Some preliminary sketches by Koldo Barroso for his tentatively titled book Portraits from the Dreamlands: A Guide to Creatures from the Dream World.
The Boombakaboomkers are creatures who run and play their drums all along the dream lands to find anything you want that you once lost. They take shapes from the spirits of different animals and always come to help you when they’re called.
I am an especially big fan of Boom-baKahog, its face comprised almost entirely of an enormous proboscis.
With Parliament defending their recent vote allowing for the creation of human-animal hybrid embryos for scientific study, the future takes one step closer to the noisome, unsettling din we all eagerly anticipate. It won’t be long before that kind of strange bio-tech has wriggled its way into (semi) polite society the same way all far-out tech has trickled down into common usage.
First thing in the morning you’ll slap your wall-screen to life so that the beast-women of the world can preach the gospel of a new, better, psuedo-you. All followed by an advertising parade for genetic remapping agents so gratuitous and glossy in its hustle it would make the advertising execs of today weep. If you’re lucky maybe some seizure-inducing cartoons right after.
Photographer Joshua Hoffine takes pictures of the things I love to hate, nightmares. There’s a wide array of horrors in his online portfolio but the image above is an easy favorite of mine. As with the photo’s unsuspecting victim I have long been plagued by horrible beasts that lurk in dark places and skitter from the edges of my vision, waiting for the very moment my guard has been let down to do their horrible work.
The struggle, as a young, poetically destitute city-dweller, to decorate the microscopic studio apartments we inhabit in a manner befitting the forward-thinking futurists we know ourselves to be is, at times, a hopeless quest. Dreaming of sleek, modular cubes or soft round-cornered bits and bobs amidst a tangle of thrifted, “borrowed”, mis-matched furnishings is an all too common practice for we that wish beyond our meager means. While I offer no respite from seemingly perennial poverty, I do bring new scenery for your interior dreamscape.
Would not something such as this piece, named the Eclosion, fit perfectly in a cramped, cyber-bohemian apartment? Would not your friends award you plaudits in recognition of your superior design sense and knack for procuring the obscure? Indeed they would, were this actually for sale. Sadly, this piece by Olivier Gregoire, like so many other furniture-lust inspiring designs is conceptual. If nothing else your wallet is spared the grievous injury designer furniture is guaranteed to cause.
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.
