3D rendering

Riusuke Fukahori creates his 3D fish not by embedding fish models in resin, but by painting them, layer by layer, in the resin as it is poured.

Strange machinery

Brower Propulsion Laboratory is like an aerospace version of Bonk Business, making machines whose mere existence is more important than their absence of functionality. However, what caught my eye was this beautiful water colour of what seems to be a J-7.

H/t thnidu.

Invisible Man

We went to Fotografiska Museet. As usual, there were several parallel exhibitions of varying degrees of interest: Robert Mapplethorpe leaves me cold—all his pictures are somehow just the same, regardless of the subject: same lighting, same æsthetics. But we’d really come to see the “Invisible Man”, excerpts from Liu Bolin’s series Hiding in the City—photographs of himself, bodypainted to meld in with the background at various places in Beijing. Looking at the pictures I realised there must be at least another invisible man: I can’t quite see how Liu could have managed to create the body paintings on himself by himself, matching them up with the environment behind him. There must have been at least another, quite skillful, person helping him with the paintings and adjusting them to the background. I find this a problem with art in general: there is this Romantic idea of the lone genius that the teamwork necessary for almost any piece of art is completely suppressed. Well, except for film, where it’s pretty obvious that the producer did not do it all alone and where the skills of all other participants have identifiable effects on the end result, so these days everybody in any way involved with the production is listed in the final credits and I can pay hommage to them by watching the credits to the end.

A slightly different example was Eleanor Coppola’s Circle of Memory, a memorial to her dead son in the form of an Irish passage grave recreated with hay bales, clearly not manually stacked by herself. However, this was more explictly a cooperatively created art piece, as the public were invited to write their thoughts on pieces of paper and attach them to the hay, so that others could read them. Honeybuns noted that it’s hard to express strong emotions without becoming banal. Indeed, quite a few of the writings had been directly cribbed from the quotable quotes at the bottom of calendar pages. So, kudos to the young woman who unpredictably but truthfully noted: “Don’t do a runner twice from the same taxi, you’ll feel so guilty.”

Young art

As the Only-Begotten Daughter reminds me, she has recently had her first art exhibition.

Teater Accént, in addition to schooling young performers, have initiated Galleri Accént, where young artists can exhibit their work in the theatre’s premises. So the OBD and several of her friends worked hard for weeks sculpting, photographing and painting, spreading the word through all those wonderful social media and then rigged up the labyrinthine cellar spaces of Teater Accént with both art and a nice setting for viewing.

This is when we arrived on the scene. I was pleased and proud, though not a bit surprised, to find that the Daughter’s pieces were among the best featured, in particular her photography. (Anything else would clearly have been against the laws of (parental) nature.) She even managed to sell a painting (though not the featured one).

3D!

We’ve had a very cultural Sunday. We started by seeing the current exhibition at Galleri Hagström and commissioning some paintings. (It sounds very grand, eh? In other words we asked our friend Pia to paint some more goldfish just for us.)

We continued to the recently re-opened Museum of Medieval Stockholm, where we spent a couple of hours. It felt as if it perhaps was not quite finished yet, as there was a large number of display cases with various objects without any explanation whatsoever of what they were or where they had been found. On the other hand, the exhibits showing how archaeologists work in combining various scraps of information into a story were very well thought out. On one wall was displayed a large computer animation of the Old Town, as seen from the north, some time in the late Middle Ages, but I thought it was rather cheaply made and could have been much more impressive with just a bit more effort put into textures and bump mapping, so that the buildings wouldn’t look quite as cardboardy.

We strolled off for dinner at Pong buffé, which was much satisfactory—buffet tends to be a sloppy story, but they managed to keep the food looking fresh and appetizing and it also was very good, even though somewhat lacking in the vegetarian area, we will probably go for the à la carte next time.

After dinner, obviously a film. We went for the 3D version of Cloudy with a chance of meatballs. It turned out to be much impressive, suddenly circularly polarised stereographic goggles are cheap enough to hand out to cinema goers, as well as good quality enough that there is no visible ghosting in the images. In addition to this, the film was perfectly enjoyable and would have been so even without the 3D. And of course, it extolled the importance of nerds. The end credits felt at some remote inspired by Yellow Submarine.

Pneumatic art

We passed the Stockholm International Fair a couple of weeks ago and found this wonderful contraption:

Ice art

Arrived in Huddinge Centrum after dark to buy food and detergent and saw something glittering around the corner. There had been an ice sculpture competition earlier in the day and the entries had been left standing there. Most of them were rather uninspired, but the winning entry ”Frusen” was a glittering marvel that changed aspect with every new angle as I walked around it—an embracing couple, a sea horse, a deconstructed face, a facetious play with light.

Approved by the Stockholm Visitors Board

Today I am lobster red, the usual result of taking me outdooors. Yesterday my sister and I arranged a belated birthday celebration for our mother and took her on a day trip to Drottningholm Palace. Of course we went by steam boat: S/S Drottningholm.



The much-praised Stockholm Archipelago is really the continuation of the islands, isles and islets in Lake Mälaren and I've always been very fond of travelling lakeside where the shores creep near the boat. It is also fascinating to know that what looks as dense pine forests in fact are just thin barriers in front of the most densely populated areas of Sweden. Shore protection laws are cool.

Denephew wasn't quite as appreciative of the beauty of water travel.



Soon however we arrived at Drottningholm and found ourselves a spot on a lawn where we picknicked. The sister had bought a Kubb set and soon we had a closely fought game going. Denephew insisted on being on my team, which much flattered me, and he didn't do at all badly, but eventually we (or at least I, he wouldn't hear of it) had to concede defeat.

Then Denephew and I went to explore the Labyrinths. I found to my surprise that the hedges all had little passages just the size for five-year-olds to run through and leave any adults behind. I don't know if they have been created on purpose by the gardeners or if millions of visiting children over the years have excavated them. I tried to explain the principle “If you get lost, stay where you are!” to Denephew, but it didn't stick as the imperative to joyously run as fast as his little legs would carry him overruled all concerns about ever getting home again. Fortunately his high-contrast clothes allowed me to glimpse him every now and then through the hedges and thus retrieve him. When I tired of the run-and-seek I scooped up the little lad and carried him back to his parents who by then had collected our belongings in preparation for a tour of the palace itself.

As has been noted by others, children strongly prefer ice cream to ancient art so while I was very fascinated by the huge battle paintings with careful legends, I did not get much of a chance to study them. I was very bemused by the room full of Klöcker Ehrenstrahl portraits of Charles XI's generals, all looking exactly the same, followed by the room full of von Kraft portraits of Charles XII's generals, all looking exactly the same. (Sorry, no photography allowed indoors.) I will have to return at some point to study all these closer.

Denephew then got his Nazi ice cream and we boarded the boat for the trip home. On the way, Denephew and his father played guessing games:
“What's round and brown, you roll it and you can fry it?”
“An egg!”
I think the boy should have gotten full points for that, one must be precise.

If he wasn't such an awful player, they would still be recording

Stop-motion photography recreates computer games using human pixels



Space Invaders
Pong
Pole Position

Speculative fiction

The term “speculative fiction” was introduced some time in the 1960s by younger authors that considered “science fiction” to be too restrictive. Fair enough, the genre is certainly fuzzy enough around the edges. However, it never really caught on; possibly it sounded a bit too academically precise. A web magazine that still carries the banner of speculative fiction is Strange Horizons. Fiction, to be sure, but also columns, analyses, art and poetry and with sometimes rather oblique connections to speculative fiction per se, i e it is rather eclectic. So am I, so I certainly don't mind. Go read!

Sculptural, cultural

The exhibition Skulptur 2007 opened yesterday at Konstnärshuset and I was invited. Here are some pieces that caught my eye:




The exhibition is open to the public: go see!