• “Black and Blue” by Emily Kaelin

    Black and Blue is a sculpture piece by Emily Kaelin, resembling a disembodied clump of long black hair ethereally embedded with bright blue butterfly wings, also severed from their proper owners. It is made of synthetic hair, Morpho butterfly wings, and glitter.

    Emily Kaelin is a young artist who constantly deals with repulsion vs. beauty, in installations, mixed-media art, and paintings, mimicking human organic materials that are generally thought to be disgusting, such as flesh, hair, blood, and bone, and creating pieces that are conflicting, visceral, and unlike anything else out there, pushing her art farther and into new territories.

    She describes her own art in these words: “push and pull of appealing and repellent, comforting and upsetting, lovely and ugly; inability to look at or render self objectively; impulse and intuition and instinct; emotionality; flesh; hairiness”

    Her art constantly intersects the descriptors of ugly, strangely beautiful, alluring, repulsive, bizarre, off-putting, interesting, intriguing, fleshy, raw, delicate, otherworldly, and original. It expresses agony incarnate in the body, in its materials of ink and parchment (blood and skin).

    A few more examples of her work below:

    See more after the cut

  • Poetry: “Disown” by saartha

    And it broke my heart but I
    killed every trembling thing. The yearning
    spaces subsided, they were reddened, they
    were convinced to stillness.

    And it broke my heart but God
    became God-in-exile, became
    yearning spaces. I buried my demons
    with a knife, and left them to it. Exile
    was the new love, it was a barren land,
    it took no prisoners.

    And it broke my heart but the pieces
    hardened, they were as clockworks,
    they counted down the hours. I was
    waiting, my body was a sharp plane,
    a border, I was waiting, everything

    had already happened, I had killed it,
    it drifted through the motionless diaspora,
    the hours turned on me and they had teeth.

    – by saartha

  • Asylum: The Video Game

    Asylum is an upcoming survival horror computer game from Senscape that will be released sometime in 2011 (so it can’t be too long now, unless the release is pushed back to 2012).

    Almost nothing is known about the story except this: you explore the sprawling, intricate, nearly opulent-looking Hanwell Mental Institute, and the horrors that the inmates underwent. The main character is an ex-patient who has returned to the asylum “to understand why he is suffering from bizarre hallucinations.”

    There’s a lot of focus on the actual exploration of the building – as creator Agustín Cordes claims, “Each single room matters and even the bathrooms are brimming with details,” and “The overall consensus is that exploring the Hanwell building feels eerily realistic and is filled with ‘touchably crisp textures.’” About the premise, “I will only say this: Asylum is supposed to feel surreal, like there’s something horribly wrong going on inside Hanwell as soon as you set foot inside the place. Don’t try to make any sense out of it, at least not until you’re halfway into the game.”

    More words from the creator:
    An aspect that has become very apparent during our testing is that Asylum, unlike most first-person adventures, is really fluid. There are virtually no loading times, control is quick and smooth, navigation is easy, you have an amazing deal of freedom of movement — all in all, everything feels just right. At times it feels like a first-person shooter actually, which is pretty cool if you ask me — after all, adventures should test your creativity and intuition, not your patience with the controls. In this regard I believe that we have definitely achieved our goal because Asylum feels, in one word, “modern.”

    I love anything to do with old insane asylums, especially in the context of horror, and if the teaser (showing the decayed and sinister corridors of the institute, and cells in which inmates are suffering in horrific, bloody ways) is anything to go by, this should be interesting and imagination-piquing.

    A gameplay trailer was released last month, which is quite amazing.