Recurring Nightmares of an Insomniac

A while back I went into an entirely uncharacteristic rant about memetic poison… companies (always companies) trying to stop people propagating memes by tieing it all up with the ugly (wasteless, pointless) barbed-wire of corporate lawfare.

Anyway, the thing I was on about has turned up again… this time being the artist’s own site, and it’s utter genius so I’m going to pass it along etc.

from Kris Kuski who I’ve been aware of for a while now… his sculpture is incredible – it’s a physical collage of Bosch meeting Geiger (which I’m sure has been said a million times), on a very dark night indeed… but in a bad way.

bosch

geiger

So anyway… the reason I finally cracked and started going on about Kris Kuski’s stuff, is that he’s the only fine-artist I’ve ever come across who gets the web… or the digital medium in general. Every single other artist site makes the pictures too small… it’s like they’re timorously, clamourously trying to stop people from “stealing from them”, when in actual fact, all they’re doing is stopping people from evangalising about them.

For a while now I’ve been telling people that it’s because art-site web designers don’t look at enough pornography, so they don’t get that it’s supposed to be a completely immersive experience. Porn sites now sell photographs that are as large (if not larger) than real life. Porn sites get it, because porn has powerful forces of natural selection operating on it all the time.

It’s not enough just to show a little picture of what the real picture is like… people want to get inside the image. They want to climb into it, and be in that world, and look out from the art’s POV. It’s an NLP thing. It’s a Big-budget Video Game thing. It’s a Block-buster Movie thing. It’s a Porn thing.

On Kris’s site you can zoom in and pan around in his sculptures in full-screen mode. The next best thing he could do is make 3d versions (yea, the ones with those weird glasses). It is sculpture after all. Anyway, here’s some more… but go visit his site art-site web-devs. You’re doing it wrong, and he isn’t.

So anyway… back to Geiger…

… and as this blog is about memetics… forget about the Geiger-themed bars, and the fact that he made the Aliens out of Aliens

Here’s a geiger wedding cake…

and obviously until a meme’s been rendered in Lego, it hasn’t really become real…

from Narisa : Flickr

And then there are these little critters, who look like lego-people, but I’m not sure they are.

from mashkulture

Go forth and multiply my pretties… fly, fill the world, and be beholden to no one, thy 20 centuries of stony sleep, vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, the blood-dimmed tide, the reeling shadows, the desert birds… it is time. It is time.