Acetio | Blogma

Compressed 02 from Kim Pimmel on Vimeo.

Some great examples of retro-futurist "envisionings"

The site: http://ru-2061.livejournal.com/ is devoted to a drawing contest where artists imagine a planet Mars colonized by a thriving Soviet space program in the year 2061.

Not all of the work is good, but some is very good. The second round of the contest, "The Stone Belt" seems to have attracted more talent than the first.

The page is in Russian, but Chrome translates it pretty well.

Russian art is always fascinating to me because the default color palette is just a little different from the American one. It's hard to put my finger on it, but if you look at, say images taken by Russian satellites:

the blues are shifted a bit toward green and the reds shifted a bit toward orange, in comparisons to the NASA photos which are usually "color-corrected" so that the blues, reds, and greens are fully saturated.

Game of Thrones has captured a lot of attention. I've seen a few episodes and wonder if it's not just Mad Men meets Lord of the Rings - a very slick and polished period soap opera set in Middle Earth.

But the intro is gorgeous. It is reminiscent of Tolkien's books, with a map at the very beginning to show you the world the characters inhabit. Supposedly it will change over the course of the show to reflect the changes to the world.

I've been having trouble keeping track of all the characters, but their animal representatives help keep them in order in my head

Stark = Wolf
Targaryen = Dragon
Lannister = Lion
Baratheon = Stag
Arryn = Eagle
Greyjoy = Squid
Tully = Fish

Clayton Boyer makes some fantastic wooden clocks and other kinetic sculptures at his shop in Hawaii.

As if I needed another reason to move to Hawaii

He sells plans for building your own as well

Clayton Boyer Clock Designs

Fred Eerdekens is a Belgian sculptor who works with light and shadow.

This piece crates words from the shadow of bent wire.

"Could suggest something..."
1999
Copper, light source
14 x 220 x 18 cm

Etsier gingerbees has a series of wonderful illustrations her father drew of steampunk vehicles.

"In Loving Memory of my father and Artist: Andrew George Brown 1950-1982. The Original Pen & Ink with marker illustrations were made in the year 1980. It has been 30 years since these master pieces have been seen or reproduced. I have taken the most care and love possible combined with my own fine art background to make sure these images are reproduced with the best possible quality and likeness in essence to their originals within an affordable range. There are 12 Fanciful Submarines in this collection; I hope you enjoy the magic and creativity of these images as much as I do."

The Wikipedia entry for the Codex Seraphinianus states: "The Codex Seraphinianus is a book written and illustrated by the Italian artist, architect and industrial designer Luigi Serafini during thirty months, from 1976 to 1978.[1] The book is approximately 360 pages long (depending on edition), and appears to be a visual encyclopedia of an unknown world, written in one of its languages, a thus-far undeciphered alphabetic writing."

The book is truly fantastic, full of animals, inventions, customs, cities, and other aspects of a fantasy world. The idea of an encyclopedia of a wildly different fictional place created in a mad-up language reminds me of the Voynich Manuscript but while that seems to have been a hoax, the Codex Seraphinianus seems to be 'merely' an art piece.

The look is quite similar to the movie "Fantastic Planet" from 973.

Something Awful has a collection of extremely abstracted characters from television and movies

Can you guess who these characters are?

La Luz de Jesus Gallery in L.A. has a show called the The Lowbrow Tarot Project

"The Lowbrow Tarot Project showcases 23 amazing artists who have used their creative genius and unique styles to take on the 22 Major Arcana [+ the card back] and create 23 new works of art in the rugged glow of the lowbrow art movement to be displayed in an exhibition at La Luz de Jesus in October 2010. A hard cover tabletop book and full color tarot card deck will follow. "

Below is the image for The Tower, an 8" sculpture by Jessica Joslin

"A first person walk through of 'Machine', a steam punk horror show we built and performed in our garage."

"it took about 18 months of tinkering in the garage to build it, we've been planning and designing it since way before. There's one top secret bit of kit we had to build first to enable the the machine to travel between scenes. The whole set is only in a normal sized double garage. One of the most time consuming bits of the build was the brick walls in old London, each brick hand carved from polystyrene, that might have been a mistake."