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:
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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:
Gentle currents get these white porcelain bowls to clink as they drifts across the surface of water in this art installation called “clinamen” by French artist Celeste Boursier-Mougenot
There’s also another installation at Bourse de Commerce in Paris
Here’s another installation in which birds land on guitars with reverb
