PUBLIC MARKS with search pink

Yōkai Daizukai, an illustrated guide to yōkai authored by manga artist Shigeru Mizuki, features a collection of cutaway diagrams showing the anatomy of 85 traditional monsters from Japanese folklore (which also appear in Mizuki’s GeGeGe no Kitarō anime/manga). Here are a few illustrations from the book.

Of course I'm flipping out in our Editor's chat about the fact that Alejandro "The Holy Mountain" Jodorowsky collaborated with Jean "Mœbius" Giraud, H.R. Giger, and Pink Floyd to adapt Frank Herbert's Dune into a film in 1975 — a project that never took off due to funding issues — when Rob, cultured beyond American measure, casually coughs that me not knowing about it is impossible, simply because it is too awesome not to be known.

Yet, I did not know!

One of the 8 works I created for the Data Art Show at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis.

All these pieces are a pun on the new craze for data visualization. The goals of data visualization as I understand them are to make complicated issues more understandable, to make obscured connections visible and to reveal hidden patterns in the data. After all these tasks have been solved ideally the result should be aesthetically pleasing as well.

But when I look around what is being done in data visualization today I have the suspicion that in many cases the design is more important than the actual information and that the use of data is more an excuse to justify the use of aesthetics.

Since I do not have a problem with aesthetics for their own sake in these pieces I deliberately took the opposite direction. Since I wanted to create something visually interesting I made up my own data which would give me the desired results. All these works are the result of generative algorithms, so all the elements and their connections are actually data and not something I assembled manually in Illustrator.

share with you how I go about making my cards from inspiration to final product.

Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.

During the 1960s and 1970s Japanese film-makers produced a series of films of unprecedented sexual candour. Returning to this legendary period of 'pink films', Matt Palmer and Jasper Sharp celebrate the aesthetic achievements of these erotic masterpieces.