Trawling the deep recesses of the tangled Web every day provides me with an opportunity to view amazing works on a constant basis, but the very same practice tends to inure one to the fantastic. It’s like mental heroin, and over time my craving has become increasingly ferocious. The strange and wonderful must be more strange and more wonderful in order to elicit more than a weary sigh and a click through to the next bit of underwhelming content.
But when I came across the works of Carioca, a Romanian design house, I began to feel that old excitement. The people populating this place have it, that indeterminable thing that results in work both beautiful and arresting. Each image took hold of the unraveled strings of stories stored in the dusty cabinet of my mind and tugged — pulling loose a whole world from a single frame. This, my friends, is the new brain candy.
I abhor novelty t-shirts. I realize that some people like them, but over the years I’ve learned that displaying your wit or preference in media on your chest is a less than desirable fashion trait. Yet in spite of years of turning my nose up at such offerings I’m finding it hard to resist the siren song of the novelty t-shirts at Atomic Tarantula.
These radioactive arachnids have found the weakness in my casual clothing defenses; attacking the front lines with a barrage of “old school” science fiction references while flanking with an elite squad of well designed hitmen. There is nothing to do now but lock myself in my high tower of fashion snobbery and await my seemingly inevitable defeat.
I’ve featured my fair share of unobtainable designs here on Ectomo, loudly preaching the gospel of DIY approaches to the prohibitively expensive (or simply non-existent) designs of which I’m so fond. Sadly, not everyone has access to the tools, materials, and workspace required to give form to their dream creations. That time is over my friends.
A Parisian art collective calling themselves Le Cartonnistes utilize cardboard to create all manner of furniture, ranging from simple shelves to beds to entire room sets. While it may seem a questionable load-bearing source material, the technique used to form the structures that will eventually become furniture insures the stability of the creation — to a reasonable point of course.
The technique requires a bit of trial and error as well as accuracy within millimeters, but the oaths with which you’ll purple the air as you make mistakes (and learn valuable lessons) are all worth it when the TV box covered in a sheet being used as a coffee table actually becomes a coffee table, and a damn fine one at that.
I highly encourage each and every one of you to try your hand at this. The only limits to your swank boudoir now are the bounds of your own imagination.
Art Center College of Design student Jake Loniak designed this motorcycle concept, which he dubbed the Deus Ex Machina. His concept is an electric vertically parking motorcycle controlled by 36 pneumatic muscles with 2 linear actuators. It can reach 60mph in three seconds and has a top speed of 75mph. The exo-skeleton has seven artificial vertebrae and a pneumatically attached helmet. One thing is for certain, it’s a much more interesting “future of transportation” idea than the Segway.
BLU’s Muto: animation on a public wall. Beautiful surely, but I couldn’t help but think about all the artwork he covered up to make it (I know, it’s a public wall, it comes with the territory.) Thanks to Ry-Tron and everyone else who sent this in!
Don’t you fucking dare post knitting patterns for Dr. Who characters. So sayeth the BBC, though most likely it was worded in a far more politely threatening manner filled with words contain superfluous “u”s. Thanks, August Moon!
Before you is the culmination of all my post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk fashion dreams. Oh sure, my compatriots and I clothe ourselves in all manner of garb designed with futurelust in mind, but not a stitch of those epic high-collared wardrobes is really functional. We’re simply playing dystopian dress-up.
But with this piece by Tim Smit — made of neoprene, lined with kevlar, and seemingly designed with my ilk in mind — we’re really getting into the business of being the no-nonsense, disaffected futuretots we’ve always known ourselves to be.
While it’s not specifically stated that this is just a conceptual design I can’t imagine it’s anything but. Yet simply knowing it exists helps to soothe the hurt of being unable to rush out and buy my first piece of Apocalypse Couture.
Hit the jump for a few more shots of this exquisite design.
Pictured above is a mailer that was sent out from a company called Veer. Is it not beautiful? It is the membership info for The Very Secret Order Of Creative Understanding, whose crest is emblazoned with the visage of the Great Cthulhu. If there are any criticisms to be leveled at this kit it is the fact that the room it is pictured in is not to be found at the Ectomo offices. Yes, you read correctly, Ectomo is not privy to this very secret knowledge! I know, it’s crazy that we, the stewards of Cthulhu Cthursday, have been omitted from the Order’s mailing list! It must have gotten lost in the mail. Yes, that’s it! Some errant postman must have espied our kit and realizing that he was in possession of forbidden knowledge, he kept it. No doubt the miscreant is, at this very moment, partaking in the secrets that are rightfully ours. That BASTARD!
Needless to say he won’t be able to handle it; he just doesn’t know how to parse that kind of information. So, if you see a postman gibbering with a wild look in his eyes let us know, as he no doubt has something that belongs to us. In the meantime we will have to settle for downloading this PDF which includes all the aforementioned documentation.
And to our postman: we will find you and we will come for what is ours, in the night, while you and your children sleep; and it will be unpleasant.
The constant struggle against the ever-mounting morass of wires, culminating in a cyclical orgy of power strips and extension cords, is familiar to all of us engaged in the painfully plodding progression of technology. While the number of cords snaking their way throughout our humble shrines to technology decreases exponentially, there are still all manner of power cords that remain, for which you have Edison and his thuggish sense of competition to thank.
While there have been several power strip designs that either attempted to consolidate or obfuscate your Gordian knot of cabling, they simply end up only slightly improved versions of their forebears and the dream of a organized domicile is shattered once more. However, designer Joris Laarman has approached the problem from a different perspective. Instead of developing another means to do away with as much cabling as possible, he has integrated the frustrating coils into his design, a stroke of genius resulting in the Wirepod.
Now this is normally the part of our program where I regrettably inform you that whatever item I’ve been rambling incoherently about is simply a conceptual design and thus unavailable for purchase. But not today my friends, oh no. It is my exquisite pleasure to inform you that Arctecnica will be releasing the Wirepod as part of it’s new line of products, called Wiremore, that seek to expose, rather than hide, our collective rats’ nests. So whether you’re the type that appreciates the decidedly cyberpunk look of cabling criss-crossing the vast expanse of a dank apartment floor, or you simply want a bit of art-snob design added to your abode, Arctecnica have you covered.
The gasmask is an integral part of any space-hobo’s fashion arsenal, and while there’s a nearly infinite number of stylistic permutations from which to choose the mask that best suits you nearly all of them are drab militaristic affairs. Hardly surprising considering they’ve never been intended as anything other than tools to avoid taking lung-fulls of poisonous gas or air swirling with microscopic debris during a siege.
Thankfully an enterprising designer, Diddo Velema, saw the gaping couture void in post-apocalyptic style and decided it needed a good filling, creating high fashion gasmasks, studded in diamonds and logos, thus cementing her place in the annals of fashion history.
Personally I prefer the understated elegance of the Vuitton, but if gaudy is your thing there’s more than enough Gucci analog to go around. Hit the jump for larger versions of the masks.
The tales of my horrific black thumb are something of a family joke among my clan, but in spite of all that I acquired a pair of plants from a good friend whose green-thumbed acumen puts Mother Nature herself to shame. I promptly killed one of them, an ivy, which I had thought indestructible, and the other, which I had previously thought lost, survived, admirably in fact.
My newfound skill as an amateur horticulturist has piqued my interest in the wide array of habitats available for indoor plant life. Discovering the Local River, a conceptual design by Mathieu Lehanneur, has only served to fuel that interest.
This incredible piece serves two functions; one being a fishtank in which freshwater fish are bred for consumption and the other being a place in which to grow fresh herbs. The ingenuity in the design is astounding, with the plants absorbing nitrates from the water the fish’s environment remains pristine, and it would be just as perfect in a polished Manhattanite’s loft as it would in a mad (environmental) scientist’s lab.
French artist Zamak produces work that immediately brings to mind all manner of media in which his work would be appropriate; from anime, video games, or even a vinyl toy, each exquisitely bulbous piece only serves to fuel my lust to see the work realized in a tactile form. The gorgeous forms of Zamak’s characters simply beg to be touched, to bound on their oddly jointed limbs, and to lumber and glide through the strange world I long to share with them. Hit the jump for a few more of Zamak’s pieces.
A duo of lamps by Swedish designer Alexander Lervik for fans of the central nervous system. The brain lamp was created from a scan of the designer’s brain.
I don’t care much for babies. Oh, sure, they have their uses: they propagate the species, they make excellent door stops, and its always good to have a few around to toss at attacking zombies. And philosophically, they are interesting: secreting loaves of swollen bologna that will one day pupate into only vaguely balogna-tasting human beings. But as far as neotenous fetishes are concerned, I prefer kittens and baby hedgehogs, which also can be hurled dramatically at a zombie in a pinch, although not without the tinge of self-loathing entirely absent in watching a human neonate be devoured by the undead.
That said, I’m tempted to get in contact with one of my Cambodian child brides and make a baby work. It never really occurred to me before that shopping for babies could be fun, that there were actual baby gifts that wasn’t just pastoral fairy tale crap, but designed with hypnotic patterns that could be used — barely out of utero — to actually help transform an infant into an adult that I’d actually want to have a conversation with.
Cue Baby Leo Designs, who make the most wonderful baby blankets, “security lovees” (?) and ominously-named-”Burpees” with designs ranging from vintage tattoos, Japanese prostitutes, retro robots and even a blanket covered in baby skulls… the perfect way to remind a new member of the family what happened to his misbehaving older siblings!
Just as the name suggests this clock, designed by Rhode Island School of Design student Alvin Aronson uses an analog mechanism to replicate the numbers on a digital clock’s LCD. The transition from minute to minute is subtle and elegant and would look great embedded into plain white wall, the numbers emerging from its unblemished surface.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
