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| WhiteflameK
WhiteflameK
βοΈ
[10836809]
[2009-06-24 02:24:56 +0000 UTC]
"Nightmare Machine"
(United States)
# Statistics
Favourites: 172; Deviations: 58; Watchers: 1222
Watching: 87; Pageviews: 116560; Comments Made: 73; Friends: 87
# Interests
Favorite visual artist: H.R. Giger, GryfFavorite bands / musical artists: Carpenter Brut, Garmarna, Moddi, Philip Glass, John Cage
Favorite books: "The Animal That Therefore I Am", "Metamorphoses", "History of Madness", "Diogenes of Sinope: The Man in the Tub", "The Companion Species Manifesto"
Favorite writers: Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Patricia MacCormack, Marc Bekoff, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Donna Haraway
Tools of the Trade: GIMP, Fantamorph, Ardour5, Audacity
# About me
Artists explaining their artwork is often overly pedantic, inaccurate and pretentious at best. But, since what I do is very odd for most people, I think it is worth explaining a little. It's a bit wordy and "iamverysmart", but bear with me for a moment.I have an interest in body horror and mutation, particularly the distorted midpoints between species, the disturbing and uncanny. My art depicts human bodies being transformed into other things, whether other animals or other objects, focusing on the surreal physiology and psychological horror of such a change. Transformation Art (often shortened to TF) is itself a community that explores the self's relation to the nonhuman and fetishizes the idea of change, hybridity and becoming other.
The idea of transformation is ancient and pervades folklore and mythology throughout the world. Likely, the ideas were attempts at understanding the relation between the human and the natural world, or perhaps, as Steve Baker poses in "Picturing the Beast", suppressing behaviors, traits, ideas, and relations to the animal that were considered "uncivilized" in order to pose the human as distinct from the animal/nature (a distinction that ultimately fails because the human is an animal whose basic psychology is that of an animal). The project of civilization distinguishing itself from nature in philosophy took a dark and brutal turn with the advent of the early asylum (which was little more than a prison for political and social undesirables) and the effort to suppress "the uncivilized", which provided tools for torturing and maiming anyone that questioned the distinction between man and animal. Even in contemporary society, these ideas are taboo and go unexplored. The "properly human" can only be maintained through the punishment, suppression and antagonism against the "improper", the "inhuman". This was the modus operandi of civilization into the modern era. You can read more about this analysis of the history of human identity in "How to Make a Human: Animals & Violence in the Middle Ages" by Karl Steel.
What has always fascinated me is digging up the uncanny and twisted ideas presented by shapeshifting: presenting exactly the sorts of ideas that we attempt to hide from ourselves, that we are material bodies, that we are animals, that we have instincts and behaviors that go against "proper social mores", that we are deluding ourselves when we consider ourselves civilized (a facade we maintain by cordoning off how society thrives on brutalizing people, animals, and the natural world). This often induces horror and discomfort. The fact that it is fetishistic is given because it is a primal rebellion against the conditioned self-suppression of so-called "civil society".
If interested learning more about this particular kind of horror, I recommend reading psychoanalytic philosopher Julia Kristeva's "Powers of Horror" which defines and discusses the concept of "abjection" in the experience and feeling of horror. You can find an introduction to the notion here: www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theβ¦
"The abject marks what Kristeva terms a "primal repression," one that precedes the establishment of the subject's relation to its objects of desire and of representation, before even the establishment of the opposition, conscious/unconscious. Kristeva refers, instead, to the moment in our psychosexual development when we established a border or separation between human and animal, between culture and that which preceded it. On the level of archaic memory, Kristeva refers to the primitive effort to separate ourselves from the animal: "by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder""
Body horror itself accomplishes this, and it is perhaps why we find it horrific in the first place. But depicting the human body changing fluidly or grotesquely into other forms, especially animal forms, brings these presuppositions about culture, selfhood, and identity into play, raising questions about who and what we are and if we are at all distinct. The potential horror and revulsion comes from images that run up against our buried assumptions about human life and make us examine what we have implicitly and unconsciously accepted about ourselves, such as ideas that "we are essentially human" or that "we always are the same person from one moment to the next". While most people will probably find transformation art unusual or off-putting, the TF community finds it to be quite appealing, precisely because they have come to terms with the questions raised and found different answers. This leads to a different perspective, and demonstrates how relative horror is to the perception and way of thinking of the viewer. I, for instance, do not find any of this to be horrific. I have found that some of my favorite horror writers and artists were not horrified by the ideas and events explored by their work, but rather found interest and curiosity piqued or even derived pleasure from the notion. David Cronenberg and Thomas Ligotti come to mind. The enjoyment of horror is another topic altogether, however.
Note that in Kristeva's analysis, the "abject" is humanity marking the animal as a symbol for "sex and murder", not that the animal actually is essentially this. In many ways, the "abject" is a form of cognitive bias. The animal isn't in actuality what human beings use as symbols, nor even is the human animal. But, the use of the animal as a symbol for brutality and wildness enables "civil society" to compartmentalize its own nature so it can present an idealized version of itself that doesn't exist as a structure for regulating and conditioning behavior and ideas from birth, punishing difference and unusual behavior arbitrarily by asserting it is essentially inhuman, when such things are inherently human and probably more pervasive than people realize. It also allows civilization to ignore the moral problems that nonhuman animals present when there is no significant moral difference between human and nonhuman for the scope of relevant considerations (i.e. the ability to feel pain, or the ability to love and empathize). Ultimately, our symbolism of the animal creates a distorted picture of ourselves and the animal which leads to unexamined immoral treatment. And so, I particularly enjoy reflecting this distorted picture back upon the human form.
And, at the end of all this, we just are animals, and we owe what is human to being animals.
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I've got a account now!
I have posted a lot of exclusive artwork for my patrons. Your support helps me to continue to create art.
Located here:
# Comments
Comments: 37
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Finay great to see you uploading on here again!
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Hi again. I recently sent a commission request through your email (your regular one). Could you please tell me if you got it or not? It's just a simple yes or no question, easily answerable in the little timeframe you have on DeviantART.
Much appreciated!
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I sent you this on FA but you didn't respond so I'm hoping you're more active over here.
Question, how would you go about doing this effect? i.imgur.com/1Wol7en.png Especially with things like the melting skin, how the animal parts form, how the fur would cover the skin, and the bubbling flesh?
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Also is there a chance you have some timelapses of your photomanipulations somewhere?
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Ahhh, it would appear you're more active on here!
Perhaps I should have asked about that inanimate image on here instead!
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No worries! Send me some images you would like me to use (I don't really mind what pose, as I think it would be more interesting to work with unpredictable variables), just make sure they are high resolution (it is really hard to work with low res images).
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Sorry for the late response, was away from home spending time with my family for Easter. I've noted you.
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Hey, this is some really impressive artwork! Are you still making Tf art? Just curious.
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Thank man, I just took a bit of a break due to a rough patch. I've started working on it again.
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No problem! Glad to hear you are creating more art!
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Thanks for watching!Β You have quite the analysis of transformation artwork.Β I wish I had some half-decent photomanipulation skills, but nope, I do not.
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:-D TY
I saw your pvp game, and I think it is very cool. I actually volunteered some time ago to create some photomanipulated graphics and characters for the original Transformania Time on the tf game site, but I ended up being very short on time. :-/
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Hi, please can y morph my girls in my gallery? You can choose (WG, animal tf, doll tf, AR and diaper tf)
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At the moment, I am pretty much restricted to commissions.
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Thanks kindly for watching me in turn. I didn't think you had a gallery here until recently.
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I had it for awhile but I just started using it :-D
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Would love to do a trade with you sometime. Β
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Oh, sorry I didn't get back to you right away. I have been feeling kind of depressed.
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Don't worry about it!
I'm really sorry to hear about that. You'll work your way through it; I know you will.
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