Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.

Robot Man

Last weekend, Los Angeles-based extreme robot performance artist Christian Ristow staged an exercise in mecha-mayhem in which his oversized monster-bots toted about large totem heads, subsequently smashed them to pieces, and then torched them a bit with a fifteen-foot flame-thrower. Clearly, "Happy Holidays!" was the message. The show was held in conjunction with the annual Christmas party of the Burbank-based special-effects shop, Edge FX, where Ristow is helping to create some of the many appendages of Dr. Octopus for "The Amazing Spider-Man." After riding sleds down a hill of fake snow and taking turns sitting in the lap of a Chewbacca-sized Satan Claus, attendees screamed, hooted, and shook their fists in the air as the 5,000-lb, 20-foot tall Subjugator and multi-armed and many-toothed Manipulatrix deconstructed whatever they could sink their machine-parts into.

"I'm happiest when I'm smashing things with a robot; luckily for me, audiences seem to like violence too."

posted by susannah breslin at 9:13:38 PM | permalink

Phoebe Gloeckner on the Web

Phoebe Gloeckner is one of the best, and most provocative, comics artists working today. In A Child's Life and Other Stories, she unblinkingly chronicled the myriad brutalities and graphic abuses of her childhood, and she used her skills as a medical illustrator to create the drawings for J.G. Ballard's Atrocity Exhibition. More recently, she published The Diary of a Teenage Girl, an illustrated novel featuring Gloeckner's alter-ego, Minnie, as a fifteen-year-old budding cartoonist growing up in the midst of the Bay Area's 1970s mess. Not too long ago, at Cody's Books in Berkeley, I happened across The Comics Journal's Winter 2002 issue, focused on the theme of "Cartoonists on Cartooning," and in the back was Gloeckner's contribution: "I Hate Comics." In it, she brutally rips to shreds the Corpus Callosum of neo-alternative comics, sparing no one--not Art Spiegelman, Scott McCloud, or Fantagraphics.

posted by susannah breslin at 6:50:03 PM | permalink

Supadupafreaky

Ah, extreme fetish fashion. Not everyone wears it. And yet, those who do, wear it like nothing else. In this spirit, as of late, a Leigh Bowery look-alike has been spotted around London (and above). These two, apparently, are "clowns," and yet this pink lady's boobs frighten me. This fellow...I don't know what to say about this fellow, except that I will never look at a bird, a U-Haul, or an inner tube the same way again. On the other hand, one can always take a more minimalist approach, or, if one can't make up one's mind, one won't be able to leave the house at all in this. You know, though, in the end, dare I say, you just can't go wrong with a mask. Link Discuss

posted by susannah breslin at 11:36:13 AM | permalink

C is for Conjoined Twins

Born Magazine is a newfangled kind of online journal featuring creative experimentation through virtual collaboration, sending literary types and artistic souls out on e-based blind dates to create cool projects in new media. This year, I sent Born a bit of flash fiction, "C is for Conjoined Twins," which had originally appeared in the ever edgy 3AM Magazine, and I was subsequently paired up with phenomenal French cyber-artiste Rolito. The results made me happy to be alive and chillin' in the new mackillennium. While the latest Born issue won't be online in full until January 1st, you can get a sneak peek at "C is for Conjoined Twins" today.

Born's Art Director, Gabe Kean, says:

"We hope to be understood as a free-form experimental venue that evolves organically. Without even a push, our contributors discover the natural connections between creative literary arts and the innovations developing in media-rich technologies, permitting a more dynamic relationship between text, cinema, audio, and interactivity...

The yearning for meaningful content is a reaction to our perception of what the web has become—a place that is only good for quick information retrieval and convenient shopping. Part of Born's mission is to reclaim the Internet as a place for quality content and artistic expression."

posted by susannah breslin at 2:06:35 PM | permalink

Flex This

Since I inadvertently deleted my earlier post featuring the burgeoning new genre of Chicken Studies, I decided to replace the void with a mention of Chris Cunningham's mind-f***k of an art film, "flex." Fans of Aphex Twin and Bjork will already know the Britain-based Cunningham's music video work, featuring morphing hip-hop heads and forward thinking robot sex. But, "flex," which God loved me enough to guide me to see a couple of years ago in London at the Royal Academy's "Apocalypse" show, is something else entirely. I haven't been the same since. And that's saying a lot.

"Flex," for an all too brief 17 minutes, stars a man and a woman floating within a black void as they engage in supreme acts of ultra violence and extreme sex, culminating in a photosonic climax the likes of which you've never before seen, I assure you. Frankly, it's hard to describe what it's like to watch "flex," but it's something akin to witnessing a rivetingly abusive metaphorical marriage between a hardened boxer and a hardcore porn star. These days, over at Director File, non-luddites can watch an all too brief excerpt from "flex" that, while lacking in the more graphic content that makes "flex" so wildly provocative, gives aspiring "flex"-o-philes a taste of a video that accidentally redefines the medium of movie-making.

The "Apocalypse" catalogue says:

"'flex' is a deliberately aggressive piece of film-making. Cunningham's aim is to attack the senses with a physical intensity using film and music."

"It was intended to be completely abstract but it didn't quite work out that way and although it feels like its trying to say something, it isn't."

Note: If you are a sniveling sissy or sexually frigid, please do stay away from "flex" by all means. It wouldn't like you either. Link Discuss

posted by susannah breslin at 11:11:27 PM | permalink

XXXbox PiXXX

Juergen Specht, a German photographer living and working in Tokyo, was apparently recently erotically inspired by the Xbox Logo, and what he describes as a "(typical Japanese?) 'Ripping Performance,'" to create the latest addition in his unique twist on neo-fetish photography in Gallery 79: Escape. In his other online galleries, Specht experiments with technofetishistic plastic-tubing bondage, LCD projection eroticism, full body digital "scans", and neon nudes. In addition, Juergen also runs D1scussion, an online discussion group for Nikon's professional-grade of digital cameras.

So, what does Juergen have to say for himself?

"I never know what I should write on 'about' pages anyway."

posted by susannah breslin at 10:35:15 AM | permalink

Eat Me, Won't You?

If you can't get enough erotic cannibalism in your daily news diet as of late, Katherine Gates of Deviant Desires wants to tell you everything she knows about cannibal fetishism. While Ms. Gates is a bit of a buzzkill when it comes to actual Dahmerites, she explains it's just fine to paint dotted lines on your significant other so they look like a slab of meat primed for the chopping block as a mode of foreplay.

Apparently, according to Gates, Muki's Kitchen is the Internet's Ground Zero for those who take terms like Tacos de Pescado to heart. There, you can find actual photographs of ladies-of-the-dinner-table taken by actual professional food photographers. Of course, for those feminist cannibal fetishists out there in the crowd, Mrs. Muki's Bistro additionally offers up a young man's meat being Char-B-Qued to a sweaty crisp atop a firey hog grilling spit.

So observeth Gates:

"One man who fantasizes about being eaten by women understands his activity as part of what Carl Jung called 'embracing the shadow aspects of ourselves.' I agree. So let's all say Grace and dig in: 'Good food, good meat, good God let's eat!'"

posted by susannah breslin at 11:36:12 PM | permalink

A Shutterbabe Who Shot the Vietnam War

Catherine Leroy was one bad-ass mo-fo who ran with the big boyz on the frontlines of the 'Nam War as one of the few chick photojournalists shooting there. The Los Angeles Times is currently offering up a highly cool profile and very awe-inspiring portfolio of this French lady's unflinching shots of American soldiers in battle and in death. She started out as a Catholic boarding school girl, but in Vietnam she became better known for being the only journalist to jump out of a plane with the 173rd Airborne during Operation Junction City, shooting her pix as she fell. And, during the Tet Offensive, Leroy and another French journalist were held captive by a North Vietnamese colonel who ended up allowing her to photograph both himself and his soldiers. A former Marine who encountered Leroy back in 'Nam says:

"When I think of her, I wonder what makes a person do what she did. Reporters and photographers, I guess, are strange people in a sense. I first thought that she might be a little crazy for wanting to be in Vietnam, and I even thought that she had to be stupid. But that's not it at all. She is far from either one, but there is something that drives these people."

posted by susannah breslin at 5:25:08 PM | permalink

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