The Null Device

2003/11/7

And continuing the strange-music theme recently dominating this blog: someone's putting together theme recently dominating this blog: someone's doing an elektro tribute to Iron Maiden. By the look of the page, I'd guess that their definition of "elektro" would be the sort of sternly Teutonic industriogothic EBM that grew out of youths in depressed German industrial cities playing with Amigas a decade or two ago. It could be amusing, or it could be dourly monotonous, or some combination thereof.

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Angular Momentum: The Reason for the Season
Church Sign Generator, which composites plastic letters onto a photograph of one of those church signs (you know, the ones which usually hold Bible verses or pithy one-liners about eternal life). Try it with your favourite NIN/Ministry lyrics or SubGenius tracts; fun for the whole family! It's sacrilicious! (via jwz)

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An article on the new generation of computer-generated über-babes, as seen in films, ads and Taschen coffee-table yuppie-erotica books, and soon to be taking jobs from yesteryear's meat-based supermodels.

Interestingly enough, the most impressive examples of computer-generated models are those with meticulously-computed imperfections (of the sort that get photoshopped out of photographs of live models). Though these are outnumbered by male geeks' idealised fantasy images of The Perfect Woman:

Obsessive behaviour often creates obsessive subject matter. Which is perhaps why a fair chunk of Weidemann's book could be written off as coffee-table porn. For every hyper-realistic exploration of a digital woman, such as Kaya, Digital Beauties features three with unrealistically large breasts. But filter out the provocative imagery of scantily clad women and you will discover some of the finest examples of computer graphics yet produced. Take Daniel Robichaud's hauntingly real digital resurrection of Marlene Dietrich. The Canadian animator chose the German chanteuse as the subject of his digital model and brought her back to life a decade after her death. The effect is simply breathtaking.

And then there's the story of Annlee, rescued from copyright slavery by two artists and now living it up in the creative commons:

As the critic Elizabeth Bard commented in the art magazine Contemporary, until the pair of French artists freed her from the Manga studio, Annlee was no more than an extra, "destined to live no more than a few pages in a comic book or frames of a film". Instead, Annlee has enjoyed a rather more illustrious career, showing at the Venice Biennalle, the New York Guggenheim, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London before culminating in a solo show called No Ghost Just a Shell at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art earlier this year.

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The blingerati arrive in Edinburgh for the MTV Europe music awards. Edinburgh? What the flaming hell were they thinking? You know what Scotland is full of, don't you? Pale people in anoraks who are into twee, shambling jangly indie-pop and such. You'd think that if they had to have the MTV music awards in Britain, they'd do so in Brighton (home of lagered-up big-beat dance parties) or the superclubs of Manchester or someplace. But not Scotland; otherwise they may as well hold next year's ones in Reykjavík or somewhere.
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