Merrick Angle is a Freelance illustrator and designer based in France. Check his About page for a list of his clients. Visit his official website to buy his stuff.
Artist’s statement:
In my work this romantic ideal of union with the natural world conflicts with our contemporary impact on the environment. These pieces are in part responses to environmental stressors including climate change, toxic pollution, and gm crops. They also borrow from myth, art history, figures of speech and other cultural touchstones. In some pieces aspects of the human figure stand-in for ourselves and act out sometimes harrowing, sometimes humorous transformations which illustrate our current relationship with the natural world. In others, animals take on anthropomorphic qualities when they are given safety equipment to attempt to protect them from man-made environmental threats. In each case the union between man and nature is shown to be one of friction and discomfort with the disturbing implication that we too are vulnerable to being victimized by our destructive practices. (read on)
First spotted via Who Killed Bambi.
The dog’s name was Nipper:
In 1898, three years after Nipper’s death, Francis painted a picture based on a photograph of Nipper listening intently to a wind-up Edison-Bell cylinder phonograph, substituting a disc gramophone for the phonograph. On February 11, 1899, Francis filed an application for copyright of his picture “Dog Looking At and Listening to a Phonograph.” Thinking the Edison-Bell Company might find it useful, he presented it to James E. Hough who, in a move that would eventually result in Edison exiting the record business altogether, promptly said, “Dogs don’t listen to phonographs.” On May 31, 1899, Francis went to the Maiden Lane offices of The Gramophone Company with the intention of borrowing a brass horn to replace the original black horn on the painting. Manager, William Barry Owen suggested that if the artist replaced the entire machine with a Berliner disc gramophone, the Company would buy the painting. A modified form of the painting became the successful trademark of Victor and HMV records, HMV music stores, and RCA. The trademark itself was registered by Berliner on July 10, 1900. (wikipedia)
More info about Nipper over at DesignBoom.
Since we’re talking about photography and typology, Chrisin has many other collections such as this one : emergency only buttons, doorlocks, doors gates and entrances, etc.
First spotted via This Isn’t Happiness
 | The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spent most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other. |
| We have only to speak of an object to think that we are being objective. But, because we chose it in the first place, the object reveals more about us than we do about it. What we consider to be our fundamental ideas concerning the world are often indications of the immaturity of our minds. Sometimes we stand in wonder before a chosen object; we build up hypotheses and reveries; in this way we form convictions which have all the appearance of true knowledge. But the initial source is impure: the first impression is not fundamental truth. In point of fact, scientific objectivity is possible only if one has broken first with the immediate object, if one has refused to yield to seduction of the initial choice, if one has checked and contradicted the thoughts which arise from one’s first observation. |
Here’s the original French text:
Il suffit que nous parlions d’un objet pour nous croire objectifs. Mais par notre premier choix, l’objet nous désigne plus que nous le désignons et ce que nous croyons nos pensées fondamentales sur le monde sont souvent des confidences sur la jeunesse de notre esprit. Parfois nous nous émerveillons devant un objet élu; nous accumulons les hypothèses et les rêveries; nous formons ainsi des convictions qui ont l’apparence du savoir. Mais la source initiale est l’impure: l’évidence première n’est pas une vérité fondamentale. En fait, l’objectivité scientifique n’est possible que si l’on a d’abord rompu avec l’objet immédiat, si l’on a refusé la séduction du premier choix, si l’on a arrêté et contredit les pensées qui naissent de la première observation. (éd. Gallimard, coll. Idées, Paris, [1938]1949, p. 9)
Gaston Bachelard was a French epistemologist. Learn more on Wikipedia.
About the Honey Pie project:
Her lips are full pink. Her teal green eyes are intense and inviting. Her black eyeliner accentuates her high cheekbones and her strawberry hair complements her light African skin. Her metallic halter dress holds her supple thighs and pushes on her round breast. She is the result of careful attention and workmanship. When you see her up close, you can’t help but stare. At $6000, she’s certainly not a cheap date. For creator Matt McMullen, she’s a work of art. For everyone else, she’s a Real Doll.
California is a place also produced a video of their visit to the Real Doll factory. Read an interview with Matt McMullen over at the MONK Magazine. Visit the official website of Real Doll and learn more about those on wikipedia.
California is a place is produced, directed, and shot by Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari. Full credit for the Honey Pie project :
On Camera: Matt McMullen
Produced by: Zackary Canepari & Drea Cooper
Directed by: Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari
Cinematography by: Drea Cooper & Zackary Canepari
Edited by: Drea Cooper
Still Photographer: Zackary Canepari
Music Composed & Produced by: Dave Janusko and Skyrider
The photos above were taken by Zackary Canepari : visit his blog and official website for more of his work.
| There is nothing that man fears more than the touch of the unknown. He wants to see what is reaching towards him, and to be able to recognize or at least classify it. Man always tends to avoid physical contact with anything strange. In the dark, the fear of an unexpected touch can mount to panic. Even clothes give insufficient security: it is easy to tear them and pierce through to the naked, smooth, defenceless flesh of the victim. All the distances which men create round themselves are dictated by this fear. They shut themselves in houses which noone may enter, and only there feel some measure of security. The fear of burglars is not only the fear of being robbed, but also the fear of a sudden and unexpected clutch out of the darkness. |
| He would rage and he would cry, my lost soldier. And I said to him, “There are two of you, don’t you see? One that kills and one that loves.” And he said to me, “I don’t know whether I am animal or a god.” But you are both. |
The entire script of the Redux version is available here.
| In truth at first Chaos came to be, but next wide-bosomed Earth, the ever-sure foundation of all the deathless ones who hold the peaks of snowy Olympus, and dim Tartarus in the depth of the wide-pathed Earth, [120] and Eros(Love), fairest among the deathless gods, who unnerves the limbs and overcomes the mind and wise counsels of all gods and all men within them. |
| What is considered most fundamental about relationships is their formation and their subsequent withering, faltering and disintegration. Before that, they change enormously in increments inside the lapses of time necessary for any of them to become memories. It means the causalities attributed to define relationships are, at best, superfluous if their goal is to help understand their qualities. It also means that to understand their qualities, a careful attending to those almost forgotten moments constituting them (Novalis’ “differential of the function of future and past”¹) has to be undertaken. Once this perspective is adopted, relationships become incredibly rich and complex, and require the refinement of distinctions and observations a mind can rarely afford to maintain for a stable period of time. Hence the underlying stream of most change and notable exceptions demands much effort to be attended to, and some of life’s most fantastic glimpses of itself are apprehended in the form of illumination, when a moment is lived long enough not to be possibly remembered in its tainted and impaired state. ¹Novalis, Werke, ed. Ewald Wasmuth, Heidelberg, 1957, vol. I, p. 129 (fragment 417) |
| Certes, le premier qui imagina de faire servir une gazette à ce que des êtres humains trouvent ce qu’ils cherchent, celui-là devrait avoir sa statue. Tout ce qui crée des rencontres mérite encouragement, même quand il s’agit de rencontre à fin sentimentale, et malgré tout ce qu’elles supposent de niaiserie et de médiocrité. |
| Chichikov bought records of these dead souls from landowners eager to lighten their own tax burdens. Papers certifying Chichikov’s ownership of 400 “souls” rapidly elevated Chichikov’s status: landed gentry opened their homes to him, tried to give away their daughters in marriage, and celebrated him at town functions. And all it took was a record of ownership of hundreds of “souls.” So every time I see another article or an ad about how to acquire more followers on twitter, friends on Facebook, or otherwise collect more “souls” for money, fame, or reputation, I start thinking about Chichikov. He did come to an ignominous end, finally fleeing town. Makes me wonder. |
Marina Gorbis, executive director at Institute for the Future and guestblogger for Boing Booing, offers an analogy between the way social media’s followers can be used today and Nicolay Gogol’s novel Dead Souls. See also how you can buy followers for your Twitter account.
”Figure 3. (a) Network after the addition of 220 links. The initials correspond to characters that play an important role connecting communities: Spider-Man (SM), Thing (T), Beast (B), Captain America (CA), Namor (N), Hulk (H). (b) Network after the addition of 300 links, when a giant component has emerged. The black (white) circles indicate characters labeled as heroes (villains). The gray circles indicate other types of characters, such as people, gods or nodes with no classification.”
Read more about Pablo M. Geiser paper HERE.
