green on blue

excellent advice

(Source: fab)

butterflies

studio plants

neon roses, ghost cat

henry miller's the books in my life

 

the full text of miller's work scanned with marginalia! see scribbles for yourself here.  

shell and seed

prototype

old paintings (mine) new pouches.

studio delvaux, leather works since 1829

Mrs. Dedryver, designer at Delvaux from 1946 until 1956
© Photography Agence Belgo Presse BXL

Leather cutting tools specific for each Delvaux bag
© Photography Hettie Judah

Delvaux-signature used at the inside
of each leather article
© Photography Wout Hendrickx

Assembling different pieces of a wallet
© PhotographyWout Hendrickx

see more

ebay purchase wrapped in patriotism

studio, disaster

arboretum walk

new works

discussion of the uncanny, or how mannequins make me deeply uncomfortable

etymology

uncanny:  1590s: "mischievous;" 1773: in the sense of "associated with the supernatural," originally Scottish and northern English, from un- "not" + canny.  Canny is from the Anglo-Saxon root ken: “knowledge, understanding, or cognizance; mental perception: an idea beyond one's ken.” Thus the uncanny is something outside one's familiar knowledge or perceptions. 

uncanny valley 

Roboticist Masahiro Mori's developed the hypothesis of the "uncanny valley" to describe people’s reactions to simulacra or robots crafted to be as human-like as possible.  There is a relational gap we experience when viewing familiar living people and their inanimate representations, whether in two-d or fully dimensional. In Mori’s diagram, the valley represents human’s negative emotional responses when confronted with replicas that mimic well but not perfectly.  A person’s innate suspicion and revulsion are triggered by these counterfeit effigies whose likenesses are too keen but still strange. If an object is crafted to resemble human likeness our affinity with the object grows according to it’s resemblance, to a point.  Once the object reaches close approximation it begins to repel.  Mori’s hypothesis is indebted to the work of both Jentsch and Freud's essays on the uncanny.

Hypothesized emotional response of human subjects is plotted against anthropomorphism of a robot, following roboticist Masahiro Mori's theory of the uncanny. The uncanny valley is the region of negative emotional response towards robots that seem "almost human". Movement amplifies the emotional response.

gaba girl and the uncanny valley

cynthia: the mannequin who became a superstar

cynthia: cast with legs forever chastely crossed.  her maker, artist lester gaba took her everywhere in the new york night scene.  she was a famous socialite in-and-of-herself and, after life magazine featured her in a spread, she became a household name.  she must have only attended events where one could sit the duration.

"among all the psychical uncertainties that can become a cause for the uncanny feeling to arise, there is one in particular that is able to develop a fairly regular, powerful and very general effect: namely, doubt as to whether an apparently living being really is animate and, conversely, doubt as to whether a lifeless object may not in fact be animate – and more precisely, when this doubt only makes itself felt obscurely in one’s consciousness." 

on the psychology of the uncanny, 1906

ernst jentsch