Next Gen cyberpumk clothes
A robotics and animatronic cosplay enthusiast known as Zibartas has made a real-life NUSA Infiltrator jacket.
This is a cosplay recreation of the NUS Infiltrator bomber jacket from Cyberpunk 2077 that has a tall collar that houses a display. That feature collar alone packs in $1,200 worth of 4 flexible OLED displays driven by a pair of Raspberry Pi 4 SBCs.
I think this is a great example of new technological fashion that is becoming possible for designers. We’re already starting to see 3D printed clothes, spray on shoes and spray-on dresses, and the re-booted Tron franchise a few years ago introduced Oryon Technologies Elastolite EL Panels (tape) into real-world costumes.
I think we’re just scratching the surface of what will soon be very quickly possible in wearables.
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Tron Electroluminescent (El) Tape
Want to create your own clothes that have lighted tape/lines like recent Tron movies? Want to create unique lighting at your next event or home? Want to wrap your car in illuminated panels?
Look no further than Ellumiglow. They sell a wide variety of wearable electroluminescent solutions for home and clothing.
The original Tron costume lighting solution supposedly was created by a company called Oryon Technologies Inc and the product was Elastolite EL Panels – but they don’t seem to exist or have a web presence anymore.
There are hobbyist selling complete Tron cosplay kits, and others that show you how to screen-print your own El clothing:
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Impossible Architecture in The Shining
A Quiet Side points out the set and hotel layout was intentionally impossible in some places. The hotel was a combination of 3 different real hotels. He suggests that was to make the hotel seem like a maze you couldn’t escape.
Even more interesting is he’s created probably the most architecturally accurate fully navigable 3D model of the Overlook Hotel in Enscape (download here). In doing so, he really shows off the impossible architectures the hotel has.
More than just confusion or giving the sense of a maze, I almost took it as a dream. I have occasionally had dreams in which you walk through a door from one place to a completely other place, or impossible switches from one place to another.
Kubrick does a good job of keeping this subtle enough that most people don’t notice these details even on re-watching.
But what if it were just a little bit more overt. What if you made a movie about being trapped in a hotel/place in which the past and future blend much more seamlessly forward and backwards in time, as well geometry that was arranged by locations where some horror or another happened more than just a logical layout. Where it’s much more dream-like and areas are connected by associations instead of physical layout? You would have to keep it very subtle to avoid it becoming the movie Inception or overdoing it; but it is and interesting idea to explore…
Kiss Me Deadly and opening the Ark of the Covenant
Kiss Me Deadly was a 1955 film noir that follows a tough private investigator that picks up a mysterious woman on the side of the road. They are assaulted by rough men and she is killed and he left unconscious. In investigating her death, he gets embroiled in a bleak and complex mystery of deceit, false identities, and violent men seeking a mysterious box. In the final scene, one of the characters opens the mysterious box and is engulfed in flames and mysterious sounds – ultimately burning down the entire building.
One can’t help but see the connections to when the Ark of the Covenant is opened in the final scenes of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Many have suggested it took direct inspiration from Kiss Me Deadly. I know when I saw the scene, it’s immediately what I thought. Interesting how visual languages for this kind of horror have persisted almost 40 years apart and are still just as frightening.
Moving wall art
Pikazo creates 3D art that appears to move. It made me wonder if we could do with lcd displays and subtly moving imagery or head tracking to change the POV/reflections. Of course, if more than one person is watching, one must stay sticky on the same person when head tracking but POV effects might still look odd.
3D AI Generated worlds
Project Genie is an experimental Google DeepMind AI system that creates interactive, navigable 3D worlds from text prompts, sketches, or images. Powered by the Genie 3 world model, it simulates physics and consistent environments in real-time.
Pseudohuasca
pseudohuasca creates videos clips that have odd glitchy entities and highly clipped electronic audio sounds. It made me think of what the anomalies in the book Roadside Picnic might look like.
That’s different
Le ravissement de Frank N Stein is a little art film made in 1982 before computer animation would have made the perspective drawing much easier. Today you could likely make this in an afternoon.
These sort of bizarre art films remind me of going to the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The top floor had lots of random video shorts like this. It’s interesting what gets considered ‘art’ – and 99% of it is forgotten by the next year. Maybe that’s why we’re seeing the dramatic collapse of the art world.
One could point to the austere minimalism as an early form of Backrooms, but the Backrooms was inspired by the unease of liminal spaces and not this particular work.
Edgar Allen Poe’s influences
PBS has a good little 2 part documentary on Edgar Allen Poe called “In Search of Edgar Allen Poe” that you can watch for free.
I’ve always been a Poe fan since I found his stories in my elementary school years. The documentary did a decent overview of his life – which was quite a story of struggles and loss in itself.
One of the things I learned was the breadth and accomplishment on his influence in many genres. He is cited as the inventor of not only the horror story, but of the detective story, and science fiction. He also wrote impressive essays on poetry, cryptography, cosmology and even the nature of the music of bells.
At the end of the documentary, there is a list of works that inspired other authors (either directly stated by the author or having obvious influence). I thought it was worth putting them here to record just how influential his work became.
- The Gold Bug
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- William F Friedman – man who broke Japanese “Purple” cypher in WW2
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- At the Mountains of Madness – H.P. Lovecraft
- An Antarctic Mystery – Jules Verne
- The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
- In the House of Suddho – Rudyard Kipling
- The Man of the Crowd
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Seven Old Men – Charles Baudelaire
- Murders in the Rue Morgue
- Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories – Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Mystery of Marie Roget
- Hercule Poirot mysteries – Agatha Christie
- The Purloined Letter
- Nero Wolfe detective mysteries – Rex Stout
- The Oval Portrait
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- The Premature Burial
- Ulysses – James Joyce
- Three Sundays in a Week
- Around the World in 80 Days – Jules Verne
- William Wilson
- Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
- Eukreka
- Pioneering treatise on an expanding universe – Alexander Friedmann
- The Balloon Hoax
- Five Weeks in a Balloon – Jules Verne
- The Tell-Tale Heart
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Fall of the House of Usher
- The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Poetic Principle (essay)
- Art for Art’s Sake movement
- French Symoblists
- The Pre-Raphaelites
- The Pit and the Pendulum
- The Inn of the Two Witches – Joseph Conrad
- Annabel Lee
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Masque of the Red Death
- The Bonfire of the Vanities – Tom Wolfe
- Poe’s Short stories
- Inspired science fiction of H.G. Wells
- Charles Baudelaire – French poet who translated Poe and popularized him in France
- Jorge Luis Borges – Argentine short-story writer/poet that translated Poe’s work to Spanish
- Fernando Pessoa – Portuguese poet/writer/philosopher and translator
- Edogawa Rampo – Japanese mystery writer that introduced modern detective stories in Japan in 1920’s. Used a pen name which was the Japanese version of the name “Edgar Allan Poe”
- Allen Ginsberg – claimed you could trace all modern literary art to Poe’s influence: Burroughs, Baudelaire, Genet, Dylan…etc
- Roger Corman – made 7 movies based on Poe’s work
- Stephen King
- Alfred Hitchcock – “It’s because I liked Edgar Allan Poe’s stories so much that I began to make suspense films”
- Poe added over a thousand words to the English language including:
- memory-stirring, normality, odorless, epilepsy, bugaboo, sentience, irreducible, multicolor, aeronaut, and cryptography