{ feuilleton }

Digital Grotesque

These organic forms are details of an architectural environment produced in sandstone using a 3D printer. The project is a collaboration between Michael Hansmeyer and Benjamin Dillenburger who use a series of algorithms to create the shapes the printer produces:

In the Digital Grotesque project, we use these algorithms to create a form that appears at once synthetic and organic. The design process thus strikes a delicate balance between the expected and the unexpected, between control and relinquishment. The algorithms are deterministic as they do not incorporate randomness, but the results are not necessarily entirely foreseeable. Instead, they have the power to surprise.

The resulting architecture does not lend itself to a visual reductionism. Rather, the processes can devise truly surprising topographies and topologies that go far beyond what one could have traditionally conceived.

The diagram below shows the scale of the completed structure. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that the first thing that came to my mind when looking at these photos was “Lovecraft!” This unpredictable rendering process immediately solves the problem of how to depict or construct a non-human architecture without resort to anything Earth-bound. Those ridged and fluted columns could be R’lyeh or they could equally be the vast and ancient buildings that Dyer and Danforth discover in At the Mountains of Madness. I’ve been waiting for a while for 3D printing to start moving beyond the mere replication of existing objects; this is a very promising development. There’s more detail about the process and construction at the Digital Grotesque site.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• At the Mountains of Madness

Magicians

The stage variety rather than occult practitioners. The levitating Mephistopheles above is the one I borrowed earlier this year for the Alas Vegas Tarot designs. “Kellar” was Harry Kellar (1849–1922), a popular American magician blessed with some talented poster designers who stripped away the superfluous text to concentrate on his name and the recurrent motif of a red devil. Considering their age (they date from around 1900) these posters are surprisingly elusive, with no indication on some of them that Kellar is a stage performer at all. He retired in 1908 so by this time his name alone was evidently enough of an audience draw.

Howard Thurston was Kellar’s appointed successor, hence the continuity of the red devils and type design. Devils and imps weren’t the sole property of the pair as the other examples here demonstrate. “Miss Baldwin” is a rare example of a woman achieving parity with her male colleagues, at least in the poster department. All these posters are from the collection at the Library of Congress where many more examples may be seen. A detail from the horizontal Kellar poster below appears on the cover of the recent lavish Taschen volume Magic: 1400s–1950s by Mike Caveney, Jim Steinmeyer, Ricky Jay and Noel Daniel.

Continue reading “Magicians”

Salomé cigarettes

Many food and drink brands are still marketed today as exotic pleasures; some long-running products—Fry’s Turkish Delight, for example—even continue to sell themselves via an Orientalist mystique that now seems quite outmoded. This will never happen again with cigarettes, of course, although I wouldn’t be surprised to see it tried with cannabis if it’s ever legalised.

Salome Ideal was a brand of gold-tipped scented cigarette sold to American women from 1915 to the late 1940s. I’ve not been able to find out how they were scented but the figure on the pack is a flagrant borrowing from photos of Maud Allan’s scandalous Dance of the Seven Veils. This page has a couple of ad designs.

Maud Allan c. 1908.

Emil Cardinaux poster from 1914 may have been for the same brand of cigarette or for a different one of the same name. Cardinaux was a Swiss advertising artist so it’s possible there was a Salomé cigarette for European smokers. More of Cardinaux’s poster art can be seen in this Pinterest collection.

Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The Salomé archive

Weekend links 177

A new Wicker Man poster by Dan Mumford appears on the cover of the forthcoming DVD/BR reissues. Prints are available.

• The long-awaited release of a restored print of Robin Hardy’s The Wicker Man approaches. Dangerous Minds has a trailer while The Guardian posted a clip of the restored footage. The latter isn’t anything new if you’ve seen the earlier uncut version, but the sound and picture quality are substantially better. I’ve already ordered my copy from Moviemail.

• “It’s a fairly bleak place, and it has this eerie atmosphere. East Anglia is always the frontline when there’s an invasion threatening, so there are lumps of concrete dissolving into sand, bits of barbed wire and tank tracks that act as a constant reminder. I really love it.” Thomas Dolby talking to Joseph Stannard about environment and memory.

• Dome Karukoski is planning a biopic of artist Tom of Finland. Related: Big Joy, a documentary about the life and work of James Broughton, poet, filmmaker and Radical Faerie.

The desire to be liked is acceptable in real life but very problematic in fiction. Pleasantness is the enemy of good fiction. I try to write on the premise that no one is going to read my work. Because there’s this terrible impulse to grovel before the reader, to make them like you, to write with the reader in mind in that way. It’s a terrible, damaging impulse. I feel it in myself. It prevents you doing work that is ugly or upsetting or difficult. The temptation is to not be true to what you want to write and to be considerate or amusing instead.

Novelist Katie Kitamura talks to Jonathan Lee.

• Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist opens on Wednesday at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

• Julia Holter turns spy in the video for This Is A True Heart.

• Alexis Petridis talks to graphic designer Peter Saville.

Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) by Hashim. From the Program Your 808 poster series by Rob Rickets.

• Rob Goodman on The Comforts of the Apocalypse.

• Post-Medieval Illustrations of Dante’s Sodomites.

• Annoy Jonathan Franzen by playing Cat Bounce!

• Paolozzi at Pinterest

• The Surrealist Waltz (1967) by Pearls Before Swine | The Jungle Line (1981) by Low Noise (Thomas Dolby) | Al-Naafiysh (The Soul) (1983) by Hashim

Abraxas 4

My thanks to Livia Filotico at Fulgur Esoterica for sending these previews from the forthcoming issue of Abraxas, the Journal of Esoteric Studies. Abraxas is a beautifully produced large-format book whose artist interviews—as I’ve mentioned before—are especially valuable. Issue 4 will include:

Prof. Sarah Victoria Turner’s interview with artist Christine Ödlund on theosophy and synaesthesia, a special feature on the Italian artist Agostino Arrivabene, a documentation of Art Angel artist Lindsay Seer’s ancestral performance/installation Nowhere Less Now, Shannon Taggart’s extraordinary photographs of Brooklyn vodou and Valentin Wolfstein insightful analysis of the Mystic Fool. Following this tarot theme, the artist Francesca Ricci provides an account of her working with urban symbols, and their subsequent transformation into a unique tarot, titled Anarca.

Mention of combining urban symbols with the Tarot sounds especially interesting after I’ve recently dealt with that challenge myself. Those who buy the limited edition hardback will receive a signed suite of Francesca Ricci’s Tarot cards. Abraxas 4 is published on September 22nd. Further details and page previews here.

Nowhere Less Now by Lindsay Seer.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Abraxas: The International Journal of Esoteric Studies