Stop the violence

Photographer and artist Francois Robert uses real human bones to produce a series of artworks that make a statement about the tragic consequences of war. He explains: “Each image is a symbol of war or violence, such as a gun or a tank, and I wanted to show that sadly the human skeleton is often all that remains from such acts of violence. This is what you are left with after war – a body count”

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Ex-Chicago-based photographer Francois Robert, born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, is renowned for his commercial work. His fine-art photography is equally provocative and covers a wide range of subjects from evocative Polaroid transfer prints, to candid street and travel photographs, and still-lifes. Among Robert’s publications are GRAPHIS (article) 1979, BEFORE AND AFTER (book) 1981, A DAY IN THE LIFE OF AMERICA (1986), THE COLOR OF FASHION (1992), COMMUNICATION ARTS (article) 1988 and GRAPHIS 335, Fall 2001. His first FACE TO FACE book which sold out in Europe and the U.S. has been followed by FACES published by Chronicle Books. His most recent book is CROSSES published by Graphis. Some of Robert’s clients include Crate & Barrel, Coca-Cola, Chicago Board of Trade, BP, Sappi Paper, Bentley Prince Street, Herman Miller, Polaroid Corporation, Western Union and Yale Medical School.

Sébastian Preschoux

Works of ink with detail view.

Nocturne installations.

Exhibitions: Berlin & France.

Sébastian Preschoux, 35 years old, is a self-taught French graphic designer and artist. He designs and creates all ink drawings based on Spirograph, thread tensions and acrylic paints.

With his work, Sébastian tries to realize shapes with traditional materials and tools that computer can realize within seconds – with reference to this, he calls himself [hu] Man vs Machine.

Ernst Haeckel: Kunstformen der Natur [1899-1904]

Kunstformen der Natur (German for Art Forms of Nature) is a book of lithographic and autotype prints by German biologist Ernst Haeckel. Originally published in sets of ten between 1899 and 1904 and as a complete volume in 1904, it consists of 100 prints of various organisms, many of which were first described by Haeckel himself.

Over the course of his career, over 1000 engravings were produced based on Haeckel’s sketches and watercolors; many of the best of these were chosen for Kunstformen der Natur, translated from sketch to print by lithographer Adolf Giltsch.

According to Haeckel scholar Olaf Breidbach (the editor of modern editions of Kunstformen), the work was “not just a book of illustrations but also the summation of his view of the world.” The over-riding themes of the Kunstformen plates are symmetry and organization. The subjects were selected to embody organization, from the scale patterns of boxfishes to the spirals of ammonites to the perfect symmetries of jellies and microorganisms, while images composing each plate are arranged for maximum visual impact.

Among the notable prints are numerous radiolarians, which Haeckel helped to popularize among amateur microscopists; at least one example is found in almost every set of 10. Cnidaria also feature prominently throughout the book, including sea anemones as well as Siphonophorae, Semaeostomeae, and other medusae. The first set included Desmonema annasethe (now Cyanea annasethe), a particularly stunning jellyfish that Haeckel observed and described shortly after the death of his wife Anna Sethe.

Kunstformen der Natur was influential in early 20th century art, architecture, and design, bridging the gap between science and art. In particular, many artists associated with Art Nouveau were influenced by Haeckel’s images, including René Binet, Karl Blossfeldt, Hans Christiansen, and Émile Gallé. One prominent example is the Amsterdam Commodities Exchange designed by Hendrik Petrus Berlage, which was in part inspired by Kunstformen illustrations.

A second edition of Kunstformen, containing only 30 of the prints, was produced in 1924.

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Download entire book here.

H.R. Giger

The Skull Beneath the Skin [Scott Thill, Wired]

Born in Chur, Switzerland, H.R. Giger (pronounced Gee-ger with two hard g’s) followed a different path from his chemist father. But his admittedly idyllic childhood in mountainous Chur was nevertheless shot through with dread and darkness. Giger’s vivid imagination created early nightmares that morphed into night terrors as his life wore on.

His childhood home’s cellar became, as Giger described, a monstrous labyrinth, where all kinds of dangers lay in wait for me.” Similarly, his early fear of worms and snakes were sublimated by skeletal sculptures of wire, plaster and cardboard.

Giger departed In 1962 for the more cosmopolitan Zurich, where he studied interior and industrial design at the School of Applied Arts. He created his first significant works two years later, culminating in a debut solo exhibition in 1966 and poster edition in 1969. By that time, he had discovered the airbrush for which his resolutely monochromatic work is best known.

But it was the ’70s on which Giger would leave his most lasting biomechanical mark.

Shortly after graduating in 1966, Giger began a doomed relationship with actress Li Tobler, who committed suicide in 1975. Before the troubled Tobler took her leave, she was immortalized in two of Giger’s most famous works, Li I and Li II, both created in 1974.

Tobler was reportedly so deeply angered by her portrayal in Li I that she tore the painting into four pieces. Luckily, one of Giger’s friends persuaded the artist to let him piece it together, and in the process birthed what remains one of the most popular lithographs ever made.

Speaking of popular, it was also Tobler’s memorable face that peered out from behind the fold-out cover of Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s epochal prog-rock classic Brain Salad Surgery, one of only two works Giger specifically designed as album art. (The other was Deborah Harry’s debut 1981 solo effort Koo Koo.)

The other album covers championing his iconic art, from bands like Danzig and Celtic Frost, were lifted from previous art. That includes Work 219: Landscape XX, more infamously known as Penis Landscape, which captivated Dead Kennedys front man Jello Biafra so deeply that he controversially lobbied to make it the cover of his legendary punk group’s 1985 classic Frankenchrist.

“I was totally blown away the minute I saw it,” Biafra told Wired.com by phone. “I thought: ‘Wow! That is the Reagan era on parade. Right there! That shows how Americans treat each other now.’ He captured it in a nutshell.”

The graphic mechanical sexualization of Landscape XX also influenced the lyrical and thematic concerns of Frankenchrist, fusing its songs “together as a concept album,” Biafra added. “I’m not sure that would have clicked in my mind, if I hadn’t had that spark of inspiration from seeing Giger’s work for the first time.”

But the release of Frankenchrist led to a protracted obscenity trial in Los Angeles that nearly bankrupted Biafra’s label Alternative Tentacles. “I’m not necessarily sure whether the picture was worth going through a year-and-a-half of hell,” Biafra said. “But at the same time, if I had known that it was going to happen, would that have stopped me? Probably not.”

Alien Nation
Tobler’s suicide turned Giger’s work darker, as many of the recognizable human elements of his nightmarish cyborg tableaux were replaced by terrifying aliens. He collected them in 1977 into his most well-known book, Necronomicon, named for the fictional grimoire created by horror legend H.P. Lovecraft.

After Dark Star brainiac Dan O’Bannon brought the collection to the attention of Ridley Scott, the director latched onto the horrific aliens in the paintings Necronomicon IV and Necronomicon V like an Alien egg-spawn to John Hurt’s face.

“I realized we had the ability to create a monster that would be superior to most of those from the past,” Scott wrote in the introduction of H.R. Giger’s Film Design Book in 1996. ” I had never been so sure of anything in my life.”

Scott’s confidence paid off huge, as his nightmarish 1979 corporate sci-fi classic Alien became an instant legend, winning Giger an Oscar for visual effects in 1980 and birthing a franchise that persists to this day. The acclaim led to further film work for Giger on franchises like Species, Poltergeist and others, including unused designs for Dune and Batman Forever.

But even those designs spawned further pursuits: The Harkonnen chairs Giger created for Dune — back when Alejandro Jodorowsky, not David Lynch, was the chosen director — sparked forays into furniture design.

Giger’s urge to bring his dark, suggestive work into full dimension continued with efforts in sculpture and even installation. In 1988, he designed the first of what would be four eventual H.R. Giger Bars in Tokyo. (Only two, both in Switzerland, remain open.) Experiencing his artwork’s cavernous, skeletal environments in the cybernetic flesh proved to be a thrill for fans of his work, famous and otherwise.

“I loved the first Giger Bar in Tokyo,” tweeted cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson, in response to a query from Wired.com. “My kind of Disney!”

The Art of Darkness
Seven decades after his birth, Giger’s uncanny merge of human and machine has crept outward like a cultural virus. There is probably no other artist alive whose work is as instantly recognizable. And, for that, we have Giger’s itinerant fears to thank.

Like David Lynch — whose brilliant feature-length debut Eraserhead, Giger admitted, was the closest that cinema ever got to his tortured art — the Swiss-born icon has capitalized on his nightmares and visions like few others. Mapping the territories of the unconscious and its dark mash of birth, sex, death and technology, Giger has created a legacy as substantial as that of his inspiration Salvador Dali.

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HRGiger/Giger Museum/Giger

Architonic Concept Space III

The latest Architonic Concept Space has been presented at the imm cologne, to great public interest. This year, the commission went to Zurich architect and process designer Oskar Zieta, who, together with the ITA Institute of the ETH Zurich, developed a new process whereby metal panels, cut into shapes and welded, are inflated under high pressure, forming three-dimensional elements.

For Zieta, the commision offered the opportunity to use this so-called FiDU (Freie InnenDruck Umformung, or free internal-pressure forming) technology architecturally for the first time, thus showing the process’s far-reaching possibilities for application.

Right up to the physical production phase, the modular structure was subject to modification; FEM (Fine Element Method) was used to simulate and refine it. The final design comprises essentially of an assymetric form, which can be configured in different ways. The identitical 3.2-metre high modules can be linked in different positions, next to or on top of each other, thereby creating seemingly random spaces – ordered disorder.

You don’t need a trained eye to see that the modular parts differ slightly. The soft creases indicate the extraordinary production process and leads to the viewer’s astonishment, having thought up to that point that what they were looking at was a piece of solid, moulded metal. Within certain parameters, FiDU is extremely precise; each uncertainty is controlled. These planned vagaries ultimately lend the structure its liveliness.

Oskar Zieta explains: The use of sheet metal is associated above all with the car industry. There, it’s pressed in a highly precise, very expensive tool and each piece is identitical to the next. But it’s only because you’ve got several tons on the go that you’re able to achieve this exact deformation. With the FiDU process, we don’t use a special, purpose-built tool, but rather work with the deformative property that the material offers. We factor in a certain uncertainty, because each piece of flat metal, in spite of its identical cut-out shape, takes on a slightly different final form.”

The Architonic Concept Space III was also exhibited at the Stockholm Furniture Fair.

[Source: Architonic]