#lizardbrained art

[lizardbraining]

meow

[qheepster]

clangen literally my favorite game. look at this absolute legend

[demon-of-side-quest-hell]

Is it weird to engage with ship art from the perspective of just "Oh! I like [X character(s)]!". Like I rarely care about the ship being written or drawn. I just like having fanart with characters I like.

[spitblaze]

Kinda fucked up ur reblogging ai art as an artist yourself

Ah, I knew this would happen someday.

I've stated multiple times: I have no beef with generative art, in and of itself. I feel there are genuinely good reasons you can employ it, ranging from harmless fun to accessibility to actual artistic use. The issues I have mostly involve 1) acquisition of the dataset, 2) involvement of money, and 3) authorial intent. I have jumpy lizardbrain issues with 'machine what will steal my job' too, but the generative art that I reblog on purpose is stuff that I feel meets my criteria for 'ethical', as lame as I sound for saying that.

So let's look at this post I reblogged from @infiniteartmachine. This is a project from @reachartwork, a disabled artist who made their own dang generative program and dataset in order to facilitate their creative endeavors. To my knowledge, they have done the work to do this as ethically as possible. Criteria one passed.

Criteria two is the involvement of money. The pinned post on the Reach side is a patreon plug. Understandable to get jumpy at first sight, before remembering that not only did this person develop their own dang program and dataset, they also make art the old-fashioned way, and are mostly asking for money to help with living expenses for themselves and their partner. No ludicrous commission fees, no use to avoid employing the talent of human artists. Two, check.

Finally, authorial intent. Looking back both on what we know and the contents of the image, I feel like I can safely call this one fine. No intent to deceive, no intent to avoid the utilization or payment of a human artist, no intent to impersonate. Just the intent to generate interesting imagery.

I've said it before, I feel like generative art's biggest advantage is its capability for surrealism and uncanny imagery. To me, there's something inherently interesting about the construction of these images! The fact that it's not a thinking person creating something with intent is both its biggest downside and its greatest strength. It doesn't 'know' anything, it can't exactly replicate an image so it puts down pixels based on its training set. The imperfections, utilized well, turn from weird smudgey marks into something that elevates the inherent strangeness of the imagery and the system.

I understand people who have reservations with the entire idea of generative art, I get your jumpiness and want to dismiss all of it entirely. But I still stand by my assertion that a hammer is morally neutral, it just depends on what you're using it for. I've found no good arguments to sway me that even generative imagery that meets my personal requirements is 'bad' in and of itself. That's where I stand on it.

[kedreeva]

Hey so I have never seen an episode of stranger things in my life but seeing your reblogs and posts about it is making me want to, even though my ridiculously active imagination usually prevents me from watching anything scarier than Coraline. Is the Steddie worth the scary?

*deep breath*

Short answer? It's really hard to judge this for someone else.

Long answer? I have no ability to judge how scary something is and so also have no ability to tell where the threshold of worth it would be especially for another person. Basically nothing scares me. I watch horror stuff and then I sleep soundly. Stranger Things doesn't even register as horror to me because it's just an adventure where the bad guys happen to be shaped weird. I'm well aware it's just pretend, all the way down to my subconscious, so it doesn't even leave my lizardbrain jumping at shadows or anything. I see the monsters and I'm too busy trying to determine how they move and thinking about how they sustain themselves and looking at what lighting tricks the CGI is using to hide things or how the prosthetics/puppetry works to be scared of any of it. I deal too closely with too many animals in real life for fake creatures to hit right.

Would the steddie content be worth watching 4 seasons of show if I was scared? I don't know. Would the show be worth watching even if it was scary to me? I think yes, for me. I don't know for you. The characters are all amazing. I'm in love with so many of them, not just steddie, and I'm watching for the whole cast. I'm watching for whatever storytelling is still good. I'm watching because I want to see what they'll tell us about this other world ours is touching. I love seeing the monsters. I love watching desperate people find their limits and then try to push past them to protect each other. I love secret bad guy complexes beneath innocuous scenery. I love kids running around having adventures adults can barely comprehend. I love best friends becoming ride or die for each other. I love mystery. I love flashy showdown fights, and weird science, and conspiracy theories that aren't quite wrong. Yes I love the new kid on the block but I didn't watch 4 seasons for him. I watched because everything else was fascinating to me. I watched because it's 4 seasons of a weird mixed family finding each other and fighting monsters together to save their tiny little town and maybe the world.

So is it worth it for steddie? I dunno. You can probably read the fic and look at the art with minimal knowledge of the show and be fine, some people are doing that. Is the rest of it hella fun and fascinating and worthwhile? I like most of it, love the characters, so I'd say yes. And it does give good context for who Steve is, for the Steddie stuff.

[kayzig]

For the love of god, don’t touch anything in Rafi’s apartment if you don’t want to transitively touch feet. 

[lizardbrainlizardgain]

Gender roles aren’t real and masculinity/femininity is whatever the hell makes you feel comfortable in your own skin. You can posses it, or abandon it entirely and you’re still a good person and not a moral heathen. If I see one more tradfem mother fucker while I’m scrolling looking for cool pictures of plants/embroidery/bread recipes/whatever I’m gonna rip their boobs off the hinges and make them eat it

[perpetual-flay]

Latest blog post. Art by Sandra Yagi.

[kmclaude]

Artistically I feel full of ennui...so jaded...dead... Apparently the solution, says id lizardbrain, is make a short comic of Jehan pissing himself. And yet still. Ennui.

Art is so neutered. Boring.

[lizardbraining]

sonic unleashed make brain monkey go vroom

[drearydiarycomics]

🎶 Thus concludes my #comics #remix of #tommy by #thewho 🎶 Lyrics unchanged from 1969, eerily relevant today 🎶 Follow Me! . . #daily #diary #digital #pinballwizard #art #drawing #dailydrawing #illustration #socialmedia #smartphone #lizardbrain #followforfollow #follow

[patrickweck]

Lizard Brain. Watercolor, ink, Pitt pens. This piece will be one of the new originals I will have on display at Art Outside at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood next weekend (May 24th-May 26th). #lizardbrain #illustration #watercolor #lizardart #surrealism #bluemask #bluemaskstudio #patrickweck #stlart #stlartists #artistsoninstagram #illustratorsoninstagram https://www.instagram.com/p/BxaI7dxD0X7/?igshid=5e5lf6dkju4f

[harlowevanished]

New guest-art is up today, thanks to Kay King at @kayzig!

I HIGHLY recommend clicking through to the main site so you can check out all the gorgeous details on Frances’s jewelry and rusty ship surroundings. Not to mention that sky! AH! And if you like this, it could be because Kay has been flat-coloring Harlowe Vanished since its start. She is THE BEST!

Check out more of her work either at her tumblr above, or on her site www.boss-monster.com! You’ll definitely want to keep an eye out for Lizardbrain, her webcomic project which I contribute to behind-the-murky-murky-scenes. Thanks again, Kay!

www.harlowevanished.com

[kayzig]

Looking forward to doing more with this, soon, but for now - practice makes perfect!

[vileart]

Hunger Dramaturgy: Sinking Ship @ Edfringe 2017

Kafka’s Irresistible Puppet Master

Physical theatre company Sinking Ship Productions has won widespread praise for their stage version of Kafka’s A Hunger Artist, which they are bringing to the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

In the title role, Lecoq-trained performer and puppeteer Jonathan Levin is giving “possibly the best solo performance of the year” (New York Irish Arts). 

What was the inspiration for this performance?

It was equal parts frustration with the direction of live performance in the US and a soft spot for Kafka. I miss the old vaudeville presentational stuff, with red curtains, footlights, and over-the-top theatrical gestures, so I thought why not use Kafka’s story about the death and decline of Hunger Artists to also talk about the death and decline of that kind of theatricality. 

And at the same time use things like miniature “toy theatre” (which were big in the 1800s), travelling vaudeville trunks, and red curtains to tell the story.

Is performance still a good space for the public discussion of ideas?

It’s certainly better than a comment board.

The main limitation, I think, on the relevance of performance is that it reaches a finite and relatively small number of people. But when done well, it is still one of the most visceral, empathetic art forms. Maybe “empathy” is a strange way to answer a question about ideas, but it’s essential to understanding. 

The audience is required to participate in the act of imagination, or you don’t have a show. So it’s never passive. And you are in a group, almost always. You can’t sit at home and watch alone, and there’s no screen mediating between you and the performer. 

In a world that feels increasingly lacking in empathy, performance feels absolutely necessary.

How did you become interested in making performance?

There were a couple of shows I saw that really blew my mind at various points in my life, and I think I’m still trying to process/recreate those experiences: Mabou Mines’ Peter and Wendy, Pig Iron’s Chekhov Lizardbrain, and a puppet company called Wakka Wakka. 

Each one had this incredible sense of magic, imagination and theatricality that I’ve been striving to find my own flavour of… Maybe we’re all just chasing the theatrical dragon so to speak.

Is there any particular approach to the making of the show?

We went into this project with some major storytelling limitations, namely: how can we adapt this story about an ascetic performance artist who spends most of his time inside a cage in a theatrically dynamic, constantly surprising way using only one performer? 

And the more we began to translate the piece into a series of contained character bits/clowning set pieces the more we found ourselves navigating even more self-imposed limitations and conventions. 

But these sort of artistic boundaries, while restricting, encourage a tremendous sense of play and problem solving in a room that was basically working through absurdist trial and error.

The piece was built collaboratively, with the three core company members being performer Jonathan Levin, writer Josh Luxenberg, and director Joshua William Gelb. We worked together from the start to pull apart Kafka’s story, find the theatrical translation, and create the staging. Playing off each other allowed us to create an intricate, interconnected work.

Does the show fit with your usual productions?

In a way, it’s a distillation of Sinking Ship’s work. All our other shows have been large casts - and too big to travel with. We built this one with Edinburgh in mind. 

Of course - and maybe this is a hallmark of our shows - we find it hard to think small. So we packed a ton of stuff into this (not so little) trunk show. The content of the plays we’ve made has been wildly different. What connects it all is a love of surprise, delight, and inventiveness (especially as an avenue to discussing big or hard ideas and feelings), an emphasis on physical, visual theatre (often with a dose of puppetry), and total integration of every element of performance. 

We believe that anything the audience sees is part of the show, which means we give as much consideration to a scene change as a scene.

What do you hope that the audience will experience?

A Hunger Artist is at its core about the relationship between the performer and the audience. So while this is technically a solo show, the audience plays an integral part. You might even call some moments “participatory” (though if that word gives you pause, don’t worry, it’s not like you’ve seen it before). 

As the trajectory of the Hunger Artist’s career shifts from prestige to anonymity, so to does the audience’s experience shift from the comfort of clown to the inevitably Kafkaesque. The performance, and in particular our central prop, a large theatrical touring trunk, is filled with surprises that will delight, astonish, and perhaps even disturb.

What strategies did you consider towards shaping this audience experience?

Without giving too much away, a portion of the show, as mentioned above, relies on some cleverly guided audience participation. So we’ve spent whole workshops devoted to figuring out what works, what doesn’t, what’s fun, and what’s not, when involving the unpredictable element of the audience on stage. 

We’ve come away with something that seems a little magical, to the point that everyone seems to think the audience participants are plants. They’re not!

In common with Kafka’s celebrated Metamorphosis, the story draws people into a world somehow familiar and yet extraordinarily strange.

    The story opens with an account of how cheering, laughing crowds once flocked to see the hunger artist who starved in a cage for 40 days and 40 nights at a time for their entertainment. 

What then unfolds is a powerful piece of physical theatre mixed with elements of puppetry. The seemingly whimsical nostalgia for a lost art form rapidly transforms into a troubling trip into the nature of memory, art and spectatorship.

Although never explicitly addressed, there is a disquieting sense that the forces, frailties and fascinations Kafka exposed in 1922 were linked to the rise of fascism back then and of far right populism today.

Levin says: “It’s a dark tale, but there is lots of humour which is something we really bring out in the production. We’ve tried to make it very fresh and physical, so there’s always lots going on. New York has been great and now we are looking forward to the biggest challenge of them all – the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.” 

Created collaboratively by Levin, writer Josh Luxenberg, and director Joshua William Gelb, A Hunger Artist is crossing the Atlantic to Edinburgh following its successful run at the historic Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village. It is packed with transformations and there are so many people on the stage that it never has the sense of being a solo show.

A Hunger Artist has further cemented the reputation of the Brooklyn-based Sinking Ship, garnering considerable critical acclaim: "Boisterously funny and chokingly sad,” Blogcritics; “An unflagging sense of theatrical invention, Lighting & Sound America; “Beautifully imagined… full of heart,” Culturebot.

Listings details

•  Theatre

•  Venue: Zoo (Venue 124) 140, Pleasance, EH8 9RR

•  Dates: 4 to 28 August

•  Time: 17:45

•  Duration: 70 minutes 

•  Guidance: None

•  Tickets:  £9 to £11

•  Box office: 0131 662 6892

•  Group: Sinking ShipProductions

from the vileblog http://ift.tt/2u7a3Gt

[jculture-en]

Toshiki Okada's TIME'S JOURNEY THROUGH A ROOM Enters Final Weeks

#Shiki #ShikiTheatreCompany [BroadwayWorld]Randich at 59E59), costumes for Kafka Fragments (P. Sellars/Zankell Hall) and set design for Chekhov Lizardbrain, Isabella, and Pay Up with the Pig Iron Theatre Company (Philadelphia). She is a recipient of the Arts Link Grant, the NEA/TCG Program for …