Friday Ephemera
Flash Earth. // 10 years of Dr Manhattan. // Male monkeys prefer boys’ toys. // Ducks and mice and mirrors. // Fire-breathing robot dog. // Flexible computer screens. // Origami sculptures. // Monumental video projection. // Manhattan water systems. // How to Make Noise. // Razor blade packaging. (h/t, Coudal) // A history of cereal commercials. // Camera cake. // Chocolate skulls. // Cooking with semen. (h/t, AC1) // Why artists are unloved. // More film titles of note. // The Cabinet of Dr Caligari. (1919) // Trainers that transform. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s Edmundo Ros and his Rumba Band.
The Dr Manhattan viral ad is great. “Teleportation, super strength, telekinesis… In-de-struct-a-bility!”
There’s more here: http://www.thenewfrontiersman.net/
Yes, the marketing people are having fun with this. There’s so much “supplementary material” to work with. And I want to see more of the cheesy “Adventures of Dr Manhattan” cartoon.
“Francis Alys is a Belgian contemporary artist living in Mexico City. Alys pushes a block of ice through the streets of Mexico City until it melts; serving as a way to mark time and measure existence.”
Oh for fuck’s sake.
“Trainers that transform” or toys that need Odour Eaters.
Anna,
“In his best-known work, When Faith Moves Mountains (A Project for Geological Displacement), 2002, Alÿs recruited 500 volunteers outside of Lima, Peru. Each person moved a shovel full of sand one step at a time from one side of a dune to the other, and together they moved the entire geographical location of the dune by a few inches. Art critic Jean Fisher writes that ‘the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth’.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Al%C3%BFs
TDK,
I was actually hoping they could be worn and then, er, deployed, thus impressing passers-by. Sadly, no.
Cooking with semen is all very well, but what does the Pope say about it?
Is semen kosher?
The camera cake is pretty impressive. It looks like leather.
The Edmundo Ros song induced a vision. I could swear I saw a guy in a Panama hat with a burro carrying bags of coffee…
I think Ros was more of a dinner-jacket-and-maracas kind of guy.
“Art critic Jean Fisher writes that ‘the radical event of art precipitates a crisis of meaning or, rather, it exposes the void of meaning at the core of a given social situation, which is its truth’.”
There’s a “void of meaning” in this “radical event of art”. But he’s just trying it on to make a buck. Critics like this Jean Fisher bint are the real problem.
Re the Watchmen promo stuff -some nerdy nitpicking:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2009/01/22/watchmen-they-need-my-help/
Heh. That’s level 3 geekery.
“…if someone wants to examine the geometry of Dr. Manhattan holding the camera waist-high and the resulting tilt and angles of the picture, be my guest.”
To which, the obvious reply:
“For Dr. Manhattan, waist-high is however high he wants it to be.”