From Inception to Inception via 2001 & Avatar

Images: Top – Hartter – Alternative Universe Movie Posters
Below – Behance “What if…” Movies reimagined for another time & place…

Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism

“Entry to the fabled TriBeCa loft where the artist and musician Rammellzee lived and worked, all but secluding himself in a thicket of cosmic paintings, militarized plastic sculpture and Samurai-like handmade costumes, was like initiation into a secret society in which graffiti, hip-hop, linguistics and science fiction were being fused into a strange new category of art. But Rammellzee opened the doors to this world more and more rarely before he died in 2010 at 49, and even stars tended to be star-struck by an invitation.

“I took George Clinton and Bootsy Collins to the Battle Station for the first time, and they left feeling like they’d just had a close encounter,” said the bassist and music producer Bill Laswell, who met Rammellzee in the early 1980s and remained one of the few people who saw him regularly.

“Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks the building on Laight Street that housed the Battle Station was sold to make way for luxury apartments, and Rammellzee and his wife, Carmela Zagari, were pushed out, relocated to a conventional, smaller place in Battery Park City. Almost 20 years’ worth of his obsessive artwork, enough to fill a large truck, went into a storage locker, where it remained unseen for years, in danger of being forgotten for good.

“But pieces of it are now starting to re-emerge, in a way that Rammellzee most likely would have approved of: in fighter formation. A bunkerlike, black-lighted re-creation of the Battle Station was one of the most talked-about pieces in “Art in the Streets,” a sprawling graffiti survey last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, organized by the museum’s director, Jeffrey Deitch, who as a New York dealer had courted Rammellzee for years.

The Suzanne Geiss Company, a new gallery in SoHo, will open its inaugural show by suspending, as if in flight, two complete sets of works that Rammellzee called “letter racers,” spacecraftlike sculptures representing the letters A to Z, built bricolage style from scraps of cast-off consumer goods like flip-flops, sunglasses, toy cars, cheap umbrellas, Bic pens and air-freshener tops.

“Rammellzee – his pharaonic name — which he formulated as a teenager, after leaving home in the projects in Far Rockaway, Queens, and later legally adopted — was not a name at all, he insisted, but a mathematical equation.

“His artwork, though he did show it in galleries, at least in the early years, was artwork only secondarily, he said. Its real purpose was to illustrate a deconstructionist-type dual philosophy, called Gothic Futurism and Ikonoklast Panzerism, that imagined a world in which Roman letters would arm and liberate themselves, at his command, from the power structures of European language. He believed he had inherited his role as a kind of lexical commander in chief from medieval monks, whose literacy in a mostly illiterate world demonstrated the extraordinary power of words to shape reality.

“He felt that even now if you control the language, you control the discourse, you control the power,” said Henry Chalfant, a filmmaker and graffiti scholar who first met Rammellzee at a 1980 exhibition of graffiti work by Lee Quinones and Fred Brathwaite (better known as Fab 5 Freddy) at White Columns gallery in SoHo.

“The letter racers were in his conception totally functional, like models to demonstrate how the letters would work if they were ever to be mechanized and able to fly into battle,” Mr. Chalfant said.

“Rammellzee’s belief that his models could be used as templates for workable military vehicles was so deep, in fact, that he came to fear the government would stop him or forcibly enlist his talents. In his earlier years, though, he had a correspondence with the Defense Department, examples of which he showed Mr. Chalfant.

“In their responses the government thanked him for his proposals, and they said that if they ever needed him, they would get back in touch with him,” Mr. Chalfant said, adding as a swift and perhaps necessary second thought that while Rammellzee always operated “at a remove from present earthly reality,” he never lost touch with that reality. “He always functioned in a very practical way vis-à-vis his career and his work as he saw it. His philosophy was rigorously elaborated. And he worked very hard, right up to the end of his life.”

Text: Art Excavated From Battle Station Earth, New York Times, February 23, 2012.

Pic: Signoverture 1991, Color Letter Racers 1988, and White Letter Racers 1991

Forward Looking Statements

“This press release contains forward-looking statements. The words “believe”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “estimate”, “intend”, “may”, “will”, “would” and similar expressions and the negative of such expressions are intended to identify forward-looking statements, although not all forward-looking statements contain these identifying words. These forward-looking statements are subject to important assumptions, including the following specific assumptions: the ability of Mood Media and Muzak to meet their respective revenue targets; the ability to achieve cost synergies; general industry and economic conditions; changes in Mood Media’s or Muzak’s relationships with their customers and suppliers; pricing pressures; and other competitive factors; and changes in regulatory requirements affecting the businesses of Mood Media and Muzak. While Mood Media considers these factors and assumptions to be reasonable based on information currently available, they may prove to be incorrect. Historical performance may not be indicative of future performance.”

Text: Mood Media Corporation Completes Acquisition of Muzak emuzak.com DA: April 16, 2012.

Image: John Baldessari, Two Whales (with People), 2010. Screenprint, 32.25″ x 23.625″.

Dead Eyes Open

“One of Jules Verne’s later Voyages Extraordinaires titled Les Freres Kip (The Kip Brothers, 1902) features in its conclusion a somewhat curious scientific concept-yet one which was quite popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth: the notion that the image of the last thing seen at the moment of death remains imprinted upon the retina of the eye.

“The fictional setting in Verne’s novel where this theory comes into play is as follows:

“A certain Captain Harry Gibson of the English freighter James Cook has been stabbed to death. On the strength of circumstantial evidence, two brothers named Karl and Pieter Kip are promptly arrested and imprisoned for the crime. Photos of the dead body are taken; in particular, snapshots of the victim’s head (with eyes open). An acquaintance of the victim asks the photographer for an enlargement of the head photo as a memento of his dead friend. The photographer agrees and makes several copies of the portrait, giving one to the victim’s family as well. Upon seeing the enlarged photo of his slain father, the young Nat Gibson is seized with grief and bends over to kiss it-and suddenly discerns two small points of light in the eyes of the photo. He examines these with a strong magnifyingglass and discovers therein the faces of the real murderers:two villainous sailors from the James Cook whom the police had initially suspected but against whom no hard evidence could be found. The real culprits are now arrested and condemned; the Kip brothers are vindicated; and the novel concludes with Justice served and the status quo happily reestablished.

“In his final chapter, Verne (always the pedagogue) explains to the reader the “scientific”basis for this pivotal discovery:

“For some time now it has been known-as a result of various interesting ophthalmologic experiments done by certain ingenious scientists,authoritative observers that they are- that the image of exterior objects imprinted upon the retina of the eye are conserved there indefinitely. The organ of vision contains a particular substancer, retinal purple,on which is imprinted in their exact form these images.They have even been perfectly reconstituted when the eye, after death, is removed and soaked in an alum bath.”

“It is likely that Verne gleaned this tidbit of ocular physiology from any one of the various newspapers, scientific journals, or encylopedias available to him in fin-de-siecle France-like the Gazette Medicale, for example, or the L’Encyclopedie franchise d’ophtalmologie by Lagrange and Valude-which offer detailed descriptions of this phenomenon (the latter of which, in particular,bears some resemblance to Verne’s own)…

“Undoubtedly, the rapidtechnological advancesmade in (and the growing popularity of) photography throughout this period also served to highlight these discoveries and to introduce them into public awareness. After all, the lesson seemed simple and very straight forward: the retina functioned like the photographic plate of a camera, therefore the final image viewed before death should remain fixed forever-like a photo-within the dead person’s eyes. It also came to be believed (as a logical extension of this hypothesis) that if death were to occur at a moment when the pupils of the eyes were hugely dilated-e.g., because of fear, surprise, anger or some other strong emotion-the retinal optograms of the deceased would be even clearer,more detailed, and easier to “develop.”

“Popular belief in these “facts” became so widespread during the final decades of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth that some police departmentsbegan to take close-up photographsof the eyes of murder victims in the hope of identifying their murderers. The most cel- ebrated of such cases involvedScotland Yard’sinvestigationof the infamous Jack-the-Ripper murders in Whitehall, London in 1888. One historian, in describing these events, notes:

In an attempt to be scientific,the police pried open Annie Chapman’s dead eyes and photographed them,in the hope that the retinas had retained an image of the last thing shesaw.But no images were found. (Stewart-Gordon121).

Text: Arthur B. Evans, “Optograms and Fiction: Photo in a Dead Man’s Eye, Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3 (Nov., 1993), pp. 341-361.

Image: New York City crime scene, 1914-1918, New York City Municipal Archive.

“I did not paint it to be understood…”

“The team at the National Observatory of Athens held a survey in 2007, in which they used 554 paintings by 181 painters, dated between 1500 and 1900, representing sun- sets and studied the coloration of the depicted atmosphere, with the aim of providing a new look at the reconstruction of the aerosol optical depth (AOD) before, during and after major volcanic eruptions, during a time when atmospheric observations were largely nonexistent. Considering the fact that sunlight scattered by airborne particles appears more red than green, the researchers found that most pictures with the highest red/green ratios were painted in the 3 years following a documented volcanic eruption.

“The 554 paintings were divided into two groups, “volcanic sunset paintings” and “non-volcanic sunset paintings.” The first group was the main focus of interest of the team; it consisted of 54 artworks by 19 artists, created within a period of 3 years following a major volcanic eruption. As the researchers wanted to detect atmospherical abnormalities in works painted by one artist before, during and after an eruption, they narrowed the number of artworks under consideration even further. They could find only five artists who had painted sunsets represent- ing all three scenarios: John Singleton Copley (1738–1815), Joseph Mallord Turner (1775–1851), Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), William Ascroft (1832–1914) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917). In the periods during which these five artists were active, the following volcanic eruptions occurred: Laki (Iceland, 1783), Tambora (Indonesia, 1815), Babuyan (Philippines, 1831), Coseguina (Nica- ragua, 1835) and Krakatau (Indonesia, 1883), respectively.

“In order to measure the amount of redness in the light depicted in these works, the researchers calculated their red/green (R/G) ratios, based on a classic study by Jameson and Hurvich in which it is maintained that the amount of redness in monochromatic light can be measured by combining it with a second light that appears green when viewed alone. They used the UVspec model in order to simulate and calibrate the R/G ratios. Abnormalities seen in time series of R/G values for the work of each artist were accepted as natural ones and have not been attributed to the individ- ual painter’s aging, as color perception stays the same over the years.

“The measurements of the R/G ratios for the paintings created during or over the 3 years following a volcanic eruption were 1.3–1.4 times greater than those be- fore and immediately after the event. In the Zerefos report, these color abnormal- ities are explained as due to the volcanic eruptions and as being very close to esti- mates from historical observations, early measurements and material found in ice cores. The conviction of the research team was that artists “have simulated the colours of nature with a remarkable pre- cise coloration” , as is proved by the high correlation coefficient of 0.83 be- tween the index of volcanic activity (DVI) and the R/G values of the paintings: It was calculated through 88 pairs, which is—according to the team—of high sta- tistical significance.

“At the end of their paper the researchers mention the famous work by Edvard Munch, The Scream, which they did not include in their survey because they could not find a certain date for it in the literature: Robock dates it to 1892 [10], while Olson puts its creation in the win- ter of 1883–1884. If the first dating is valid, its high R/G value, over 2.10, can only be explained—the researchers say— as reflecting Munch’s memory of the red atmosphere that followed the eruption of Krakatau in 1883. The article closes with the researchers’ wish: “Through the eyes of painters and other artists it is ex- pected to get information on past natural phenomena that have escaped attention of scholars until now,” and with the cita- tion of J.M.W. Turner’s words: “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like”.

Text: Eleni Gemtou, Depictions of Sunsets as Information Sources, LEONARDO, Vol. 44, No. 1, pp. 49–53, 2011.

Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the Islands in the Bay of Naples, circa 1776. Oil on canvas, 122cmx1764cm.