Sophianotloren

Because the feeling is so profound
But all I have
Is shit
Instead of words
And my desire to convey
This emptiness
Longing
What-the-fuck-ever it is
Just feels trite
Stupid
Worthless
Which also pretty much sums up
My opinion of myself right now.

Fuck it. Hit “publish.”

Filed under: General

One of the first trendsetters in the stock photo cliché memeplex has been adapted into a stage production by Sheila Callaghan, which premiered last week in Washington D.C. According to the reviews, more than 6,000 pieces of prop lettuce were used for the play.

MADRID — The short but plentiful career of US installation artist Ree Morton, surveyed at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid in Ree Morton: Be a Place, Place an Image, Imagine a Poem, reminds us there are still many untold histories of 20th century women artists. Morton’s impressive body of work, made over only nine years, has hovered on the peripheries of American art histories for decades despite the artist enjoying professional recognition during her life before she tragically died in a car accident in 1977 at age 40. Taking a broader view than ever before, this new retrospective revisits the breadth and innovation of her work as it materialized amid post-minimalist and feminist art practices on the East Coast of the United States.

Morton’s trajectory was anything but conventional. She took up studying fine art in 1965, at the age of 29, while she was leading a suburban life as a naval housewife and mother to three young children. Deciding to pursue art professionally after earning an MFA in 1970, she moved to New York City in 1972, a transition she subsequently referred to as “a feminist classic, out of the kitchen and into the studio.” From there, she joined the eclectic and socially conscious SoHo art scene. The large body of work Morton produced between 1968 and 1977 traces her rapid maturation from amateur to professional artist, detailing a confidence in drawing influence from a huge range of styles, ideas, and subjects.

Moving through the show, it becomes clear that Morton’s aesthetic sensibilities spanned paintings, sculptures, performances, and installations, and that they unfolded in close dialogue with the events of her own life. Made in the crosshairs of the abstract forms of post-minimalist art of the late 1960s and the politically inclined feminist art of the early ‘70s, Morton’s semi-abstract forms are wrought through a deeply personal and sometimes inscrutable language of signs and symbols that seems to deliberately resist easy interpretation.

The first piece of the show, “Untitled” (1971–73), cleverly reinforces the theatrical aesthetics, architectural forms, and self-referential imagery that is present throughout Morton’s practice. The work is a crude shelter or hut made from propped up and colorfully painted tree branches that houses a color pencil drawing of the hut’s branches. This pairing reinforces an internal logic between paper and sculpture, and doubles as both a real and symbolic doorway into Morton’s oeuvre.

Two large galleries are dedicated to her graduate works, made between 1968 and 1971, which were not shown in her two previous retrospectives of 1980 and 2008 (the latter also curated by the same two curators as the current Reina Sofia show, Sabine Folie and Ilse Lafer). A relevant inclusion, these pieces underscore Morton’s sophisticated use of non-figurative and serial forms typical of post-minimalism, as seen for example in “Untitled” (ca. 1970). This large, dark canvas, with its unevenly painted grids, the curators tell us in the wall text, aligns her early work with what critic Lucy Lippard called “eccentric abstraction,” a term applied to Morton’s contemporaries Eva Hesse and Louise Bourgeois.

Morton’s more ambitiously-scaled spatial works emerged in the early ’70s at the same time as installation art as a genre was in formation. Pieces like “Paintings and Objects” (1973), shown at the start of the exhibition, offer a useful segue into later works as Morton used two- and three-dimensional forms together, with painted planks of wood jutting from canvases connecting floor and wall. From here, Morton’s installations converged with her growing interest in feminist and decorative art movements, producing a spectacular series of colorful, large-scale installation works in the mid ‘70s. The companion pieces “Souvenir Piece” (1973) and “Newfoundland Drawings” (1973), which commemorate Morton’s summer vacation in Canada with her children, feature rocks on tiny plinths offered up for studious inspection as memento mori on a low-lying table. “See-Saw” (1974) likewise recalls the child-like wonder of play, only with a more sinister twist. The work only resembles the eponymous playground item by its crudely built structure of a long plank balanced horizontally on a perpendicular tree trunk. On closer inspection it is clearly not fit for use, but appears more as a kind of ritualized prop with one of the “seats” curiously hanging backwards.

The measured theatricality of these works anticipated Morton’s most immersive installation, “To Each Concrete Man” (1974), first shown at the Whitney Museum in a solo show of the same name. This piece, more than any other, demonstrates Morton’s ability to create dynamic spatial arrangements with affective results. Dark grey painted walls in a huge room enclose two staged scenes on either side of a long rectangular space: four drooping ceiling lamps hover over four stumps of wood teetering on little legs on one side, while on the other a raised stage supports four wooden “characters” of child-like height that Morton called “Woodsmen.” The figures’ blank faces are directed back toward the stumps and lamps as if frozen in the midst of a performance. As Morton’s only fully immersive installation, the work marks her adroit intervention into the genre of the large-scale installation format at the mid-point of her short career.

Other rooms showcase Morton’s penchant for thematic investigations as diverse as Victorian botany in “Weeds of the Northeast” (1974), sentimental heraldry and flag making in “Something in the Wind” (1975), kitschy maritime panoramas in “Regional Pieces” (1975–76), and architectural design in “Manipulations of the Organic” (1977). The show culminates with several rooms that champion Morton’s repeated use of a sculptural material called celastic. Now obsolete due to its toxicity, the material was widely used in the ‘70s for making stage props as its fabric texture hardens quickly when wetted with acetate.

Morton used celastic to make objects resembling bows (“Beaux,” 1974), cakes (“Bake Sale,” 1974), ribbons and ladders (“Signs of Love,” 1976), and roses (“For Kate,” 1976). Creating a saccharine riot of “feminine” iconography in the years before she died, Morton seems to have waded into the contested feminist debate about “women’s art” — a descriptor she notably rejected for her own work — by deliberately overstating a girlish, kitschy aesthetic in order to lay bare its gendered stereotypes. As she wrote in one of her notebooks — which are now in the care of the Franklin Furnace Archives — “it is impossible not to be dealing with clichés when drawing flowers. How do you do it and let that show?”

While each of Morton’s works can stand alone, seeing them in a full retrospective setting like this allows for a wider trajectory of early installation art to emerge, underlining the importance post-minimalist and feminist art practices had on the new genre taking shape. The exhibition marks a welcome intervention specifically into histories of early installation art, a relatively recent art historical narrative constructed by scholars and curators since the ’90s, yet one where very few female artists have been permitted.

Ree Morton: Be a Place, Place an Image, Imagine a Poem continues at the Reina Sofia Museum (Calle Santa Isabel, 52, Madrid, Spain) until September 28.

Created by Bank of America Merrill Lynch's Chief Investment Strategist Michael Hartnett, this illustration shows "free-float equity market capitalization" in billions of dollars.

Just wanna curl up into a little ball and die.

Tried going out to a social thing, happy hour, poly folks. Rearranged my entire week’s schedule, including my therapist appointment. Figured since I’m always complaining about how lonely I am, how much I need sex, need connection, need touch, I should maybe do something to give that a chance to happen.

It was loud. Painfully loud. Overwhelmingly loud. Bass kicking my brains in, gut-punching me loud. I spent 30 minutes or more doing nothing but moving around finding cute girls to try to talk to, striking up conversation, trying, trying, trying, like I always try. Figured maybe here there would be half a chance at getting a positive response instead of “oh, that’s sweet” (and the implied “but I’m straight” with it.)

What a joke. What a fool I am. Several dudes tried to chat me up — the big “I’M GAY!” rainbow pin right above my face doesn’t matter. A couple of the ladies I tried to strike something up with spent time right by me, enthralled by whatever some guy was talking about. Nothing interesting to me.

I had to leave before I just started screaming. It hurts to be simply existing in a space and having concussive sound waves battering my entire body. Even if I didn’t feel invisible and worthless and unwanted it would be too painful.

More than half an hour to wait for the next bus. I’ll go back to the Albatross; at least there I know I can find a corner to sit alone and hurt in solitude since I have to kill a couple more hours before I can get back to my bed and sleep (aka leave consciousness behind, which is all I really want to do.)

Filed under: General

From all the pain on the outside — the noise, the messy rooms in this messy house, the stress, the stupid people (and the okay people doing stupid things) — because if I could escape that…

I could handle dealing with some of the pain on the inside. And there’s plenty of it, too. I just can’t get to it to even begin to think about, let alone work with it, when every moment is a constant struggle to barely cope with the external hell.

Just took sleeping pills again, different kind. Managed to stay awake through the Ambien.

Emotional equivalent of tableflip, fetal curl, cry.

Filed under: General

I have a piece up at Dissent on the Animas River mine pollution in Colorado, the toxic history of mining in the U.S. West, and how mining companies have created new toxic frontiers in poor nations around the world. An excerpt:

The boom-and-bust mining economy has also left much of the region without access to stable jobs. When the mines close, where can their workers turn? Where can the people who built the United States through mining and farming and lumbering the West’s rich natural resources go? Throughout the region, two disparate economies have developed, with the rise of tourism and wealthy “amenity migrants” revitalizing particularly beautiful or desirable areas on one hand and towns where the mining landscape tore down mountains or left giant open pits, such as Leadville and Butte, on the other. In the second, residents suffer from poverty and a lack of economic opportunity. They cling to the mining or logging culture, hoping it comes back, because they have no other options. Tourist towns like Silverton and Durango have little space for working-class culture and few well-paying jobs like mining. With complex international economic conditions often dictating the success of these mines, it is easier for workers to blame environmentalists for the loss of their jobs.

And when the EPA comes in to clean up these towns, workers often resist. After changing hands several times, and undergoing an initial cleanup effort after the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, the mining complex that included the remnants of the Gold King finally closed in 1991 and, after negotiations with the government, its Canadian owner capped it with concrete and agreed to do water remediation downstream from the mine. What the mine’s owner did not agree to was to have the mine listed as a Superfund site, which would have mandated a more comprehensive cleanup effort. It’s hardly surprising that mining companies aren’t prepared to pay up. But residents are often opposed to the Superfund mandate, too. They don’t want what is now the tourist town of Silverton tainted with that label. So the EPA agreed not to list it so long as it could implement water quality improvement projects, which are underway.

It’s hard to blame the residents. Throughout the West, tourism has replaced natural resources as the major economic engine of many former mining communities in the region. And, leaving economic concerns aside, many residents simply find the Superfund label insulting. This became clear when the EPA declared Leadville a Superfund site in 1983, after over a century of mining, and began cleaning up the toxic tailings piles that littered the city where many locals played as children and where their children still played. Locals resisted the EPA for a decade, feeling offended by the rejection of their heritage. If the lead in the tailings hurt the children’s cognitive development, as the EPA claimed, did that imply that Leadville miners were stupid, since they played there too? Many former miners, at any rate, took it that way.

Resistance from mining communities is only one of the many obstacles the EPA, the Bureau of Reclamation, and other government agencies face in maintaining these abandoned mines and preventing water contamination. Underfunded and under attack from conservatives, the EPA has to deal with extremely technical situations in which a minor error can cause severe pollution. When they, or their contractors, make a mistake—as they did last month—conservatives seize on the opportunity to blame the EPA and tell us government doesn’t work. Their opportunism is astounding. The contractors may have messed up, but the EPA is hardly responsible for polluted rivers. Rather, corporations, along with their right-wing backers, are whom we should hold responsible. When President Carter signed the original Superfund bill in 1980, it forced polluters to pay for the cleanup of two centuries of toxicity, creating a fund of $3.8 billion by 1996. This bill did a tremendous amount to protect Americans from pollution. It also angered conservatives who considered it anti-business. In 1995, the newly powerful Republicans in Congress refused to renew the polluter tax after it expired, leading to the depletion of the program’s surplus and hamstringing its ability to remain effective.

For motion designers with clients demanding flashy movement that is in fact total nonsense, Vancouver-based art director and motion designer Peter Quinn created a handy set of 100 pre-made fake user interface (UI) animations.

“PQ FUI toys is meant for those situations where you just have to drop in some Fake UI bullshit to make something look a pinch more interesting, adding a little sparkle, or just saving yourself 10 minutes,” Quinn told Hyperallergic.

The UI is basically the tools with which a user navigates a digital device, whether it be the icons on your iPhone or the scrolling functions on this very website. The PQ FUI Toys, available on Aescripts for dragging and dropping into After Effects, include such high-action gibberish as “nice, but useless circle,” frenetic “pointless graphs,” and even some Knight Rider talking car red light action.

Quinn explained that after 10 years working in busy agencies, he had his own hoard of ready-made animation that helped keep his productivity high, with characters, sound, and other “flickery UI jazz” that he found more and more in demand.

“Nowadays you see this type of thing everywhere,” he said. “It’s its own sub-genre of motion design; at one end you’ve got wonderful, well-conceived, could-actually-work-in-real-life user interface graphics that are not only mesmerizing design, but also useful storytelling devices.” He cited as an example Jayse Hansen’s graphics for the Iron Man films, where the futuristic controls for the Iron Man superhero suit were actually functional and had meaning, although they were fictional. However on the other end, there are the merely interesting dots and lines, and wildly spinning “bunch of knobs,” that serve no purpose aside from visual flair. Below is a selection of the fake user interface animations Quinn shared with Hyperallergic as GIFs.

The PQ FUI Toys by Peter Quinn are available on Aescripts. 

Art history doesn’t have to live in the past, as proved by the Flux Factory exhibition Ero Guro Nansensu, which closes today. The title translates to “erotic grotesque nonsense,” a phrase that was used by Japanese mass media to describe counter culture from the 1920s to the ’40s. Through the research of historian and curator Kara Jefts, the exhibition brings to life an avant-garde group of Japanese artists called Mavo. However, very little of the artists’ original work remains and their historical trace verges on erasure, forcing Jefts to redefine what it means to “research.” Unable to read the scant literature available on Mavo because it was largely published in Japanese, she decided to approach her research through lived experience.

Mavo was only active from 1923 to 1926, yet the movement’s artists were part of an important inter-war turning point in Japanese culture. A cataclysmic earthquake struck Japan in 1923, killing thousands and displacing many more. Social norms also shook when tax qualifications for voting were abolished and universal male suffrage was granted in 1925. Mavo sought new modes of expression that challenged conventions and upended rigid social hierarchies in the wake of these huge physical and political shifts. Critics, however, were often dismissive of the group and art historians have all but ignored them in favor of larger contemporaneous movements, like German Expressionism.

Jeft’s exploration of the group began while she was working on her Masters thesis at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. (Full disclosure: I met Jefts while also attending SAIC and partook in a practice run of “Dance of Death.”) She turned to the magazine Mavo, which the members of the art collective produced during their brief run. Focusing on the images instead of the articles, she sidestepped the language barrier and found a way into the group’s mysterious cultural moment. The magazine, much like the group, met with a lot of resistance due to its sensationalist content. Calls for social reform permeated its pages and the publication’s images leaned toward the salacious. But it also called for community building and creative collaboration, which Jefts seemingly took as her research-via-experience cue.

Working with other students and artists, Jefts has staged several re-enactments of Mavo’s “Dance of Death,” a performance she had only seen in a photo in Mavo magazine. The image is chaotic, with six men, many of them dressed as women, all of whom seem to be in suspended states of transcendent action. One man holds a hammer poised over the central figure’s head; unaware, the middle character balances on one foot over an orgasmic moment between three lovers in the foreground. A female figure languidly smokes a cigarette off to the side, while a man in heels swings above them all. You get the sense that everything is in perfect balance for one moment before it all goes terribly wrong. 

Ero Guro Nansensu showcases the ongoing results of Jefts’s experiential research (she is still producing work and performances related to Mavo). The exhibition opened with a series of framed reproductions of the original Mavo image, each with one of the seven figures colored in. According to Jefts, the original image was poor in quality, so she began outlining and shading each performer to figure out their movements. She transformed these shapes into a life-sized backdrop, upon which she configured her own actors for the performances. But in the context of the gallery space, the backdrop, with its colorful yet featureless figures, seems a reminder of the absences that can permeate history. Photographs by Leonard Suryajaya capture Jefts’s “Dance of Death” productions as if through a time warp. The compositions are nearly identical to the original photo from 1924, yet purposefully include studio lights and surreptitious bystanders with iPhone cameras, revealing the present within the past.

While Jefts may have set out to discover a lost moment of history, she also revealed how easily it can be colored or constructed. She does not present this as a fault, but merely a nonsensical, perhaps even grotesque, fact.

Ero Guro Nansensu: Modern Japan and Erotic Grotesque Nonsense is on view through September 15 at Flux Factory (39-31 29th Street, Long Island City, Queens).

edwardian-time-machine:

Afternoon dress
Designer: Jeanne Hallée (French, 1880–1914)
Date: 1912

Source

*careless whisper plays gently in the background* (by dilfosaur)

Photographs of immaculate, domestic interiors are common to us today, with countless images of private homes readily found in design magazines and on social media. The tradition of documenting personal rooms, however, was an exclusive one when it emerged in Europe at the start of the 19th century. Before the advent of photography, those who could afford to commissioned artists to paint small, highly detailed watercolors of the interiors of their homes that they would then slip, like photographs, into display albums. Such paintings offer a glimpse into the decadent lifestyles of the 19th century’s well-to-do and the art of recording finely decorated interior spaces. Currently, 47 such paintings are featured in House Proud, an exhibition at the Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Gallery at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland. The exhibition was organized by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, and the works are drawn entirely from its Thaw Collection.

“The paintings were usually made after a room had been redecorated, or they were made as mementos for royalty or their families,” curator Gail Davidson told Hyperallergic. “They would put the interiors in albums and turn the pages and reflect on their lives and what the rooms meant to them.”

Some parents created albums as parting gifts for their children, presented when they married and moved away so they would have physical memories of their childhood home. Families also often laid albums out on tables in drawing rooms or salons to impress their guests. Queen Victoria, who commissioned many pictures of the interiors of palaces she visited with her husband, wrote in her personal diaries that the couple enjoyed reviewing the pictures together while “thinking about their lives and what took place in these rooms,” as Davidson said.

Aristocratic families across Europe also eventually adopted the practice of commissioning these “room portraits,” as Davidson calls them. House Proud features examples of paintings from many countries including England, France, Russia, and Germany that reveal the various interior design trends of the 1800s as well as the rise of consumer culture. As people increasingly traveled across the continent, bought holiday homes in the country, and filled their residences with objects and furniture from abroad, illustrations of domestic interiors proliferated, reaching a peak around 1870.

“The practice was very much an element of the growth of the industrial classes and the development of conspicuous consumption,” Davidson said. Many of the watercolors, for example, depict interiors filled with plants and organic decorations that reflect not only an interest in the natural world but also a growing trend to own rare and exotic plants. The Villa Hügel in Venice, for example, had a Japanese salon filled entirely with decorative elements that transformed it into a garden-like space; Berlin’s Royal Palace housed a Chinese Room with murals of tropical plants and birds that also soared above the space in a ceiling painting. Rooms of that era also feature real orchids and birds in cages, which people kept not only to impress but also to entertain guests.

Many of the commissioned artists (who were mostly men) began their careers painting either topographic maps for military use or porcelain wares, but they started specializing in paintings of interiors as demand for the subject grew. Some painters even built reputations for their individual handiwork. House Proud presents paintings, for example, by Austrian brothers Rudoolf and Franz von Alt; James Roberts, a British painter who traveled with Queen Victoria; and designer Charles James — all of whom were known for their distinct styles. The approach to painting these interiors also evolved with time, gradually becoming less formal and more intimate.

“At the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, you see a more impressionistic kind of painting,” Davidson said, “which you didn’t have earlier on in the century, where everything was much more meticulous.” Rather than adhering to a specific formula that dictated stage-like scenes, artists gradually depicted more relaxed, homely environments. Sometimes even the occupants of the buildings made appearances: the Polish Count Lanckoronski, for example, reads a book in his salon in Vienna; a girl plays the piano in a room in Hall Place, Leigh, as a dog snoozes by her side. In the foreground, someone has left a stack of newspapers folded over the frond-patterned couch. Although these paintings still largely drew attention to how people decorated their homes — from the fabrics of their furniture to what they hung on their walls to what they collected — they also sometimes resembled snapshots of daily life, curiously similar to the photographs that would gradually replace them in the early 20th century.

House Proud: Nineteenth-Century Watercolor Interiors from the Thaw Collection continues at St. John’s College’s Elizabeth Myers Mitchell Gallery (60 College Avenue, Mellon Hall, Annapolis, Maryland) through October 11.

Let us all listen to the brilliant writer Claudia Rankine, discussing race, white liberals, and her book Citizen, in a recent interview with BuzzFeed:

BuzzFeed: You mentioned liberal subjectivity in an interview last year.There’s a distancing that takes place in many liberal circles, a lot of “we’re not like that”. I’m interested in the space between how many white liberals see themselves, separate to “the bad people”.

Claudia Rankine: Well, this is why I wanted the book to exist in the space of the white liberal. Because people like to say “oh, it’s the South”, “it’s ignorance”, “it’s white supremacist Fox News”. And I’m like, no, no, no. It’s white alliance with all of those things. So that these moments are happening in our offices, with our so-called friends, in the Congress, among highly educated people who apparently know better. So it was a very conscious thing to move the book away from scandal and towards white alliance. The use of the second person – that “you” – was meant to say, “Step in here with me, because there is no me without you inside this dynamic.”

Claudia Rankine

“Step in here with me…”  Yes.  Yes, I will. Yes.

Let us listen to people of color. Let us educate ourselves. Let us move and agitate and stand with people of color and do the hard work to make this world a just, equitable place. Yes.

Our silence is racist. Our inaction is racist.

Let us be in the fight.

Yes.

Fiction

1. The Story of My Teeth, by Valeria Luiselli, translated by Christina MacSweeney
2. Possessing the Secret of Joy, by Alice Walker
3. The Time of Our Singing, by Richard Powers
4. Somebody’s Daughter: A Novel, by Marie Myung-Ok Lee
5. The Book of Unknown Americans, by Cristina Henriquez
6. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, by Julia Alvarez
7. Everything I Never Told You, by Celeste Ng
8. What the Body Remembers: A Novel, by Shauna Singh Baldwin

 

Poetry

1. Citizen, by Claudia Rankine
2. Gathering of My Name, by Cornelius Eady
3. Head Off and Split, by Nikki Finney
4. Martín and Meditations on the South Valley: Poems, by Jimmy Santiago Baca
5. Slow Dance With Trip Wire, by Camille Rankine
6. This is What Happened in Our Other Life, by Achy Obejas
7. The Flood, by Chiwan Choi
8. Coal, by Audre Lorde

 

Yuri Kochiyama, Asian-American Movement Leader

Anthologies

1. This Bridge Called My Back, by Cherrie Moraga
2. Queer Brown Voices: Personal Narratives of Latina/o LGBT Activism, by Uriel Quesada
3. Queer and Trans Artists of Color: Stories of Some of Our Lives, by Nia King

 

Non-Fiction

1. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander
2. On Lynchings, by Ida Wells-Barnett
3. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown
4. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass
5. The Everyday Language of White Racism, by Jane H. Hill
6. Between the World and Me, by Ta-Nehisi Coates
7. Ain’t I a Woman, by bell hooks
8. Custer Died for Your Sins, by Vine Deloria
9. The Black Notebooks: An Interior Journey, by Toi Derricotte
10. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, by Harriet Jacobs
11. The Warmth of Other Suns, by Isabel Wilkerson
12. The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America, by Tamara Winfrey Harris
13. Arab America: Gender, Cultural Politics, and Activism, by Nadine Naber
14. The Fire Next Time, by James Baldwin
15. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts, by Maxine Hong Kingston
16. A History of Prejudice: Race, Caste, and Difference in India and the United States, by Gyanendra Pandey
17. Rosa Lee: A Generational Tale Of Poverty And Survival In Urban America, by Leon Dash
18. Fresh Fruit, Broken Bodies Migrant Farmworkers in the United States, by Seth Holmes

 

 

Support your favorite independent bookseller or shop:

***

Original logo art by Esme Blegvad.

Related Posts:

• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Cristina Henríquez
• Some Queer Writers of Color
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
• Complicating The New Jim Crow
• The Rumpus Review of [insert] boy by Danez Smith

Hovertext: Personally, I consider this a pretty solid apocalypse.

New comic!
Today's News:

spx:

Kate Beaton: beatonna

Noelle Stevenson: gingerhaze

SPX Spotlight on Kate Beaton & Noelle Stevenson

Saturday, 9/19, 12-1pm, White Oak Room

STEP ASIDE, I’M A SHARK! Two of our favorite creators sit down for a discussion of webcomics, writing for all ages, and their latest works. SPX is thrilled to present Kate Beaton, creator of “Hark! A Vagrant!”, “The Princess and the Pony” and her SPX 2015 debut “Step Aside, Pops: A Hark! A Vagrant! Collection” in discussion with Noelle Stevenson, creator of “Nimona” and co-creator of Eisner Award-winning series “Lumberjanes.” No sharks or ponies were harmed in the making of this panel. Moderated by Heidi MacDonald.

For more info, go here: http://www.spxpo.com/spx-2015-programming

Haaaaaaaaaay

hellyeaheyemakeup:

Liquid Gold :)

prostheticknowledge:

Programmable Materials

Project by Skylar Tibbits for MIT’s Self-Assembly Lab explores materials that can alter their shape under certain conditions, from carbon fiber and fabric to woodgrain:

Programmable Materials consist of material compositions that are designed to become highly dynamic in form and function, yet they are as cost-effective as traditional materials, easily fabricated and capable of flat-pack shipping and self-assembly.  These new materials include: self-transforming carbon fiber, printed wood grain, custom textile composites and other rubbers/plastics, which offer unprecedented capabilities including programmable actuation, sensing and self-transformation, from a simple material.

Nearly every industry has long desired smarter materials and robotic-like transformation from apparel, architecture, product design and manufacturing to aerospace and automotive industries. However, these capabilities have often required expensive, error-prone and complex electromechanical devices (motors, sensors, electronics), bulky components, power consumption (batteries or electricity) and difficult assembly processes. These constraints have made it difficult to efficiently produce dynamic systems, higher-performing machines and more adaptive products, until now. Our goal is true material robotics or robots without robots.

A couple of examples - here is a proof-of-concept adaptive airfoil which does not require any additional mechanical parts:

Here is a proof of concept demonstration of ‘programmable wood’:

More about this project can be found here

melanaegis:

Costume for Morticia Addams (Anjelica Huston)
Addams Family Values, 1993
Costume designer Theoni V. Aldredge
The Collection of Motion Picture Costume Design Larry McQueen

Hollywood Costume [2012], edited by Deborah Nadoolman Landis

hobolunchbox:

Soon.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled against Universal Music Group in a 2007 Digital Millennium Copyright Act case that could change how and when copyright holders can send takedown notices. The case revolves around a takedown notice sent to...

DARPA has revealed a new kind of landing gear that allows helicopters to land on inclines and uneven terrain, a feat that's generally impossible using traditional landing skids. Rather than the fixed landing gear that most helicopters sport, this ne...

tastefullyoffensive:

“Why must you embarrass me, human?”

THERE IS! NO! XML ERROR!

THERE IS NOT EVEN ZUUL!

JUST BUILD AND RENDER THE DAMN PDFs!