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Grotesque and Gorgeous: 100,000 Art and Medicine Images Released for Open Use

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library by OMG Here I Am

Ha! The skull eating a book. 

aeternums:

Ophelia’s Skull | Owen W. Lee

The work is a part of a project that aims at re-coding Shakespeare in the 21st century’s vision. The skull represents a well-known tragic character, Ophelia in Hamlet, who is many times used as a symbol of tragic death in a variety of art works in art history. The lyrical, unique literary style has been borrowed to describe the scene by artists. Most of the pieces are mainly focused upon depicting the scene that Queen Gertrude tells people the death from drowning of Ophelia. however, it is deemed that Shakespeare himself is more concentrated upon the dialectic between life and death.The project interactively delivers synesthetic images to audiences with visuals, sounds, textures, scripts and materials. The skull is a straightforward object to symbolise death, simultaneously,the surface is decorated with graceful sentences from the scene of Ophelia’s death in another aspect of the beauty of death.

Inside the skull, a paper strip hand-crank musical box is placed so that audiences can feel the emotion of the tragic beauty in the 16th century renaissance melody and rhythm, which have been reinterpreted and composed by the designer after an analysis of the 16th century’s lute music by John Dowland (England, 1563–1626). The artwork reminds of automata in the 16th–17th century in Europe.The music and the visual are converged upon multi-sensory delivery in an analogue and tactile flavour. This project is now expecting 2nd Version based upon contemporary technology.

16/17th Century skull with Sator Square

The Sator Square is a word square containing a Latin palindrome featuring the words SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS written in a square so that they may be read top-to-bottom, bottom-to-top, left-to-right, and right-to-left.

One likely translation is “The farmer Arepo has [as] works wheels [a plough]”; that is, the farmer uses his plough as his form of work. Although not a significant sentence, it is grammatical; it can be read up and down, backwards and forwards.

If “arepo” is taken to be in the second declension, the “-o” ending could put the word in the ablative case, giving it a meaning of “by means of [arepus].” Thus, “The sower holds the works and wheels by means of water”

The Sator Square is a four-times palindrome, and some people have attributed magical properties to it, considering it one of the broadest magical formulas in the Occident. An article on the square from The Saint Louis Medical and Surgical Journal vol. 76, reports that palindromes were viewed as being immune to tampering by the devil, who would become confused by the repetition of the letters, and hence their popularity in magical use.

source: The Macabre And the Beautifully Grotesque

How am I just now discovering the Macabre and the Beautifully Grotesque? Great stuff on there.

EDIT: Of course, when I research the "Sator Square" tumblr tag, it leads back to Sleep No More. Shall we call this internet feedback? Web echo? Browsing boomerang? Apparently there are Sator Squares to be discovered in the McKittrick. 

You Are Slowly Decaying

I must have sleepwalked and started a greeting card company. 

Grave of Richard Churcher (1681) in Trinity Churchyard, the oldest carved tombstone in NYC

via “Manhattan’s Art of the Dead”

The third story in my cemetery art series for Hyperallergic focuses on the Trinity cemeteries in Manhattan. Dead rooster mentioned, but not pictured, although there are plenty of ominous graven images. 

Incarnate (Three Degrees of Certainty II), Maskull Lasserre. 2012.

Human skull carved into old software manuals.