SteamPunk by Roger Wood

This man's work is so wonderful that I have made a slideshow gallery of it.

Roger Wood creates with time in mind. Yet even though the clock can be a consistent element of his work, it’s often secondary to its creation. Whether it’s a curious timepiece or a unique assemblage, Wood thrives on working with an immeasurable array of findings from the tarnished and forgotten to the odd or intriquing. He is a devoted collector of usual and unusual objects with one thing in common, a history.

The source of his inspiration lies in the hundreds of curiously labelled drawers and boxes brimming with artifacts of all description that line the shelves of his Toronto studio. Wood orchestrates an arrangement from his myriad of treasures until the precise moment that it feels right. Then he quickly glues them all down so they can’t escape.

Playful, wondrous timepieces emerge that take flight on cherubic wings, float and sway on fine wires, or appear frozen mid-explosion with flying springs and cogs that bounce at the touch.

This definitive merging of objects and ideas has brought Wood much critical acclaim across Canada. Shows at galleries, museums and awards at several exhibitions are ongoing testaments to his freedom of imagination. Just as his single signature feather at the tip of the second hand quivers magically through time, Roger Wood's creations continue to fascinate.

Recently, klockwerks was featured on the popular HGTV television show, Craft Scape. Click here to view the show.

Culture Jam

'Banksy' and his fine-art mayhem

A Fantastic Opportunity

We Want Your Soul has been formed by a consortium of international companies - including leading financial and genetic research institutions - to create a product that gives you an actual CASH VALUE for your soul.

Ransom Note Generator

Here's a site that enables you to write

in images from Flickr

TRY IT

The Real London Underground Map

The London Underground map is perhaps the most iconographic symbol of London, appearing on everything from tea towels to boxer shorts to, well, London Underground maps. Designed in 1933 by Henry Beck, the map was a revolutionary view of subterranean London by presenting stations not in the awkward mass in which they actually sat, but in a tidy and easily readable, colour-coded grid.
Thing of beauty though it may be, the map is not without its flaws. Since it doesn't accurately depict the actual street-level topography of London, it can be quite confusing for tourists (and thus quite amusing for natives.) In his book Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson points out that:

An out-of-town visitor using Mr Beck's map to get from, say, Bank Station to Mansion House, would quite understandably board a Central Line train to Liverpool Street, transfer to the Circle Line and continue for another five stops to Mansion House. At which point they would emerge 200 yards down the street from the location they'd started at.

And for all you Londoners rolling your eyes at this entry because you know all this, we present to to you 50 Things You Didn't Know About the London Underground. So there.

THE MORPHING MAP

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Discovering the House of Cthulhu

But one day the stuffed animals discovered a strange looking thing.

THE STORY

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Haiku for the End of Winter

from a haiku collaboration years ago with my friend Fuki



The Full Collection


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Sound Technique in Alphaville

"The images seem to illustrate the information being presented in the audio track. Shots of Natasha and Lemmy are edited together and lit in such a way that they seem to disappear and reappear in a rhythm that mirrors the verbal pulse of the voiceover: ‘Light that goes…light that returns.’ A medium shot of Natasha is sustained in the visual track as ‘Oh beloved of all, beloved of one alone…your mouth silently promised to be happy’ is spoken in the voiceover. As the line is uttered, Natasha’s mouth softly breaks into a fragile smile, providing a visual illustration of the imagery evoked by the audio track. The power of the visual image is that it augments the expressions of the voiceover by conveying subtle nuances that might not be possible to convey in a verbal manner.

It is rare that the visual track of a film is enlisted in the service of the audio track in such a way. As Mary Ann Doane points out in her article, 'The Voice in the Cinema', sound is most commonly used so that it merely augments the meaning conveyed through images. Sound often completes our sensory experience of the represented world, but visual information is usually endowed with primacy. The fascinating aspect of the interlude in Alphaville is the way in which this relationship is inverted: the visual track contains images that merely illustrate the aural information presented in the sequence. Images of Natasha and Lemmy show different expressions, motions, relations of bodies. Collectively they illustrate the overall sensibility being discussed in the monologue: that of being in love"

Sound Technique in Alphaville

Miyazaki and Oshii: Anime's clashing titans

After years in Japan, I've only recently become interested in anime, having been introduced to it through the charming work of Miyazaki. Here's an article which is somewhat pessimistic about the future of anime:


"Oshii is the godfather of a futuristic anime style called cyberpunk, and the synapses of anime fans are still quivering from his 'Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence,' released last year to great fanfare in Japan and a more cautious critical endorsement in the United States.



The film resumes the plot of his 1995 cult hit 'Ghost in the Shell,' praised by the Wachowski brothers as their inspiration for 'The Matrix.' The sequel trails Batou, a Descartes-spouting lug of an anti-terrorist cop as he wends through the morally weary world of 2032. He is trying to find out why gynoids, robots custom-built in female form for sexual company, have gone on a murderous rampage. But Batou is a human spirit living in a mechanized body. And he lives in a time when the bad guys can hack into your brain and download phony ideas and memories just to mess with you."

MORE

TSUNAMI BENEFIT 津波救済金

津波救済金　　オーガニックレコードから３CDセット

Organic Records has produced an excellent 3 CD set of ambient and trance, all profit from which is to go to relief work for survivors of the Sumatra Tsunami.

Listen to the samples, and you'll probably agree that it's well worth buying.

Click on the map for a larger map with links to the playlist and samples.

オーガニックレコードがアンビアント、トランスの３枚組の素敵なCDをプロデユース
それからの全利益はスマトラの津波の生存者の救済活動にあてられます。

サンプルを聞いてくれれば買う価値があると同意するでしょう。