Ever wonder what it would sound like if Darth Vader went to a Berlin discotheque and spontaneously suffered anal prolapse after indulging in one-too-many ketamine suppositories? WUNDER NO MOAR:

You can blame thank DJ Dead Billy for this introduction to the one-hit-weirdness that was Warning’s “Why Can the Bodies Fly“. (Germany, 1982.) Boogie music ain’t been this afflicted since a certain muppet lost his cookie at the disco.

It’s all about robots and sugar cubes this afternoon. A crunchy animation with a ’60s space age feel, Une Mission Ephémère was crafted in 1993 by Polish animator Piotr Kamler and scored by experimental/musique concrète composer Bernard Parmegiani. The best part of this clip is watching the way the robot’s facial expressions change as he sculpts playthings and conducts experiments while floating in his little bowl. More clips by Kamler – including Chronopolis, which was his first and only full-length feature – can be found at UbuWeb. Chronopolis and Kamler’s work is often characterized as “science fiction,” but have more in common with Borges than with Star Wars, as one excellent write-up on Kamler notes. [Another hat-tip to Wobbly.]

An animated short by Joe Bichard and Jack Cunningham, buy cialis MARS! tells the story of, seek well, medicine the planet Mars. Specifically it details the meeting of two groups of creatures. The first is a menagerie of Tetrominoe-esque creatures who inhabit the center of the planet. The second are a flotilla of space-faring ships who land on Mars for more sinister reasons.

A little late to the party on this one, perhaps, finding it as I did on Gawker’s sci-fi flavored branch, io9 which came upon it filtered through a few other websites, some of which even non-internet denizens might frequent.

A repost of a repost of a repost then, it still deserves mention here. The new video for The Ghost Inside by Broken Bells features the curvaceous Christina Hendricks as an interstellar would-be starlet as she seeks out fame and fortune. The story is straight out of a Philip K. Dick novel, while the space aesthetic has a decidedly Alien flavor. The metaphor may indeed be a little heavy-handed, but pithy is the order of the day when faced with such time constraints. It certainly it doesn’t keep the piece from being entertaining.

Oh yeah, the song isn’t bad either.

Crater Face by Skyler Page is an exercise in simplicity in every regard, from its story to its animation and Dan Deacon’s music. Despite this — or, perhaps, because of it depending if you’re of the mindset — it is completely engrossing, with an incredible sense of humor and melancholy packed into its four plus minutes.

via DRAWN!

Peristaltic Skin Machine from Lucy McRae on Vimeo.

Artist duo Lucy and Bart, previously mentioned on Coilhouse, have a history of crafting low-fi yet complex representations of genetic enhancement. Recently, Lucy McRae further elaborated on these themes by creating the two videos that you see here together with artists Mandy Smith and Mike Pelletier.

In the Peristaltic Skin Machine clip above, McRae aims to “redefine the body’s surface… using liquid, air, speed and color.” Plastic tubes running along the length of the head and neck appear to cycle multi-colored chemicals along the skin’s surface, simultaneously hinting at some form of futuristic intravenous engineering and recalling the ancient art of mapping Chi pathways and meridians. Below, the clip Chlorophyll Skin shows human skin enveloped in porous white sacs that change color as the video progresses, taking on the resemblance of  scales, feathers, and succulent fruit at various points in the clip. Vitalic and Fever Ray provide the perfect soundtrack.

Chlorophyll Skin from Lucy McRae on Vimeo.

Via Face Culture via Twisted Lamb.

Jeremy Geddes, an accomplished artist from Australia, is working on a series of cosmonauts that has me wishing for a modern, minimally-decorated living space so that I may grace my walls with his work.

The White Cosmonaut

Whether they’re suspended in monochrome space, seemingly ascending with flocks of doves, or floating across barren cityscapes, these cosmonauts’ head-to-toe space armor makes them into blank representations of ourselves. Almost any emotion can be projected into these paintings: is the cosmonaut doing a happy air dance, or is he dead in his suit? Or maybe they’re just awesome space people, placed into aesthetically-pleasing, universally-appealing settings.

Heat Death

OK, the title of the piece above leaves less to the imagination, but I prefer to think of him merrily romping through the empty, radioactive streets, enjoying the lack of gravity. Geddes has consistently said that he wants these pieces to raise questions, rather than answer them, which is precisely what makes me love them more each time I look. Whatever the case may be, this series is gorgeous beyond belief.

The Red Cosmonaut

There are more, bigger cosmonauts on Geddes’ website. Click the jump for two more images here.

There can be no doubt that the fine folks at The Asylum are fans of the special breed of 50s era science fiction; an era in which the mysterious atom reigned supreme. So intrinsic to the conclusion of WWII, viagra a symbol of American dominance and ingenuity, healing and a portent of The Future the atom was also viewed with fear, and whole oeuvres were built around the concept of atomic energy run amok, creating vast, horrifying menageries of over-sized, irradiated monsters. What else but fanatical love for this bygone age could explain the existence of films like Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus or the soon to be classic Mega Piranha starring former pop icon Tiffany and former Brady Buncher Barry Williams? How else would one explain the decidedly sub-par visual effects except as a desire to retain the essence of those films? This, dear readers, is devotion. This is love. Now to patiently await the remake of Them!.

I always thought danger along the frontier was something that was a lot of fun; an exciting adventure, like in the three-D shows.” A wan smile touched her face for a moment. “Only it’s not, is it? It’s not the same at all, because when it’s real you can’t go home after the show is over.”

“No,” he said. “No, you can’t.”

Story goes like this: there’s an emergency ship en route to a plague-ridden planet, carrying essential medicine. The pilot finds a stowaway; a young girl, Marilyn, who just wants to see her brother.

The pilot now has a problem: he has enough fuel to get himself to the planet, but no one else. Interstellar law is clear: all stowaways are jettisoned immediately.

But space captains are heroic sorts. Whatever harsh decisions the author puts in their background to prove their grit, this is still a story. This time will be different. Marilyn is the perfect, plucky sidekick-in-training; surely the pilot can figure out some way to save both her and the planet’s populace.

No. There is no solution. She says her goodbyes and is ejected, with “a slight waver to the ship as the air gushed from the lock, a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing, then there was nothing and the ship was dropping true and steady again.”

The above is from Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations. When it came out in Astonishing Science Fiction in August, 1954, it shocked the hell out of the magazine’s readership, used to the last-minute triumph of human ingenuity.

Godwin’s classic was only the beginning. The ensuing decades would see American sci-fi delve into realms unthinkable to its forebears. Desperate to shake off the genre “urinal,” as Kurt Vonnegut so succinctly termed it, writers first ditched one of the key assumptions: that the hero will always save the day. Maturity, in this view, meant uncomfortable truths. Often, it meant unhappy endings, not just for the protagonists, but frequently the entire world.

This is a scattershot story of how the bleak tomorrow came to reign, and how it changed our visions of the future.

Ah, the legendary 14th episode of Nu Pogodi (“You Just Wait!”), a ’70s/’80s children’s cartoon outlining the tormented, love-hate, co-dependent relationship of Zayatz and Volk (bunny and wolf), the Wile E. Coyote & Road Runner of the USSR.  Their relationship spanned 16 “classic” episodes (from 1969 to 1986) and included plenty of substance abuse, violence, “bad touches,” and one very awkward romantic dinner.

The 14th episode – with its murderous rabbit simulacrum, metrosexual hair-cutting/pants-pressing robots, junky schteeempunk Volkswagon (YOU SEE WHAT I DID THERE?!), and zero-G flight simulators that play Space Race-inspired Soviet pop music. Episode 14 – my first exposure to electronic music of any sort. The techno kicks in at 2:57, when the main Space/Technology portion of the episode begins. In this episode, the wolf chases the rabbit around the “Dom Yunogo Technika,” which translates roughly to “House/Society of Young Tech-heads.” (That’s my best 5 AM translation, at least).  Before 2:57, there’s a short mini-episode in which Rabbit & Wolf share a dinner together – the aforementioned date, which ended in hilarious tragedy and made the show go down in Russian gay animation/film history, as both Rabbit & Wolf are male.

As with all episodes of Nu Pogodi, which can be found on YouTube, the wide-ranging music is one of the best parts. This episode is one of the best examples of that. The tracklist of Episode 14, which includes some appearances by Western artists, is this:

1. Alla Pugachova – Million Alyh Roz
2. Digital Emotion — Get Up, Action
3. Digital Emotion — Go Go Yellow Screen
4. Bonnie and Clyde – Leroy Holmes
5. Methusalem (Empire) – Black Hole (Bavarian Affair)
6. Digital Emotion — The Beauty & The Beast
7. Zemlyane – Trava u Doma
8. VIA Leisya Pesnya – Kachaetsya Vagon