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)

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)

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)

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)

This image looks remarkably like groves of trees growing among Martian dunes. But, the trees are an optical illusion. They are actually dark streaks of sediment on the downwind side of the dunes. They were created by escaping gas from the evaporating carbon dioxide ice below. The bottom of the ice melts into vapor and moves toward holes in the ice, carrying dark sediment along with it that is then deposited when the gas escapes.

Wired Science: Strange Places on Mars: What Do You Want to See Next?

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)

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

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

Tom Gauld’s web site

(via Jorn’s shared items)

For an ambitious landscape design project, Magnus Larsson, a student at the Architectural Association in London, has proposed a 6,000km-long wall of artificially solidified sandstone architecture that would span the Sahara Desert, east to west, offering a combination of refugee housing and a “green wall” against the future spread of the desert.

bldgblog: Sand/Stone

Van Wedeen, a Harvard radiology professor, is awestruck: “We’ve never really seen the brain – it’s been hiding in plain sight.” Conventional scanning has offered us a crude glimpse, but scientists such as Wedeen aim to produce the first ever three-dimensional map of all its neurons. They call this circuit diagram the “connectome”, and it could help us better understand everything from imagination and language to the miswirings that cause mental illness. But with 100 billion neurons hooked together by more connections than there are stars in the MilkyWay, the brain is a challenge that represents petabyte-level data.

Wired: Revealing the brain’s hidden connections

Pink Tentacle: 19th Century Mermaid Illustrations

“I was studying mosaics in school” recalls Cliff. “I just remember sort of making this connection in my head between the tiles and roach papers. It’s when one sees the level of detail in Cliff’s work that the true amazement begins. Little bits of paper– otherwise thrown away– cut into delicate shapes and arranged together in such a way as to form a true work of art.

Chronic Art

(via Toke of the Town via Disinfo)

Animutations by Aggeliki Vrettou

(via Coilhouse)

Gallery of Computation

The Art Of Gail Wight

(via Fadereu)

(via Erowid)

See also: Alex Grey Obama Portrait

Also: Barack Obama ecstasy tablets

Dalata’s Flickr

(via Wooster Collective)

More Images

(via Disinfo)

Wired: 35 Years of the World’s Best Microscope Photography