A Journey Around My Skull scanned Harry Clarke’s illustrations for Edgar Allan Poe’s Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Stunning stuff.

A Journey Around My Skull: Harry Clare, illustrations for E.A. Poe

(via Coilhouse)

The First Decade of Computer Art (1965-1975) (PDF)

(via Social Physicist)

Read more, and answer, at the Psychetect web site

Gustave Doré was a world famous 19th century illustrator. Although he illustrated over 200 books, some with more than 400 plates, he is primarily known for his illustrations to The Divine Comedy, particularly The Inferno, his illustrations to Don Quixote, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven.

Gustave Doré Art Collection

Wikipedia entry on Gustave Doré

(via Reclusland)

Flickr Photo Pool

(via William Gibson via GammaCounter)

Dark Roasted Blend has a big round-up of trippy architectural visions of future cities. Here are some highlights:

Luc Schuiten’s Vegetal City

The Walking City by Archigram, an old favorite of mine.

‘Shroom City, by Frederic St. Arnaud

There are many more at Dark Roasted Blend: Hallucinatory Architecture of the Future

(Thanks Trevor!)

Surrealist book-object; harsh noise album in paperback form.

300 pages of pixel-noisescapes, created soley using the antique mac paint app LightningPaint.

Paperback with full colour cover, black + white interior.

Cementimental – Untitled Harsh Noise Graphic Novel

(via Fadereu)

Pink Tentacle: Monster illustrations from ‘Yokai Jiten’

With Chemistry as Art, Safren uses chemical reactions on metal surfaces to create dynamic images. With these works, Safren brings to the fore the chemical materiality of painting and the intimacy of individual artist with their materials. Safren’s ‘paintings’ interact with their viewers through the refractive and reflective nature of the chemicals applied to their surfaces.

Cheryl Safren

(via Fadereu)

Today marks the 116th anniversary of Norman Rockwell’s birth. Born in New York, Rockwell became best known for his idealized images of small-town life. He was shunned by the art world in his time and that impression has largely continued today. A commercial illustrator for the vast majority of his life, for many Rockwell is associated only with saccharine sweetness and stagnant tradition.

This is wrong.

The other side of Norman Rockwell

Elena Dorfman: Still Lovers

(via Notes From Somewhere Bizarre)

See also: Documentary about men and their RealDolls

Real 3D Mandelbulbs

(First saw this via Social Physicist, have seen it several places since)

aDiatomea: ColonyI from MRK on Vimeo.

aDiatomea is an artificial life system that uses various methods and notions of a-life research. The basic principle of aDiatomea is that every aspect of it is entirely mathematically generated and thus it is not created purposefully as an art piece but as a complex system that takes a life of its own. These artificial organisms are based on actual unicellular organisms known as Diatoms. These beautiful microscopic creatures are constructed using the superformula, an equation that can reproduce organic forms. Granular sound is injected in these organisms, acting as their life-force, while they interact with each other and their environment. This film shows a recording of 36 seconds of evolution, pushing the boundaries of complex computer calculations.

Vimeo Gallery

Flickr Set

aDiatomea Site

(via Fadereu)

The guerrilla pseudo-documentary “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” billed as “A Banksy Film” and narrated by Ifans, will have its world premiere Sunday night. [...]

According to a description, “L.A.-based filmmaker Terry Guetta set out to record this secretive world in thrilling detail. For more than eight years he traveled with a backpack through Europe and America. After he met a British street artist known only as Banksy, things took a bizarre turn.”

But whether the artist known as Banksy directed the film himself is still a mystery.

Reuters: Banksy’s “Exit” to premiere at Sundance

(Thanks Bill)

I belong to a gospel choir. They know I am an atheist but they are very tolerant. Ultimately, the message of gospel music is that everything’s going to be all right. If you listen to millions of gospel records – and I have – and try to distil what they all have in common it’s a sense that somehow we can triumph. There could be many thousands of things. But the message… well , there are two messages… one is a kind of optimism for the future rather than a pessimism. Gospel music is never pessimistic, it’s never ‘oh my god, its all going down the tubes’, like the blues often is. Gospel music is always about the possibility of transcendence, of things getting better. It’s also about the loss of ego, that you will win through or get over things by losing yourself, becoming part of something better. Both those messages are completely universal and are nothing to do with religion or a particular religion. They’re to do with basic human attitudes and you can have that attitude and therefore sing gospel even if you are not religious.

The Observer: On gospel, Abba and the death of the record: an audience with Brian Eno

(via Zenarchery)

What do you think is the true nature of this world and how can a person get closer to it?
We are naked beings and nothing has any meaning. We only fabricate things to help us be more removed from nature. Humans are like the prodigal sons of Earth – moving away from their mother to spend her fortunes, only to return in death as the stripped down and barbaric beings we once were. So to get closer to true nature? Burn your clothes and belongings and money, have a sharp chiseled stone to catch food and a grass hut to keep shelter! Or realize we live a world that is consumed by false beliefs and agreements and try to live your life without taking it all too seriously.

Coilhouse: Sculpting The Infinite With Kris Kuksi

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: Thee Psychick Bible (Part 2) from DANGEROUS MINDS on Vimeo.

Update: The embedded video isn’t working right now, so try this direct link instead.

20 paintings, and the history of the Futurist movement

Marinetti wanted Futurism to become the official artistic style of Italian fascism, but Mussolini resisted and encouraged a wide range of styles to keep artists of all types on the side of the regime. While Futurism would ultimately be linked to fascism, there were many socialist and anarchist Futurists, linked by an interest in political violence. Towards the end of the 1930s, Italian fascists were adopting the stance of their German counterparts, considering modern art to be degenerate and rejecting the Futurist movement.

20 Dynamic Paintings From The Italian Futurists

(via Mister X)

See also: Vorticist art collections

Yep, it’s all just an art installation, inspired by artist Joseph Beuys as an extension of his “7000 Oaks” project. Over the course of five years beginning in 1982, Beuys planted 7,000 trees in the city of Kassel, Germany, each with an accompanying basalt stone column (intended to illustrate the opposing characteristics and yet harmonious co-existence of tree and rock, apparently). After his death, the concept was brought to West 22nd Street.

Scouting NY: The Mysterious Stonehenge on West 22nd Street

(Thanks James K!)

Interview is here.

Reactions to a few things:

There is a particular line I remember from The Sopranos where I think Tony Soprano says, “There are only two businesses that are recession-proof. There are certain elements of the entertainment industry, and this thing of ours”

I’m surprised that Moore watched the Sopranos, but it further confirms my thesis that television is the new cinema.

Where comics are starting to score heavily is in the documentary approach. People are starting to tell coherent stories that are autobiographical or documentary comics dealing with a particular situation. There has been a heartening surge of those, and they are largely coming from outside the comics industry. The comics industry, meanwhile, seems to be going down the tubes, as far as I can see. And it’s largely their own fault, that they did not embrace change heartily enough, that they didn’t have any new ideas, that they didn’t have a clue.

I think this is a little too pessimistic, but maybe that’s because I live in Portland and when I think of the comics industry I think of Floating World and The Stumptown Comics Festival and stuff. On the other hand, the only ongoing series I’m currently reading is the documentary series Reich.

would like to think that in our present time, not just in comics but in almost every form of the arts, I think that creative expression is within the reach of more people that it ever has been. Now, that is not to say that there are more people with something to say than there ever have been before. But I would like to see a situation where people finally got fed up with celebrity culture. Where people started this great democratic process in the arts where more and more people were just producing individually according to their own wants or needs.

This, on the other hand, is far too optimistic.

On the subject of writing an opera with the Gorillaz (previously mentioned here):

Well, that is a bit premature. We were having talks, but it was much too early to be talking about it. It got onto a website and then it went all over the place and got incredibly inflated. There’s a possibility of us working together on a project, but it wouldn’t be for a long, long time. But they are hopefully going to be doing something for Dodgem Logic’s third issue. And we’ve got some other fine people lined up for the future.

Consider this a correction.

Schmidt served as the music adviser to curator Jasia Reichardt for the landmark exhibition “Cybernetic Serendipity” at London’s ICA in 1968, and his selection of computer music for the ICA show proved extraordinarily prescient. Schmidt had long been intrigued by electronic music, systems, and their connections to the visual arts. “Cybernetic Serendipity” showcased pathbreaking work by hundreds of artists, including John Cage, Nam June Paik, and Jean Tinguely, and was a huge success for Reichardt and the ICA, drawing somewhere between 45,000 and 60,000 viewers and foreshadowing multiple major trends on the interfaces between art and technology. “Cybernetic Serendipity” also galvanized the interest in systems-based art. “The very notion of having a system in relation to making paintings is often anathema to those who value the mysterious and the intuitive, the free and the expressionistic, in art,” wrote Reichardt in 1968. “Systems, nevertheless, dispense neither with intuition nor mystery. Intuition is instrumental in the design of the system and mystery always remains in the final result.”

Rhizome: Brian Eno, Peter Schmidt, and Cybernetics

Tom Gauld’s web site

(via Jorn’s shared items)

Prof Roger Wotton, from University College London, found that flight would be impossible for angels portrayed with arms and bird-like feathered wings.

“Even a cursory examination of the evidence in representational arts shows that angels and cherubs cannot take off and cannot use powered flight,” said Prof Wotton. “And even if they used gliding flight, they would need to be exposed to very high wind velocities at take off – such high winds that they would be blown away and have no need for wings.

“Interestingly, the artist Giotto showed one angel with a rigid ‘mono-wing’ which could be an adaptation for gliding flight. But if they do just glide, how are the wings folded, unfolded and held rigid?”

Telegraph: Angels can’t fly, scientist says

(via Swadeshine)

In response to this NY Post piece by Emily Nussbuam, Robert Moore makes a persuasive case that Buffy the Vampire Slayer made TV art:

This was the decade in which television became art. So argues Emily Nussbuam in a recent New York Magazine essay, “When TV Became Art”. She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a pivotal age for TV and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in the development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all in all, the finest decade for great television. Others have argued that TV had arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling numbers) arguing for the fifties, based on the series that presented staged plays for a television audience, including such original masterpieces as “Twelve Angry Men”, written by Reginald Rose for Studio One, and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, written by Rod Serling for Playhouse 90. Later, Robert J. Thompson, in his widely cited Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, argued for the eighties as the crucial period. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side; it is difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that emerged in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past ten years is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows from all previous decades combined.

Nonetheless, I want to take issue with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the overall picture up into decade-sized blocks obscures the reality. I believe that one can point at a precise point where TV became art, and that point was the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. [...]

I understand Nussbaum’s desire to fit the birth of TV as art into a decade framework, but the truth is that art, like life, is messier than that. TV had become art before 2000 and it was largely thanks to Buffy.

Pop Matters: When TV Became Art: What We Owe to Buffy

(Thanks Zenarchery)

I love the The Wire but it certainly wasn’t the most ground breaking series on television (remember, both The Sopranos and Six Feet Under preceded it). I haven’t watched Buffy, but Moore makes a strong case. Either way, the 00s certainly marked a turning point in the history of television. It was, perhaps, the decade in which television eclipsed film.

It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Ditko sees himself as a real-life “Howard Roark,” Rand’s fictional architect in The Fountainhead, a man who refuses to compromise his vision. Rand’s influence was even more obvious in his right wing vigilante character Mr A, who would throw someone off a building for disagreeing with him. His work became didactic, shrill, hectoring and far-right his influence waned. Mr. A was like Bill O’Reilly as a superhero. What teenager wants to be yelled at by a moralistic superhero? In the opinion of many, his work degenerated into fascistic rhetoric and lunacy from the late 60s onwards.

There have been almost no interviews, ever, with Steve Ditko. While really not a hermit or a recluse, he’s an intensely private person and refuses all interviews, although there are stories of him speaking to a fan ballsy enough to ring his doorbell, but always standing in the doorway, never inviting them in to his studio. In his recent BBC documentary In Search of Steve Ditko, otaku British talkshow host Jonathan Ross tracked Ditko down in New York City and called the artist on the telephone. Ditko politely refused his request for an on camera interview. But when Ross (and Neil Gaiman) showed up on his doorstep, he did in fact entertain them, although not on camera.

Dangerous Minds: Searching for Steve Ditko

See:

Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko (Buy it on Amazon)

In search of Steve Ditko documentary on YouTube

I first heard about this documentary from Trevor a couple years ago, but I haven’t watched it yet.