Human Shells

The body is the shell of the soul.

-Klaus Kampert

Germany based photographer Kampert makes the familiar, unknown.  He has the ability to see beyond the fundamentals of a body, and create these amazing structures using his subjects.  The shapes themselves, combined with the lighting and compositions, just blow my mind away.

http://www.klauskampert.com

Something different.

Don't date a girl who reads.

By Charles Warnke

Date a girl who doesn’t read. Find her in the weary squalor of a Midwestern bar. Find her in the smoke, drunken sweat, and varicolored light of an upscale nightclub. Wherever you find her, find her smiling. Make sure that it lingers when the people that are talking to her look away. Engage her with unsentimental trivialities. Use pick-up lines and laugh inwardly. Take her outside when the night overstays its welcome. Ignore the palpable weight of fatigue. Kiss her in the rain under the weak glow of a streetlamp because you’ve seen it in film. Remark at its lack of significance. Take her to your apartment. Dispatch with making love. Fuck her.

Let the anxious contract you’ve unwittingly written evolve slowly and uncomfortably into a relationship. Find shared interests and common ground like sushi, and folk music. Build an impenetrable bastion upon that ground. Make it sacred. Retreat into it every time the air gets stale, or the evenings get long. Talk about nothing of significance. Do little thinking. Let the months pass unnoticed. Ask her to move in. Let her decorate. Get into fights about inconsequential things like how the fucking shower curtain needs to be closed so that it doesn’t fucking collect mold. Let a year pass unnoticed. Begin to notice.

Figure that you should probably get married because you will have wasted a lot of time otherwise. Take her to dinner on the forty-fifth floor at a restaurant far beyond your means. Make sure there is a beautiful view of the city. Sheepishly ask a waiter to bring her a glass of champagne with a modest ring in it. When she notices, propose to her with all of the enthusiasm and sincerity you can muster. Do not be overly concerned if you feel your heart leap through a pane of sheet glass. For that matter, do not be overly concerned if you cannot feel it at all. If there is applause, let it stagnate. If she cries, smile as if you’ve never been happier. If she doesn’t, smile all the same.

Let the years pass unnoticed. Get a career, not a job. Buy a house. Have two striking children. Try to raise them well. Fail, frequently. Lapse into a bored indifference. Lapse into an indifferent sadness. Have a mid-life crisis. Grow old. Wonder at your lack of achievement. Feel sometimes contented, but mostly vacant and ethereal. Feel, during walks, as if you might never return, or as if you might blow away on the wind. Contract a terminal illness. Die, but only after you observe that the girl who didn’t read never made your heart oscillate with any significant passion, that no one will write the story of your lives, and that she will die, too, with only a mild and tempered regret that nothing ever came of her capacity to love.

 Do those things, god damnit, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.

Do it, because a girl who reads understands syntax. Literature has taught her that moments of tenderness come in sporadic but knowable intervals. A girl who reads knows that life is not planar; she knows, and rightly demands, that the ebb comes along with the flow of disappointment. A girl who has read up on her syntax senses the irregular pauses—the hesitation of breath—endemic to a lie. A girl who reads perceives the difference between a parenthetical moment of anger and the entrenched habits of someone whose bitter cynicism will run on, run on well past any point of reason, or purpose, run on far after she has packed a suitcase and said a reluctant goodbye and she has decided that I am an ellipsis and not a period and run on and run on. Syntax that knows the rhythm and cadence of a life well lived.

Date a girl who doesn’t read because the girl who reads knows the importance of plot. She can trace out the demarcations of a prologue and the sharp ridges of a climax. She feels them in her skin. The girl who reads will be patient with an intermission and expedite a denouement. But of all things, the girl who reads knows most the ineluctable significance of an end. She is comfortable with them. She has bid farewell to a thousand heroes with only a twinge of sadness.

Don’t date a girl who reads because girls who read are the storytellers. You with the Joyce, you with the Nabokov, you with the Woolf. You there in the library, on the platform of the metro, you in the corner of the café, you in the window of your room. You, who make my life so god damned difficult. The girl who reads has spun out the account of her life and it is bursting with meaning. She insists that her narratives are rich, her supporting cast colorful, and her typeface bold. You, the girl who reads, make me want to be everything that I am not. But I am weak and I will fail you, because you have dreamed, properly, of someone who is better than I am. You will not accept the life that I told of at the beginning of this piece. You will accept nothing less than passion, and perfection, and a life worthy of being storied. So out with you, girl who reads. Take the next southbound train and take your Hemingway with you. I hate you. I really, really, really hate you.

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Although I don't agree with Mr Warnke's ideas, I can't help but love this passage.

Something about the way he writes.

The passion behind it.

How ironic that he writes against girls who love reading, yet girls like myself (as a girl who can't get enough of literature) find the passage intriguing and stimulating, thus attracting me to get to know him.

Nuance

Nuance / 2013

Travail sur l’image vivante musicale. 

Musique : “Ants” de EdIT / Planet Mu Records

Video: Marc-Antoine Locatell

Danse : Lucas B.

Utterly genius in regards to every aspect.

The digital

The Choreography

The dust, light and movement create an unforgettable experience for the viewer.
Reminds me of previous post on the finger-tutting genius's ad.

Stretch & Expand

"London-based artist Michael James Talbot creates beautiful sculptures of elongated women inspired by Greek mythology and Venetian masquerades."  

These statues are actually quite tall, some even taller than 6 feet!  I would love to see them in person, to really sense their weight and presence in the room.  The length combined with the slender frame of the structure adds an interesting contrast between delicacy and balance.  I also love the color and the murkiness of the pieces, making them seem antique, fragile and ancient.  

"Talbot creates his captivating pieces by molding clay and casting each sculpture in bronze. He then proceeds to finish with chemical patination, adding a new sense of character to the already expressive figures. The artist says, "The human form gives me an endless source of inspiration. The subtlest of movements and expressions can be captured in the sculpture to portray a myriad of emotions and convey tension, drama, fluidity and grace. No other subject has this richness of emotional and spiritual content or the capacity to convey such a broad and interesting narrative.""

via MyModernMet 

2020 東京

There is nothing I need to say.

I am so proud.

2020 Olympic Summer Games.

Wrapped up

Tomohide Ikeya is a Japanese photographer who has turned the his hobby of scuba diving into a conceptual body of work.

Here is a selection from her "MOON" collection

I love these photos because they incorporate three things I am absolutely infatuated with.
Water, hair & the moon.
The dark eeriness of the photographs combined with the stillness of the water creates a whole new dimension of reality for the viewer.  The photos seem to have a depth that you can't really explain.  The "moonlight" reflecting on the water just add to this, and give texture to the pieces.  

I would expect the birth of a mermaid to be something like this.

"I'm a photographer who has a concept of "Control" for my work.

Water is one of "uncontrolled" things which the human being never can to do.

I had a lot of opportunities to think about ‘water’ with doing scuba diving in several countries as a hobby.

The beauty of sunshine viewed from under water, daily life of aquatics and me as human just be able to see their world for a moment...

We thought human could control water if we had lots of equipments and cared for risks in water, but human never be able to live in water. And we also never be able to live without water.

Water doesn’t only give a life, but also takes a life. On the other hand, water is not the Mother of Creation or the Master of Destruction, it’s just be there as ‘water’.

Water is a philosophical existence very much even be as ’just water’.  I had been fascinated with water more and more and I had gotten a zeal for expression it.

It is one of reasons which I became a photographer, so I have been creating 

my works which has a relation with water.

I'm expressing "enthusiasm for life" by photography throughout the figure of Water and Human."

http://tomohide-ikeya.com

It's not as it seems.

Awareness campaign created by Duval Guillaume Modem 

and produced by monodot in support of STOP THE TRAFFIK. 

Visit http://www.stopthetraffik.org/ to get involved.  

Skidding in the mud.

"Ion Fukazawa has created a device that creates centrifugal force via a manned-bicycle for creating ceramic vessels."  Exploring the relationship between human interactions and a product line, Fuakazawa challenges the contrast between a machine-based precise and identical product design and the unique and creative art process of the human touch.  The machine allows the product to be created by organized chance and natural forces. 

Created as part of Ion Fukazawa's COFA final year Design exhibition.  

See the process here and the official website of the product here.

Shot on the Sony FS700 with Zeiss primes by Max McLachlan at Cockatoo Island in Sydney.

www.ionfukazawa.com