Anouk Wipprecht creates garments that move, breathe, and react to the environment around them. Wipprecht started with a background of fashion, theater and dance, but a growing interest in interaction design and electrical engineering inspired her to develop clothing that appeals as much to the DIY/tech crowd as it does to fans of haute couture. “Instead of the body having to give a purpose to a design” Wipprecht said in a recent interview with Fashioning Tech, she’s interested in developing “design [that] gives a purpose to the body.”
Wipprecht has crafted projects such as Intimacy, a set of garments that become transparent when in proximity of each other, Fragilis, a dress that evokes the heart and veins through lighting and motion, and Daredroid, a cocktail-making robot dress equipped with IR sensors that administers booze through pneumatic control valves. More projects can be found on her site. Here she is discussing Pseudomorphs, her self-painting dresses:
Not much is known about this photo. It looks like the carte-de-visite of a Broadway actress named Nora. That’s all we may ever know about her, though it’s fun to imagine her as a feisty character who smoked cigars, cheated at poker, held séances, and habitually carried a riding crop.
Shannon Funchess radiates a certain low, rumbling power unlike anyone or anything else around her. And her voice… O Holy Fuck, that VOICE. It belongs in a cathedral, or an abattoir.
The Brooklyn-based musician’s previous work as a frontwoman, and with NYC indie darlings like TV on the Radio and !!! and Telepathe is all very cool, but it’s only more recently, with the platform of Light Asylum — her duo with electronics maestro Bruno Coviello– that Funchess’ vision and strength seem to have reached a fulminating state.
This is the raw, real stuff right here, hearkening back to ultra-early Ministry, dance hall Cabaret Voltaire, or any of 4AD’s most toothsome output from back in the day. Think Ian Curtis at his most tuneful, Grace Jones at her most carnivorous, or Clan of Xymox with roid rage… then think far, far beyond that, because, with Coviello matching her, it seems like Funchess now has the space she needs to commit to ritual that pushes even further into the dark. Light Asylum songs, at their best and most grandiose, seriously feel like they’re on the verge of some sort of Crossing-the-Abyss-at-the-Discotheque type of working. (Is that statement too bombastic? Maybe. Maybe not. Go to one of their live shows and decide for yourself.)
“To me Light Asylum is a metaphor for the lack of genuine self-expression in the world, where people suppress their sexuality, their creativity, their entire lives. This music is for them and for people to realize that they’re not alone. The music is dark, but it’s at a place where you can see there is light at the end of the tunnel. The darkness isn’t all around us; it’s inside us.” [via]
Over at Instructables site, maker j_l_larson writes, “I have noticed a strange inequity between the poseability of girls and boys dolls. Most of the female dolls have stiff arms and legs, which permit them to do little more than model clothing.” To rectify matters, Larson created a step-by-step tutorial for modifying girls’ dolls so that they can actually do stuff. Lisa Wade of SocImages adds, “scholars have noted that ‘action figures’ and ‘dolls’ tend to be pose-able and non-pose-able, respectively, reflecting the idea that boys are encouraged to be active agents and girls passive objects.” The tutorial is a great way to examine this issue, and the disembodied in-between shots are works of art in their own right.
Last week, Geraldine Hoff Doyle, one of the inspirations for the character of Rosie the Riveter, died at age 86 in Lansing, MI. Doyle was just 17 years old when a photographer for United Press International snapped her photo at the metal-pressing plant where she worked. The photo was subsequently used by the U.S. War Production Coordinating Committee as reference for a poster titled “We Can Do It!” Lansing was oblivious to her fame until 1984, when she came across a reproduction of the poster in a magazine. Doyle’s daughter, Stephanie Gregg, told the Lansing State Journal, “she was very kind and generous. She lived the ‘We Can Do It!’ life every day.” The image was originally aimed to encourage women to enter the workforce in support of the war effort, but became an image of empowerment for the ages, inspiring, as Marina Galperina writes in her Rosie tribute post at the Animal NY blog, “a legacy of posters, merchandise, motivated females and countless internet doppelgangers.” Galperina has posted a selection of her favorite Rosie images from Flickr, and invites others to do the same. More “We Can Do It!” girls on Flickr right this way.
Fellow admirers of the late Pina Bausch may get a little emotional, watching this trailer for the upcoming film Pina– Dance, Dance… Otherwise We Are Lost, made “For Pina Bausch, by Wim Wenders.”
Via Gabrielle Zucker, thanks.
Coming soon. In 3D, no less! In the wake of that first wave of 3D schlockbusters and huge budget family movies, it’s going to be interesting to watch and see if this oncoming wave of arguably more “arthouse friendly” 3D films (Wenders’ film, Herzog’sCave of Forgotten Dreams, and Scorcese’sInvention of Hugo Cabret being chief among them) will change more critical viewers’ perceptions and expectations of the medium.
The Impossible Girl is the glorious solo debut of Kim Boekbinder (previously of the duo, Vermillion Lies). Kim’s a quirky, funny, bravely vulnerable, electrifying lightning rod of a woman. Her music tends to reflect these traits in a most endearing fashion.
She recorded the 18 tracks of her record in increments earlier this year at studios in Maine and Boston with Sean Slade (Radiohead, Dresden Dolls) and Benny Grotto (Aerosmith) and an assortment of talented session players. She’s also been traveling internationally on a shoestring budget, bringing her songs of love, loss, self-discovery, sex, drugs, and nuclear physics to audiences in Berlin, Melbourne, and New York City.
Photo by Heike Schneider-Matzigkeit.
The Impossible Girl is yet another wonderful example of how crowdsourcing hubs like Kickstarter are enabling creative people to self-produce art that would otherwise be very difficult for them to afford. It’s a brave new world full of, ya know… POSSIBILITY. And community. And rainbows. And unicorns. Yay!
Kim’s album drops today. You can buy a copy in MP3 or CD format (the packaging for which features an exquisite portrait of The Impossible Girl by longtime Coilhouse fave, Travis Louie), and she’s offering all kinds of fancy package deals that include posters, limited edition eye makeup kits by Sweet Libertine, and an Impossible Girl paper doll by (yet another beloved Coilhouse comrade) Molly Crabapple.
Fetishwear blog Kinky Attirewrites, “[Nichelle] Nichols sang for Duke Ellington and Lionel Hampton. But it is her inescapable destiny to be best remembered as Star Trek’s Lieutenant Uhura. At some point in her career she also helped to advertise thigh-high boots.” The Boot Fetishistadds, “I’m assuming she was commissioned for these pictures, most likely booked for a photoshoot to be used in this catalogue. I think these pictures were taken in the 1950’s, obviously prior to her Star Trek days. However she had been a singer in the famous Blue Angel Club in New York and my guess is the catalogue relates to a store in New York.” HOT. HOT. HOT. If only she were only wearing this Star Trek corset as well! Set phasers to stun, girl. RAWR.
On a recent intercontinental Skype call, overwhelmed by a dozen disparate tasks and simultaneous preparations for conducting her most high profile Coilhouse interview to date with a certain world-famous filmmaker, Nadya expressed some anxiety and uncertainty to Mer. Mer’s reply, paraphrased: “Nadya, you may look like some fragile, doe-eyed forest creature, but everyone knows you’re an iron fist cast in velvet. You’re gonna nail it all to the floor. Baby, you’re the Bambinator.”
And so it was that a new nickname was born. Definitely fits, right?
Artist’s rendering of Nadya Lev! (Actually, no, it’s Lisa Black taxidermy. But still.) COME WITH ME IF YOU WANT TO BLOG.
Nadya did indeed nail that interview to the floor. Can’t tell you anything more about it quite yet, but it’s guaranteed to be one of our most fascinating and high-profile features to date, you’ll see! It’s been great to share Nadya’s joy and excitement over this particular success, perhaps because we recognize that a lot of the work that she does for Coilhouse has traditionally been the least glamorous and the most thankless, most time-consuming and wallet-robbing. Behind-the-scenes stuff.
This year especially, she’s really gone down into the trenches for us, managing the majority of the Coilhouse empire’s recent growing pains: advertising, financing, digital mag formatting training, merchandise and content development, staff restructuring and expansion, publisher and distributor re-negotiations. Additionally, our girl’s kept up her usual globe-trotting antics for that other full-time job of hers, and even found time to help build a huge-ass interactive kinetic sculpture in her nonexistent spare time.
We are so proud of our wee Bambinator. We can’t wait to see what the future holds for her, and for Coilhouse.
