“Matchstickmen” are giant matchsticks with burnt match heads that look disturbingly like blackened human heads. Created by German artist Wolfgang Stiller, the sculptures have been exhibited since 2008 in unsettling installations in which the matchsticks are tucked in coffin-like matchboxes, and otherwise scattered around the installation space.
VIA: –LAUGHING SQUID–
Lucien Shapiro‘s sculptures are a bit frightening. These baseball bats-turned-weapons seem to be pulled out of a post-apocalyptic neo-dark ages. In fact, these sculptures are part of the larger Urban Obsessions series. Like the title implies, the weapons suggest a sort of violent desperation, an urban restlessness taken to its hyperbolic end. Also, the sculptures of Urban Obsessions are nearly ritualistic like implements of a a post-modern tribal religion. –BEAUTIFUL DECAY–
Human beings have never been very good at predicting the end of the world. Though one would never know given our current surge of enthusiasm for apocalyptic scenarios. Even firearms manufacturers today are marketing real-life (and deadly) weapons as “zombie apocalypse” guns. (We all know that zombies aren’t real. Right? Right?). And just consider the last dozen years: Public interest has lurched from Y2K to 2012 to solar flares. It’s easy to make light of these attachments. But recent events reveal a contradictory and troubling attitude at the back of our fascination with The End.
VIA: –THE JEWELRY EDITOR & SHE WALKS SOFTLY–
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 is an insanely ambitious novel of life three hundreds years hence, set in a solar system where the Earth continues to limp along, half-drowned, terrified, precarious — and only one of many inhabited places. Read the rest.
VIA: –BOING BOING–
CONSPIRAPORN! 