prosthetic knowledge

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks: nOdalisque 

From the archive, a brief look at a classic Fine Art archetype in today’s world, from glitchy machinima, 3D animation, Kinect pornography, and the concept of the “opsieme” with the aid of eye-tracking.

Read the whole piece at Rhizome here

Machina by Claudia Hart

Framed digital art piece is a 3D animation of a sleeping female nude subject in the classical pose of Venus / Odalisque - a two minute example of the twenty minute work:

“Machina” (2008) by Claudia Hart from bitforms gallery on Vimeo.

“Machina” is a 3D animation portraying the compressed time and space of painting, shows a dreaming character whose slow, drowsy movements articulate all of the minutia of a single moment. “Machina” uses the most advanced techniques of virtual reality simulation, and a series of animations that result in a representation that is sensual and organic. Occasionally, Machina opens her eyes to gaze at the viewer, in a moment of transformation, allowing the object of our gaze to subject us to hers. Based loosely on works such as Titian′s Venus and paintings by the Baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens, “Machina” is meant to introduce sensuality into the virtual realm by employing an idea of beauty as defined by a woman.

More about the artist’s work at Bitforms Gallery here

Related - earlier this week I discovered a similar (though glitchier) idea in Georgie Roxby Smith’s piece “Uncompossed” [link]

Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs To You 

Large-scale solo exhibition which was on at Japan’s Mori Art Museum of one of Asia’s leading female artists. Her works are sculptural, with both natural and technological forms - looks interesting:

Since the 1990s, Lee Bul has built an international career as one of the leading contemporary artists from Asia. Her oeuvre is dominated by sculptures that demonstrate a mastery of materials and techniques, including her celebrated Cyborgs and Anagrams series, hybrid machine-and-organic forms referencing critical theory as well as dystopian cinematic worlds; karaoke “pods” that evoke space capsules for eternal sleep; and glittering, spectral gures and cityscapes that seem to be falling into ruin. For over twenty years, it could be said that Lee, whose practice has spanned her home country’s transition from military dictatorship to democracy, has been on a quest for an elusive something . the ultimate physical form perhaps, or the ideal society. While showcasing her major works in the four sections “Ephemeral Presence,” “Beyond Human,” “Utopia and Dreamscape” and “From Me, Belongs to You Only,” in the “Studio” section this exhibition will present the drawings and models that also form the font of her ideas. The subtitle “From Me, Belongs to You Only” is also a message from Lee: her attempt to find the “something” for which she is constantly searching in a personal relationship with each individual viewer. Come and experience that message for yourself in the spaces at “Lee Bul: From Me, Belongs to You Only.”

More Here

Female Orgasm in Brodmann Brain Regions 

Visualization of stimulation in the brain with scans taken over a seven minute sequence - via The Visual MD:

The human brain can be separated into regions based on structure and function - vision, audition, body sensation, etc, known as Brodmann’s area map.

This animation shows the functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, brain data of a participant experiencing an orgasm and the corresponding relationships seen within these different regions based on utilization of oxygen levels in the blood. 20 snapshots in time of the fMRI data are taken from a 7 minute sequence. Over the course of the 7 minutes the participant approaches orgasm, reaches orgasm and then enters a quiet period.

Oxygen utilization levels are displayed on a spectrum from dark red (lowest activity) to yellow/white (highest). As can be observed, an orgasm leads to almost the entire brain illuminating yellow, indicating that most brain systems become active at orgasm.

You can see the video at the The Visual MD here [via The Guardian UK]

Rhizome: Prosthetic Knowledge Picks - The Female Pixel 

A digest of links on the idea of ‘The Female Pixel’, including (on Tumblr) FM Towns Marty, Sheroes, V5MT, PartyTime! Hexellent.

It also features Lillian Schwartz, Waldemar Cordeiro, Jovi Xu, and Christian Zander.

You can read the whole thing here

3DCG 

Japanese site appears to be 3D creative community similar to Pixiv, which hosts viewable 3D models using WebGL modern browser technology.

The above gif does not represent the quality of presentation nor the interactive functionality of the service - it is far smoother and the graphics have a higher definition. You can see the original here.

You can explore the site here - and if you look around, there are other fantastic examples.

FEMICOM 

New online resource project by Part Time! Hexcellent! [Tumblr Blog] that looks at the female characters that have appeared in the history of video games:

Though the FEMICOM site itself is quite new—(cue the advance apology for any broken links)—the idea behind it has been dear to me for quite some time. As a child of the 1990s, much of my play time was spent with that generation of video games and computers, whether at the mall’s arcade, in the school’s computer lab with its neat array of Macintoshes, or at cousins’ or friends’ houses where we marveled at the amazing graphics of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and DOOM. And aside from my early obsession with baseball and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, I was also a girly-girl through and through, happy to play with Barbies and fairly insistent on wearing dresses at all times. As I grew older, I found that video game culture and girly culture rarely intersected. Yet, happily, there were places where the two worlds overlapped; these were my favorite play spaces in my teens and beyond.

FEMICOM is a portmanteau that combines the words feminine and computing. It is also a nod to the Japanese video game console called the Nintendo Famicom. FEMICOM is my attempt to document and preserve those special pockets of feminine tech, especially of the 20th century. Tamagotchis and Hello Kitty Game Boys are part of this space, as are web sozai, webrings, software skins, and electronic paper dolls, to name a few. By bringing these electronic artifacts together in a central archive, I hope to encourage comparisons among them and to ask and answer questions about stereotypical gender roles and how they have come to shape modern games and computing experiences. FEMICOM will catalog these items, which are often missing from other video game and software databases, so that they can be easily browsed or searched. Additionally, the site will feature game development resources, interviews, and other relevant content. 

[Bold is my emphasis] 

As I have said earlier, the site is in the early stages of content development, but you can check out here

Hyper-Real Paintings of Hilo Chen

Hilo Chen, born in 1942 in Taiwan, paints scenes of women suntanning on the beach. A perfect setting for the contemporary female nude, yet some of his work enters obsessive and voyeuristic territory (as can be seen above).

More about the artist can be found at the Bernarducci Meisel gallery here.
Other works can be found at other websites here / here / here

Guk Hyun Lee

Part of a collection called ‘Veiled’, oil paintings of women which depict a surreal reality (something I can’t quite put my finger on … is it the masks, the smeared lipstick, glamour verses the mundane?)

More paintings of the collection can be found on the artist’s blog here

Baby Kerosine by Simon Birch [2011]

More at Gandalf’s Gallery Modern

Camouflaged Selves - Black hair by Kim Min Kyoung (김민경)

40x40cm, Lambda print, Saitec, Plastic, 2011

Richard Phillips

0xFFDA by William Esdale

Where vintage half-tone pin-up nudes meet digital glitch

More here

girl bahamian/girl bohemian by ghost ▲ latitudes

Tumblr: http://ghostlatitudes.tumblr.com/
Flcikr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/platipicus/

(via boyhominid-deactivated20120409)

zxthetics:

Beauty

Original photographer unknown.

Sourced here: blog.yimmyayo.com/post/3499431962

Shameless self-promotion (I did the pixellation here - took awhile and happy with the results), but does anyone here know who did the original photograph (in the source link)?