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Organic Forms in Extraterrestrial Life: The Art of Laurie Hassold

Laurie Hassold’s macabre, alien, and delicate sculptures are alarming and beautiful. Disturbingly sexualized, inspired by >radial symmetry, they resemble specimens or fossils in an esoteric collection of bizarre lifeforms that have arisen on other worlds, bringing to mind both Lovecraftian horrors and Ernst Haeckel‘s illustrations of sea anemones. Made with wire, clay, paint, bones, and found objects, these intricate pieces masterfully merge an impression of the organic and the alien, and evoke a sense of the terrifyingly sublime.

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The Fashiontech Marvels of Anouk Wipprecht: “Smoke Dress” & “Spider Dress”

Dutch fashiontech designer Anouk Wipprecht, who specializes in interactive garmentry that responds to its environment and to human presence/input, has created a breathtakingly beautiful dress in collaboration with technologist Aduen Darriba, which emits clouds of smoke when it detects someone approaching.

Also a source of delight and awe, born of a collaboration between Wipprecht and hacker/engineer Daniel Schatzmayr, is the dramatic, eerie, and hauntingly lovely animatronic “Spider Dress” – a prototype of a mechanic dress equipped with sensors, indicators, and controllers, created with the aim to give more power and “psychological thrills” to the sugar-sweet character that performative wearables often have. Sensoric, servo-controlled, mechanic, microcontroller-based, and reacting/attacking upon approach, surprising the audience with different moods and behaviors. To boot, it’s inspired by LIMBO, one of my favorite video games.

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“Notes from the Acrid Plain with Burton Hoary, Vol. 7”

One of the most memorable features that I saw during the Seattle International Film Festival in 2008 was a short film directed by Jonathan Ashley, called Notes from the Acrid Plain with Burton Hoary, Volume 7. It was a whimsical, eerie, darkly humorous, yet touching post-apocalyptic narrative styled like a vintage documentary, where “naturalist Burton Hoary hosts a survey of the toxic landscape known as the ‘Acrid Plain,’ peopled by the masked descendants of the human race. This chapter focuses on the Harvesters, their obscure practices and the perils they face.” I was pleased to discover that the short film is now up on YouTube.

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“Morbid Anatomy Anthology” Kickstarter Project

Joanna Ebenstein and Colin Dickey have put together an anthology based on the best of the Morbid Anatomy Presents lecture series, and are running a Kickstarter campaign to produce it. Subjects include “anthropodermic bibliopegy (i.e. books bound in human skin), 19th-century Diableries, collections of preserved human tattoos, death-themed 19th-century Parisian cabarets, extreme taxidermy, popular wax anatomical models, the Anatomical Venus, Santa Muerte,” and many others. The Morbid Anatomy Anthology promises to be a beautiful, fascinating, high-quality volume that you will be proud to have on your bookshelves. A pledge of $25 or more will get you a copy of the book.