Michael DeForge's "Ant Comic"

Fascinating and enrapturing, Michael DeForge's "Ant Comic" series is a hell of a trip with rich, bizarre visuals and some heady sondering.

The story is loosely based on the typical life of an ant colony, with a healthy spattering of anthropomorphic mysticism & existentialism.

It's also a little NSFW, fair warning.

Check out the whole series on Michael DeForge's site!

Our Relationship with the Written Word

Written word is one of the earliest forms of phenomenological design, a means to affect the presence of another person within the mind of the reader. It's a powerful and emotional phenomenon when executed by a skilled author, weaving engaging narratives and endearing, rich characters all from the simple context of a common written language.

Techniques in written word have been evolving since the advent of written language and technologies for the distribution of written word have matured over the ages to reach the mass market, but written word has always maintained a single fundamental feature: that the reader's copy of the material is static, non-interactive despite its faculty for delivering emotional depth. Even a written letter has a static nature, despite its purpose in demanding a response.

Maria Montez

This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.

Blue (1993)

Against a plain, unchanging blue screen, a densely interwoven soundtrack of voices, sound effects and music attempt to convey a portrait of Derek Jarman's experiences with AIDS, both literally and allegorically, together with an exploration of the meanings associated with the colour blue.
Writer / Director Derek Jarman
Blue (1993) on IMDb

Sundance Winner IRISH FOLK FURNITURE

Have you seen the Sundance winner IRISH FOLK FURNITURE? It's a wonderful little meditation on design and tradition. It delivers nostalgia, aesthetics, humor, and a documentarian style without pretension. Awesome!

What is Phenomenology?

Today we're going to talk about a concept you might already be fairly familiar with, even if you haven't had time for much critical thought on the subject before now. Phenomenology literally "the study of that which is apparent", is the study of experience established by Edmond Husserl in the early 20th century. Phenomena (that which appears or is apparent) was defined by Immanuel Kant in his 1781 "Critique of Pure Reason" by its contrast with noumena, a "thing-in-itself".

FireSides #1 - Part 1: Cellini's Rave

FireSides is a repository of histories, legends, and anecdotes. Many of these stories are based in fact, while others are only rumored to be true. Like the flickering campfire, these tales aim to briefly illuminate life's mysteries, fueling the flame of curiosity.

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Here's what we know for sure:

While virtually all other Italian city-states had since adopted some form of monarchy, the Republican Commune of Florence remained a bastion of civil liberties. It's people took massive amounts of pride in knowing that no matter what station of society they were born into anyone could rise to the top. But this golden hippie paradise was perched atop a tenuous thread. Ambitions from within and without were constantly threatening to destabilize this brotherhood. When they weren't stringing people up in la piazza, power mongers in Florence were commissioning massive art projects in order to sway public opinion into their favor.

Science Fiction Design and the Imminence of Space Blimps

Terrifying bat-winged firefighters from a 1910 French post card

The future is so notoriously difficult to foresee that looking back on what was predicted by generations past more often than not looks absurd than clairvoyant. Science fiction authors and designers know this, yet plunge nevertheless into imagining the aesthetics of our future, with varying degrees of predictive success. But as time goes on, history tends to demolish even the tamest predictions, and one small technological development can render an entire potential future impossible - just look at what the internet has done to the clunky future-worlds of Alien or The Terminator.

The Face of Garbo

This post comes to us from artist and aestheticist satellite contributor Christopher Richmond, who keeps his own fascinating research blog, Something, Something, Hill of Bees.

Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. A few years earlier the face of Valentino was causing suicides; that of Garbo still partakes of the same rule of Courtly Love, where the flesh gives rise to mystical feelings of perdition.

Les Miserables: Group f/64 & Pictorialism

If you haven't seen Les Miserables yet, go see it. You may have some trouble adjusting to a head-to-toe, front-to-back musical. You certainly may cry. You also, if you're like me, may notice how seldom the gorgeous sets and blocking are delivered to us in wide shots.

Welcome to aestheticist!

aestheticist is the combined effort of young professionals collecting whatever stretches our minds and informs our work. It's anything that makes you stop and adjust your mental image of the world to make this new addition fit. The result is an ongoing study of context: how is aesthetic contemporarily defined and what communicates aesthetically to the contemporary world?

None of us at aestheticist feign to be journalists; the search for context is a professional obligation that allows each of us to be more effective at our jobs. Between the core contributors and guest contributors, the aestheticist group constitutes photographers, production designers, musicians, animators, and directors. There will always be something new to find at aestheticist!

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