"The Madre Tierra Eco-Resort is located a mile from the center of Vilcabamba, the Andean village made famous for the longevity of its citizens. Visitors come from all over the world for the relaxed atmosphere, the deliciously healthy food from our gardens, the mineralized pure water, the fresh, clean air and to spend time among Ecuador's very gentle people."
And this creation, sleeping mother earth personified.
Like mazes? You'll be begging for a copy of this one. A Japanese woman unearthed her father's maze, which he spent seven years drawing. Is he a graphics artist or perhaps in some mathematical or engineering field? No, he is a janitor at a university.
There are undiscovered universes inside of all of us.
Not many artifacts from 500 years ago strike this kind of balance between "astounding" and "skin-crawlingly creepy", but this windup toy mechanical monk certainly claims the title. The thing works perfectly; on winding, it marches around in a square moving its arms and head, mouthing (presumably) Latin chants. Here's a video of the device in action:
It's just one example of automatons, a lost art of entirely clockwork mechanical toys and figures. In this day and age, the sum total of animated figures most people may encounter in a lifetime is at a theme park. We know some of the arts from this era, such as cuckoo clocks and coin-operated fortune tellers, but few appreciate just how hard Renaissance people worked to try to make convincing androids using only gears, chains, and springs.
You'll find many more examples at the UK site House of Automata. Here's a few more fascinating artifacts from this lost, magical era:
And there were quite a variety of clever mechanisms deployed for these. For instance, why wind a toy when you can power it entirely by dumping in a bucket of sand?
And here's a Chinese magician set from 1920 - doing an actual magic trick!
Public Access TV in the 1980s - they were desperate for content! "It's the law." - Anybody could air their videotape and everybody did. For being such a wholesome enterprise, they sure pushed the sex, sex, sex. And drugs. And sex. And ventriloquist acts. And wacky costumes. And unbelievably untalented schmoos. But mostly lots and lots of sex. Basically if 4chan got to run TV, this is what it would look like.
We don't even have this much liberty on the Internet now - what happened?
Francis E. Dec was a New Yorker who had a relatively normal life as an Air Force radio operator, Bachelor of Arts graduate, and lawyer, until he was overtaken by paranoid schizophrenia and drew out the remainder of his years as a harmless crank who wrote a series of documents detailing a vast conspiracy-theory worldview which he mailed out and otherwise shared. We're talking racism, sexism, homophobia, religious conspiracies, mind-control rays, the works.
That bein' said so, his ravings make for a fun little theme park of kooky whimsy.
He's since achieved underground cult status, with tributes popping up everywhere from the Church of the Subgenius to Discordianism to popular music, including fictionalized versions of his works and a whole fan site, seen here.
So, a few terms to know if you want to study Francis' worldview:
The Brain-Bank Cities:
Cities existing on the far side of the moon we never see and which house your moon-brain (your real brain) of the Computer God. Primarily based on your lifelong Frankenstein Radio Controls, your moon-brain of the Computer God activates your Frankenstein threshold Brainwash Radio inculcating conformist propaganda. As such, these cities and the moon-brains housed in them are a vital part of the Gangster Computer God Worldwide Secret Containment Policy.
The Computer Brain Machines:
These secret machines are used by the Gangster Government for the purpose of filling out all of its paperwork, such as taxes, forms, bills, etc. The speed of these machines is 2000 words a minute and they actually do the work which is supposedly done by Government Employees.
Infrared Crusader Priests:
These troops, created by the Computer God, were several hundred years ago responsible for the conquering and degeneration of the Slovene People, as well as for the savage butchery and experimentation upon thousands of innocents in order to perfect the process of implanting Frankenstein Controls inside the human skull. The Crusader Priests wore black robes and armor, with night-vision plastic lenses built into their helmets. They also used weapons smeared with Poison Nerve Jelly and conducted mass-exterminations by burning vast fields dusted with inflammable poison nerve gas powder Prussic Acid. Their headquarters were specially designated, fortified monasteries. Their modern-day successors include both black-robed judges and black-robed priests.
Frankenstein Slavery:
The process during which one’s own body is remote-controlled by the Worldwide Mad Deadly Gangster Computer God. Frankenstein slavery is usually most prevalent at night, when you are unwittingly operated upon by the Computer God Sealed Robot-arm Operating Cabinet. Sodomy and rape, performed upon you by your tormentors, is an added bonus.
Rumors abound of archival on Ubuweb, but I'll be hanged in Tarnation if I can find them.
What you're looking at was all built by one man, a humble civil servant with no architectural training working only with his hands and carrying each stone home himself.
Ferdinand Cheval was a postman in Hauterives, France, a tiny community with a population all of 1500. In 1875, Cheval was making his postal rounds when he tripped over a stone (ready your psychedelic jokes) and became inspired to collect stones and build his own palace, which he called "the Palace Ideal."
He then proceeded to spend the next 33 years doing just that. Solo, without help, mixing his own mortar, carrying stones to the site with a wheelbarrow, and working by lamplight at night so as not to interfere with his day job.
Make no mistake - while Cheval had no training in art, his palace is a breath-taking structure of intricate detail mixing styles of architecture from Hinduism and Christendom. Having competed the work to his satisfaction in 1912, he sought to be buried there, but discovered that French law wouldn't allow this request. He then proceeded to build his own mausoleum in exactly the same fashion at the local cemetery, taking another eight years to finish it.
Having completed this final project, his most obstinate excellency retired to his palace for exactly one year, to be honored and recognized by such international artistic talents as Andre Breton and Pablo Picasso. Many came to visit and interview him. Then, he died in 1924, and was buried at his mausoleum. Because a man can't just sit around!
The palace is today a national landmark of France and a tourist destination. Find out more here.
"Subvertizing" is a kind of culture-jamming art with a political statement, in which a company's logo, mascot, or advertising is manipulated into stating an anti-corporate message.
You've probably seen images with a character like this being tossed around all over the web - they go back years, to the very first image boards. Trouble is, you never see them posted with any context, so you have no idea what's going on here. Well, wonder no more, it's <a href="http://photoslaves.com/understanding-joshua-by-charlie-white/">the art project of Charlie White</a>, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Roski School of Fine Arts. Why not pop over to that link and browse through the gallery? You're bound to recognize at least one of them.
In 2004, Pope John Paul II was entertained by a very modern and urban performance: break-dancers in the Vatican! He seemed to enjoy it. Here's the video:
While the rest of you sit around trying to figure out how to get rich, and complaining that your degree isn't worth anything in the job market, David Rees makes money sharpening pencils.
Granted, David Rees is also a satirical comedian whose clip-art comic "Get Your War On" is syndicated in newspapers nationwide, and he has other comic projects afoot, and he's also a blogger over at Huffy-Poo, but that's all just his rent money. His true passion in life is producing the ultimate sharpened pencil, and he has a video here explaining his business:
No pun intended, but you may be asking yourself, "What's the point in all this?" Well, see, it's a satire. It's a commentary on our society at this point in time, when the very pencil itself holds quaint nostalgia for most of us in this digital age. Along with the sheer uselessness of most of us, now that all of our jobs went away. Along with our sloppy, feckless, ignorant society that doesn't give a shit about doing anything right anymore.
Watch this man. If he can put all this thought, this care, this attention to detail into putting a nice cone on a number-2, could the rest of you maybe be bothered to spell a word or two per sentence correctly? Turn on your turn signal once in a while? Hang onto your trash until you walk that ten feet to the next trash can? Yes... yes you CAN!
Scenes of nightmarish chaos form the attractions at this park in Lazio, Italy. The place is known as "The Park of the Monsters", and though you might think that fascination with monsters - to the extent of building monuments to them - is a recent idea, this park dates to the 16th century.
Sculptures include Cerberus, Pegasus, Proteus, plus many other figures of mythology, random bears, dragons, and other large brutes, and one particularly grotesque face whose gaping mouth forms a gate. Also, one house purposefully built to lean several degrees to the side, in case you thought the Tower of Pisa was the only tilted building in Italy.
