I can’t help but admire Ian Obermuller’s whacked-out Self Absorb Awash in a sea of near future cautionary tales and space-marines, paranoid psychothrillers and myriad different flavors of “-punk” appendaged sub-genres, there seems to be less and less work being produced that features the truly alien. Self Absorb tells the story of a young man who awakens in an alien jungle with no memory of how he arrived there. He eventually finds himself in the presence of one Dr. Trellis, a “metaphysicist” who counts among his assistants two individuals whose consciousnesses he has transferred into his pet cats. Yeah, it’s that kind of story. As far as animation goes, it is, perhaps, not the most jaw-dropping display you will ever see, but it does a wonderful job of creating a sense of place. Regardless of its art direction, its embrace of the bizarre has me interested in seeing what comes next.
The controller uses a computer graphics technique called “Structured Light” to build a depth map of the field of view. This allows the Xbox Kinect camera to discern shapes and ultimately build a skeletal model of the person standing in front of it. It does this by projecting a grid of tiny infrared dots across the room, and reading the position of those dots with another camera. Those infrared dots show up really well on an IR camera as they’re quite bright. Projected against a person, they create interesting contours and patterns.
A community of Bay Area artists, models and makers came together to pose for this series, working together in pitch darkness to craft these images. Penven describes the experience:
As a photographer I am most interested in the nature and quality of light: how light behaves in the physical world, and how it interacts with and affects the subjects that it illuminates. For this shoot my models and I were essentially working blind, with the results visible only after each image was captured. Together, we explored the unique physicality of structured light, finding our way in the darkness by touch and intuition. Dancing with invisible light.
Prior to releasing this shoot, Penven posted some early experiments combining the IR camera and the Kinect. The haunting early sketches have the air of sci-fi surveillance footage, and are just as fascinating as the final product.
More images after the jump, and many more in large format on Audrey’s Flickr page. The opening reception at Pictopia is on April 1st from 6-11pm, and will feature a musical performance by Doctor Popular and vegan cupcakes by Idle Hands Baking. See you there!
TV on the Radio’s new song “Will Do” has a tenderhearted, lovely new video… replete with VR cybergoggles. Their next album, Nine Types of Light, drops April 12th. Best wishes to bassist Gerard Smith for a speedy recovery.
Director: Dugan O’Neal / Executive Producer: Danielle Hinde / Director of Photography: David Myrick / Visual Effects: BEMO / Art Director: Ashley Fenton and Megan Fenton / Editor: Dugan O’Neal and Isaiah Seret / Virtual Reality Goggles by Nikolai Hass and Simon Hass / Commissioner: Michelle An / Production CO: Doomsday Ent.
Oldies but goodies: Syd Mead’s designs for the original Tron from the late 70s. Hot on the heels of last week’s post on cyborg theory, a quote from Mead on the subject:
The fashionable ideology that “artificial” lacks the inherent goodness of “natural” is an appealing, but hopelessly simplistic notion of the intellectually chic. Artifice is the result of a deliberate intent to make. Nature also “makes” things, using a set of basic building blocks common throughout the universe. Exchanging infinite time for deliberate design, nature has ingeniously built plants, planets, galaxies and unimaginable constructs which seem to structure the universe itself. What we call “natural” is simply the result of whatever set of rules nature has followed in fashioning our observable reality. On planet Earth, nature has manipulated the common elements to fashion everything from bacteria to the molten core of the planet. Discoveries in the “nano” technologies of bio, molecular, and micro engineering will re-edit the nomenclature of “natural” versus “unnatural”, blurring if not erasing the line of distinction between “machine” and “organism”, “natural” and “unnatural”, “God-given” and “man-made”.
The reels of footage from America were, to say the least, a cause for concern. So concerning, in fact, that Serov personally presented the official report to Khrushchev. Witnesses in the room claim that the First Secretary of the Central Committee looked visibly shaken, the blood draining from his face. The idea that the enemy would be in possession of such an animal, empowered with such advanced situational awareness and capable of communicating with humans was astonishing. His first question upon composing himself was to ask just how the KGB could have been unaware of a program to create such a creature; a question for which Serov had no answer. It was a spectacular failure of intelligence that would haunt the rest of his career and, some speculated, would ultimately be the reason for his dismissal (unfairly, one might point out, as the experiment had come to fruition before his appointment as the Ministry’s head).
Needless to say, work began almost immediately on a response. The canine was smart, yes, and agile but it was still a dog and, therefore, still susceptible to all the dangers that might befall the squishy, fragile body of a living creature. Dr. Sergey Sergeyevich Bryukhonenko had already laid the groundwork for what Russian scientists were proposing, and they wasted no time in putting it into practice. No such head-start was afforded them in the construction of the mechanical body, however, and yet the team still managed to build a working prototype in the span of two years.
In light of the charming Goodnight Dune children’s book that’s making the rounds online right now, today seems like a great time to share some treasures from my personal stash of weird, random, off-color, No-Seriously-WTF-Were-They-Thinking movie franchise ephemera.
These, for your delectation, are scans and photos of various pages from the astoundingly age-inappropriate Dune activity book series, published in 1984 to promote David Lynch’s movie adaptation of the classic Frank Herbert novel, produced by Universal Studios.
You know, FOR KIDS:
Yes, that’s a coloring page of Dr. Yueh preparing to assassinate Duke Leto with a dartgun. And up at the top there, that’s a floppy, diseased sex organ-reminiscent Guild Navigator, presented a-la la la “Connect the Dots”.
And here’s another cheerful coloring page of the fresh corpses of Duke Leto and Piter:
Heeeeee! Who the frak was in charge of marketing? More to the point, what kind of Melange were they smokin’ during the merch meeting, when it was decided that producing this series of vengeful activity books for a K-through-8 demographic made good business sense?
Well, whoever they were, Coilhouse salutes them.
Explore the childlike wonderment murder, intrigue, suppurating boils, phallic symbolism and knifeplay after the jump.
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.
“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.”
Also worth watching is this short making-of documentary, detailing how the production team managed to pull everything together on next to no budget. “It was just a group of folks who got together and made this through sheer will.”
Wow. Huge admiration for musician Ben Lovett, director Christopher Alender, producer Kris Eber, animator Wes Ball, and their entire crew. UR DOIN’ IT RIGHT.
An oldy but a goody, posted both for those who have never heard it, and those who have heard it a hundred times already. The serene and mysterious ambient music of Jupiter as captured by NASA Voyager:
These sounds are the result of “the complex interactions of charged electromagnetic particles from the solar wind, planetary magnetosphere, etc.” (Via Andy Ristaino, thank you.)
There’s something deeply comforting and astonishing about this, isn’t there? Our universe is so far from silent. A wide range of heavenly bodies are constantly emitting unique electromagnetic signals that we can pick up and process, provided we have the right instruments. The stars do sing.
On an altered yet recognizable version of our neighbouring planet, we find a world populated solely with two women. We do not learn their names nor how and when they came to Mars, but we observe their wanderings in a desolate landscape which they attempt make navigable and habitable with an amalgam of high-tech components retrofitted to found artifacts and monuments that appear to be the remnants of a long-gone civilization. The remains of massive stone listening devices are littered about the landscape, leading us to wonder: is this a colony that has collapsed and lost touch with earth? How did its occupants become stranded? Or are these the nocturnal imaginings of two post-apocalyptic survivors?
The book can be viewed and purchased on Blurb. The artists write on Tumblr, “the ideal book we designed for the series, 12”x12” hardcover, 80 pages, available now through blurb online only, until a publisher daring enough picks it up. A full preview of it is on the website.” $108 may seem somewhat pricey, but that’s actually because Blurb is expensive for people to use, not because they’re trying to make a huge profit. If a real publisher picked up this book, it would be more affordable. Fingers crossed.
