“Based loosely on works such as Titian’s Venus and paintings by the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, Sleeping Beauty is meant to introduce direct sensuality into the virtual realm, but employing an idea of beauty defined by a woman rather than men in which the subject does not express conventional canons of body and facial type. In so doing Sleeping Beauty inverts the typical 3D character-based animations of interactive gaming, not just through its visual language buy by also rejecting their violence and aggressive speed.”

Fascinating piece by Claudia Hart, art critic and visual artist. Read more about Hart and this piece at this link. I don’t think it completely inverts voyeurism but somehow enhances it. The langurous movement embedded within the image is liberating in a sense but it invites continued observation, and hence the tendency to secretly voyeur.

A collection of public sculptures from all over the world. Some of them are utterly pornographic in nature and some are semi-Futurist (ala Boccioni). I like the static ones. They seem to be so damn defiant in this wierd way, of their environment and the onward gaze. See more pictures here.

Aspen is exactly the magazine or journal that I've always wanted to create but never did have the chance or time. It's got one element that I really like in a journal; media-rich content that sees critical text juxtaposed next to artwork. Each comments and reflects on the other without either dominating the rhetoric. While looking or listening to the audio or visual art in the each issue of Aspen, difficult theoretical postulations become somehow easier to understand, as relative connections become more fluid and apparent. The content itself is fascinating, from analysis of pre-modern Asian paintings, spoken word/avant-pop/classical phonograph recordings to scrapbook art, all of which are rhizomed and networked into a sexy mass of plausible cultural hypothesises.

Aspen has been around for a while and they used to have a print version, but now only exists on-line, which is actually a better platform for its hyper-textual content.

Check it out… it's a must-read. Oui, c'est incroyable.

Anyone interested in starting an online art-literature journal thingy together?

V reading Thomas Pynchon.

The Beat has a fascinating interview with Alan Moore, the legendary English writer who wrote canonical graphic novels such as the Watchmen, V for Vendetta (yes, the movie starring Natalie Portman) and From Hell, a brillant, complex and polyphonic semi-biography of Jack the Ripper. Moore's writing completely revolutionized the comics industry and his poetic, lyrical style brought an incredible density to characters such as Swamp Thing, a figure erstwhile considered to be too emotionally vacant to depict in a meaningful way.

In this interview, he expresses his general disgust for the American comics and film industry:

I'm perhaps overstating my case here a bit, but I think I lent an awful lot of literary and intellectual credibility to the American comics business and to the comics business in general when I entered it. I don't feel the same way about comics any more, I really don’t. I never loved the comic industry. I used to love the comics medium. I still do love the comics medium in its pure platonic, essential form, but the comics medium as it stands seems to me to have been allowed to become a cucumber patch for producing new movie franchise.

Pingmag has recently published an interesting series of Tiny Tokyo pictures inspired by Olivo Barbieri’s aerial photographs, which coolly transformed famous landmarks and cities into miniature models. While Barbieri had the good fortune to use a helicopter and an expensive tilt shift lens, these Tokyo images were easily achieved through the use of high rise buildings and basic photoshop effects.

In the Metropolis article, Barbieri explains the rationale behind his unique aerial pictures:

"I was a little bit tired of the idea of photography allowing you to see everything," Barbieri says. "After 9/11 the world had become a little bit blurred because things that seemed impossible happened. My desire was to look at the city again."

Technorati Tags: Tokyo, Architecture, Photography, Barbieri

Rose Seidler House (1948-1950), a Bauhaus-styled home in Sydney built for his mother.

Renowned architect Harry Seidler has died in his Sydney home, aged 82. Considered to be the earliest exponent of Bauhause and Modernist principles in Australia, Seidler worked and studied with some of the world's best-known Modernist architects including Walter Gropius, Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer and Oscar Niemeyer.

A Sydney Morning Herald article reveals Seidler's steadfast devotion to the Modernist ethic.

We ask Seidler of his inspiration when designing tall buildings. He looks taken aback. “Inspiration?” he says incredulously. “Architecture is not an inspirational business, it's a rational procedure to do sensible and hopefully beautiful things; that's all.” [28 September, 2002, p 4.]

]]>