Coraline is the perfect blend of childhood fantasy mixed with a subtle horror that keeps the story engaging for adults as well as children. Coraline discovers an alternate version of her life through a door in her living room. In this at first wonderful other world her parents are attentive, her neighbors more interesting, the garden blooming, toys magical, and the only disconcerting aspect the fact that everyone has buttons for eyes. Coraline's night time adventures soon turn dangerous, however, when she discovers her "other mother" wants to keep her forever, and all Coraline must do to stay in this happy world is sew buttons over her eyes too. In addition to this story, the film's incredible use of 3-d stop-motion animation further brings to life Coraline's worlds in incredible detail. This movie thoroughly transported me into this strange and fascinating world and left me thinking about it for days (now going on months).
2. Uglydolls
Uglydolls are more like weird monster stuffed animals-- somewhere in between Sesame Street and some Nickelodeon cartoon. Despite being named "dolls", Uglydolls have a wide appeal that crosses genders, and have none of the cutesy appeal of beanie babies or other stuffed doll fads. Instead it is precisely their weirdness and indeed "ugliness" that makes them so interesting and funny. Uglydolls are supremely simple in their design, essentially they are two pieces of felt-like fabric sewn together, stuffed, and decorated with round felt eyes and triangle felt teeth. Despite this simplicity, they come in many characters and colors, each accompanied by a name and description equally as idiosyncratic as the dolls themselves.
"Ice-Bat comes from an Ice Cave and loves hiding inside ice Chests.
Everything he touches turns to ice...
Ice Bat thinks you are cool and he wants to chill with you.
He wants to hang out with you... or just hang upsidedown, if that's OK with you..."
All in all, it is this combination of idiosyncracy, simpleness, and weirdness that makes Uglydolls my favorite toy in recent memory.
3. Todd Hido's Homes at Night
Todd Hido's series of photographs of homes at night is beautifully haunting and lonely. Hido's houses range geographically, seasonally, and architecturally, however all share a common photographic aesthetic. The color photographs contrast the warmth of light from inside the house (almost all Hido's houses have a light or two on inside) with the often foggy, cold, or murky exterior where we stand looking. Always devoid of people, Hido's work nonetheless strongly suggests their presence just behind the curtains, and this voyeuristic sense heightens the dynamic of loneliness we feel. Indeed this feeling is very real, as Hido works by driving through neighborhoods at night looking at and photographing strangers houses. When I first saw Hido's work I felt as if I was looking at the exact picture I wanted to take but hadn't yet figured out how to, and Hido's work has since had a strong influence on my own photography.
4. The Whorfian Hypothesis
The Whorfian hypothesis postulates the systematic and profound influence of language over thought. What or how one thinks is wholly determined by their language. This is the extreme end of the spectrum of thinking on language's influence on thought, more moderate views formulate questions for research such as "when and in what ways do linguistic categories shape thought?". There is a sizable body of psychology research showing the influences language has. For example, the negative effect of lack of a recursive counting system upon ability to distinguish between even small numbers such as 5 and 6, as well as the negative impact of verbal recall of perceptual memories such as eyewitness accounts of perpetrator faces. Without going into more specific details, the supported premise that the language we speak actually has a significant impact on the way we think (even when not thinking for speaking) is at once hard to comprehend-- since the task of separating out ingrained language patterns is nearly impossible-- and amazing in its implications for all different fields and cultural relations.
5. Tronic Studio
Tronic is a computer animation/design studio in NYC I worked at last spring and summer. Working in broadcast, film, print, internet, and the environment, Tronic seeks to merge the overlapping boundaries of these varied mediums and use them to arrive at more creative solutions. Recent work includes spots for Sony, Diesel, Oracle, Discovery, and Samsung. I think Tronic's work is very interesting especially in its fusing of architectural knowledge into 3-d animation which creates a stronger structural feel to the work absent in some other computer graphics. The founders of Tronic in fact went to graduate school for architecture, and computer animation grew out of that. Additionally, Tronic was only founded in 2001 and as an 8 year old company has already found a niche in the business, which I think interesting in terms of finding a way to find success as an artist in the greater world.
www.tronicstudio.com
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