stargate/sunstreak

Incredibly, as the investigative team at Muckrock discover, the presence of a brochure for the creepy-looking Buffalo Bill Wax Museum among the cache of declassified material from the Central Intelligence Agency has an even more bizarre reason for its inclusion. Not just hoarders of ephemera, they kept the historic document of the exhibition as it was decades ago in hopes of teasing out evidence of not just extra-sensory perception but also time-travelling abilities. What exactly was behind the choice of this chance culture touchstone (or rather, shibboleth) is unclear.

procrustean bed

Reading about how medical research and treatment can at times be prone to assigning arbitrary standards and causation to particular diagnoses and projected outcomes that risks spoiling the investigation by latching itself to the serviceable led us to learn about a mutilating, rather gruesome classical metaphor: a Procrustean bed. A son of the sea god Poseidon, Procrustes was a highway man and demented blacksmith who ran a hostel on the trail between Athens and Eleusis. Inviting pilgrims to stop and rest, the demigod would show his guests to their accommodations, a bed that was inevitable too big or small for the hapless traveller. Procrustes would then proceed to adjust his guests to fit, stretching them tortuously or whittling them down to size. The hero Theseus finally dispatched this menace as his sixth and final labour by putting the monster to his own rack. Despite its horror-story roots, the reference is invoked quite a bit and in addition to the above criticism levied against medical science, the European Union in its relations to its member states is sometimes described as the same sort of arrangement. The notion of one size fitting all or reverse-tailoring also occurs in geometry and statistical analysis where data is chosen selectively in order to prove a proposition. Television editors also call on Procrustes when they are faced with the sore task of having to cut for time.

post-mortem

In an effort to increase the public’s awareness of the environmental consequences of invasive species and monocultures, the city of Chicago’s bureau of parks and recreation has partnered with several art institutes to turn blighted trees into a medium for carving—rather than just carting them off. Though little consolation for loosing such ancient and stately members of the community to a voracious beetle that has consumed hundreds of millions of trees in North America since its accidental import from Asia circa 2002, it also provides an unexpected outdoors encounter, as authorities work to halt the spread, with the arts and generates curiosity for both the spectator and the creator.

le génie du mal

Our thanks to Kuriositas for introducing us to this handsome devil, who’s taken up residence underneath the pulpit (chaire de vérité) of Saint Paul’s Cathedral of Liège (previously).
Not the usual subject of religious sculpture, the artist who executed this fallen angel, Guillaume Geefs, had to come up with his own iconography—drawing from the myth of Prometheus and other sources to frame his creation—which was commissioned as a replacement for an earlier work by his younger brother, whose version of the Genius of Evil was removed from the church for being too much a distraction for the congregation. See a comparison at the link up top. I suspect that church-goers still do not dedicate their undivided attention to the sermon but rather spare a glance to the tortured soul lurking below—the elder Geefs making the androgynous figure even more alluring. The brothers Geefs came to prominence themselves in the 1830s with Belgian independence movement by creating nationalistic monuments and public sculpture that celebrated their history and culture separate from the Netherlands, and the Church turned to the artists to convey their dispatch of the “triumph of religion over evil’s genius” but it is debatable whether either iteration was exactly on message for parishioners and the wider public—the devil too sublime and seductive. It’s always a gamble whether people respond better to caricature or camouflage.

vanlife

Packing their customised Volkswagen T4 with only the bare necessities, a duo from south east England took off for the continent and turned their motorised dream home into a six-year long roadtrip. They’ve documented their adventures in a guide book and travelogue called The Rolling Home—happily in its third printing—and just because they’ve settled back in Cornwall, they’ve not lost the taste for the nomadic life and still live in their van.

beyond the uncanny valley of the dolls or playable-character

Neural networks have trained themselves, dreaming themselves from an age of nightmare to a liminal, lucid slumber, to produce absolutely convincing, authentic-looking images of people that only exist in the machine’s circuitry.
Second generation applications of learning software are already outpacing human engineering by crafting their own versions and this visage-generator works as good as it does by bouncing ideas off of a parallel, adversarial programme constantly critiquing its choices and adjusting accordingly. Visit Sploid at the link up top for a video demonstration which includes entire computer-created environments—although not uncanny like a mannequin any longer, the results and transformations are still eerie and different than the transitional figures of the face-morphing sequence of Michael Jackson’s 1991 single “Black or White,” who had a warmth in their slipping away.  There’s something a touch dejected, I think and it’s different that the impermanence of a dream since one dreams of those one knows or remembers, in watching these characters glide past that seem surpassingly real yet are a chance configuration that may never be grounded as existing in any sense.

black tuesday

Thanks to our faithful chronicler, the good Doctor Caligari, that among other things, this date marks the anniversary of the US stock market crash in 1929 that had ripples across the globe and made possible the unthinkable, a second act to the Great War—the war to end them all. Speculation in the exchanges had been promoted to all and sundry and participation and was nearly universal as was leverage and exposure against a heady backdrop of utopian peerage that made hold-outs and outliers appear irresponsible and social misfits and ensured brokerage a sure bet—until all of a sudden it wasn’t and desperate efforts to reverse the sell-off failed. For those subsequent times when the bottom has threatened to fall out of world economies, safety protocols have been put in place but I wonder what sort of tolerance and strain come into play amongst all this automation and inscrutable programming. As I reflect on this question, it is also the day in Western Europe that in the small hours of Sunday morning an hour is stolen from us. And while we’d potentially be facing the sore tasking of resetting several dozen antique clocks, the reality is that all the vital systems are automated and though the change was a noticeable annoyance, there wasn’t anything that absolutely needed changing. Beyond a biannual reminder to check one’s smoke-detectors (the two in my apartment will silently summon service personnel to change their batteries, if need be), I wonder what else synchronicity is robbing us of and how this degree of mechanization has removed the human element from our economic model and other things.

eigenvectors

We’d previously encountered and were delighted with the imaginative fusion of the found-object as the anchoring artefact of a composition but had not seen the entire gallery of the brilliant Christopher Niemann gathered into a single portfolio before. Via the equally brilliant Everlasting Blört, these sketches might inspire some abstract and effort-added, breakfast table pareidolia in you the reader.