Tuesday 10 April 2012

Eric Tan

I was researching retro adverts of the 50s and 60s due to their view of the future at that time, compared to ours now. The view they had back then was one of excitement and wonder at new technologies, whereas now we have a much more negative view and tend to be more sceptical of new technologies.

Whilst researching this I discovered the work of Eric Tan. He has made many retro-style posters for movies, mainly Pixar ones. My favourites are these on he has done for Wall-E, as they really do give off the whole 1950s-future-vibe.





He has also created posters for other movies:





I really love his stylised drawings and the whole retro-futurism feel of his work.

Monday 9 April 2012

Scott Bain

Whilst looking for some of Mike Libby's work, I stumbled across Scott Bain's work. Bain has taken the whole cybernetic insect thing one step further - he has transformed insects into vehicles!

Just take a look at some of these, they're brilliant:







I especially like the graffitied-on beetle.

Mike Libby

After a friend mentioned him on a post, I decided to blog about him.

Mike Libby creates some absolutely beautiful steampunk insects and arachnids, using real insects or arachnids combined with mechanical parts. All the intricate little clockwork details make the bugs seem fragile and delicate, and it serves to make them even more interesting-looking than they already are.

I'm a fan of the steampunk look, so these really appeal to me.





Monday 2 April 2012

Tim Lewis


"Pony" by Tim Lewis is a kinetic sculpture of a creature that has hands for its feet, as well as its head, giving it a creepy, surreal feel. It walks along as well as reacting to movement around it. Would it be possible for creatures such as these to be genetically engineered in the future?

Here is a video of "Pony" with another of Lewis' sculpture "Jetsam" in the foreground.

Wednesday 28 March 2012

Nemo Gould

Nemo Gould creates some brilliant kinetic sculptures using found objects:




This is one monkey I definitely wouldn't like to meet - just look at those teeth!





Check out more of his work at his website.

Saturday 24 March 2012

Lisa Black's Cyborg Animals

I've just discovered the sculptures of Lisa Black, where she combines the organic with the mechanical:









I think they're pretty damn cool.

Amber Case: We Are All Cyborgs Now

"It's not that machines are taking over, it's that they're helping us to be more human".









Patricia Piccinini - We Are Family


Patricia Piccinini's "We Are Family"

What if we someday got to the stage where we could make weird monsters - hybrids of two completely different animals? Would they have unique human qualities, such as reasoning and conscience? They would unlikely be able to lead a happy or normal life, as they share characteristics from two animals (in the case of Piccinini's sculpture, dog and human) yet they are neither and so would be shunned by both species; regarded as an abomination.

Sunday 18 March 2012

Questions

I have decided that the title for my project is going to be "Does technology make us more or less human?".

Within this topic I am going to be asking myself questions like:

- Do these sort of technological advancements (that may eventually allow us to evade, or at least slow down, certain processes such as death and disease) aid or hinder what makes us "human"? What about cyborgs - is there a point where they stop being human, or will they always be classed as human, no matter how much they have been modified?

- What are the potential dangers and benefits of these technological advancements?

- What impact will they have on the future of humanity?

- What defines us as human?

- Social networking plays a large role in our lives today; is it making us become recluses? Are we better off without it? (Admittedly these two questions stray from the transhumanist theme, but they still fit in with my question, so I feel they are still worth looking into).

If anyone has any thoughts or opinions on any of the questions, please feel free to comment. Your help is very much appreciated.

Saturday 17 March 2012

Previous work

I've decided to post some of the best pieces I have done so far on this course.



This was a piece I did on value. I was looking at ephemera and how it sells for a lot more if it is in good quality than if it's in poor quality. I took this matchbox and modified it to make it, and the matches inside, seem far more valuable, so that people will take better care of it. Each match is wrapped in tissue paper and has its own little tray within the box. There are two layers of these "trays" (much like how you get two layers inside a chocolate box).






For this project we each got given a typeface and an item we had to incorporate into our final piece. I got given Gill Sans and a clipboard. My piece is about the life of the creator of Gill Sans, Eric Gill. For those of you that don't know about him, he was basically a very messed up guy. Amongst other things, he had sex with his dog and this is what my piece is based on. On the clipboard clip (which is hidden under the paper, and so is supposed to represent the hidden, dark side of Gill's life) it reads "the bearded typographer jumps onto the lazy dog".






This is for my classification project where I had got given a topic (I got amphibians) and had to find a way to organise them. I eventually narrowed it down to just frogs and then picked six frogs that had odd abilities or characteristics (representing how diverse frogs are). I drew these frogs and wrote the facts down underneath. I then took two of my frog pages and turned them into posters. (If you're guessing that I was inspired by Mike Mignola for the drawings then you guessed correctly).

Then, last but not least, this is my animation I produced in the rotation period at the start of the year which people seemed to enjoy.

Friday 16 March 2012

Hello.

I'm an art foundation student who is currently specialising in graphic design and this is my blog for my final major project, the topic of which is transhumanism. Here I'm just going to put my discoveries, my thoughts, my inspirations and sometimes some of the work I have done.

For my final major project I got to choose my own topic and I had a few favourite ideas out of the nine or so I wrote down, the three main ones being mysteries (the supernatural type, like cryptids, unexplained phenomena, UFOs and the like), robots (technological singularity, robots taking over the world, that sort of thing) and transhumanism, which was a last minute addition to my ideas. Admittedly, I did not know much about the subject this morning but I had heard the word a few times recently and decided to look it up and it seemed a perfect topic for a FMP. Luckily, my tutors also really liked it and so here I am, at the beginning of an epic 8 week project on transhumanism.

(Seeing as my project is on transhumanism, playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution totally counts as research).