When Gonzo Artist Ralph Steadman Illustrated George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1995)

in Art, Books, Literature | August 16th, 2017

As a nov­el­ist, George Orwell did not traf­fic in sub­tleties, but then nei­ther did the authors of Medieval moral­i­ty plays. The alle­gor­i­cal Ani­mal Farm per­forms a sim­i­lar, if sec­u­lar, func­tion, giv­ing us unam­bigu­ous vil­lainy and clear didac­tic intent. Orwell not­ed in his essay “Why I Write” that he meant the book to “fuse polit­i­cal pur­pose and artis­tic pur­pose into one whole.“ Orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished with the sub­ti­tle A Fairy Sto­ry, the nov­el car­i­ca­tures Stal­in­ism and the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, and Orwell left no mys­tery as to his intent when he com­ment­ed in the pref­ace to a 1947 Ukrain­ian edi­tion that he meant the book to “end on a loud note of dis­cord” meant to sig­ni­fy what he saw as the insta­bil­i­ty of the Tehran Con­fer­ence.

Lead­en state­ments like these aside, Orwell swore he “did not wish to com­ment on the work,” writ­ing, “if it does not speak for itself, it is a fail­ure.” The book does indeed speak, in two par­tic­u­lar ways: its vivid­ly grotesque char­ac­ter­i­za­tions of the humans and ani­mals on the farm and its indeli­ble col­lec­tion of pro­pa­gan­dis­tic slo­gans.

These are the fea­tures best cap­tured by gonzo illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man, famous for his col­lab­o­ra­tions with Hunter S. Thomp­son. Pub­lished in 1995—with the Fairy Sto­ry sub­ti­tle restored—the Stead­man-illus­trat­ed 50th anniver­sary edi­tion real­izes anoth­er pre­vi­ous vari­a­tion on the book’s title: Ani­mal Farm: A Con­tem­po­rary Satire.

These images draw out the exag­ger­at­ed absur­di­ties of the nov­el as only an artist with Steadman’s twist­ed, sur­re­al­ist sense of visu­al humor could. They are pro­found­ly effec­tive, though there’s no telling what Orwell would have thought of them. Steadman’s car­i­ca­tures uni­ver­sal­ize the book’s dra­ma, pro­vid­ing the kind of stock char­ac­ters we find in folk­lore, “fairy sto­ries,” and reli­gious alle­go­ry. But Orwell wrote that he wished us not to mis­take his express polit­i­cal intent: “It was of the utmost impor­tance to me that peo­ple in West­ern Europe should see the Sovi­et regime for what it real­ly was…. I have been con­vinced that the destruc­tion of the Sovi­et myth was essen­tial if we want­ed a revival of the Social­ist move­ment.”

Stead­man, to his great cred­it, felt no need to lit­er­al­ize Orwell’s stat­ed inten­tions in his illus­tra­tions, but rather took the book’s bizarre world on its own terms. You can read more quotes from Orwell’s earnest, intend­ed pref­ace for the book, restored in the Stead­man edi­tion, at Brain Pick­ings, where you’ll also find a good num­ber of the illus­tra­tions as well. Copies of the book can be pur­chased on Ama­zon.

Stead­man not only applied his skill as a car­i­ca­tur­ist to Orwell’s fic­tion­al farm denizens, we should note, but also to the author him­self. He made sev­er­al sketch­es of Orwell, such as that below of the writer with a cage of rats around his neck. You can see sev­er­al more of Steadman’s draw­ings of Orwell at The Guardian.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Break­ing Bad Illus­trat­ed by Gonzo Artist Ralph Stead­man

Pink Floyd Adapts George Orwell’s Ani­mal Farm into Their 1977 Con­cept Album, Ani­mals (a Cri­tique of Late Cap­i­tal­ism, Not Stal­in)

Gun Nut William S. Bur­roughs & Gonzo Illus­tra­tor Ralph Stead­man Make Polaroid Por­traits Togeth­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Artist Draws 9 Portraits While on LSD: Inside the 1950s Experiments to Turn LSD into a “Creativity Pill”

in Art, Creativity, Psychology, Science | August 15th, 2017

LSD was first syn­the­sized in 1938 by chemist Albert Hoff­man in a Swiss lab­o­ra­to­ry but only attained infamy almost two decades lat­er, when it became part of a series of gov­ern­ment exper­i­ments. At the same time, a UC Irvine psy­chi­a­trist, Oscar Janiger (“Oz” to his friends), con­duct­ed his own stud­ies under very dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. “Unlike most researchers, Janiger want­ed to cre­ate a ‘nat­ur­al’ set­ting,” writes Brandy Doyle for MAPS (the Mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary Asso­ci­a­tion for Psy­che­del­ic Stud­ies). He rea­soned that “there was noth­ing espe­cial­ly neu­tral about a lab­o­ra­to­ry or hos­pi­tal room,” so he “rent­ed a house out­side of LA, in which his sub­jects could have a rel­a­tive­ly non-direct­ed expe­ri­ence in a sup­port­ive envi­ron­ment.”

Janiger want­ed his sub­jects to make cre­ative dis­cov­er­ies in a state of height­ened con­scious­ness. The study sought, he wrote, to “illu­mi­nate the phe­nom­e­no­log­i­cal nature of the LSD expe­ri­ence,” to see whether the drug could effec­tive­ly be turned into a cre­ativ­i­ty pill. He found, over a peri­od last­ing from 1954 to 1962 (when the exper­i­ments were ter­mi­nat­ed), that among his approx­i­mate­ly 900 sub­jects, those who were in ther­a­py “had a high rate of pos­i­tive response,” but those not in ther­a­py “found the expe­ri­ence much less pleas­ant.” Janiger’s find­ings have con­tributed to the research that orga­ni­za­tions like MAPS have done on psy­choac­tive drugs in ther­a­peu­tic set­tings. The exper­i­ments also pro­duced a body of art­work made by study par­tic­i­pants on acid.

Janiger invit­ed over 100 pro­fes­sion­al artists into the study and had them pro­duce over 250 paint­ings and draw­ings. The series of eight draw­ings you see here most like­ly came from one of those artists (though “the records of the iden­ti­ty of the prin­ci­ple researcher have been lost,” writes Live­Science). In the psych-rock-scored video at the top see the pro­gres­sion of increas­ing­ly abstract draw­ings the artist made over the course of his 8‑hour trip. He report­ed on his per­cep­tions and sen­sa­tions through­out the expe­ri­ence, not­ing, at what seems to be the drug’s peak moment at 2.5 and 3 hours in, “I feel that my con­scious­ness is sit­u­at­ed in the part of my body that’s active—my hand, my elbow, my tongue…. I am… every­thing is… changed… they’re call­ing… your face… inter­wo­ven… who is….”

Trip­py, but there’s much more to the exper­i­ment than its imme­di­ate effects on artists’ brains and sketch­es. As Janiger’s col­league Mar­lene Dobkin de Rios writes in her defin­i­tive book on his work, “all of the artists who par­tic­i­pat­ed in Janiger’s project said that LSD not only rad­i­cal­ly changed their style but also gave them new depths to under­stand the use of col­or, form, light, or the way these things are viewed in a frame of ref­er­ence. Their art, they claimed, changed its essen­tial char­ac­ter as a con­se­quence of their expe­ri­ences.” Psy­chol­o­gist Stan­ley Kripp­n­er made sim­i­lar dis­cov­er­ies, and “defined the term psy­che­del­ic artist” to describe those who, as in Janiger’s stud­ies “gained a far greater insight into the nature of art and the aes­thet­ic idea,” Dobkin de Rios writes.

Artis­tic productions—paintings, poems, sketch­es, and writ­ings that stemmed from the experience—often show a rad­i­cal depar­ture from the artist’s cus­tom­ary mode of expres­sion… the artists’ gen­er­al opin­ion was that their work became more expres­sion­is­tic and demon­strat­ed a vast­ly greater degree of free­dom and orig­i­nal­i­ty.

The work of the unknown artist here takes on an almost mys­ti­cal qual­i­ty after a while. The project began “serendip­i­tous­ly” when one of Janiger’s vol­un­teers in 1954 insist­ed on being able to draw dur­ing the dos­ing. “After his LSD expe­ri­ence,” writes Dobkin de Rios, “the artist was very emphat­ic that it would be most reveal­ing to allow oth­er artists to go through this process of per­cep­tu­al change.” Janiger was con­vinced, as were many of his more famous test sub­jects.

Janiger report­ed­ly intro­duced LSD to Cary Grant, Anais Nin, Jack Nichol­son, and Aldous Hux­ley dur­ing guid­ed ther­a­py ses­sions. Still, he is not near­ly as well-known as oth­er LSD pio­neers like Ken Kesey and Tim­o­thy Leary, in part because, writes the psy­choac­tive research site Erowid, “his data remained large­ly unpub­lished dur­ing his life­time,” and he was not him­self an artist or media per­son­al­i­ty (though he was a cousin of Allen Gins­berg).

Janiger not only changed the con­scious­ness of unnamed and famous artists with LSD, but also exper­i­ment­ed with DMT with Alan Watts and fel­low psy­chi­a­trist Humphry Osmond (who coined the word “psy­che­del­ic”), and con­duct­ed research on pey­ote with Dobkin de Rios. To a great degree, we have him to thank (or blame) for the explo­sion of psy­che­del­ic art and phi­los­o­phy that flowed out of the ear­ly six­ties and indeli­bly changed the cul­ture. At Live­Science, you can see a slideshow of these draw­ings with com­men­tary from Yale physi­cian Andrew Sewell on what might be hap­pen­ing in the trip­ping artist’s brain.

Note: IAI Acad­e­my has just released a short course called The Sci­ence of Psy­che­delics. You can enroll in it here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare Footage Shows US and British Sol­diers Get­ting Dosed with LSD in Gov­ern­ment-Spon­sored Tests (1958 + 1964)

Hofmann’s Potion: 2002 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its His­to­ry of LSD

Ken Kesey Talks About the Mean­ing of the Acid Tests

Aldous Huxley’s Most Beau­ti­ful, LSD-Assist­ed Death: A Let­ter from His Wid­ow

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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An Online Guide to 350 International Art Styles & Movements: An Invaluable Resource for Students & Enthusiasts of Art History

in Art | August 14th, 2017

If you majored in art his­to­ry, you no doubt have last­ing mem­o­ries, and pos­si­bly painful ones, of long nights spent in the library mem­o­riz­ing the names and sig­nal char­ac­ter­is­tics of var­i­ous art move­ments. What a shame, you might well think when look­ing back, that a sub­ject as fas­ci­nat­ing and impor­tant as the trans­for­ma­tion of human cre­ativ­i­ty over time could become such a chore. Now that you’re free to learn about art his­to­ry in what­ev­er man­ner and order you like, why not start in Mono­skop’s expan­sive online guide to art styles and move­ments?

As “a wiki for col­lab­o­ra­tive stud­ies of the arts, media and human­i­ties,” Mono­skop has long offered a wide selec­tion of down­load­able books, videos, sound record­ings, and oth­er mate­ri­als invalu­able for any­one with an inter­est in the arts, espe­cial­ly the mod­ern arts.

Its move­ment-and-style guide “brings togeth­er some 350 art styles and move­ments from the 1860s until today. Besides the canon­i­cal isms of mod­ern art, it expands the list with move­ments usu­al­ly treat­ed as sec­ondary to the visu­al art canon, such as Let­trism, Sit­u­a­tion­ism, Sound art, Expand­ed cin­e­ma, Neo­ism, or Soft­ware art, and does not leave out non-West­ern art either.”

Each move­ment or style’s entry pro­vides, among oth­er infor­ma­tion, the major artists, events, and texts (includ­ing, of course, “man­i­festos” and procla­ma­tions) asso­ci­at­ed with it, the media its works used, and links to all the rel­e­vant items both with­in and out­side of Mono­skop’s col­lec­tions. It also includes relat­ed his­tor­i­cal images, such as Futur­ist pho­tog­ra­ph­er Anton Giulio Bra­gagli­a’s 1911 Salu­tan­do, De Sti­jl painter Piet Mon­dri­an’s 1920 Com­po­si­tion with Yel­low, Red, Black, Blue, and Gray, George Seu­rat’s Pointil­lism-defin­ing 1884 A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te, or stills from com­put­er art pio­neers Lil­lian Schwartz and Ken Knowl­ton’s 1970 ani­ma­tion Pix­il­la­tion.

You may arrive in Mono­skop’s guide to art styles and move­ments intend­ing only to learn about one style or move­ment, but none of them devel­oped in iso­la­tion. The orga­ni­za­tion makes it easy enough to see the con­nec­tions that a dip in to research Arts and Crafts could well fin­ish up, who knows how lat­er, in Pre­ci­sion­ism, Neo-Dada, or the afore­men­tioned Expand­ed Cin­e­ma (an intrigu­ing term; if you don’t know the art to which it refers, you can fol­low that link and find out). Or maybe you are cur­rent­ly a stu­dent major­ing in art his­to­ry, and you need some­thing a bit more inter­est­ing than your text­book to solid­i­fy in your mind the nature of and con­nec­tions between all these artis­tic ven­tures, influ­en­tial or minor, long-lived or flash-in-the-pan — in which case, book­mark Mono­skop’s guide right away.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art Visu­al­ized in a Mas­sive 130-Foot Time­line

Take a Trip Through the His­to­ry of Mod­ern Art with the Oscar-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Mona Lisa Descend­ing a Stair­case

Bauhaus, Mod­ernism & Oth­er Design Move­ments Explained by New Ani­mat­ed Video Series

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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What Happens When the Books in William S. Burroughs’ Personal Library Get Artistically Arranged — with His Own “Cut-Up” Method

in Art, Books | August 7th, 2017

If your Face­book news feed looks any­thing like mine, you wake up each morn­ing to a stream of not just food snap­shots and self­ies but pic­tures of books, whether stacked up, dumped into a pile, or arranged neat­ly on shelves. Why do we post dig­i­tal pho­tos of our print­ed mat­ter? Almost cer­tain­ly for the same rea­son we do any­thing on social media: to send a mes­sage about our­selves. We want to tell our friends who we are, or who we think we are, but not in so many words, or rather not in so few; a few of the books we’ve read (or intend to read), care­ful­ly select­ed and arranged, does the job. But what if, instead of assem­bling a self-por­trait through books, some­one else entered your per­son­al library and did it for you?

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an (she of, among many oth­er endeav­ors, the air­plane-bath­room 17th-cen­tu­ry Flem­ish por­trai­ture) recent­ly took on that task in the Lawrence, Kansas home of famous­ly hard-liv­ing and furi­ous­ly cre­ative beat writer William S. Bur­roughs. She did it as part of her long-run­ning Sort­ed Books project, in which, in her words, “I sort through a col­lec­tion of books, pull par­tic­u­lar titles, and even­tu­al­ly group the books into clus­ters so that the titles can be read in sequence.

The final results are shown either as pho­tographs of the book clus­ters or as the actu­al stacks them­selves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Tak­en as a whole, the clus­ters are a cross-sec­tion of that library’s hold­ings that reflect that par­tic­u­lar library’s focus, idio­syn­crasies, and incon­sis­ten­cies.”

Kansas Cut-Up, the Bur­roughs chap­ter of Sort­ed Books, fea­tures such arrange­ments as How Did Sex Begin? / Unin­vit­ed Guests / Human Error, Mem­oirs of a Bas­tard Angel / A Night of Seri­ous Drink­ing / A Lit­tle Orig­i­nal Sin, and Amer­i­can Diplo­ma­cy / Phys­i­cal Inter­ro­ga­tion Tech­niques / In the Secret State. Thom Robin­son of the Euro­pean Beat Stud­ies Net­work describes Bur­roughs’ book col­lec­tion as “a selec­tion of large­ly Euro­pean works whose con­tents include para­noia, the­o­ries of lan­guage, pseu­do­science, mor­dant humour and drugs: in ret­ro­spect, it’s easy to imag­ine the own­er of such an idio­syn­crat­ic library pro­duc­ing the melange of Naked Lunch. Per­haps for this rea­son, it seems hard to resist reorder­ing the books which Bur­roughs owned in 1944 in order to empha­sise the most recog­nis­able ele­ments of the lat­er Bur­roughs per­sona.”

Some­times Katchadouri­an seems to do just that and some­times she does­n’t, but her method of book-sort­ing, which she explains in the episode of John and Sarah Green’s series The Art Assign­ment at the top of the post, bears more than a lit­tle resem­blance to Bur­roughs’ own “cut-up” method of lit­er­ary com­po­si­tion. “Take a page,” as Bur­roughs him­self explained it. “Now cut down the mid­dle and cross the mid­dle. You have four sec­tions: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sec­tions plac­ing sec­tion four with sec­tion one and sec­tion two with sec­tion three. And you have a new page. Some­times it says much the same thing. Some­times some­thing quite dif­fer­ent.” And just as a rearranged book can speak in a new and strange voice, so can a rearranged library.

via Austin Kleon’s newslet­ter (which you should sub­scribe to here)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Assign­ment: Learn About Art & the Cre­ative Process in a New Web Series by John & Sarah Green

How to Jump­start Your Cre­ative Process with William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Tech­nique

The 321 Books in David Fos­ter Wallace’s Per­son­al Library: From Blood Merid­i­an to Con­fes­sions of an Unlike­ly Body­builder

115 Books on Lena Dun­ham & Miran­da July’s Book­shelves at Home (Plus a Bonus Short Play)

Dis­cov­er the 1126 Books in John Cage’s Per­son­al Library: Fou­cault, Joyce, Wittgen­stein, Vir­ginia Woolf, Buck­min­ster Fuller & More

The 430 Books in Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s Library: How Many Have You Read?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Cindy Sherman’s Instagram Account Goes Public, Revealing 600 New Photos & Many Strange Self-Portraits

in Art, Photography | August 4th, 2017

The career of Jen­ny Holz­er, the artist who became famous in the 1970s and 80s through her pub­lic instal­la­tions of phras­es like “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” has made her into an ide­al Tweet­er. By the same token, the career of Cindy Sher­man, the artist who became famous in the 1970s and 80s through her inven­tive not-exact­ly-self-por­traits — pic­tures of her­self elab­o­rate­ly remade as a vari­ety of oth­er peo­ple, includ­ing oth­er famous peo­ple, in a vari­ety of time peri­ods — has made her into an ide­al Insta­gram­mer.

But though Sher­man had been using Insta­gram for quite some time, most of the pub­lic had no idea she had any pres­ence there at all until just this week. “The account, which mys­te­ri­ous­ly switched from pri­vate to pub­lic in recent months, is a mix of per­son­al pho­tos along­side Sherman’s ever-famous manip­u­lat­ed images of her­self,” reports Art­net’s Car­o­line Elbaor.

“What we see here is some­what of a depar­ture from the artist’s tra­di­tion­al mod­el: the frame is tighter and clos­er to her face, in what is clear use of a phone’s front-fac­ing cam­era. Plus, the sub­ject mat­ter is decid­ed­ly inti­mate in com­par­i­son to her usu­al work — the lat­est posts doc­u­ment a stay in the hos­pi­tal. She may even be hav­ing fun with fil­ters.”

She appar­ent­ly start­ed hav­ing fun with them a few months ago, from one May post whose pho­to she describes as “Self­ie! No fil­ter, haha­ha” — but in which she does seem to have made use of cer­tain effects to give the image a few of the suite of uncan­ny qual­i­ties in which she spe­cial­izes. Though not a mem­ber of the gen­er­a­tions the world most close­ly asso­ciates with avid self­ie-tak­ing, Sher­man brings a unique­ly rich expe­ri­ence with the form, or forms like it. Her “method of turn­ing the lens onto her­self is uncan­ni­ly appro­pri­ate to our times,” writes Elbaor,” in which the stage-man­aged self­ie has become so ubiq­ui­tous that it’s now fod­der for exhi­bi­tions and often cit­ed as an art form in itself.”

Sher­man’s Insta­gram self-por­trai­ture, in con­trast to the often (but not always) glam­orous pro­duc­tions that hung on the walls of her shows before, has entered fas­ci­nat­ing new realms of strange­ness and even grotes­querie. Using the image-mod­i­fi­ca­tion tools so many of us might pre­vi­ous­ly assumed were used only by teenage girls des­per­ate to erase their imag­ined flaws, Sher­man twists and bends her own fea­tures into what look like liv­ing car­toon char­ac­ters. “A bit scary,” one com­menter wrote of Sher­man’s recent hos­pi­tal-bed self­ie (tak­en while recov­er­ing from a fall from a horse), “but I can’t look away.” Many of the artist’s thou­sands and thou­sands of new and cap­ti­vat­ed Insta­gram fol­low­ers are sure­ly react­ing the same way. Check out Sher­man’s Insta­gram feed here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Say What You Real­ly Mean with Down­load­able Cindy Sher­man Emoti­cons

Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Launch­es Free Course on Look­ing at Pho­tographs as Art

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Download & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

in Art, History, Technology | August 2nd, 2017

Last week we fea­tured the British Muse­um’s archive of down­load­able 3D mod­els of over 200 rich­ly his­tor­i­cal objects in their col­lec­tion, per­haps most notably the Roset­ta Stone. But back in 2015, before that mighty cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion put online in 3D the most impor­tant lin­guis­tic arti­fact of them all, a project called Scan the World cre­at­ed a mod­el of it dur­ing an unof­fi­cial com­mu­ni­ty “scanathon,” and it remains freely avail­able to all who would, for exam­ple, like to 3D print a Roset­ta Stone of their very own.

Or per­haps you’d pre­fer to run off your own copy of a world-famous sculp­ture like ancient Egypt­ian court sculp­tor Thut­mose’s bust of Nefer­ti­ti or Auguste Rod­in’s The Thinker, both of whose 3D mod­els you can find on Scan the World’s archive at My Mini Fac­to­ry.

There the orga­ni­za­tion, “com­prised of a vast com­mu­ni­ty of 3D scan­ning and 3D print­ing enthu­si­asts,” has amassed a col­lec­tion of 7,834 3D mod­els and count­ing, all toward their mis­sion ” to archive the world’s sculp­tures, stat­ues, art­works and any oth­er objects of cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance using 3D scan­ning tech­nolo­gies to pro­duce con­tent suit­able for 3D print­ing.”

Scan the World has­n’t lim­it­ed its man­date to just arti­facts and art­works kept in muse­ums: among its mod­els you’ll also find large scale pieces of pub­lic sculp­ture like the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty and even beloved build­ings like Big Ben. This con­jures up the tan­ta­liz­ing vision of each of us one day becom­ing empow­ered to 3D-print our very own Lon­don, com­plete with not just a British Muse­um but all the objects, each of which tells part of human­i­ty’s sto­ry, inside it.

As much of a tech­no­log­i­cal mar­vel as it may rep­re­sent, print­ing out a Venus de Milo or a David or a Lean­ing Tow­er of Pisa or a Moai head at home can’t, of course, com­pare to mak­ing the trip to see the gen­uine arti­cle, espe­cial­ly with the kind of 3D print­ers now avail­able to con­sumers. But as recent tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry has shown us, the most amaz­ing devel­op­ments tend to come out of the decen­tral­ized efforts of count­less enthu­si­asts — just the kind of com­mu­ni­ty pow­er­ing Scan the World. The great achieve­ments of the future have to start some­where, and they might as well start by pay­ing trib­ute to the great­est achieve­ments of the past.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

Artists Put Online 3D, High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of 3,000-Year-Old Nefer­ti­ti Bust (and Con­tro­ver­sy Ensues)

The Com­plete His­to­ry of the World (and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty) in 100 Objects

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Métal hurlant: The Hugely Influential French Comic Magazine That Put Moebius on the Map & Changed Sci-Fi Forever

in Art, Comics/Cartoons, Sci Fi | August 1st, 2017

Would you believe that one par­tic­u­lar pub­li­ca­tion inspired a range of vision­ary cre­ators includ­ing Rid­ley Scott, George Lucas, Luc Besson, William Gib­son, and Hayao Miyaza­ki? More­over, would you believe that it was French, from the 1970s, and a com­ic book? Not that that term “com­ic book” does jus­tice to Métal hurlant, which dur­ing its ini­tial run from 1974 to 1987 not only rede­fined the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the medi­um and great­ly widened the imag­i­na­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties of sci­ence fic­tion sto­ry­telling, but brought to promi­nence a num­ber of whol­ly uncon­ven­tion­al and high­ly influ­en­tial artists, chief among them Jean Giraud, best known as Moe­bius.

Métal hurlant, accord­ing to Tom Lennon in his his­to­ry of the mag­a­zine, launched “as the flag­ship title of Les Humanoïdes Asso­ciés, a French pub­lish­ing ven­ture set up by Euro com­ic vet­er­ans Moe­bius, Druil­let and Jean-Pierre Dion­net, togeth­er with their finance direc­tor Bernard Farkas. Influ­enced by both the Amer­i­can under­ground comix scene of the 1960s and the polit­i­cal and cul­tur­al upheavals of that decade, their goal was bold and grandiose: they were going to kick ass, take names, and make peo­ple take comics seri­ous­ly.”

This demand­ed “artis­tic inno­va­tion at every lev­el,” from high-qual­i­ty, large-for­mat paper stock to risk-tak­ing sto­ry­telling “shot through with a rich vein of humour and deliv­ered with a nar­ra­tive sophis­ti­ca­tion pre­vi­ous­ly unseen in the medi­um.”

Giraud took to the pos­si­bil­i­ties of the new pub­li­ca­tion with a spe­cial avid­ness. Under the pen name “Gir,” writes Lennon, he “was best known as the co-cre­ator of the pop­u­lar West­ern series, Blue­ber­ry. By the mid-1970s, Giraud was feel­ing increas­ing­ly con­strained by the con­ven­tions of the west­ern genre, so decid­ed to revive a long-dor­mant pseu­do­nym to embark on more exper­i­men­tal work. As ‘Moe­bius’, Giraud not only worked in a dif­fer­ent genre to ‘Gir’ – a deeply per­son­al, high­ly idio­syn­crat­ic form of sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy – but his art looked like it was drawn by a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent per­son,” and “unlike any­thing that had been seen in comics — or, for that mat­ter, in any oth­er medi­um.”

Métal hurlant saw the debuts of two of Moe­bius’ best-known char­ac­ters: the pith-hel­met­ed and mus­ta­chioed pro­tec­tor of minia­ture uni­vers­es Major Gru­bert and the silent, ptero­dactyl-rid­ing explor­er Arzach, who bears a cer­tain resem­blance to the pro­tag­o­nist of Miyaza­k­i’s 1984 film Nau­si­caä of the Val­ley of the Wind. Read through the back issues of the mag­a­zine — or its 40-years-run­ning Amer­i­can ver­sion, Heavy Met­al — and you’ll also glimpse, in the work of Moe­bius and oth­ers, ele­ments that would lat­er find their way into the worlds of Neu­ro­mancer, Mad Max, Alien, Blade Run­ner, Star Wars, and much more besides.

“A while ago, SF was filled with mon­strous rock­et ships and plan­ets,” said Moe­bius in 1980. “It was a naive and mate­ri­al­is­tic vision, which con­fused exter­nal space with inter­nal space, which saw the future as an extrap­o­la­tion of the present. It was a vic­tim of an illu­sion of a tech­no­log­i­cal sort, of a pro­gres­sion with­out stop­ping towards a con­sum­ma­tion of ener­gy.” He and Métal hurlant did more than their part to trans­form and enrich that vision, but plen­ty of old per­cep­tions still remain for their count­less artis­tic descen­dants to warp beyond recog­ni­tion.

via Tom Lennon/Dazed Dig­i­tal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mœbius & Jodorowsky’s Sci-Fi Mas­ter­piece, The Incal, Brought to Life in a Tan­ta­liz­ing Ani­ma­tion

Moe­bius’ Sto­ry­boards & Con­cept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

The Inscrutable Imag­i­na­tion of the Late Com­ic Artist Mœbius

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Miyazaki Meets Warhol in Campbell’s Soup Cans Reimagined by Designer Hyo Taek Kim

in Animation, Art, Design, Film, Life | July 28th, 2017

M’m! M’m! Good! M’m! M’m! Good!,

That’s what Warhol Campbell’s Soup Cans recon­ceived as Miyaza­ki films are,

M’m! M’m! Good! 

Brazil­ian-Kore­an design­er Hyo Taek Kim has found a con­tin­u­ing font of inspi­ra­tion in his child­hood love of Hayao Miyaza­ki’s ani­mat­ed films.

He has decon­struct­ed them into a series of Pan­tone of col­or palettes and cap­tured sev­er­al favorite moments through the lens of VHS tape glitch­es.

Miyazaki–Special Soup Series, his lat­est explorato­ry jour­ney into the enchant­ed world of the revered mas­ter ani­ma­tor and director–finds him reduc­ing each film to a cou­ple of essen­tial fla­vors.

One can imag­ine Mom call­ing the kids in from an after­noon of sled­ding for a warm, Cream of Toma­to-ish bowl of Totoro.

Spir­it­ed Away and Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle are slight­ly more sophis­ti­cat­ed fla­vors, that may involve leafy greens.

Princess Mononoke and Por­co Rosso are Grandpa’s favorites–real stick to your ribs fare.

The sub­tle iconog­ra­phy brings added dimen­sion to the stark prod­uct design Warhol dupli­cat­ed to such acclaim.

As Kim told the Cre­ators Project:

Sim­ple design that works is always so much hard­er to cre­ate than you might expect. It’s just very fun to mar­ry two ideas, artists and/or con­cepts into one big image. Andy Warhol changed the world of phys­i­cal arts. Hayao Miyaza­ki changed the world of ani­mat­ed arts.

This is not Kim’s first go at Campbell’s. His ear­li­er Super­soup Series reduced super­heroes to con­som­mé and cream ofs. Don’t for­get the oys­ter crack­ers.

Posters and t‑shirts of Hyo Taek Kim’s Miyaza­ki Spe­cial Soup and Souper­soup Series can be pur­chased here.

View more of Kim’s soup cans online at the Cre­ators Project.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Roy Licht­en­stein and Andy Warhol Demys­ti­fy Their Pop Art in Vin­tage 1966 Film

Build Your Own Minia­ture Sets from Hayao Miyazaki’s Beloved Films: My Neigh­bor Totoro, Kiki’s Deliv­ery Ser­vice & More

A New Theme Park Based on Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neigh­bor Totoro Set to Open in 2020

Watch Moe­bius and Miyaza­ki, Two of the Most Imag­i­na­tive Artists, in Con­ver­sa­tion (2004)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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