❥ Candlestick
{ outside blaze, inner light }
The souls of a young girl has been bewitched, and placed on the candlestick which has wings, burning and burning. The flaming smoke formed into her face and hair, tears dropped with pain, looking for someone who could set her free.
We rose up slowly as if we didn’t belong to the outside world any longer… like swimmers in a shadowy dream who didn’t need to breathe.
The Spaewife work in progress - Premo Pearl polymer clay on wire/foil armature. After about a million gazillion years of poking holes, I still have a considerable section to go… then I will rub white mica powder on it and bake it. The general intention is to fill the dip with water/oil and do some kind of rainbow effect or possibly a projection on it.
Coral-like, organic, seductive? It certainly seems to simultaneously attract/repel people. There’s something almost repulsive about its form, and yet…
I wanted it to have illusionary qualities: think scrying. Decided to go with the Spaewife in the end because the Spaewife is Scottish/and also comes from the Völva witch of Norse mythology. Which I am a little obsessed with.
Resin gourds. I think I might project on them. I have one that I’ve stickered completely with faceted pieces of mirror sticker. This is like a hopeful failure - I made a silicon rubber mould from a real Chinese gourd that I took back to Guangzhou, hoping to make a cheap-ass production line of transparent or translucent gourds. No suck luck, since no one is inventive enough to want translucent resin. So I made 10 of these instead, and I think I’m going to use them in my holographic pepper’s ghost projection. They may become something in their own right, however. Right now they sit cocooned on my desk, waiting.
Our clearest motivations are to seek pleasure and avoid pain. However, daily life in the Society of the Spectacle offers many more opportunities to experience pain than it does to experience pleasure. Consequently, most people have ceased to expect much pleasure in their daily lives and are content to support a social system which simply offers less pain.
KARBORN

“KARBORN – A prototype young artist of the future-technoid, paradisiacal, neuromantic – an integration of intelligence and an instinctive engagement with visual arts, music, film and machines – informed by his vision of the clarity, beauty and geometry of the real world.”

KARBORN is enigmatic, born of kar; he creates works of astonishing clarity and mystery that draw you into their 4D depths. He is an embodiment of the contemporary metaphysical creature.
His work transcends genre - fine art, photography, digital manipulation: I don’t know I don’t care. His faces stare you in the mind and ask: does it matter?
John Foxx - Cathedral Oceans - City of Endless Stairways from KARBORN

If something burns your soul with purpose and desire, it’s your duty to be reduced to ashes by it.
Does The Kindle Spell The End for Books?
Is this the end for books as we know it? Since 2007, when the Amazon Kindle tumbled out into the global market with its first electronic e-book cry, this sort of cyber hearsay has been both muttered and boldly declared as fact by dystopian doomsayers. (Because everyone knows that everything we read on the Internet is true.)
Hark! The apocalyptic D-day for our most archaic form of literary recording is near. Books will soon, if not seized from houses and thrown on burning heaps in a reenactment of Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, will simply cease to interest the vast majority of readers as an object of consumption and slowly disappear from the world. In 2113, our future generations will peruse the digital archival of our papered pasts and shake their head, bemused at our collective idiosyncrasy.
But is this really true? Have we really pushed so far to a new digital frontier? Most people aren’t voracious readers, or proudly proclaim themselves to be bibliophiles to everyone they know (obviously, I don’t do this). But, biased as I am, I don’t believe e-books can or will ever replace actual papered books…
Blueblood
They say
blood is thicker than water,
as they drown me as a martyr
in the shallows of the sea
with hands so soft and tenderly.
I’m so far from our motherland,
scattered by the wind and sand
across strange floors and through still plains,
still, they sigh the same refrain:
Why, they ask, did you have to leave
me alone with the belief
that one day you would journey back
upon the beaten water track
Golden crown alight my head,
your promise I treasured and fed
upon the vivid flood
of your blue blood.
Now I drift through the dark woods,
sworn my pledge to sisterhood.
Milky eyes, a killer smile,
our nails are sharp, our hearts defiled
We find those strangers on the sea,
we rise above, a melody
upon our lips to the men in the sky
and so sweetly, they die:
Why, they ask, did you have to leave
me behind with the belief
that one day you would journey back
upon the beaten water track
Golden crown alight my head,
your promise I treasured and fed
upon the vivid flood
of your blue blood.
Once we were so innocent,
the moon waxed and waned crescent
in the holographic sky of our eyes
so we dreamed that we could fly.
They say
blood is thicker than water,
as they drown me as a martyr
in the shallows of the sea
with hands so soft and tenderly.
Hammer and Sickle. Neon Neon (Gruff Rhys and Boom Bip) present ‘Praxis Makes Perfect’ - a conceptual power pop tour de force inspired by the colourful life of maverick Italian publisher Giagiacomo Feltrinelli.
“A Communist activist, Feltrinelli traveled the world making friends with Third World radicals like Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, before he was found dead under suspicious circumstances at the foot of a high-voltage power line outside Milan in 1972.
Schroeder’s surreal five-minute spectacle is as intoxicating as the track: peppered with Communist symbols, erotic banquets and cameos by historical dictators, it is a wonderfully disorienting watch.”
— Dazed Digital
Mirror is the surface par excellence of late modernism. Its paradoxes confound the illusion of transparency—indexing the instabilities of perception, while offering the possibility of reflexivity. As [Ian] Burn observed, ‘a mirror produces not only an event or a piece of self-conscious theatre, but also deflects visual attention away from the object itself. Like Reinhardt’s paintings, mirrors and glass have a low level of visibility.’
LUCAS SAMARAS
(AMERICAN; GREEK, 1936)
ROOM NO. 2 (THE MIRRORED ROOM), 1966
mirror on wood
overall: 96 x 96 x 120” (243.84 x 243.84 x 304.8 cm.)
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1966
K1966:15Photos: The Past Rendered
Dan Graham, using one-way mirrors.
Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.
