Simply awesome! This video clip from a German TV shows shows a pair of T-Rexes, mother and child, facing down a triceratops. Totally real construction, no CGI, and simply amazing. You can really get a feel for the scale of these gorgeous monsters. So damn cool.
Dinosaurs Disrupt German Television Program [Geekologie]
In one of the more delightful things I’ve ever seen in my life, some enterprising soul has done something almost unthinkable: made Usher bearable. Outside of my realm of experience, appartently Chuck E. Chhese used to have a competitor called Showbiz Pizza, and Showbiz had their own in-house animatronic band The Rock-afire Explosion. I’m not sure of the source of this video, but in a nutshell it’s Usher’s “Love In This Club” as preformed by said talking animal stage show… and it’s brilliant. I hope this affects your day as much as it has mine.
Usher – Love In This Club [YouTube]
Beuatiful. Haunting. Creepy as fuck. All these terms can be used to describe this nightmarish little bit of clockwork. Her vacant, yet active, dollface looks around the room as she plucks away at her invisible harp. Her bady is old, broken; the holes are visible, and one wonders how this marvel has stayed intact for so long. How old is she? Where did she come from? Her enigmatic, slack-jawed stare provides no answers. Luckily, YouTube does. Made by Gustave Vichy, she was born in Paris in 1880. Truly haunting, truly wonderous.
Automaton Harpist by Vichy [Bruce Sterling, via Ectoplasmosis]
Amazing piece of art here. Theo Jansen is a kinetic sculptor who lives in Holland. Using the wind on the beaches of the Netherlands to power his works, he builds these giant skeletons which are able to walk. According to his Wikipedia article, Jansen is “dedicated to creating artificial life through the use of genetic algorithms”. He tests the survival-fitness of his pieces by studying their ability to survive on the beach while moving around within enclosed areas of both wet and dry sand. He then “breeds” his structures together, and grades the “offspring”. By doing this, complex designs emerge on an almost evolutionary scale. So damn cool.
Kinetic Sculpture [glumbert.com, via Bioephemera]