While doing a little holiday shopping last Fall (on the occult-sounding ritual known as “Black Friday”), I spotted a bargain and caved in, buying something for myself. I purchased a gigantic external hard drive — with a Terabyte of space — to archive my files: a Maxtor OneTouch 4. Imagine my surprise when I opened… Continue reading Save Your Life: Clone It
Tag: photos
Surreal Estate
Point Click Home magazine features a fun slide show feature called “Surreal Estate”. I couldn’t help but think of Anthony Vidler’s book, The Architectural Uncanny, as I paged through the designs, real and imagined. If the “home” is where we store our secrets, their shells are the stuff of fantasy — permeable-yet-impenetrable, wondrous and scary.
Smoking Stunts and Growths
Wow! This image from the Roy Castle Lung Cancer Foundation’s (UK) anti-second hand smoke campaign stunned me for a moment, with its visual echo of my recent post about the website, Photoshop Disasters. (Via the excellent advertising watchblog, AdGoodness). In that original post, I wrote: “We always already understand that advertising is manipulative and fake, and yet when the flaw appears,… Continue reading Smoking Stunts and Growths
Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection
Photoshop Disasters is a funny weblog that collects flawed design elements in advertisements and elsewhere (like the above image from a Sears Catalog). The accidental amputations, bizarre hands, and other forms of freakish anatomical blunders strike a viewer as uncanny when you spot them in what would otherwise be a “picture perfect” advertisement. We always… Continue reading Photoshop Disasters and the Fantasy of Picture Perfection
Next Nature
In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Sigmund Freud writes: …an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes,… Continue reading Next Nature
Medical Manikins and Suffering
Today I stumbled onto Oobject — a weird multiuser “curations collection” that exhibits photos that members spot online, organized by offbeat themes. One of the most uncanny exhibits of them all is a collection of “medical manikins”. The above shot by Tomer Ganihar (a shot taken as part of a series he did in an Israeli hospital… Continue reading Medical Manikins and Suffering