Undine: Photographs

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Van Gogh's Ear by Diemut Strebe

Van Gogh's severed ear was 'regrown' from cells of a living relative, the great-great grandson of his brother Theo. The ear was shaped by bio-artist Diemut Strebe on a 3-D printer and grown at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. It was shown in June at the Centre for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany, and will be in New York next year. Thanks to Danny Ayala for showing it to me www.dannyayala.com

Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Three photos by Jonas Bendiksen

I'm reading Zona by Geoff Dyer, which is packed with quotes and references to other people's work, a bit like a David Shields book (Shields did mention Dyer in his reading at Booksmith earlier this year, something about Dyer being the more handsome of the two, which isn't true, incidentally). The book is a must-read for fans of Stalker, delightful anyway, even if you haven't seen the film, clever, funny, and studded with lovely phrases like 'the permadepths of the present' (where the still-happening past operates in Tarkovsky's Zone-time, as in Aboriginal Dreamtime). I'm enjoying it a lot. Here's three images from a photographer Dyer mentions on page 75, Jonas Bendiksen. The first is apparently Bendiksen's most famous, shot in a place I had never heard of till now, the so-called spacecraft crash zone in Kazakhstan, where space debris comes crashing to earth on a regular basis, and the bits of white fluff are apparently butterflies, though they look more like anemone seeds or dandelion clocks to me ...