On the Masthead

Considering the blog is going down, a deep sea diver makes a pretty fitting final masthead image update. In June, he emerged on the streets of Nantes (with a little help from the Royal de Luxe theater company) in search of his already famous niece, the Little Giantess. Now that they’ve been reunited, their next stop is Berlin, so if you’re heading to Germany this fall, adjust all your plans to make sure you’re in town from the 1st through the 4th of October.

Image Source: Stéfan under creative commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

 

Previously…

Header 13: Masami Teraoka
Tagline: Local Moco

I’m still kicking myself for missing the chance to see Masami Teraoka’s work when it was featured at Catherine Clark a few years back. One of his works is being featured now through July 3rd at St. Mary’s College Hearst Gallery as part of an exhibition that explores the influence of mountains on artists’ work, specifically Japan’s Mount Fuji and Northern California’s Mount Diablo. The twinning and superimposition of these two predominate features of their respective landscapes based on their imaginative force strikes me as nothing short of inspired.

 

Header 12: Josh Keyes
Tagline: Art + Muni / Time

Josh Keyes is just one of the participating artists whose work is on view through June 21st at the Marin French Cheese Company. Get up there while there’s still time: the next Bay Area showing of Keyes’ work isn’t scheduled until 2011.

 

Header 11: Quints
Tagline: Untitled (I)

Lottie Davies’ Quints was awarded First Prize in the 2008 Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize competition. Listen to an interview with the photographer on the National Portrait Gallery site.

 

Header 10: Prado on Google Earth
Tagline: Naked Eye

Get up close and personal with fourteen works from the Prado via Google Earth. Then head over to Jonathan Jones’ blog on the Guardian’s site to find out why technology is scary (I kid).

 

 

Header 09: Haruki Murakami
Tagline: Interested bystander

Murakami has unveiled plans for an L.A. animation studio, set to open in Summer 2009.

 

Header 08: The Unfinished Swan
Tagline: Negative space. Also some positive.

When creating a game, a designer is faced with both representing a space and creating the ways players will negotiate its terrain. Often that interface between input and navigation will harden into a genre, so that subsequent side scrollers for example all share the same basic gameplay. Then someone will come along who changes the dynamics of the interaction rather than just refurbishing existing elements. So while Defender begets Chopper Command begets Drop Zone, suddenly the vertical plane of unbroken sky becomes a cross section and the Mario Brothers begin bounding about its elevations.

The same thing has happened with the First Person mode, once synonymous with Shooter. Portal allowed you to puncture holes in the architecture, creating openings that connect to wherever you designate based on the subsequent shot of your gun. The shortest distance between two points was no longer dependent on obstructions in the landscape. Now Ian Dallas is developing a new wrinkle on the First Person mode, by forcing the player to interact to reveal the space itself. Armed with a kind of paint ball gun, you’ll have to Pollock the hell out of your surroundings, which appear as a dimensionless white void, in order to navigate them. Slowly, as you splatter every surface with black projectiles, features emerge: walls, ceiling, benches, words. Appropriately, Dallas seems to be exploring the inherent terror in being left in the dark, or in this case, the white. Messages like “Please wake up” and “Don’t be afraid” appear in the tech demo and screenshots. Eventually, the white and black dichotomy flip flops. Check out the video for The Unfinished Swan by clicking here

 

Header 07: Kate Moss
Tagline: A Blog Worth Its Weight in Gold

So… obvious… should be… Shannon Sossaman…

 

 

 

Header 06: Henry Selick
Tagline: Eyes Peeled

Henry Selick, who breathed life into Wes Anderson’s undersea creations like the Crayon Pony Fish in The Life Aquatic, returns with a new feature length stop motion film early next year. Coraline is based on the book by Neil Gaiman.

 

Header 05: Béla Tarr and Mihály Vig
Tagline: Moving Images

The Werkmeister Harmonies was my introduction to both the transcendent filmmaking of Béla Tarr and the achingly melancholic music of Mihály Vig. If you live in NYC, seize the chance to experience them both next week when the MoMA screens The Man From London. The film runs from September 22nd through September 28th.

 

Header 04: The Big Picture
Tagline: Contemporary Illuminations

Now that we’ve been assured the Large Hadron Collider won’t kill us all when it goes live on Wednesday (probably), we can let out our collective held breath and revel in the uncanny beauty of its design.

Over at the Big Picture the Collider’s components seem to burst forth like an opening sunflower or mimic pagan representations of the sun. BP has become essential browsing, as anyone who clicked over to check out their images from the Olympics Opening Ceremony will attest, so if you haven’t bookmarked it yet, be sure to do some exploring at your earliest convenience.

 

Header 03: Royal de Luxe
Tagline: Art – new flavors now available

The Royal de Luxe theater company who wowed the world with The Sultan’s Elephant performance that made the “Little Giant Girl” into an Internet sensation are bringing their latest, the Revolt of the Mannequins, to Perth, Australia next year.

 

Header 02: Mirror’s Edge
Tagline: searching High and Low for new art and new experiences

Walking down Second St. heading towards Market I always look up at the buildings and find myself mentally negotiating the rooftops, edging along the ledges, vaulting my way over to a projecting cornice. There’s something liberating in the thought of transgressing spaces, stripping them of their signifiers and contemplating them as pure landscape. The Blues Brothers barreling through a suburban mall in their Dodge Monaco comes to mind, as well as Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint scrambling about the faces on Mt. Rushmore in North by Northwest.

Video games have always offered a quick fix for those in the need of some simulated vertical dérive, from the rooftops of Thief II: The Metal Age all the way back to the ghost-like clipping through the walls of Doom thanks to a bit of console cheating. In November, DICE will be delivering their parkour inspired Mirror’s Edge which invites players to trade in their shotguns and spells in favor of sliding, bounding and catapulting through areas usually only traversed by pigeons and window washers. I always knew those parapets were there for our dismount.

 

Header 01: James Jean
Tagline: art, culture and my aversion to sunlight in general

James Jean’s safe sex art for the organization AIDES took home the bronze medal at Cannes this year.