Cropped Will Cardini artwork

July 31st, 2009

Jason Hackenwerth

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 5:14 pm

via design boom.

via web urbanist.

July 28th, 2009

Joyteeth

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 9:11 am

My buddy Jose-Luis Olivares just clued me in to a blog for this (White River Junction-based?) sketch group (excuse me I mean “multi-participant reactive drawing space”) called Joyteeth that he’s a part of.

Here’s a choice Chuck McBuck Charles Formsan drawing (damn that guy’s good!) from the blog:

July 24th, 2009

Ernst Haeckel

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , — William Cardini @ 7:51 am

via woest & vredig.

via counterform.

via tangible interactions.

July 21st, 2009

R.I.P. Heinz Edelmann

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 11:31 pm

Edelmann was the art director for Yellow Submarine. He was a well-known illustrator in Europe.

Zardoz

Filed under: SF Reviews — Tags: — William Cardini @ 2:55 am


via locosceles.

My friend Will Sellari showed me the movie Zardoz on Sunday night.


cover of the novelization, via jimthing.

It was a violent movie (starring Sean Connery!) with a barely sensical climax, a weird dislike of penises and an even stranger inability to understand erections, but besides all that, these masks were really amazing:


via the rope store.

Also there were some great inflatables. Trailer:

July 20th, 2009

Apollo Program Patches

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 11:24 am

To celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Apollo 11’s lunar landing, here’s some Apollo program iconography courtesy of the Kennedy Space Center website.

Apollo 11:

Apollo 12:

Apollo 13:

Apollo 17:

I’m jealous of whoever got to design these. NASA, I’m disappointed in your inconsistent usage of Roman and Arabic numerals. Where’s your style sheet? Also, aren’t y’all glad that NASA has a sense of pomp, and wouldn’t let the next moon lander be named after Stephen Colbert? I know I am. Thanks for keeping mythology alive.

July 17th, 2009

Amy Marie Long

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 10:04 am

I love images like this last one, that catalogue a bunch of weird, discrete phenomenon by arranging them into some kind of a grid.

artist website

thnx allison

July 15th, 2009

Moon starring Sam Rockwell

Filed under: SF Reviews — Tags: , , , , , — William Cardini @ 11:50 am

I saw Moon Monday night.

It was really refreshing. The last hard sci fi movie that I remember seeing was Sunshine, and that kind of fell apart at the end. Moon, directed by Duncan Jones, definitely follows the tradition established by 2001 and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, while also managing to throw in some humanizing bits of humor.

Ditko’s Abstraction at Blog Flume

Filed under: Comics Criticism — Tags: , , — William Cardini @ 9:25 am

There’s a great post by Ken Parille over at Blog Flume on “Ditko and the Beauty of Abstraction.” Here’s a snippet:

[In this panel, there’s] a giant ‘paint splat’ surrounded by a fuzzy ‘lightning bolt’:

Even though a cartoon ‘paint splat’ has a representational connection to an actual one, here that connection is severed, for the nature of the object is unknown – it’s just a gesture, a play of form and color. In the standard cartoon idiom, a splat would represent an action; here it may be an action or just a thing: in other words, in the grammar of this scene it could be either a subject or a verb.

It’s fascinating to me that images in comics can have specific grammatical functions, can be a subject or a verb. It’s definitely something very unique to the medium of comics, and something that I see exploited way more in older newspaper strips than in contemporary comics, which is a shame. When cartoonists play around with visual symbols in this way, reality beings to melt and lose its concrete nature. It becomes “a set of symbols to be manipulated abstractly” as the co-mix blog puts so succinctly.

Update December 21st, 2017: The post from which I pulled the quote in the previous paragraph, and the whole co-mix blog, has been deleted.

July 14th, 2009

What’s up on the Interwebs

Filed under: Inspiration — Tags: , , , , , , , — William Cardini @ 5:21 pm

In alphabetical order:

BEN AQUA INTERVIEW

We would find any location with a working electrical outlet and set up late-night, poorly organized, anything-goes shows—parking garages, Laundromats, the UT art building. We were really inspired by that famous show with J Church on the Lamar Pedestrian Bridge. Most of the recordings were made in really limited-edition mix-tapes for friends and such, so most of that stuff is out of print. I have a huge amount of unmarked CD-Rs from these kids, super scuffed-up and all. One of them came with a few shards of broken glass.

via malcolm elijah’s flickr.

BEN JONES INTERVIEW

Paper Rad isn’t a sexy story either. I’d like to be able to talk about it like a young New Yorker might talk about dance parties or graphitti or doing drugs, but when you ask me about Paper Rad I am going to have to tell you about how it was and is just a desperate vital exercise in finding meaning in life.

CO-MIX BLAWG by JASON OVERBY and BLAISE LARMEE (hilariously URL’d COMETS COMETS)

Performance is perhaps the most overlooked element in comics criticism today. It is the boogie man among indie creators who seek “unmediated expression” and it is indistinguishable from nonperformance in super-mainstream comics. In fact it is difficult to say there exists a nonperformative space in comics at all, since the entire reality of comics exists only in the mind of the reader and the creator.

AND

Comics is a reductive medium. Visual forms are presented in the service of an idea and are simplified so that they may convey information clearly and concisely. The cartoon is a type of signifier that can be used to play mathematical games.

BRILLIANT

thnx sam