Collective Consciousness
Childhood Demons & Heroes: Hikari Shimoda
>Hikari Shimoda’s Website
Hikari Shimoda on Tumblr<Previous post on Hikari Shimoda here.
The first three images are a series called Whereabouts of God. The images depicting children in superhero costumes were part of a solo show, In a World of Dead Gods, which exhibited at the Artcomplex Center of Tokyo in December of last year. Her statement for the exhibition is this:
“A catastrophic earthquake hit Japan on March 11, 2011. Not only did this earthquake kill many people, but it has also called attention to a nuclear power plant explosion without precedence. This horrible tragedy occurred as a result of this society’s reliance on nuclear energy. Responsibility for this has thus been transferred from the adults to their children. Those who are born into this world are instantaneously burdened by an atrocity of whole-world magnitude. They are also required to save it. We must now face a new reality in order to live in this world. Through images of children wearing such costumes as those of Superman or Sailor Moon, I am expressing indirectly problems that the world now faces.”
Pictures from Pyongyang
These images of Pyongyang, the capital city of North Korea, taken by London-based photographer Charlie Crane and published in 2007, are beautiful but also unsettling. Staged, perfect scenes are displayed: empty train stations and restaurants utterly devoid of life, sterile and pristine; a single representative child, store clerk, or hospital employee standing blandly posed in the midst of these surroundings with completely neutral expressions. Food is set out on a restaurant table for people who aren’t there. These places feel vacated but at the same time inviting.
Tags: artifice, contemporary architecture, eerie, north korea, photojournalism
R.I.P., Elizabeth Taylor
Tags: classic hollywood
“Biojewelry”: Grow Your Own Bone Wedding Rings
Several years ago, Tobie Kerridge and Nikki Stott, design researchers at the Royal College of Art, and Ian Thompson, a bioengineer at King’s College London, teamed up to create wedding bands from bone cells extracted from five volunteer couples.
According to a BBC News article, “The scientists extracted the participants’ wisdom teeth to get at a sliver of bone that attaches them to the jawbone.” After extracting the bone cells for culture, “These are fed with nutrients and grown on a ‘scaffold’ material called bioglass, a special bioactive ceramic which mimics the structure of bone material.” It was a “long and fragile” process, but basically took place in the following steps:
The process
1. Extract bone chips from jaw. Rinse.
2. Place bone cells in ring-shaped bioactive ceramic scaffold.
3. Feed liquid nutrients and culture in a temperature-controlled bioreactor for six weeks.
4. After coral-like bone forms fully around scaffold, pare down to final ring shape and insert silver liner (for engraving).Harriet Harriss, one of the participants, says: “I love the idea that it’s precious only to us because it is, literally, us. It’s almost worthless to anyone else. To take something that is from myself and make it into something precious is a lovely thing and means quite a lot to me.”
Of course, there is more potential for this project than just offbeat wedding rings made from the beloved’s own bone cells. It could eventually be used to grow bone replacements for implantation, so that the bone required to, say, repair a damaged jaw, wouldn’t have to be harvested from a piece of a rib, or elsewhere in the body. “Dr. Thompson says he thinks it will be used in clinical practice, but not in his lifetime.”
via goetia on Tumblr
Tags: anatomical-themed, bioart, biotechnology, bizarre, bones, jewelry, sinister arts and crafts, weird science projects
Domestic Violence Ad
This is a really powerful minute-long commercial, if you can call it that, for the National Domestic Violence Hotline.
Tags: blood, bruises, commercials, domestic violence, emotive, injuries, special effects makeup
Kate MacDowell
Kate MacDowell makes incredible works of art, akin to installation pieces, out of porcelain, a medium she chose for its “luminous and ghostly qualities as well as its strength and ability to show fine texture.”
Detailed and realistic, these pieces make loud and piercing statements about the troubled relationship between man and the natural world, but remain elegant and delicate. They “borrow from myth” (one example is this piece, titled Persephone, which references the myth of Persephone’s abduction by Hades to the Underworld, in which she mistakenly eats the seeds of a pomegranate he offers to her, thus forcing her to spend a quarter of each year in the Underworld – in MacDowell’s vision, the pomegranate’s seeds are actually pills, tablets with a neat little line down the middle); other sources of inspiration include “art history, figures of speech, and other cultural touchstones.”
The pieces are visual metaphors, or illustrated “figures of speech,” such as a pair of lungs with canaries inside them, or a dead rabbit containing a human skeleton. In MacDowell’s world, man and nature are grafted to each other, repeatedly, in surreal and subtly horrific ways. As she explains, often “aspects of the human figure stand in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world.”
Check out her work below, and be amazed. More can be seen on her Website.
Tags: anatomical-themed, animals, conceptual, environmentalism, greek mythology, installation art, kate macdowell, metamorphosis, political, porcelain, rabbits, surreal
“Sandman” Adaptation for TV
Warner Bros. TV is adapting The Sandman graphic novel series into a show [article]. I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing, but I’m kind of looking forward to it nonetheless, whenever it airs. I can’t help thinking it might turn out better if it was being made by HBO or something, though.
I was super obsessed with Sandman in high school. It was kind of an epiphany for me. It was and still is the most profound, intellectually and visually interesting, artistic, and endearing thing in the comic book world that I’ve ever found. My favorite members of the Endless are Dream, Death, and Delirium; I see myself in each of them. I hope that they find actors who somewhat fit the roles for the Endless. I particularly think it’s important that they find an actress who suits my idea of what Death should look like, for some reason.
Tags: graphic novels, neil gaiman, tee-vee, the endless, the sandman
Rat Love
My Victoriandustrial rock idol Emilie Autumn recently did an interview with Planet Green. I thought her answer to the last question, advice on “how to make more green, compassionate, and creative choices,” was most pertinent, as it’s totally the way I see it, too:
I would suggest that the element that would help the most in keeping our planet green is to learn to appreciate the beauty and importance of what it is that we have, similar to my view of vegetarianism and converting people to that way of eating. It is much more effective, and far less annoying, to increase people’s appreciation for animals of all species than it is to tell people not to eat them. A dietary alteration will soon follow once the animals in question are seen as something more important than food. We need to teach people to fall in love with the natural world again before we can expect them to care about saving it.
Also, here’s a behind-the-scenes video from Emilie’s photoshoot for Bizarre Magazine – with rats! (Don’t mind the God-awful porn lounge-type music they always accompany their videos with, it’s so ridiculous):
Follow ze linkTags: animal love, emilie autumn, environmentalism, rats, vegetarianism
