On this Remembrance Day, I thought I would show you have some of the artifacts of weaponry and warfare can actually be re-imagined as something useful, and dare I say, beautiful. Estonian artist Mati Karmin and his company MarineMine have taken salvaged cases of WWII era Russian anti-submarine mines and created everything from functioning fireplaces, to tables, armchairs, beds to sculptural pieces like his 'toy' baby carriage (complete with grenades instead of rattles).
These sorts of mines were in fact very common. I know from doing marine fieldwork offshore western Canada that we in this country dumped our own on the seabed (at a time when people never imagined that future generations would do anything at those sorts of depths and the scientists and even fishers to whom these are now a real hazard). The ones used in these sculptures and furniture were not deployed at sea, but stored in warehouses in full working order, on an island in Gulf of Finland, for decades. The Soviet army finally removed and destroyed the explosives in the early 1990s, leaving the amazing vessels behind. Karmin has seen the beauty in the cases and had the imagination to put them to better use.
Earlier this week was the 50th anniversary of the first manned dive to the deepest point on Earth: the Marianas Trench, south of Japan, near Guam, along the edge of the Philipine Basin. Wired magazine posted this wonderful, animated documentary. They credit the interview to Victor Ozols, and video to Roman Wolter. Featuring the audio recording of an interview with Jacques Piccard, who made the dive, the stylish animation never sacrifices science substance for aesthetics. Information is clearly and elegantly portrayed in illustrations, sufficiently schematic to be easily absorbed, yet really lovely and engaging. If all science museum exhibits were this good, I'd never escape the museum.
Also, I am reminded once again how much I want to go to the seafloor. I was once on a research cruise aboard the R/V Atlantis and got to seeALVIN, but sadly, no dives were included during that trip.
The entire, award-winning, steampunk short film The Anachronism by Matthew Gordon Long has been released on vimeo. It has intrepid Victorian, amateur-biologist children, printmaking specimens and discovering a ship-wrecked robotic squid submarine, which are pretty much a list of my favorite things, in a setting I recognized instantly as Canada's west coast, my former home. What little I caught of the Japanese was disconcerting. The story telling is perfect, right down to the things left untold.
On a sun dappled summer day a science expedition propels two children toward an enigmatic encounter at the edge of their known world. Arriving on an isolated beach, they stumble upon the shipwreck of a robotic squid submarine. The secret it holds within changes their lives forever.
The Anachronism is a Steampunk science-fiction short set in the late nineteenth century. Unfolding with the simplicity of a children's storybook, this lush journey through the landscapes of Canada's West Coast draws inspiration from a whimsical juxtaposition of Pacific Rim cultural references to elaborate an elegant meditation on the courage of curiosity and the haunting effect of childhood trauma. In 2009 the film won six Leo Awards including Best Short Drama.
