A piece inspired by Theodor Adorno’s and John Maus’ teachings (using Maus as a model).

As colorfully attractive Normality looks at the first sight, it’s a very limited state of mind, resulting in the death of the person’s progress. On the piece, Society on the left, and Authority on the right, both safely situated on the well-defined terrain, keep the person imprisoned to Normality (and therefore his intellectual death). Masterfully, they also keep him tied down, blind of all the possibilities on his back, which are as endless as the Universe itself.

Title: “Normality is Death” (Theodor Adorno)
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for a larger, 24″x36″ printable version.

Not a great photo-montage, I was just having fun.

Title: “…and They Lived happily ever after”
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for a larger, printable version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.

My second unofficial music video for John Maus. This one is animation too, but abstract-geometric instead. Made me realize the many limitations of Sony Vegas Pro when it comes to animation (I’m moving to After Effects).

If the Vimeo 1080p version is too slow for you, you can try 720p on YouTube.

As some of you might have heard, the Neo-Nazi party in Greece got 7% in the recent elections. Soon enough the party showed its true colors by demanding “respect” and “discipline” from all. A laughable situation of course, but all this got me thinking about the Nazi’s nemesis, the Anarchists.

While both groups have demonstrated their share of violence, not all Anarchists are violent (something that’s rarely true for neo-Nazis though). There are a lot of Anarchists who are into Anarchism for their simple wish of having their community ran by its Free People, who believe in the basic ideology behind Anarchism (minimized or no government/police/currency), and they don’t go out of their way to burn cars or beat others.

While Anarchism can’t work as it stands right now, I do believe that it’s an ideology that we should be trying to approach as much as we can. It’s about liberty and freedom, ideals that I believe everyone should be fighting for. But ultimately, it’s about trust. Anarchism trusts the human being to be self-governable and fair to all of its dealings, while Nazism doesn’t. Nazism feels that humans can’t be trusted to do anything right, hence requiring draconian laws, government, police, and military to keep everyone in check.

As with everything, the truth is somewhere in the middle. Some humans can be trusted, some can’t, while most humans can be trusted for some things, but not for other things. But definitely we can’t condemn all the citizens to Nazism just because of some bad eggs. Which is why I believe that politically, a centrist-liberal position that yields towards Social-Anarchism is the best approach for our times. Maybe when society is more mature (or more connected via technological means), a more solid step towards Freedom can be attempted. But no matter what, the Nazi ideology has no place in the modern world.

This is my favorite collage from the ones I made so far. Not only because of the final result, but also because I paid a lot more attention on the technical merit of the collage. I worked on it all day, I forgot to even eat and drink (I got dehydrated).

The idea came to me in a dream 2-3 nights ago. For those who didn’t get any clues by checking the picture, this is Alice, of “Alice in Wonderland” fame. Only, it’s a very twisted version of the famous book. Look at the objects carefully and think of what (or who) they could represent!

The collage could be interpreted in various ways: not only as Alice winning the Queen, but also thinking hard if she should replace her as the new Evil Queen! Or, for those who never read the book, this could be some poor Alice in the modern world, pondering if she should wear the outfit, and… I’ll leave the interpretation open on this one.

Title: “Alice’s Choice”
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for a larger, printable version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.

A magazine illustration-type collage.

Title: “Split Opinion”
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for a larger, printable version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.

I’m getting the hang of the “common” collage style, as found on hipster blogs. It’s actually easy to do collages in that style. It’s the Julien Pacaud style (retro-futuristic story-based surrealism) that’s almost impossible to replicate…

Title: “Summer Dreams”
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for a larger, printable version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.

A more traditionally-styled collage. I think I started this collage hobby by trying to say too much, and it mostly ended up convoluted or cheesy. So I’m going simpler, with a style that’s more common, as found on various blogs. This took me only an hour to complete, compared to my older collages, that took anywhere between 4 and 8 hours.

Title: “Tiger Marines”
License: Creative Commons BY-SA-NC 3.0/US. Click for a larger, printable version. Credits in the EXIF metadata.