had that same quick and kindly wit. After saying yes, I realized I should probably ask him what sort of music he made.

“Well, I used to be in this band called Railroad Jerk.” Oh, yeah! I had some notion of Railroad Jerk. Weren’t they one of the first bands to sign to Matador? They were on that What’s Up, Matador? compilation with John Spencer Blues Explosion, Helium, Guided by Voices, Liz Phair, Yo La Tengo, etc…

“Yeah. That’s done,” he said. “Now I have a band called White Hassle.” White Hassle? “Yeah, um. It’s a pun. You know, White Castle.” Well, hey. Why not. I remember much of my decade in NYC as a sad, scrambling time, but all of those shows and records I did with Marce’s “junk folk pop ’80s rock electro-blues” outfit (in cahoots with drummer Dave Varenka and an assortment of other wonderful players) are among my fondest memories.

In more recent years, Marce has been crafting a new sound. It’s a bit softer, more contemplative than the huge, herky-jerky energy of his previous work, but those razor-edged lyrics, rich guitar chords, feverish harmonica solos and spot-on vocals are bright and sharp as ever.

Marce has always been a thoughtful guy, and while his songcraft might seem like straight-up, uncomplicated acoustic country fare on the surface, listen more closely and you’ll realize there’s a lot more going on with his lyrics and presentation than the usual, weary old “my dog died and the old lady left me” American folk tradition scalp-taking. Marce’s wry, self-aware humor is evident in references to emailing, texting, even the act of songwriting itself in the title track. From a recent review over at The Observer:

Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie, Dylan, and the Everly Brothers are obvious reference points—Americana fans will love this album—but Hall doesn’t really go in for nostalgia, and careful listeners will also hear echoes of the Modern Lovers, Einstürzende Neubauten, and New York’s No Wave bands. Like them, Hall lets the sounds of his city seep into the recordings; the tracks sound simultaneously organic and artificially distressed.

In addition to making great music and poetic lyrics, Marce does wonderful illustration work for The New Yorker, the Village Voice and others. You can learn more about that and other facets of his career at his personal website. Obviously, by now, you’re aware that I can’t say enough good things about this fella. If your curiosity is piqued and if you’re not already familiar with his work, I almost envy you: you’ve got 20+ years of fantastic Marcellus Hall music to get acquainted with. I heartily recommend starting with The First Line, and going from there.

Please Say Something from David OReilly on Vimeo.

Like Edgar Allan Poe, the FAM returns after a week’s absence, delirious and with no memory of its whereabouts. Who knows what trouble it got up to? Regardless of whether or not the FAM spent last week in a meth-fueled haze, the fact of the matter is that it is back, looking to put the deaths of all those Shriners behind it. So let us get to today’s films instead of dwelling on the fact that those tiny cars are not street legal and one cannot be blamed for driving through a parade if the route is not clearly marked.

Today it’s two short films by David O’Reilly: 2009’s Please Say Something and his most recent External World. Both feature his off-beat direction combined with a dark sense of humor. External World takes a page from Robot Chicken with stories told in bite-sized morsels stitched together with a thin, overarching tale while Please Say Something follows a cat and her mouse husband through their dysfunctional relationship. O’Reilly and his team do a spectacular job, using a bare minimum of detail to convey each scene. The characters are equally simple though they still manage to display a wide range of emotions. They are wonderful and delightfully weird, though your tolerance for acerbic wit will determine how well you take to them.

Street artist Roa does some amazing work, site producing giant images of animals. He recently posted some work he did in Mexico and it is no less stunning. The severed bird head using the swinging gate to expose a skull behind it is particularly clever.

An admission of hypocrisy: Up close and personal, fungi kind of gross me out but put them in a painting and I’m all over them. I know, it makes no sense. It may be that, in a painting, they still portray a a sense of decay and fluidity without the moist, musky, oozing mucilage found in reality. Everything in a painting is blessedly dry, I suppose is what I’m saying. And while I realize that the appearance of a viscous sheen can be recreated I also know that if I were to touch it I would not draw back a hand coated in a vile mucus.

Enter these paintings by Dhear One, portraits of creatures on alien worlds, enveloped by otherworldly fungi, turning everything into a landscape — stalks and tendrils reaching up into the air seemingly in defiance of gravity, if there is any present. They are snapshots of worlds overrun. This is what happens when nature takes back the Fantastic Planet.

What better day than Thursday for some marionette flavored nightmare fuel? Behold the mad weirdness of Patrick Sims and Les Antliaclastes’ Hilum. I’m at a loss to properly describe this one, but fortunately the London International Mime Festival website described it thus:

A micro comic-tragedy based on the cycles of the washing machine and set in the basement of a rundown museum of natural history. Orphaned and cut off from the ordered kingdom of curiosities upstairs, the cast of nursery rhyme characters, cartoon images, and mischievous urchins turn playtime into a theatre of cruelty. Whites mix with colours, delicates get hot washed, and a monstrous big toe devours holes in the socks.

So there is that. I’m not sure if that is really very helpful at all. Two minutes, really, is all you need to decide if this is up your alley or not.

Via Wurzeltod : The Medium Of…

Nelson Boles freely admits that this short piece is a trailer in name only. And that’s really too bad because after having watched it I desperately want more of Orfeu. Noles’ painterly style is quite beautiful and even though it is a patchwork of imagery aborted abruptly at the finish it shows great potential. Potential that might be realized should enough people take notice.

Via Drawn