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Post-apocalyptic

The hacker spirit is always alive and well in post-apocalyptic fiction, as characters throw together contraptions from whatever junk they can find. While these might not always be practical or possible in reality, their primary purpose is usually to look the part. This is definitely the case for [Danny Huynh]'s post-apocalyptic animatronic creations, which look like they can slot straight into Mad Max or Fallout.

[Danny] is an avid RC enthusiast, so many of the models are highly customized off-the-shelf RC cars. However, it's the lifelike moving characters in these models that really catch the eye. Their hands and feet move with the steering and throttle, and in the motorcycle builds they will often lean with the turns. Other notable builds include a hexapedal taxi and a couple of animatronic bands.

All the vehicle builds are electric, but it looks like [Danny] often includes an audio module to simulate a roaring engine. He makes extensive use of servos and linkages for character movement, with wiring and electronics carefully hidden by paint or bodywork.

With all the CGI technology available today, great animatronic builds like an eerily lifelike heart, or a talking Nikola Tesla are all the more impressive to see.

Continue reading "Small Scale Mad Max: Danny Huynh's Dystopian Animatronics" →

Women Are The Post-Apocalyptic Future

BERLIN and PARIS — In recent years, impending ecological apocalypse has spurred a number of contemporary artists to visualize fears of an environmental collapse. Yet it's also inspired artists to imagine post-apocalyptic futures. British artist Emma Talbot and American artist Dana Schutz address the subject of societal, ecological meltdown in their recent shows, organized respectively at Kindl, Berlin, and at Musée d'Art Moderne (MAM), Paris. While they draw the spectators' attention to humanity's absurdities, contradictions, and collective inefficacy, they offer paths to eco-centric renewal as well. Looking at their paintings, I couldn't help thinking of late American writer Ursula K. Le Guin's futuristic stories, some of which envisioned nonhuman, eco-based intelligence. 

Technology and contemporary society's addiction to it are central to Talbot's paintings, featured in the group show POLY: A Fluid Show, curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen, at Kindl Center for Contemporary Art, Berlin. The exhibition is devoted to contemporary artists whose works consider the idea of pollination, derived from biology, as the basis for re-envisioning societal structures, emphasizing collectivity and hybridity. In her collage across six silk panels, "When Screens Break" (2020), Talbot paints faceless avatars floating amid colorful amoebas and black and white webs. Speech balloons with underlined text describe a world that's so technologically mediated that when smartphones break, they leave a harrowing sense of emptiness. "When Screens Break" is also the title of an animation playing on a small screen on the floor, in which a lonely figure grieves the loss of screen interaction.

Installation view of Emma Talbot: In the End, the Beginning at Kesselhaus at Kindl, Berlin

Talbot's site-specific mini exhibition, Emma Talbot: In the End, the Beginning (2023), also at Kindl, plays out as a sequel to the accelerated post-human future as glimpsed in the group exhibition. Talbot fills the soaring space at Kindl's Kesselhaus with enormous paintings on silk suspended from the ceiling, along with fabric sculptures. She displaces the centrality of the human figure, instead centering giant spiders painted on silk in the section Materials for Survival. Many other creatures are combines (e.G., plant-animals, humanoid-insects). In its exuberant fecundity, the post-human world is seductive. Only upon closer inspection is it clear that Talbot renders nature's revenge — for instance, the River Styx rising against humans' rapaciousness (the text bubbles name capitalism and greed as primary culprits). But the paintings also weave the human body into sprawling mosaics of fertile, fungible forms, reminding viewers that we're made of  the same chemical elements found in nature. Knocked off nature's pedestal, human consciousness may learn from nature's inbuilt, multiple intelligences, and from our common organic foundation, to survive, then to regrow.   

Much like Talbot, Dana Schutz builds on recognizable social scenarios for her pre- and post-apocalyptic compositions. Dana Schutz: Le Monde Visible, the first survey of her work in France, curated by Anaël Pigeat at MAM, Paris, and co-organized with the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, is a veritable whirlwind of social dystopias. In the oil painting "Men's Retreat" (2005) — an eerie grotesque in sickeningly bright colors — grown and middle-aged men wearing neckties, stripped to tank tops, faces painted or blindfolded, frolic at an outdoorsy retreat, yet their expressions convey a peculiar sense of senility and menace. Other tableaux are more explicit: in "Presentation" (2005), a somber crowd witnesses a vivisection (of a living subject?), complacent in the spectacle, while in "Fanatics" (2005), masqueraded citizens crowd angrily behind a metal-fence barricade. Finally, "Beat Out the Sun" (2018) depicts the absurdist scenario of an inscrutable, cartoonish mob — climate-change deniers, no doubt — marching shoulder to shoulder to attack the scorching disc hovering dangerously low on the horizon.  

While neither Talbot nor Schutz places responsibility for climate-response failure squarely on patriarchal systems, for both artists, specifically female-identified bodies seem central to the world's post-apocalyptic future. Talbot's sculpture of a multi-tentacled insect, for instance, features long-haired wigs and nimble humanoid limbs as vestiges of the human, whereas her collages also include breasted figurines evoking ancient deities amid the webby patterns. Not suggesting that we tame the wild, Talbot instead emphasizes the resilience of the human, particularly female, body, and its capacity for rebirth, as essential to the survival of the entire species. 

Dana Schutz, "New Legs" (2003), oil on canvas

In Schutz's paintings, women are empirical world builders. She paints them as deeply focused, blocking out the surrounds of an encroaching jungle — part greenery, part cement — populated by semi-human and robotic beings. "Civil Planning" (2004), which depicts this scene, satirizes the futility of human endeavors, but also pays wistful homage to perseverance. In another painting, "Reformers" (2004), women lean over a collapsed table, on which a marionette-like figure has broken in half — another frustrated collective effort. 

Though the humanity depicted in most of Schutz's works suggests an inborn haplessness, she offers some hope for the post-apocalyptic future. In "New Legs" (2003), a raw-pink-fleshed blond woman seated on an empty beach atop a pile of rough-hewn rocks is fashioning a pair of legs: Eve re-inventing herself in a depopulated world, in which she can only count on her ingenuity (though she may also be molding a knobby fetish of Adam). Schutz's large painting "The Visible World" (2018), after which the show is titled, is an odyssey centered on a nude female figure, swept up on a rock by crushing waves. A bird perched on her thigh holds a red sphere, possibly a pomegranate, in its open beak. The painting's opaque symbolism, which may hint at the limits of human empiricism, conveys a sense that this shipwrecked, grief-stricken, somewhat de Kooning-esque creature (the wall text refers to her as a traffic-light-green-eyed Prometheus) may yet be the planet's only hope. 

Dana Schutz, "The Visible World" (2018), oil on canvas Installation view of Emma Talbot: In the End, the Beginning at Kesselhaus at Kindl, Berlin Dana Schutz, "Party" (2004), oil on canvas Installation view of Emma Talbot: In the End, the Beginning at Kesselhaus at Kindl, Berlin Dana Schutz, "Reformers" (2004), oil on canvas

POLY: A Fluid Show continues at Kindl Center for Contemporary Art (Am Sudhaus 3, Berlin, Germany) through February 25. The exhibition was curated by Solvej Helweg Ovesen.

Emma Talbot: In the End, the Beginning continues at Kesselhaus at the Kindl (Am Sudhaus 3, Berlin, Germany) through May 26. The exhibition was curated by Kathrin Becker.

Dana Schutz: Le Monde Visible continues at Musée d'Art Moderne (MAM) (11 Avenue du Président Wilson, Paris, France) through February 11. The exhibition was curated by Anaël Pigeat, assisted by Alexandra Jouanneau, and organized by MAM in collaboration with the Louisiana Museum in Denmark.

"Dune" And The Delicate Art Of Making Fictional Languages

A trailer for Denis Villeneuve's "Dune: Part Two" features the boy prophet Paul Atreides, played by Timothée Chalamet, yelling something foreign and uninterpretable to a horde of desert people. We see Chalamet as the embodiment of charismatic fury: every facial muscle clenched in tension, his voice strained and throaty and commanding. A line at the bottom of the screen translates: "Long live the fighters!"

The scene fills barely a few seconds in a three-minute trailer, yet it establishes the emotional tone of the film and captures the messianic fervor that drives its plot. It also signals the depth of Villeneuve's world-building. Part of what made his first excursion into the "Dune" universe such an experiential feast was its vivid, immersive quality, combining monumental architectural design with atmospheric soundscapes and ethereal costuming. We could see a few remnants of our world (remember the bit with the bagpipes?), but the over-all effect was transportive, as if the camera were not a piece of equipment but a cyborgian eye live-streaming from a far-flung alien civilization. Chalamet's strange tongue is part of the franchise's meticulous set dressing. It's not gibberish, but part of an intricate linguistic system that was devised for Villeneuve's adaptations.

Engineered languages such as the one Chalamet speaks represent a new benchmark in imaginative fiction. Twenty years ago, viewers would have struggled to name franchises other than "Star Trek" or "The Lord of the Rings" that bothered to invent new languages. Today, with the budgets of the biggest films and series rivalling the G.D.P.S of small island nations, constructed languages, or conlangs, are becoming a norm, if not an implicit requirement. Breeze through entertainment from the past decade or so, and you'll find lingos designed for Paleolithic peoples ("Alpha"), spell-casting witches ("Penny Dreadful"), post-apocalyptic survivors ("Into the Badlands"), Superman's home planet of Krypton ("Man of Steel"), a cross-species alien alliance ("Halo"), time-travelling preteens ("Paper Girls"), the Munja'kin tribe of Oz ("Emerald City"), and Santa Claus and his elves ("The Christmas Chronicles" and its sequel).

A well-executed conlang can bolster a film's appearance of authenticity. It can deepen the scenic absorption that has long been an obsession for creators and fans of speculative genres such as science fiction and fantasy. But the entertainment industry's fixation with crafting super-realistic realms can also be distracting. Speculative fiction works by melding the familiar with the unrecognizable. It makes trenchant provocations not by creating the most believably alien worlds possible but by interweaving them with strands from our own.

Hollywood's current obsession with constructed languages arguably started with "The Lord of the Rings" film adaptations of the early two-thousands. J. R. R. Tolkien was a professor of Old English at Oxford and a lifelong conlanger, and he famously created the tongues of Middle-earth long before writing the books. "The invention of languages is the foundation," he once wrote. "The 'stories' were made rather to provide a world for the languages than the reverse." The trilogy's success showed the power of conlangs to create engrossing alternate realities, inspiring filmmakers to seek out skilled language creators.

The most influential conlanger working today is David J. Peterson. Born in Long Beach, California, Peterson started to create languages in 2000, while he was a sophomore at U.C. Berkeley. His early projects were amusing experiments: X, a language that could only be written; Sheli, which included only sounds that he liked and was initially unpronounceable; and Zhyler, which he created because he enjoyed Turkish and which, in honor of the Heinz Company, had fifty-seven noun cases. In 2005, he graduated with a master's degree in linguistics from U.C. San Diego. Two years later, he co-founded the Language Creation Society with nine other conlangers.

Peterson's big break came in 2009, when HBO reached out to the Language Creation Society with a strange request. They were creating a television show (which would turn out to be "Game of Thrones") and wanted someone to develop a language (which would emerge as Dothraki). Nothing like this had ever happened before, so the society organized a competition that would be judged by the show's producers. After signing a nondisclosure agreement, applicants were invited to send in a phonetic breakdown of Dothraki, a romanized transcription system, six to eight lines of translated text, and any additional notes or translations.

Peterson had an edge over his competitors: unemployment. For two and a half weeks, he worked eighteen-hour days, assembling a hundred and eighty pages of material. He made it to the second round and eventually produced more than three hundred pages in Dothraki. He landed the job and was later invited to develop five more languages for the series, including High Valyrian, which proved especially popular among fans. In 2017, a High Valyrian course launched on the language-learning app Duolingo; at one point in 2023, more than nine hundred thousand people had signed up as active users.

Along with James Cameron's "Avatar" (2009), which appeared in theatres soon after Peterson was hired by HBO, the first season of "Game of Thrones" demonstrated that audiences not only tolerated fictional languages—they loved them. What had previously been a nerdy pastime transformed into a standard of fantasy filmmaking. Peterson became the go-to language wizard. He has since been hired to create some fifty other conlangs, including languages for the Dark Elves in "Thor: The Dark World" (2013), for the Grounders in the television show "The 100" (2014-20), and for the desert-dwelling Fremen in the two "Dune" movies. When Chalamet, as Paul Atreides, calls to his combatants, he does so in words devised by Peterson and his wife and fellow-conlanger, Jessie. (Peterson worked alone for the first "Dune" film, and collaborated with her on the second.)

Peterson's success stems from a commitment to naturalism. He knows languages well; he has studied more than twenty, including Swahili, Middle Egyptian, and Esperanto, and seems to have an endless mental Rolodex of the lexical, grammatical, and phonological patterns found around the world. Yet, when an interviewer asked him how, when assembling a new conlang, he decides "which aspects of a language to borrow from and mimic" (Greek suffixes? Mongolian tenses? Japanese particles?), he rejected the premise. "If you just ripped out a structure from one language and put it in your own, the result would be inauthentic," he replied.

Peterson's idea of authenticity sometimes puts him at odds with his source texts. When creating High Valyrian, Peterson was forced to include words that George R. R. Martin had composed for the books, including dracarys, meaning "dragon fire." The word was obviously inspired by the Latin draco, meaning "dragon," a decision that Peterson found "unfortunate." "In the universe of the books, there is no such thing as the Latin language—or any of the other languages on Earth," he once wrote. "It is literally impossible for any word (or anything else) in the Song of Ice and Fire universe to be related to anything in our universe." As a result, he made dracarys its own root and chose zaldrīzes as the word for "dragon," provoking a string of disappointed comments from "Game of Thrones" fans on his blog.

As Peterson laid out in his 2015 book, "The Art of Language Invention," he treats languages as evolving systems whose features are interconnected and shaped by a unique history. To design verbs in High Valyrian, for example, he simulated a four-stage evolution from a prehistoric form. In the version of High Valyrian spoken in "Game of Thrones," verbs have an imperfect stem (for past actions that were continuous or incomplete) and a perfect stem (for past actions that were completed). The perfect stem, he decided, was formed in ancient times by appending -tat­ to the end of the imperfect. Over time, this became -tet and then -et, which often reduces to -t in the version spoken in the television show. (During that imagined history, -tat also gave rise to the verb tatagon, meaning "to finish.") There are countless other intricacies to High Valyrian verbs, yet, for Peterson, even producing this lone grammatical feature required simulating generations of linguistic change.

When he was invited to work on "Dune," Peterson fell back on the methods he had honed for previous projects. "In the case of both Dune and Game of Thrones," he wrote during an Ask Me Anything on Reddit before Part One's release, "there was some minimal language elements from the books that I had to account for, but other than that it was up to me to create something brand new." He had decided, in other words, to develop what conlangers call an a-priori language—one whose vocabulary and grammar are wholly original, and not derived from an existing linguistic system.

Creating something new might have made sense for other projects, but, as fans will surely inform you, language functions differently in "Dune." Written by Frank Herbert, and originally published in 1965, the novel recounts how noble houses compete to control the desert planet Arrakis (the eponymous Dune), the only source of the most precious substance in the universe. The story entwines the fate of the aristocratic Paul Atreides with the indigenous Fremen, whose harsh desert life style and religious prophecies set the scene for ecological challenges and epic political face-offs.

Herbert's "Dune" takes place unimaginably far in the future. The time span separating us from the events of "Dune" is roughly twice the distance between us and the end of the Ice Age; sabre-toothed tigers are closer to us than the plot of "Dune" is. Nevertheless, it's a world suffused with familiar echoes, most of which manifest in language. The novel features words derived from French ("verite"), Turkish ("kanly"), Hebrew ("Kwisatz Haderach"), German ("schlag"), and Navajo ("Nezhoni"). Having been raised in a Sikh household, I remember noticing the emperor's title, Padishah, a Persian term that has been used as an honorific for rulers in North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Sikhs use it to refer to God and the ten prophet leaders, or gurus.

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