Illustration from a recent Make magazine article on Parsons.

Source and details here

(Thanks Bill)

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In 1986 Peter had the idea of growing a chair. Nine years later Peter and Becky became partners. Pooktre was born. Together they have mastered the art they call Pooktre, which is the shaping of trees as they grow in predetermined designs. Some are intended for harvest to be high quality indoor furniture and others will remain living art.

See More: Pooktre

(via Grinding)

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Remember me writing about the art of Fletcher Hanks? It’s been out since last November, but Trevor just pointed it out to me: Mike Allred drew a an all new Stardust the Wizard story for Fantastic Comics #24.

Sample images and interview at Newsarama

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Congratulations to Honky Tonk Dragon, who’s gonna be a daddy! He shares some thoughts and feelings presents some artistic examples to illustrate:

Though we are socially conditioned to see artists as hedonistic libertines, the connection between creativity and reproduction makes a certain sense to me. But as I try to wrack my brains for examples which illustrate this connection, the only one I can come up with is one of my artistic heroes, Kevin Kresse.

Kevin and his partner Bridget, had just quit their real jobs in order to focus on developing his artistic career, when they learned they were expecting twins. From this combination of circumstances Kevin began a series of paintings which exemplify many of the feelings I am facing.

Full Story and several images: Honky Tonk Dragon

See also my friend Sky’s blog/zine on alternative fatherhood: Pirate Papa

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New Three Volume Work by and relating to Austin Osman Spare and Vera Wainwright.

Though no publisher is given these books have been issued in a limited edition of only 59 numbered copies by Tony Naylor of Mandrake Press Ltd. / I.H.O. books and the works are not listed in British Books in Print. Past experience suggests that the book will sell out straight away and anyway it is not going to be made available to bookshops or Amazon so no I.S.B.N. is given. Austin Osman Spare did not always work in isolation. These three volumes are a powerful reminder that he also worked with others they shared concepts and esoteric interests.

These hardbacks landscape format, 8.5 ins x 12ins. Sheets are 120 gramme watermarked goatskin parchment paper. All three books are uniformly bound in black faux leather elegantly blind stamped with distinctly Sparean profile of face towards for edge of both front and back board. Place ribbon. The binding method used is innovative and is noted for its tremendous strength: the leaves being both gripped and glued in place. It is quite impossible to remove a page; the paper would tear long before the binding compromised.

The three volumes are complementary and the publisher, has avoided imposing arbitrary numbers upon the volumes. So, in no particular order:-

Drawings by Austin Osman Spare for V.S.W., A drawing book of 24 images drawn by Spare for Vera in 1944 when Spare visited her in Helston, Cornwall. The title page has a image by Spare of his (horned) head merging upwards into a profile of Vera Wainwright. The original cover of the drawing book carrying Spare’s inscription to Wainwright is also reproduced. These drawings have only previously been published in an edition of 24 portfolio folders, each one containing one of the original drawings. The closing pages provide brief biographies of Spare and Wainwright. The last two pages presents a speculation concerning numerical analysis of Spare’s work and the significance of the word “One” and the point within in the circle in relation to Spare’s work and philosophy.

Vera Wainwright and Austin Osman Spare, Poems and Masks. 44pp An illustrated 5pp article by Eileen White describes Wainwright from the point of view of someone living in the village of Mappowder in Dorset where she lived the last years of her life. Whilst aware of her literary connections with the Powys family what emerges is a vibrant picture of the woman herself by someone who came to know her well. Poems and masks was initially published by the Toucan Press in 1968, the same Channel Island publisher which issued Gull’s Beack and Black to Black by Kenneth Grant. The biographical note and introduction to this edition plus that of the second US edition are reproduced as are the poems plus 8 additional ones, previously unpublished. Spare’s illustrations are reproduced together with other relevant vignettes and illustrations, though the original illustrations are carefully identified thus.

Vera Wainwright and Austin Spare, Poetry and Art, 80pp. A 2pp illustrated article discusses Spare’s use of the mask icon in his philosophy whilst further testament to its significance in Spare’s circle is here testified to by the inclusion of a short story by Frederick Carter edited and provided an introduction for Spare’s Focus of Life. The story, illustrated with vignettes of Spare’s use of masks in his art. A yarn of an artistic genius who moves from wax work faces to major art fraud revealing occult mysteries relating to Rosicrucianism and Shakespeare.

Spare and Wainwright planned to publish together a monthly magazine to be called “Art and Letter”. Spare’s design for a title page including hoped for contributors is reproduced plus some relevant letters from Wainwright to Spare. Then follow 8 short stories by Wainwright; some are very short indeed, literary vignettes really. These are far more explicitly occult than her poems. They are by no means cosy with two describing the perception of indescribably horror. In another an enigmatic stranger proves to be a nature spirit. Suitable illustrations supplied by Spare to Wainwright including a very fine satyr’s head. One drawing featuring a wrecked cart axle forming a crucifix with a tree with a crow torn to pieces in the foreground explicitly illustrates the last story presented “Corporate Worship”. In this enigmatic tale the narrator eschews prayer in church to worship in nature only to find the vicar, who is also some form of animal spirit, leading her in prayer there. One feels such ambiguity lies at the heart of Wainwright’s approach. She also perceived ambiguity in Spare himself. In one letter to him she said “… I conclude that you are on the threshold of sainthood but have not yet crossed it! You still face darkness often, but you could turn towards he light - as it is there at your elbow. You could be quite a wonderful person, but to change a metaphor - there is still a little devil at your coat-tail!

A further section reproduces Spare’s drafts for Poems and Masks. Mostly very rough but with some striking, quite finished, faces that were not used, despite them being far more married to the text than those that were.

Wainwright was not without artistic ability herself and four pictures by her of the Devon and Cornwall countryside are included plus some contemporary images of the village in Cornwall where Spare visited her. 7pp reproduce drawings with notes that Spare gave to Wainwright which are instructive concerning his composition of pictures, the use of exaggerated perspective akin to his sidereal portraits

Enclosed with each set of three volumes is an original handwritten letter from Wainwright to Spare and also a cheque signed by Spare. All three volumes are supplied sealed in cellophane so it is luck of the draw as to how long the letter is, or its subject matter! Preferences as to number will be accommodated as far as possible.

The three books will only be supplied as a set, all together at a price of 120 UK Pounds.

Via Plutonica. I can’t find the reference on their site, but Psyche points to Caduceus Books as the source for this.

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The Kaibo Zonshinzu anatomy scrolls, painted in 1819 by Kyoto-area physician Yasukazu Minagaki (1784-1825), consist of beautifully realistic, if not gruesome, depictions of scientific human dissection.

Unlike European anatomical drawings of the time, which tended to depict the corpse as a living thing devoid of pain (and often in some sort of Greek pose), these realistic illustrations show blood and other fluids leaking from subjects with ghastly facial expressions.

Full Story and More Illustrations: Pink Tentacle

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“This series looks at contemporary American culture through the austere lens of statistics. Each image portrays a specific quantity of something: fifteen million sheets of office paper (five minutes of paper use); 106,000 aluminum cans (thirty seconds of can consumption) and so on. My hope is that images representing these quantities might have a different effect than the raw numbers alone, such as we find daily in articles and books. Statistics can feel abstract and anesthetizing, making it difficult to connect with and make meaning of 3.6 million SUV sales in one year, for example, or 2.3 million Americans in prison, or 410,000 paper cups used every fifteen minutes. This project visually examines these vast and bizarre measures of our society, in large intricately detailed prints assembled from thousands of smaller photographs. The underlying desire is to emphasize the role of the individual in a society that is increasingly enormous, incomprehensible, and overwhelming.”

(via Chris Jordan)

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"Um… Ia? Ia? F’thagan?" by Harris O’Malley (or on deviantART). Brings a smile to me face.

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The new issue of Trevor Blake’s OVO Magazine has many names familiar to Technoccult readers and/or Esozone attendees (and some not so familiar): Anonymous, Dmitry Babenko, Johnny Brainwash, Klint Finley, Witta Kelssling-Jensen, Vincent Al Ken, Ruggero Maggi, Mail Art Paul, Willi Melnikov, Thom Metzger, Emilio Morandi, No Institute, Wes Unruh, Carlos Valdez and Edward Wilson.

Download OVO 18: Money for no money.

In my article I explore the politics of alternative currencies, which is sadly more relevant now than I realized when I wrote it in October.

For those not in the know, OVO has been published by Trevor Blake since 1987. Trevor says of his work:

When I started publishing OVO I was just a self-important hayseed living in a small town making a dumb little zine among thousands of others. But OVO did accomplish a few things in the first fourteen issues. OVO was the first to publish several essays by Hakim Bey that later appeared in his book T.A.Z. The Temporary Autonomous Zone. OVO published work by Mike Diana long before his work drew the attention of State and Federal employees. Photographs of body piercing appeared in OVO two years before the Modern Primitives issue of Re/Search. The phrase ‘phone tag’ appears in print for the first time in the first issue of OVO. ‘Liberating Wednesday’ by PM, author of bolo’bolo, appears in OVO for the first (and only) time; this is nearly a decade before and fifty-two times more radical a suggestion than ‘Buy Nothing Day.’ Crop circles and the Men in Black are referenced at a time when they were still obscure. The first appearance of Ride Theory in print occurs in Ignatz Topolino’s contribution to OVO. And OVO was aware enough of the outer edges of scientific ethics to mention gene patents in the same year they first were granted.

I am honored to be a contributor to such a worthy publication.

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I interviewed Satoshi Sakamoto for the newly (re)launched R/evolutionary XChange shop:

R6XX：You call your work “surnaturalism.” What does that mean to you?

Satoshi: 　I have been calling my work “surnaturalism” consistently since I was 23. I use “sur” to differentiate between supernatural and surrealism. Also the name “surnaturalism” suggest its roots in surrealism. The surrealistic melting clock invented by Dali is senseless for a person who has never seen a clock. Surnaturalism includes nameless things of nuances of colors and forms. It is similar to music. Ultimate surnaturalism should be understandable even for the beings of other planets.

Full Story: R/evolutionary XChange.

Be sure to check out Satoshi’s prints!

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A Yale University art student is causing a national controversy with her senior art project that revolves around self-induced abortions. Aliza Shvarts says she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” in order to become pregnant and reportedly used herbs to cause abortions.

Shvarts, a senior art major, intentionally caused the death of the babies with the herbs.

Afterwards, she allegedly saved her blood and the blood from each of the babies she killed to create an art display.

The display consists of a cube with video footage she took of the miscarriages on either side and a canvas in the middle with paintings created from the blood.

Full Story: Life News.

It was a hoax, a Yale spokesperson claims:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. Her art project includes visual representations, a press release and other narrative materials. She stated to three senior Yale University officials today, including two deans, that she did not impregnate herself and that she did not induce any miscarriages. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.

She is an artist and has the right to express herself through performance art.

Had these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.

(via Hit and Run)

Update: Maybe not a hoax after all…

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I know a lot of the Technoccult community is located on the west coast, particularly in Oregon, so:

Skull Skates presents artist Pierre Dacruoix in his first showing in the USA at Diesel Fuel in Portland, Oregon - Sat. April 26th from 6:00 pm to 10:00 pm.

From Take Me To Your Prom (Color Magazine):

RECENTLY WORLD GOVERNMENTS AND MEDIA HAVE BEEN TAKING STEPS IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION BY ACKNOWLEDGING THAT THERE IS IN FACT A GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM. AS SUGGESTED BY AL GORE IN HIS EYE OPENING DOCUMENTARY "AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH", IT’S NOT THE LARGE HUMAN POPULATION, BUT RATHER THE EXCESSIVE LIFESTYLE PRACTICED BY MANY THAT IS GOBBLING UP OUR RESOURCES AND EATING OUR ATMOSPHERE.

IN RESPONSE TO THE GROWING TREND TOWARDS THESE EXCESSIVE LIFESTYLES AND AS AN ACTION TO INITIATE A STYLE SHIFT, VANCOUVER ARTIST PIERRE DACRUOIX HAS DESIGNED A SERIES OF TEN T-SHIRTS UNDER THE "GREEDCLOWN" LABEL. EACH OF THE DESIGNS CARRIES A THOUGHTFUL IMAGE AND MESSAGE, MOCKING THE "BLING" LIFESTYLE AND DEBUNKING THE "SUCCESS IS EXCESS" IDEA.

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The designer behind the trend-spotting website, The Cool Hunter, has started a new endeavour called Dear God. People anonymously write in short letters to God, some negative, some positive. He posts them online with an accompanying image to set the mood.

"It doesn’t matter what your version of God is…Jesus, Allah, Buddha or simply a spiritual universal energy… praying to a higher power soothes and heals. It’s scientifically proven that people who pray are healthier, happier and more resilient.

"Share your prayers here and help us create hope one prayer at a time. Simply send us your personal letter to your God and/or a picture that sums up your message visually. (Dear God will source a picture if you don’t have one)."

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“David Mach, a sculpture and installation artist, creates art from wire coathangers.The way he makes these is to first make a mold of the figure and then create a hard plastic form around which the coathangers can be formed.

On his website he says, “When I have ideas I want to make them, and not just some of them, but all of them. As a result of that my sculpture covers a multitude of sins. I like to work in as many different materials as possible. It’s no understatement to say I am a materials junkie - jumping from highly-painted realistic cast fibreglass pieces to sculpture with coathangers, to a thatched barn roof laced with fibre-optics to designs for camera obscures (or at least the buildings to house them) and layouts for parks.”

(via Inventor Spot)

(David Mach’s site)

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I came across this via Kottke. I’ve seen bits and pieces posted about Outside over the past couple months, but this is a good review of a game everyone should be dying to try:

In terms of the social environment, almost anything goes. Outside has a vast network of guilds, many of its players are active participants in designing the game’s social environment, and almost any player will be able to find company to undertake their desired group quests. On the other hand, gold-buying is rife, the outskirts of virtually every city zone in the game are completely overrun by farmers, and the developers have so far proven themselves reluctant to answer petitions, intervene in inter-player disputes, or nerf broken skills and abilities. Indeed this reviewer will go so far as to say that the developers are absent from the game entirely, and have left it to its own devices. Fortunately, server uptime has been 100% from day 1, despite there being only one server for literally billions of players.

The reviewer gives it a 7/10.

ADDITIONALLY, just reading this on the Telegraph website, which goes to show just how peculiar IRL and Outside can really be depending on what tribe you end up playing:

The Masai warriors’ guide to England
by Andrew Pierce

Six Masai warriors, who are so fierce they kill male lions with their bare hands, have been warned that surviving the perils of the African bush will be child’s play compared to what they can expect on their first trip to England. […]

"Even though some may look like they have a frown on their face, they are very friendly people — many of them just work in offices, jobs they don’t enjoy, and so they do not smile as much as they should."

The Masai men — who become warriors after tracking, running down and killing a male lion — may struggle with Greenforce’s interpretation of how English law operates.

"For example, if someone was to see a thief and chase after him and, when they catch him they hurt him, then the person who hurt the thief would go to prison as well as the thief."

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You had a kind of vision as a young man that changed your life and work. Can you tell me about that?

It was 1975. I had spent the year at the Boston Museum School doing some very bizarre performance works. The last one included going to the North Magnetic Pole and spending all of my money. I came back exhilarated and exhausted, not to mention slightly suicidal. I was pretty young, like 21. I’d been searching, and I just didn’t understand what my life was all about. So at one point I kind of asked, “If there is a God, then please give me a sign.”

Then, on the last day of art school, I was standing on a street corner, saying goodbye to my professor, when this woman drove by and invited us to a party later that night. My professor picked me up that evening and offered me a bottle of Kahlua and LSD, and since I felt like I had nothing to lose — I had never done psychedelics before — I tried it. I drank about half the bottle. And when we got to the front door of the lady giving the party, I told her what was in the bottle, and she drank the rest of it. I went into her apartment, sat on a couch and closed my eyes; inside of my head it seemed like everything was in a big, dark tunnel, but I was revolving around in a spiral toward the light. There was this beautiful, amazing kind of luminosity, a kind of light that I’d never imagined. It was the light of love, the light of redemption, in a weird way. I felt a kind of ecstatic joyfulness that was a real release from my depression, and I saw the experience as symbolically important in that I was in the dark, going toward the light.

This was a kind of spiritual awakening for you?

Exactly. It was like going through a spiritual rebirth canal. And it was like nothing I had experienced before. I called the girl (the party giver) the next day, and asked if we could get together and talk about the experience. She ended up being my wife, 33 years ago. So it was a definite turning point. I had met a sort of divine love in the flesh in the form of my wife, and this definitely opened me up to a new realm.

SF Gate.

(via Daily Grail).

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“Robert Delford Brown is the strangest pastor I know.

And I don’t think he’d mind me saying that. (I checked, by the way.) In fact, being different from all the rest was part of why he founded the Church of the Exquisite Panic, Inc. in 1964.

Entrenched in the high experimentation of New York’s art scene in the 1960s, Brown wanted a way of marrying his modernist art with his need for a religion without barriers that would allow him as well as his art to be ever-questioning and ever-evolving.

So he came up with Funkupaganism, an Orthodox Pagan religion.”

(via Star News Online)

(Funkupaganism via Funk Up)

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This collection of 3d Sidewalk Art is mostly the creation of English chalk artist Julian Beever. The art, when viewed at the correct angle gives an awesome 3d illusion.

(via Optical Illusions)

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The New Yorker has a long article about the 1950s comic book crack down, including some interesting information about the man who started it all, Seduction of the Innocent author Fredric Wertham:

He did not want to censor comic books, only to restrict their sale so that kids could not buy them without a parent present. He wanted to give them the equivalent of an R rating. Bart Beaty’s “Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture” ($22, paper; University Press of Mississippi) makes a strong case for the revisionist position. As Beaty points out, Wertham was not a philistine; he was a progressive intellectual. His Harlem clinic was named for Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law. He collected modern art, helped produce an anthology of modernist writers, and opposed censorship. He believed that people’s behavior was partly determined by their environment, in this respect dissenting from orthodox Freudianism, and some of his work, on the psychological effects of segregation on African-Americans, was used in the Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education.

Wertham thought that representations make a difference—that how people see themselves and others reflected in the media affects the way they think and behave. As Beaty says, racist (particularly concerning Asians) and sexist images and remarks can be found on almost every page of crime and horror comics. What especially strikes a reader today is the fantastic proliferation of images of violence against women, almost always depicted in highly sexualized forms. If one believes that pervasive negative images of black people are harmful, why would one not believe the same thing about images of men beating, torturing, and killing women?

Full Story: New Yorker.

(via Mind Hacks).

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Reminds me of something a designer acquaintance of mine, Melncoly, is fond of saying:
"Be yourself and you will always be in fashion.”

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In a small airport office, the agents asked about drugs and prostitutes. It’s all in my book, Horsley said, offering them a promotional flier that quotes English musician Bryan Ferry calling it “a masterpiece of filth.”

“If I had to live my life again,” he told them, “I would take the same drugs, only sooner and more often.”

They asked about his criminal record. Again, in the book: 25 years ago, when he was 20 and walking around London with his hair dyed bright orange, he was arrested and fined 100 British pounds for possession of a gram of amphetamines.

“Describe your relationship with Kate Moss,” they said. Not in the book this time. Horsley said he’d never met the supermodel, who was questioned by police last year over newspaper photographs that appeared to show her snorting cocaine. Silently, he wondered to himself where on earth that question had come from.

He said they made him raise his right hand and “swear on the Bible” that he was telling the truth.

Then Sebastian Alexander Horsley was handed a document telling him he was being refused entry to the United States of America under the provisions of “Section 212 (a) (2) (A) (i) (I) of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended.”

He was being run out of America for “moral turpitude.”

Full Story: Washington Post.

(via Hit and Run).

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In the months running up to her death Lady Jaye had been working on a large scale art project to canonize living saints, people who she felt worked selflessly for higher causes at their own expense. Of course Jackie fit this bill better than anybody and I don’t think that was lost on anyone except, perhaps, for her.

Jackie quietly lived ideals which other people pay lip service to at best. Walking to buy cigarettes with her once, she said to me, ’Every religion in the world says to be kind to the people who have nothing, on the street, because after all, you never know who those people could secretly be.’ This was a philosophy I saw her put into practice again and again, with the people in her neighborhood, with her family, with her friends, with strangers, with me. Jackie had little time for the ’old’ religions, as she called them, though she lived the simple human essence that many of them tried, and failed, to convey. Her generosity of spirit was shocking at times.

Full Story: Myspace.

See also: Broken Sex.

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“Born without legs, Kevin Connolly snaps photos of people staring at him — turning the watchers into the watched. When Kevin Connolly was ten years old his family took him to Disney World, but for some theme park visitors that day, it was Connolly who quickly became the main attraction.

“I remember distinctly being surrounded by Japanese tourists trying to take my photograph without talking to me or asking me,” he says from his apartment in Bozeman, Montana. “My dad was right behind me, and I remember him getting pretty frustrated with the whole process, because it was something that was happening every single day.” Born without legs, Connolly was already used to the stares of strangers — but that moment would help him start to understand that the lens could work in both directions.

On a solo trip to Europe, more than a decade later, he was riding his skateboard down a Vienna street when he felt a man staring at him. Connolly lifted his camera to his hip, pointed it toward the man and without even looking through the viewfinder, clicked off five or six shots. Connolly would repeat that action 32,000 more times during his travels, creating a diverse portfolio of individuals from a broad assortment of countries. He posted some of these images online, under the title “The Rolling Exhibition.”

(via Yahoo News)

(The Rolling Exhibition)

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“I am fascinated by Canadian sculptor Brian Jungen’s remarkable work, using Nike sneakers and human hair to create these stunning mythic masks (very reminiscent of Pacific Northwest Indian art). The black, white, and red Air Jordons share the same bold palette as many Native American artifacts. Jungen is particularly intriqued by the way meaning is layered when a familiar object is repositioned to evoke something entirely different. “

(via The Journal of Mythic Arts: News and Reviews. Brian Jungen’s work via the Catriona Jeffries Gallery)

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“An Italian team of archaeologists unearthed the goblet in the 1970s from a burial site in Iran’s Burnt City, but it was only recently that researchers noticed the images on the bowl tell an animated visual story.

The oldest cartoon character in the world is a goat leaping to get the leaves on a tree.

According to an article in the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies:

The artifact bears five images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree, which the members of the team at that time had not recognised the relationship between the pictures. Several years later,Iranian archaeologist Dr Mansur Sadjadi, who became later appointed as the new director of the archaeological team working at the Burnt City discovered that the pictures formed a related series.”

(via Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub)

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