“You see how the smoke trembles up in the roof holes? As if whimpering and afraid? Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm because of what they know, and what they don’t know.” — from Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring
Tag: art
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The Virgin Spring: Like Leaves in a Storm
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Death Has Long Been a Savvy Financial Move in the
Death has long been a savvy financial move in the visual arts: it guarantees that the supply of new works has come to an end, conferring scarcity value upon the existing oeuvre. For an artist it is better to die old, however. Death can reduce the value of young artists by taking them from the market before immortality is assured. From “Of Death and Profit”, New York Times Editorial Notebook, August 19, 2009.
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I Really Like This Set of 50×50 Pixel Short Films
Pixel Film:Oo. from garth+ginny on Vimeo.
I really like this set of 50×50 pixel short films by garth+ginny. Once again, constraints can lead to effective art.
(Via Offworld)
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ANSI Art Generator from Drastic
Rad, there’s an online ANSI art generator! Relive the glory days of BBSes and dodgy w4r3z nfo files right in your browser. I remember wasting a lot of time back in junior high making colorful DOS menus using ansi.sys and batch files. Better than launching Windows 3.1!
Check it out, make some art: ansi.drastic.net (The drawing program seems to be broken for me under Firefox 3.5.1, but your mileage may vary)
(Via Waxy)
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Id Been Wondering What Those Thinly Etched or
I’d been wondering what those thinly-etched or embossed porcelain “hidden images” found on antique plates and teacups were called: lithophanes. Artists would carve molds for them using warm wax over a glass plate, with a mirror to reflect light from a window underneath so they could get a preview of their work. A translucent bas relief, with the subtle grisaille quality of a lithograph.
I came across the name after seeing a blog entry on Finkbuilt about using his CNC router robot to computer-carve some psuedo-lithophanes. Is there anything that CNC and/or laser etching can’t do?
A video of his machine carving:
(Photo above via the Wikimedia Commons)
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Boxi: To Die For
I like grafiti but not usually a big fan of stencil – this intricate 11-layer job is pretty cool, though. (Via the Wooster Collective)
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Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take
A short clip from Double Take, a film by media artist Johan Grimonprez (there are a handful of other clips on YouTube). “They say that if you meet your double, you should kill him.” Hitchcock versus Hitchcock versus the Cold War, with cinematic history folding in on itself. There’s a worthwhile interview with Grimonprez over on the Cinema Scope website with more info.
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An Italian vision of a scientific Utopia
The science journal Nature reviews the new book Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism by Christine Poggi. The review itself is a decent synopsis of the Futurist movement in art and literature and the role that modern technology played in shaping European political thought in the early 20th Century. (Note: the Italian Futurist utopian dream devolved rapidly into the very frightening march of fascism, and would eventually become our model for Blade Runner-style sci-fi dystopia…not something to idealize, but worth learning a lesson from)
The Futurists imagined a world governed by electricity. Their electrical fantasies, writes Poggi, take a Utopian turn in their vision and evolve into an orgy of violence. They saw Italy as being “fertilized” by electricity, banishing hunger, poverty, disease and work. Air temperature and ventilation would be controlled automatically, telephones would be wireless, and crops and forests would spring up at speed. But in this world of ease and plenty, fierce competition would arise over superabundant industrial production. War would break out, fought by “small mechanics” whose flesh resembled steel. Deploying “steel elephants” and battery-powered trains from afar, they would wage a thrilling interplanetary war.
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William Hogarth‘s Final Engraving: The Bathos
William Hogarth’s final engraving, a self-satirical illustration of the end of time, parodizing the bathetic imagery in his contemporaries’ works. I admire a guy who can go out on a bit of pessimist humor. (see also this explication of the print)
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Looking at the Stars Always Makes Me Dream As
Looking at the stars always makes me dream, as simply as I dream over the black dots representing towns and villages on a map. Why? I ask myself, shouldn’t the shining dots of the sky be as accessible as the black dots on the map of France? Just as we take a train to get to Tarascon or Rouen, we take death to reach a star. We cannot get to a star while we are alive any more than we can take the train when we are dead. So to me it seems possible that cholera, tuberculosis and cancer are the celestial means of locomotion. Just as steamboats, buses and railways are the terrestrial means. To die quietly of old age, would be to go there on foot. Vincent van Gogh, quoted on Roger Ebert’s Journal (itself a great read)
