Influence of Royal de Luxe spreads

Posted by hil

Dogpuppet

(photo credit: jazamarripae)

It’s interesting when you can see a show like Royal de Luxe having an influence on the culture. I think something like that might have been at work in this dog puppet that was at Barcelona’s Món del llibre, an annual fair to promote book reading/purchasing, oriented towards children. According to jazamarripae (thanks!) there were a couple of dogs and some camels, and this strange thing, all mounted on wheels and operated by levers and pulleys.

I mentioned a giant Korean boy puppet before, but have found a few more pictures of him in Korean now: photos from anomi1: 1, 2, 3,4. I’d still be interested to find out more about him and who made him. From the same occasion there is also this face which has the same puppet mechanism marks at the side of it’s mouth.

This cool girl puppet (photo by driguiluza) in Chile, where Royal de Luxe toured earlier this year, is another example.

_Kreibel_, who started the Royal de Luxe Central group photo pool at Flickr, has some related stencils, and a tutorial on how to do them. He also has some photos of Kijk mij! a street exhibition of Jordi Bover’s photographs of the audience watching Royal de Luxe.

Why doesn’t Digg recognise the arts?

Posted by hil

Taking a closer at Digg, I noticed that they have no catagories for the visual or performing arts, books, literature, or craft. The catagories under entertainment are: celebrity, movies, music and television. Why are they so impoverished?

Les Machines de l’île de Nantes

Posted by hil

Thanks to Darthbob from Laprise.org who recently alerted me to a new project related to Royal de Luxe, Les Machines de l’île de Nantes, which opened over this last weekend.

Machines

Planned as a new artistic, cultural and tourist venture, and part of an urban renewal of the docklands, it consists of numerous large mechanical creatures to build dreams around, imagined by François Delarozière and Pierre Orefice. They are installed in the great naves of the old shipyards on the island of Nantes, France.

First, there is a great elephant, similar to the Sultan’s, but a bit bigger at 12 metres high, which can take 30 passengers on its back for a 30 minute journey. It will journey every day.

Then there will be a huge tree, with branches that you can walk within. In time there will be herons in the tree, and people will be able to take rides in baskets below their wings.

Herontreerdl

The third part is a gallery of imagined machinical marine creatures, also rideable:

Le Luminaire des grands fonds:

Angler

(photo credit: Claude Joannis)

La Larve de crabe:

Larvae

(photo credit: Claude Joannis)

Le Poisson pirate:

Piratefish

(photo credit: Claude Joannis)

Le Calamar à rétropropulsion:

Squid

(photo credit: Claude Joannis)

La Raie manta:

Manta

(photo credit: Claude Joannis)

I think there is also a royal crab planned.

Other links:

Royal de Luxe – this unofficial French site is always the best for all up-to-date RdL news.

At Nantes Métropole:

  • dossier presse Eléphant
  • machinesfr.pdf
  • Les Machines de l’île : check links from this page
  • Les Machines de l’île: this site has plans, sketches, video and photos:

    • video 1: intro, bits of elephant and branches, maquette of the tree
    video 2: adapting the original buildings, building the elephant, in particular its feet!
    video 3: making the models of the creatures – very cute little squid, manta
    video 4: piecing the iron and wooden shell of the elephant together with crane.

    photos 1 – 18: the opening, with elephants first parade
    photos 19 – 26: models
    photos 27 – 49: making the elephant
    photos 50 – 55: the buildings

Maville.com’s special coverage: check out the manta, the angler fish in particular.

France 3: Les Fabuleuses Machines de l’île has a cool photo gallery – the best photo of the crab larvae so far.

At Flickr:

L’Internaute Magazine photo gallery: cool workshop making photos (added 19.7.07)

Cursters

Posted by hil

Curster_munny_by_curster

There are a lot of monsters out there on the web, and I tend to be pretty selective about which I like. Some of Erin Currie’s Cursters I like a lot, particularly the ornate ones, like this or this, or this or this. Erin has an Etsy shop, too.

I hadn’t heard of munnys before seeing the monster above. Interesting to see a cross-over between urban graffiti and stencil art culture and toys.

Finding Nemo on Ice

Posted by hil

Disney sure milks every drop out of it’s successes. After first becoming a musical, Finding Nemo – On Ice is about to tour in Australia. It’s quite interesting to see how they have tackled the puppets, however. For a quick overall impression, you can see a range of them on the video linked on this page, and there are some good photos by Conrado4 at Flickr. It seems like I was not the only one to find the idea of ‘finding Nemo on ice’ amusing, and wonder about the placement of the fish eyes.

It’s not so much the repetition of a favourite story that is so depressing about productions like this, but that they have to follow the exact same path and shiny look every time, there are no variables, and it’s all locked in. When my kids were babies I had a similar reaction to Fisher Price activity centres, though I am yet to meet someone who felt the same dislike of them. I see they are now collectable vintage on Ebay.

Search for a Scapegoat

Posted by hil

Notsorry

I’ve written previously about Shan Jayaweera’s John Howard puppetry satires. Now with an election looming later in the year, ‘Australian Prime Minister John Howard needs to find something
new to blame and scare the voters into voting for him’. Follow his efforts in a welcome new series, John Howard – Search for a Scapegoat:

  • Episode 1: Howard looks at former grand Mufti Sheik Taj el din al Hilali.
  • Episode 2: John Howard goes into the music world to find two potential scapegoats to help him win the next election. There is also an advertisement for the latest Liberal Party
    Reception centre.

Climate change is a tragedy of the commons

Posted by hil

World Unity is crucial to the climate: Michael’s article on climate change as an archetypal tragedy of the commons is in The Age today. Read it – its good stuff!