Incredible Surrealist Wall Painting Movie
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
Tycho from Penny Arcade linked to this today in a newspost. Words cannot describe how cool this is. Just watch.
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Results tagged “art” from The Weekly Geek
Superheroes Invade Art Museum, Story At 11
This week New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art unveiled it's newest exhibit "Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy." As you may have guessed from the title, the exhibit features costumes worn by actors in superhero cinema. In addition to a wardrobe that would inspire murderous jealousy in any comic geek, on display will be outfits created by today's leading couture designers inspired by the supersuits and contemporary sportswear similarly inspired.
The exhibit runs through September 1st, so any Big Apple based geeks would do well to go and have a peek. For those of us not lucky enough to live in New York City the gallery over at DVICE will simply have to do.
New Painting For Sale: The Death of Peach
Up for sale on Etsy as of today, a painting I did in college called "The Death of Peach".
Mario is grief-stricken in this nightmare scenario where Princess Peach is impaled callously by a giant pirahna plant. Toad watches in horror as Mario prepares to hurl a Bob-Omb and avenge his love. Oil on canvas 38"x36"
You can check out the listing here. Now's your chance to own a little bit of The Weekly Geek!
Painting the Hunter
Thought you guys might enjoy watching a video of me hit by a sudden burst of inspiration today. I've been thinking of something to fill up this canvas I painted over a month ago. The subject? Only one of the creepiest villains in game history: a Combine Hunter from Half Life 2: Episode 2. I wanted to keep it simple and exercise my brushwork skills while capturing the strangely vicious kinetic energy of the things.
Non-moving photo after the jump.
Young Me/Now Me
I've always envied people who had the tenacity to complete photo journaling projects. Whether taking a picture of yourself every day for a year, or documenting a family history, photo projects are fascinating studies in human mortality. Linked from Boing Boing today, I found YOUNGME - NOWME on a site called Color Wars, where people take old childhood photos and recreate them with their newer, older bodies. I especially enjoy the ones who put a lot of effort in getting the clothing/setting correct, such as this chap who finally was able to live his dream of having the world's greatest mustache.
I'm tempted to do a few of my own.
[link via Boing Boing]
Okami Art Site Launches: Perfect for Mashups
Why oh why didn't you do something this awesome back when Okami first came out, Capcom? In order to help promote the release of Okami for the Wii, a brand new art site has launched, showcasing the incredible hyper-sumi-e style of the Clover Studios classic. Not only will you find some choice wallpapers for adorning your desktop (some old, some new) you'll find backgrounds and characters in reasonably high resolutions. You could cut out the characters and place them on the backgrounds just like those old Colorforms sets! Perhaps if you didn't have a Wii and wanted to pretend to play Okami.
They even have each set in an easy-to-grab .zip file. Thanks, Capcom! Now let's remember how awesome your non-Resident Evil non-Mega Man franchises are and give them a little more love from now on, ok?
Oh Noes! A Virus for the Mac!
I am a Mac-loving douchebag through and through. I drank the kool-aid and I freely pass it around. The kool-aid tastes good you guys, and one of the best things about the Mac is that there literally aren't any viruses for the system. No one is writing them, and the security of the operating system is near-inhospitable for the little guys to propagate. Troika art and design studio, however, have developed what they are calling the "Newton Virus" which uses the Mac's motion sensing software (originally used to brace the hard drive in the event you drop the thing). The effect is playful, and I'd love to see this released as an actual product.
[link via TUAW]
Warcraft in the Real World
I was a horrible student, both in high school and in college. I resented having to take classes that I knew had no bearing on my future interests, and ended up getting quite poor grades even though I was perfectly capable of completing the tasks and taking the tests. I just didn't show up. As my college career wore on I was able to focus more on my own interests, including art history. My 400-level art history classes in college were my absolute favorite, taught by the brilliant William Folkestad. I was fascinated by art of previous decades and how important all of it seemed. How we live in a post-post-post-post modern world and how it feels like all the good art is behind us. Performance art fascinated me the most, and the happenings of the 1970's excited me. Performance art in the States today is a bit stifled, barring the antics of groups like Improv Everywhere and the Graffiti Research Lab. But in Europe? It seems to flourish.
Artists in Europe have embraced home brew technology. They utilize it in amazing ways, and many of their techno-flavored interests are leaking into the video game realm. Take these two projects, influenced by the omnipresent World of Warcraft and Second Life, presented by a man named Aram Bartholl (seen above with the giant axe-thing). Aram is creating World of Warcraft weapons that he plans on carrying around in Berlin, most likely documenting people's reactions to something so common in the virtual world, but so foreign in the actual. Playing with context and shaking up the way you see your daily life is what art is all about, and the increase in popularity of video games is providing great inspiration for this process.
The other project that fascinated me is this one which allows two people to chat at each other using over-the-head word bubbles. Again, taking something commonly seen in a video game and transporting it into the real world. The effect is at the same time amusing and jarring.
You can view more of Aram's stuff over at We Make Money Not Art, and read more about the neat stuff that is happening over across the water.
[link via (and images taken from) WMMNA]
Thar Be Monsters
In the days of exploration, cartographers would put massive amounts of care and style into their maps. These hand-drawn masterpieces not only convey information to you such as "there is a mountain here" or "this is a sea", but depict vessels sailing on the sea, or frightening monster whales swimming along merrily. Hand-drawn maps have fascinated me ever since I first read The Hobbit and saw Tolkien's own maps of Middle-Earth. Helmink.com is an amazingly extensive library of beautiful hand-drawn maps from hundreds of years ago. I love surfing through this site, looking at the intricate details cartographers would inject into their maps. Since these are all so old I assume they fall under public domain, so you could feasibly use these for your own art mash-ups. Each map is high resolution and would at the very least make fantastic desktop wallpaper. They also sell the original maps, which is handy if you have a couple thousand dollars lying around.
Here's to a lost art made obsolete.
Jimiyo's 8-bit Link
Jimiyo is an artist with an obvious passion for games. He's created the surreal 8-bit Link featured above, a similarly strange 8-bit Mario, and most notably a fantastic 8-bit rendition of Obama. Not only does he share our love of games, geekery, and art, but we share political ideals as well. I ask you my geekateers, is this or is this not nearly the very essence of The Weekly Geek? I submit that it is.
[Via Drawn!]
Saint Mario and the Dragon
With a name like Butt Johnson and a piece like the one above, how could we not feature this on The Weekly Geek?
[Via MonsterBrains]
Yo Ho Ho and a Slab of Bacon
It's fairly common knowledge that I am obsessed with bacon. I have perfected the art of cooking bacon, I have a wallet that looks like bacon, I have an air freshener for my car that smells of bacon. I wrap my hot dogs in bacon. It's a wonder I am not 500lbs. My love of bacon only goes so deep, however. Not hardly as deep as these guys who made a meat ship.
That's right, a ship made out of meat. Happy Monday morning!
[link via Slashfood]
The NES Beer Pong Table
I spent a couple years somewhere in the vast desert of central Washington State racking up a massive amount of debt in order to get a piece of paper that says that I do Art. Yes, many people don't know that Washington State isn't completely covered in lush rainforests with a Starbucks at every tree trunk, but that's beside the point. College in the US has degraded into a strung together series of parties, rendering its only use into perfecting the art of the beer bong. Or making the perfect beer pong table. Or building something else that helps just-turned-21'ers consume massive quantities of shitty beer in order to, I dunno, grow up or something. From a list of 33 of the best beer pong tables (best is definitely subjective in this case) comes this absolutely atrocious Nintendo themed table. From the article:
This table is 8 bits of pure joy. Highlights include Little Mac doing a funnel from MegaMan, Link getting in a barfight, Donkey Kong battling Samus Aran and much much more. This is really more art than it is table.
I think college has warped this poor man's logic. This is definitely more table than art. I mean, just look at Soda Popinski. They didn't do any artistic legwork in researching the fact that his original name was Vodka Drunkinski. They portrayed him drinking a bottle of Tide or something. Horrible. At least now we know that Mario is a Guinness man. Explains the swarthy hairiness I guess.
There's also an NES controller table in the article, but I will leave that to you to critique. I'm going to go wash my eyes out with soap.
[link via Pongalong]
Metroid Print Edition 2 for Sale!
Don't you wish you had a way to express your deep love of Metroid Prime 3: Corruption? Some sort of object you could hang on your wall to show all your friends that you live and breathe all things Samus? Well, worry no longer! We have a new print available at the Weekly Geek store - it's a new edition of our popular Metroid print. It's a linoleum cut hand printed (by yours truly) onto high-quality deckled paper and it's only available in a limited edition of 18. When they're gone, they're gone!
They are $15 with free shipping (that's $10 off the first edition price!) - buy one now before they all run out!
Browser Game: Manifold
In spite of what you may think, I do not in fact spend my days sipping drinks on a rooftop lounge in front a laptop, scouring the intertubes for news to bring you, my Geeks of Week. No, I like many of you, am bound by the shackles of commerce and have the detestable misfortune of having a day job. At this day job, again, like many of you, I am constantly tasked with finding new ways to distract myself and accomplish as little as possible, thus ensuring the vicious cycle of corporate life is complete.
Occasionally I accomplish this by pounding my keyboard in a furious rage over the latest Halo 3 news, at which point Furniss steps in to make my writing intelligible. However, more often than not I can be found sitting at my desk, an Excel spreadsheet open for plausible deniability, shirking my duties and playing a browser game. Most of the time these games are easily forgettable and I hold no special reverence for them, sometimes though I find a game that just tickles me in ways indescribable. Manifold is just such a game. It's short, pretty, doesn't make an obscene amount of noise, and engages me to the point of distraction so that I can forget about the time I'm wasting furthering someone else's goals.
Manifold provides you the opportunity to hurl gravity defying orbs at walls, with which to propel yourself (a strange alien silhouette) over a bevy of obstacles. Each time you die (which I did numerous times figuring out just how high I could launch myself) you're simply deposited back at the last level you were playing with a change in the soothing background hue. This is simply a fun time-wasting opportunity, and I demand you play it immediately.
Manifold via Game | Life
Awesome Zelda Art
Geekateer Lordfate sends us in this awesome photo of a painting he recently had commissioned from an artist named Kelli Nelson depicting Link and Zelda in a very stylized stained-glass style. Apparently it only cost him $75 (pretty inexpensive for a commissioned piece of work, and VERY inexpensive for something of this quality) and she takes requests for other video game art. Click the thumbnail to view the awesomeness in its full glory.
Check out Kelli's work at Cheap Paper Art and spruce up that hovel you call a home. (Thanks, Lordfate!)
Podcast for 07-23-07 | You've Got The Power
The Geek, Chris and Colette wax nostalgic this week about Nintendo Power and the glory of magazines devoted to in-game maps and brand-whoring. Also discussed is Live Arcade titles for the week and Paper Mario. Roger Ebert returns us to six months ago when the "Are Video Games Art?" question was still relevant, and Jon Lovitz beats up Andy Dick. This was a very random week. Enjoy!
continue reading "Podcast for 07-23-07 | You've Got The Power"
The Botanical Gameboy
We Make Money Not Art directed me to this interesting Botanical Gameboy today. Just like the experiments you used to do in science class where you would power a clock or something using lemons, these lemons actually allow you to play a game of Tetris. Could lemons get any cooler, honestly?
From the site:
Botanical Gameboy was an experiment conducted during Playshop. This was an attempt to power a gameboy by harvesting voltage from lemons 9 lemon trees. We designed a custom game: Count Volta to live on the gameboy. Through this experiment, we found that we would need 48,000 lemons to power our gameboy, thus we demonstrated the wonders of powering small devices and controlling video playback speed by squeezing lemons.
Neat!
Photo Credit: Future Farmers
Take off your rose-colored nostalgia glasses.
As a child of the 80s, I grew up watching the cartoons that defined our generation at the time. I'm sure a good percentage of our listeners here at the ol' Dubya Jee share a similar history. And as geeks, we paid a lot more attention to our cartoons than the average kid. Like video games came to be, toons were an escape for us. We had our He-Man, Transformers, Ninja Turtles, etc. We had a giant proliferation of toys to go with our favorite shows. By most accounts, the 80s were the golden years for cartoons. Well guess what, those "most accounts" are dead wrong. That's right, I said it. I am getting sick and tired of all these 80s kids declaring that "all cartoons today are crap" and that everything we grew up on was vastly superior to what is on now.
That line of thought is patently wrong and I'll tell you why.
continue reading "Take off your rose-colored nostalgia glasses."
I Am 8 Bit Opens this week
If you happen to be in the LA area (West Hollywood specifically) check out the i am 8 bit art show opening April 17th. The opening is from 7-11PM and is usually a grand old time. Apparently there is going to be a GIANT ATARI JOYSTICK (that works!). From the release:
...over 100 artists will reinterpret images, characters and scenes from our favorite old school 1980's video games, including Travis Lampe's "Sad Joust" seen above. Look and purchase new and other original video game masterpieces from Joe Ledbetter, Amy Sol, Luke Chueh, Roland Tamayo, Erik Alos, Matt Dangler, Greg "Craola" Simkins, Bob Dob, Jose Emroca Flores and many, many more. This exhibit is packed with some of the best work this gallery have ever seen, as well as some new prints from favorites from prior years.
I checked out the first year of this event, and was impressed by a lot of the pieces. What I wasn't so impressed with was the fact that the show wasn't open to submissions. All the artists are local LA artists with ties to the gallery in some way, and many of them aren't even part of the actual video game art scene. Being part of that scene myself, I was slightly offended I didn't get a chance to get showcased in such a high profile show, but such is life.
Get cultured and go see some art. 8 Bit Weapon is playing too.
Steampunk Star Wars
Gah. I just love everything about Steampunk. The re-imaginings, the .... steam. Ever since watching Return To Oz and getting incredibly freaked-out as a child I have loved anything copper, bolted, and powered by clockwork. Artist Eric Poulton has put up a series of excellent images of beloved Star Wars characters reworked Steampunk-style. You can see here Lord Vader in his full regalia, his cold heart sheltered behind tempered glass. Here are some more!
I'd love to see Princess Leia in a poofy ball gown with a parasol or an incredibly detailed clockwork AT-AT.
Top Five List: Top Five Games As Art
Video games being regarded as "Art" seems to serve as a sort of validation for our hobby. If games are Art, then they serve some sort of higher social significance than the standard "they allow us to improve hand-eye coordination" argument we have all heard. Certainly, gaming is big business and a serious one, but can games be "Art"? What is "art", anyway? Having a bachelor's degree in art doesn't make me an expert by any means, but I was taught that art is anything anyone takes the time to call "art". A broad definition, but it works. It's not just how pretty a game looks, or if it is made to look like a painting. Art requires the person viewing to think, to maybe change their world view through the eyes of the Artist, who is regarded as a sort of seer, someone who can visualize and filter the world in ways we cannot.
We here at The Weekly Geek think that video games are the very definition of Art. Hit the jump for our Top Five Games As Art lists!
Video Game Pumpkin Art!
This past weekend we did some pumpkin carving, and of course being a gigantic geek I had to do some game related pumpkins. So here we have my wife's generic pumpkin, my Katamari pumpkin and my ode to the Triforce. You can see my repositioning of the pumpkin's stem to the Prince's antenna. Also you can make out the Sharpie™ marks from where I cut the pieces out. I probably should have used non-permanent marker...
Have you carved your video game referencing pumpkin yet? I wanna see em!
Fine Art With Hot Glue
I wish to direct your attention to the fabulous Glue Gun Crafts site where I wrote an article about using your glue gun to make something awesome. In the interest of full disclosure, I work for the company who made this site. Also I coded out the site. Go me!
-Frodo
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