March 26, 2012 - Comments Off on Mutants and Miniguns

Mutants and Miniguns

There are few things more inspiring than a beginning, perhaps only an ending. Humanity's fascination with the end stretches back to the dawn of religion when the first creation and destruction myths were told. Yet we seem ever more possessed with the latter as intuitively we know all things end. One need only look at the yearly predictions of the end for proof. Such forecasts will invariably grow more prevalent with 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar, approaching (though their calendars ended fairy regularly making the doomsday connection meaningless). This obsession's roots can be expressed as a single question: what will remain of us after we're gone? From this single question endless amounts of work have poured forth, from best-selling novels to blockbuster films.

WasteMy personal interest in the post-apocalypse stems from the way it turns the tables. To us, our constructions seem indelible but most trances of humanity would be wiped off the Earth within a couple centuries if we weren't here to maintain them. A look at the haunting photography from post-fallout Chernobyl is a chilling reminder of this fact. But such devastation doesn't require a nuclear accident to occur. All that is needed is time and nature as the photography of Peter Lippmann beautifully illustrates in his series, Paradise Parking and Photo Finish.

Paradise ParkingCamera4Of course there was no era as obsessed with the end of world as the decades of the Cold War when both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. seemed a hair's breadth away from pushing the nuclear launch button. The aesthetic from that era speaks of hope for a technological future mingled with the fear that civilization wouldn't live long enough to see it. The website for Small Studio based in Australia captures this era wonderfully with a modern graphic twist that is to die for. I love the simple one page horizontal design. My only gripe is the reliance on large light boxes for additional information where I think a more elegant solution could have been integrated. As a side note, I feel that almost all of these one page sectional sites require some code to cause the window to lock onto each section so you don't end up between two when scrolling.

Small StudioI was inspired to do an apocalyptic post after seeing the following short, RUIN by OddBall Animation. More is to come which has me very excited. I hope to see this made into something, anything, I can pay for. It's just that good! I love the setting especially. The overgrown skyscrapers sate my desire to see what an abandoned New York City would eventually become. The cinematography is gorgeous, resulting in one of the best chase sequences I've seen in years.

The Sketching Mechanism is a series of weekly posts, published on Mondays, containing the artistic musings of Mobile Designer/Developer Ben Chirlin during our Monday morning meeting at the NY Creative Bunker as well as his inspiring artistic finds of the week.

Published by: benchirlin in The Sketching Mechanism

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