Joshua Hoffine is one of my favorite artists, turning the act of staging into a artform of the highest caliber.
His blog is a fascinating read and beyond worth checking out, as Joshua goes into some great detail about the prep work and process as he uses family and friends to people his awesome creations.
Via Joshua Hoffine’s Horror Blog. Check it out – it’s absolutely worth it.
[I]llustrations from a circa-1530 manual on artillery and siege warfare seem to show jetpacks strapped to the backs of cats and doves, with the German text helpfully advising military commanders to use them to “set fire to a castle or city which you can’t get at otherwise”.
The treatise was written by artillery master Franz Helm of Cologne, who was believed to have fought in several skirmishes against the Turks in south-central Europe at a time when gunpowder was changing warfare.
Helm explained how animals could be used to deliver incendiary devices:
“Create a small sack like a fire-arrow. If you would like to get at a town or castle, seek to obtain a cat from that place. And bind the sack to the back of the cat, ignite it, let it glow well and thereafter let the cat go, so it runs to the nearest castle or town, and out of fear it thinks to hide itself where it ends up in barn hay or straw it will be ignited.”
Via The Guardian.
Martin Vargic, an amateur graphic designer from Slovakia, designed this map that depicts a world after 260 feet of sea level rise.
For average sea levels to rise this high, it would take the melting of both of Antarctica’s ice sheets, along with Greenland and other ice caps and glaciers across the world.
While this much sea level rise isn’t likely for at least several hundred years, the increased atmospheric carbon dioxide levels we bring about today create “largely irreversible” climate change for 1,000 years even after we curtail our greenhouse gas emissions, according to one study.
Click on the map to zoom in; a lot of the differences don’t seem major until you zoom in, where it becomes much more impressive. It’s a big load though, be warned.
Halcyon Maps via Huffington Post which should load faster if you have issues with that.
My work offers models of relational aesthetics that are undesirable at first glance in terms of the ideal tie between desire and the social sphere. It speaks of nature, which references existentialist moments within the repetitive scenario between power and struggle, consumed and consumer, subject and object, action and reaction in popular culture.
I am fascinated with the psychological aspect of consumerism and its emotional link to “Abject”.
All of this forms part of Burdens of Excess where I play with visions of the future, scenes of surgical fetishes and glamour and unsettle the viewer with images of carefully staged and naturalistic wax reproduction of human organs in form of luxury fetish.
Artist Andrea Hasler via Huffington Post.
“Everyday scenes from the lives of robots have been captured in this exhibition for us to observe,” says artist Toby Atticus Fraley.
“Robots assembled from pieces of Americana illustrate mundane everyday rituals, acts of daring, and precious milestones. These scenes of great joy and crushing sadness cover the beginning to the end of a typical robot’s lifespan, celebrating and revering the beauty in the everyday.”
Artist Toby Atticus Fraley via Neatorama.
Since 1990 I have been occupied creating new forms of life. Not pollen or seeds but plastic yellow tubes are used as the basic material of this new nature. I make skeletons that are able to walk on the wind, so they don’t have to eat.
Over time, these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storm and water and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.
Self-propelling beach animals like Animaris Percipiere have a stomach. This consists of recycled plastic bottles containing air that can be pumped up to a high pressure by the wind. This is done using a variety of bicycle pump.
Several of these little pumps are driven by wings up at the front of the animal that flap in the breeze. It takes a few hours, but then the bottles are full. They contain a supply of potential wind. Take off the cap and the wind will emerge from the bottle at high speed.
The pictures are neat, but check out the videos – these creations move almost like living things.
Via Theo Hansen’s Strandbeest.
Thanks to a rare medical condition, a Washington state woman found out that pregnancy was not enough to prove motherhood; DNA testing indicated that she was, in fact, not the mother of her own children – so who was?
During the course of a desperate battle to retain custody of her three children, it was discovered that her twin was the real biological parent.
The twist? She, 26-year-old Lydia Fairchild, was her own twin.
By the time Fairchild was 23 years old, she had given birth to two children and was pregnant with a third. Her relationship with the father had been rocky. They separated – not for the first time – and she found herself, at 26, a struggling, single mother; out of work and unable to support her kids.
In order to qualify for financial assistance in supporting her young family, Fairchild was required to undergo DNA testing to prove that she was the mother of children for whom she was claiming.
In December, 2002, Fairchild was contacted by the Washington state prosecutor’s office and told to come in to discuss the test results. To her horror, the young mother was informed that she would be the subject of an investigation into possible welfare fraud as the DNA tests had revealed no genetic link between her and the children she claimed were hers.
The inevitable interrogation and investigation followed as Fairchild was barraged with questions. Who was she? Who was the real mother?
Around the same time, another woman, Karen Keegan, was facing a similar situation as a potential kidney donor situation indicated no genetic link between Keegan and two or her own three sons. Fortunately for her, her doctors realized that she might have that rare condition known as chimerism.
Derived from the name of a strange hybrid creature, the Chimera of Greek legend, this condition had been documented just 30 times throughout the world. Those rare individuals, dubbed “Chimeras”, had started out as twins; in the early stage of pregnancy, one of the twins had merged with – been absorbed by, one could almost say – the other twin.
The cells of the consumed twin, however, did not disappear and remained alive in one concentrated area of their sibling’s body. In essence, a human chimera is one person made up of two separate sets of genetic material; they are, in fact, their own twins.
In Kreegan’s case, doctors tracked down a long-removed thyroid nodule that wound up having – yep, you guessed it – DNA that matched that of her sons.
In Fairchid’s case, nobody involved in her case had even heard of chimerism, so she found herself in court in threat of losing custody of her own children. Lydia Fairchild had an ace up her sleeve, however – she was already pregnant with another child. With a court-appointed witness to the birth, the blood samples nevertheless showed no genetic link between baby and mother.
Fairchild then finally caught a break, and one of the prosecutors (irony duly noted) happened across an article in the New England Journal of Medicine about Karen Keegan’s case. Finally, after sixteen more months of hell, the case against Fairchild was dismissed.
DNA may be a crazy powerful tool, but here, as with the problem of twins (helped in that case by the fact that identical twins do not actually have the same fingerprints), there lies a cautionary tale about lending infinite credence to DNA, for the world is a very, very strange place.
Via Liberty Voice for the full fascinating (and twisted) story.