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.
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.
In 2238 the first fully human-passable android was developed by the AI Underground in what historians would come to call “Genesis 2.0″. The poor confused half-breed slipped into this world from the comfort of a cozy lab-grown womb with the full weight of the world on his shoulders and a legacy of terrible, unavoidable, blood-soaked horrors he had yet to fulfill.
I grew up in a small town in southern Delaware called Milton. The town now boasts a population of 1,657, which was lower when I lived there years ago. There were a ton of antique stores crammed with all manner of dusty, random junk that I absolutely loved. We had a farmer friendly grocery store and a number of small, family-run shops for whatever else you might need. When news of a corporate chain moving into a lot of vacant land began to surface, there was an incredible uproar from community members. At the time I couldn’t understand it, anything new that came to town meant something to distract from my “boring” days of hanging out on my favorite felled tree by a peaceful, quiet lake in my tiny, picturesque Victorian town.
One of Ian Burns’ latest pieces, End of an Era, is the ingenious pairing of 16 black and white televisions (all displaying live feeds presumably from the cameras mounted above them) and chandelier. The piece is decidedly dystopian, likely intended to make a statement on the ever-decreasing level of privacy the citizens of supposedly free countries are afforded in this day of near constant surveillance.
However, to many the appeal of this piece will lie in the fact that it looks like something ripped from the crinkly celluloid of Ridley Scott’s cyberpunk masterpiece, Blade Runner. I can’t be the only one that thinks these chandeliers would have fit perfectly among the grungy detritus of a futuristic Los Angeles, or better yet my very own cavernous, abandoned apartment building.
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.
