Visita ou Memórias e Confissões (Manoel de Oliveira, 1982)
I’m probably just a hack but there’s so much public domain stuff that anyone can take and use in any way they like, so like… I might just do that. Just make another version of Dracula, or The Raven, or whatever story that has already been written and is free to reinterpret in any way I see fit.
I am not immune to the siren call of a new chain in town.
Yesterday we shared some wood engravings by Alaskan artist, librarian, and illustrator Dale DeArmond (1914-2006) as illustrations for American ethnologist Frederica de Laguna’s transcribed collection of Dena stories, Tales from the Dena, published in 1995 by the University of Washington Press. The trickster character, Raven, features prominently in the folklore of the Denaʼina and DeArmond seems to delight in depicting Raven’s wily character. According to the Sitka Sentinel, DeArmond described ravens as entertaining, intelligent, and mischievous. She’s said she doesn’t particularly identify with them, but she does respect them. “Rather admirable,” she said of the feathered tricksters, “their approach to life. I like it.”
Shown here are a selection of DeArmond’s wood engravings illustrating a few of the Raven tales collected in Tales from the Dena. Click on the images to see the captions.
In the early 70s Sesame Street was created with an eye towards educating poor, inner-city children for free, and became a massive hit with all children. In 2016, faced with going off the air forever after facing conservative efforts to destroy public broadcasting since basically its beginning, new episodes became a timed exclusive for premium cable network HBO. In 2022 HBO Max, newly merged with and taken over by reality TV channel Discovery, removed Sesame Street episodes and spin-offs from streaming as a tax write-off and scheme to avoid paying residuals.
Sesame Street’s official YouTube channel is uploading the episodes for free, btw. A lot of creators are rebelling against this bullshit.
As always, America, PBS has you and your kids’ backs.
I also want to put in a plug for the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, spearheaded by GBH in Boston to preserve and make available public funded programming from around the country. More than 7000 public television and radio programs are available to stream through the website, with more than 40000 hours of programming archived and available to researchers and educators through the Library of Congress and GBH itself.
That surreal PS1 era of 3D graphics is ideal for the occult. So much of occult art is attempting to explore the ineffable, to depict something beyond words. That era of 3D art was dominated by the rapid onset of powerful new technologies. It was an artistic peek through a keyhole into a grand imagined future. Magic and vaporware go hand in hand.
You get me.
Early 3D art was concrete enough to represent the things they were trying to represent, but still crucially abstract enough to allow the readers imagination to flood into the gaps.
Even the earlier half-generation of 3D allowed artists to create surreal dreamscapes that would be at home in any grimoire or alchemical text.
specifically in reference to game development, popular engines have become so advanced and the push for hyperrealism so strong that occult art and games have become oversaturated with blood and gore, which completely discounts the fear that comes with the uncanny valley, liminal spaces, and disconcerting binaural audio and the weight that these aspects can have when it comes to making something genuinely unsettling, odd, and memorable.
The purpose of occult art is not necessarily to scare or frighten or unsettle. It is to communicate an incommunicable idea. In my opinion, yhe goal of occult art is to induce wonder, to induce awe.
