honeyland and alienation — a cartoon rhapsody

18Nov09

Múm’s video for Rhubarbidoo (off Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy, their latest album) is one of the most re-enchanting videos that I’ve seen for a long time.  If, as Max Weber has argued, Enlightenment rationalization, especially as it manifests itself in the bureaucratized capitalism of Western society, results in a disenchanted world where we […]

Filed under: animation, art, cinema, culture, film, history, music, nature, philosophy, society, technology, video   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: Adorno, alienated labor, alienation, American farming, animation, Aya Yamasaki Brown, bee society, Beholden, capitalism, cartoons, childhood, consumerism, creation, creative destruction, Dialectic of Enlightenment, disenchantment, Disney, Enlightenment, Enlightenment thought, exploration, Fantastic Planet, fantasy, Flowers and Trees, Gulliver's Travels, hive as factory, homo ludens, Honeyland, Horkheimer, imagination, industrial militarism, industrialism, industrialization of American Farming, Ingibjörg Birgisdóttir, invention, iron cage, Jason Malcolm Brown, Lilliputians, Max Weber, Múm, montage, natural world, nature, play, re-enchantment, Rhubarbidoo, Rockwell, science fiction, social control, social unconscious, They Made Frogs Smoke 'til They Exploded, totalizing systems of control

COMBO and MUTO — revolutionary urbanism with a spraycan

18Oct09

BLU, the Bologna-based street artist and wall-art animator, has recently teamed up with David Ellis, a Brooklyn-based “motion painter,” to produce the animated work COMBO, an amazing piece of urban re-inhabitation that imaginatively brings dead urban space back to life through the use of paint and stop motion.  In the opening sequence of COMBO, a […]

Filed under: animation, art, culture, funs, society, video   |  2 Comments
Tags: alienation, animation, Beneath the paving stones — the beach!, BLU, COMBO, David Ellis, dead space, detournement, Guy Debord, imagination, la plage!, motion painting, MUTO, non-space, revolutionary urbanism, Situationist International, Sous les pavés, stop motion, street art, urban geography, video, wall-art animation

Sigmar Polke with Vava and Ida

28May06

In the last part of April, I went to the Osaka National Museum of Art with my friends Ida-san and Vava-san to see the Sigmar Polke exhibit, which was really great. The pieces on display were from Polke’s own collection and personally chosen by him as representative of his life and work, which is a […]

Filed under: art, culture, Japan, Kansai, Osaka, politics, society   |  Leave a Comment
Tags: anti-capitalism, anti-fascist, art, Capitalist Realism, commercialism, commodification, consumerism, exhibit, fantasy, Gerhard Richter, imagination, museum, Osaka, Osaka National Museum of Art, painting, pop, pop art, product, Red Army Faction, Roy Lichtenstein, Sigmar Polke, Uniqlo, 国立国際美術館, 大阪