Guiron’s most prominent feature is his knife-shaped head, which is 100 times harder than diamond and is packed with shuriken-like stars that can be fired from a pair of openings above the eyes. The creature has 360-degree radar vision, 60 times more teeth than a piranha, lungs adapted for long-distance space travel, sac-like organs for storing energy and uranium, balloon-like organs in the legs that blast jets of liquid through the feet, webbed fins for stability in water, and magnetic suction cups on the hands.

Michael Kenna, White Squares, 1987.

Hausu cast eating a Hausu cake.

My Boyfriend is Type B is a South Korean romantic comedy film from the year 2005. The basic premise of the film comes from the Japanese blood type theory of personality, which claims that a person’s blood type can determine their personality traits. The heroine is type A (conservative and introverted) while her love interest is type B (passionate and irresponsible). –Wikipedia

A new collection of cassette-only reissues from Merzbow have been released by Blossoming Noise. These recordings were made in 1981, 1982, and 1988.

Group portrait of the Experimental Workshop.

Men’s fashion blog favorite, Take Ivy, is being reprinted this summer by powerHouse. Amazon has it up for pre-order now for less than twenty bucks, which definitely beats paying $449 on eBay.

Kiyoji Otsuji, Pitiful Object, 1949
Gelatin silver print, 35.3 x 27.6 cm

Hideko Fukushima, Untitled, 1955
Ink, acrylic on paper, 33.3 x 30.6 cm

To round out the CTG posts for the day, here’s a photograph of the group from the catalog to the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition. Left to right: Koji Fujino, Masao Kohmura, Kunio Yamanaka, Haruki Tsuchiya, Makoto Ohtake.

Running Cola is Africa!, 1968
Idea: Masao Kohmura, Program: Koji Fujino

See more work by the Computer Technique Group in Kohmura’s set on flickr.

Computer Technique Group (CTG), Return to a Square, 1969

The Computer Technique Group was a Japanese collective of art and engineering students founded by Masao Kohmura and Haruki Tsuchiya in the late 60’s and partially funded by the IBM Scientific Data Center.

The CTG Manifesto, from 1966 explains:

CTG is an active think tank that takes advantage of well developed electronic computer systems and makes them serve the needs of human beings. We, the post-war generation, have been exploring our place in machine society for all our born days. Living without machines is attractive in its own way in our dreadful age but it is regressive evolution back towards apes, and is different from the creative evolution we are aiming for.
We will tame the computer’s appealing transcendental charm and restrain it from serving established power. This stance is the way to solve complicated problems in the machine society.
We do not praise machine civilization, nor do we criticise it. By a strategic collaboration with artists, scientists and other creative people from a wide variety of backgrounds, we will deliberate carefully the relationships between human beings and machines, and how we should live in the computer age.

They were a bit more business savvy than the average sixties artist collective, operating as a multi-faceted creative and analytical technology studio:

[The CTG] opened up an office in downtown Tokyo and aimed to have two kinds of activities. As a design office, it managed graphic design works and sold art works to galleries. In parallel, it was a think tank with expertise in computer analysis. CTG members often appeared in journals and on TV. Unanimous agreement was a CTG rule and the creative staff for each work were nominated following discussion and copyright is still reserved by all the members even now.

The group was part of several important computer/media art shows of the era, including Cybernetic Serendipity and the Venice Biennale of 1970. However, by that time the CTG had disbanded. Haruki Tsuchiya’s explained this in the groups final pamphlet, Goodbye Computer Art!:

My primary interest is in ascertaining the significance of art for human beings and how it is being realised in our society. This may be an exaggeration, but I say that computer art is a revolt against the whole of technology…. Today, new relationships between engineers and artists are expected for computer art. It has become a thing of the past for me.

The best source of information on the CTG is a 2007 article from The Bulletin of Computer Arts Society, which examines the group and Kohmura’s post-CTG activity. There is a pdf available online.

A still from House.

A poster by Sam Smith for Nobuhiko Obayahshi’s 1977 film House. A new 35mm print is currently making the rounds in the USA, courtesy of Janus. Here is a list of screenings.

From the NY Times review:

The yelps you’ll hear and possibly emit, though, will be of surprise and delight, not terror. “House,” which turns on a misbegotten, increasingly violent trip taken by seven teenage girls, is not in the least scary, despite its body count and gore. If the hairs on your neck snap to attention, it will be only because of Mr. Obayashi’s flamboyant visual style, his comic flights of fancy and genre manipulations. This might be about a haunted house, but it’s the film that is more truly possessed: in one scene a piano bites off the fingers of a musician tickling its keys; in another a severed head tries to take a bite out of a girl’s rear, snapping at the derrière as if it were an apple. Later a roomful of futons goes on the attack.

View the trailer here.