GENOMICON

and as pointed out by www.technovelgy.com, it all gets a bit weird 3.40 in.

Disembodied human hands. Marvelous. Personally I would’ve made it with 6 fingers… quite hairy etc. A bit damp. A bit trembly. Ok, 7 fingers… and each finger terminating in another hand, with 3 fingers on each.

It’s a type of cannibalism in some ways. Brrr…

… give me nice clean, uncomplicated machines any day. People can be a bit weird.

Brrr…

(from www.jim-skullgallery.com : via )

String Skulls… combinations of phobias you didn’t even know you had… a bit like potato faces, also from Notcot.

(via).

I’ve also noticed that various bits of “explorative” architecture are getting to be a bit spooky as well… I don’t know what it is? They look too much like lungs? Like dead bits of indescribable sea monsters? Like live bits of indescribable sea monsters?

This is from translu-cent.blogspot.com – which is a blog about the design for a Swiss Bank. Holy Crap, really? This isn’t what I imagined at all.

Hypernornal Stimuli etc.

Back to faces… something that I find interesting is what I call Androidal Xenophobia… the way we can anthropomorphise just about anything, but if something gets too close to being human, it creeps us out.

These for example are actual photographs of actual humans… but they’ve been photoshopped to look like dolls… and the effect kicks in. The site that it came from didn’t display the bottom half in the preview, so the effect doesn’t happen until you open the actual page. I used to think it was something in the eyes, but now I’m not so sure.

Speaking of Automata, here’s a kit where you can make your own:

I love this stuff.

There’s a whole site for automatons here:

and needless to say there are hundreds of them on youtube.

“I could do that” is the spirit of the age – or one of them at least. It’s what sets us apart from our TV-watching cultural ancestry.

There’s something a bit spooky about these things

Reminds me of Czech stop-motion cult-bloke, Jan Švankmajer who made Alice and Wonderland and Faust among others.

from botjunkie

and

Creepy…

… this is slightly creepy as well, though in a different way:

(from)

playing on a different set of fears I think. This is pretty cool actually…. although it still isn’t actually doing anything… useful, which was kindof the promise of the cnc router-hexapod, back in the day.

Being the condition that hasn’t quite made itself apparent yet (but it will), by which we can anthropomorphise just about anything…

(via)

but for some unaccountable reason, attempts at facsimiles of people are really creepy.

(via)

which is another service where for a small (ie: large) fee, you can turn your vague appearance into a little robot thing. This happens via www.mechrc.com and www.thatsmyface.com

who have this amazing service where you can upload a couple of pictures and they’ll make a 3D digitised version, which makes you look even more fucking weird than you do in real life.

“Apply your face to many items” they suggest. What? Like egg-cups? Soap-on-a-rope? Your actual face?… How about wall-papering the toilet with hundreds of them?

Ok you’re scaring me now.

I can think of endless possibilities for this, and not a single one of them doesn’t give me the creeps.

There’s something strange in the human condition that allows us to anthropomorphise pretty much anything – easily (and this is something the Japanese excel at – to the extent that their cars cant have “sad” faces)… and yet when it comes to “as accurate as possible humanoids” we’re incredibly good at spotting fakes.

And not only that, they seem a bit unnerving.