ulises studio's digital images stage hypnotic procession of golf carts tracing invisible lines
Curious Conformity, the latest digital work by Ulises studio, meditates on repetition, order, and quiet resistance. The studio presents a series of looping digital images and videos where white golf carts glide across saturated green fields in perfect, hypnotic formation. Empty of drivers, the vehicles trace silent trajectories in line, a surreal ballet of repetition and quiet coordination that evokes both harmony and unease. The work continues Ulises' exploration of surreal minimalism and speculative worlds, inviting viewers to question the systems we follow and the illusions we live inside. Rendered with the studio's signature digital aesthetic, Curious Conformity places movement at the center of its conceptual inquiry, not as freedom, but as habit. The perfectly looping motions mimic rituals we perform without noticing, drawing attention to the tension between aesthetic satisfaction and philosophical disquiet.
all images by Ulises studio Curious Conformity reflects on structures of routine
The project reflects on deeper structures of routine and alignment, through a guiding statement that serves as its philosophical core: 'In the garden of order, not all harmony is freedom. We follow lines drawn long before us, mistaking movement for meaning. But the perfect path rarely asks questions. Let the loop unsettle you. Let the pattern reveal its silence,' add the designers. Ulises frames the work as a meditation on conformity, not as oppression, but as seduction. In the world of Curious Conformity, the loop is beautiful, the alignment comforting. And yet, beneath the surface, a question lingers: who drew these lines? Why do we follow? With no clear beginning or end, the fields in Curious Conformity become symbolic landscapes of obedience, scenes where progress dissolves into pattern, and calmness conceals control. Drawing from speculative design and digital animation, Ulises studio blurs the lines between visual pleasure and conceptual tension, crafting a work that is as charming as it is quietly subversive. Read More Phaidon's Forthcoming "Mid-Century Modern Designers" Book
white golf carts glide in perfect formation across green fields
the vehicles move without drivers, tracing silent, looping paths
a surreal ballet of repetition and alignment unfolds
loops repeat endlessly, inviting deeper reflection
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Washington Post
5 days ago
- Washington Post
A treasure trove of new books to read during Pride Month
The dazzling variety of current and upcoming books on LGBTQ themes is a reassuring reminder of how far we've come. This year, fans of queer romance can read books set in the worlds of Formula 1 ('Crash Test'), clandestine Victorian clubs ('To Sketch a Scandal') and Italian restaurants ('Pasta Girls'). In July, Phaidon is publishing a lavish survey of global queer art as a companion piece to Jonathan D. Katz's Chicago exhibition 'The First Homosexuals,' while the queer Korean vampire murder mystery 'The Midnight Shift,' by Cheon Seon-Ran, will draw first blood in August. Joe Westmoreland's autofiction classic 'Tramps Like Us,' a sort of gay(er) 'On the Road' first published in 2001, is being reissued. Alison Bechdel is back. There are two new studies, one by Daniel Brook and another by Brandy Schillace, of the groundbreaking LGBTQ advocate and sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, whose books were burned by the Nazis. Phil Melanson's entertaining historical fiction debut, 'Florenzer,' imagines the early life and same-sex longings of Leonardo da Vinci against the backdrop of a conflict between the Medici family and the Vatican. The novel, which owes a debt to Hilary Mantel's 'Wolf Hall' trilogy in the detail and immediacy of its telling, feels freshly contemporary in its papal intrigue and plutocratic power battles. These books — and those I discuss at greater length below — are variously warm, comic, sad, jubilant, curious, violent and erotic. Each has insights of its own to offer, but they're united by their awareness of the continuing vulnerability of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer people. 'Gaysians,' which is 'Flamer' author Mike Curato's first graphic novel for adults, doesn't shy away from violence, racism and transphobia, outside the community or within it. The colors of the trans flag give the book its dominant palette, working especially well for its many nightclub scenes. The story, about a group of young Asian Americans living in Seattle in 2003, is most powerful when Curato unleashes his more expressionistic side to capture different characters' traumatic flashbacks and glimpses of historical tragedy. But this darkness is offset by the story's cozy, reassuring focus on friendship and found family. Some may find Curato leaning too heavily on sentimentality — his 'gaysians' give themselves the cutesy name 'The Boy Luck Club,' riffing on Amy Tan's novel 'The Joy Luck Club,' and speak mostly in catty clichés, as if auditioning for 'Drag Race.' For me, this mawkish tendency stunted the book's emotional range. One of the most curious books of the season comes from 'the emerging field of queer ecology.' In 'Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature,' Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian makes a powerful case for trying to understand nature without the artificial binaries and hierarchies of human societies. Though she is, by training, a mycologist — a fungi specialist — she embraces all life forms, a disposition derived from her understanding of diversity being nature's 'very premise.' Sometimes this embrace borders on the erotic; one might well blush reading how, 'turgid with spring rains, mushrooms carefully arrange themselves into fruiting bodies, poking up through the soil to disperse their spores.' True to its nonbinary ethos, the book is really many things: an account of growing up in New York's Hudson Valley surrounded by snakes and slugs; a survivor's memoir about the path to healing following a childhood sexual assault; a story about growing to love one's own 'ambiguous,' 'amorphous,' 'amphibious' nature. It can sometimes feel a bit more like a manifesto than a work of science — 'How we treat swamps is an indicator of our societal health' is a typical assertion — but the radical-green politics are all part of the book's charm. And while Kaishian's inclination to romanticism occasionally threatens to undermine her mission as a scientist, as it does when she claims she'd prefer the mysteries of eel reproduction to remain outside human knowledge, it's nevertheless a fascinating book that celebrates difference in unexpected ways. I certainly know more about snail sexuality than I did before I opened it. One of the summer's most hotly anticipated titles is 'Deep House: The Gayest Love Story Ever Told.' Jeremy Atherton Lin's follow-up to 'Gay Bar,' for which he won a National Book Critics Circle Award, is a strong cocktail of memoir, legal history and sociology. He proceeds along parallel tracks to tell the romantic (and very horny) story of his relationship with a British man he met in 1996 and the jagged path taken by American and British legislatures and courts to eventually grant basic rights to people in same-sex relationships. 'We were aliens in each other's countries,' he writes, 'because in our own we remained second-class citizens.' Lin beautifully captures the Bay Area at the turn of the millennium: the creeping gentrification, the tech bros, the video shops, the aging hippies. He's also not shy in his descriptions of sex of many kinds and configurations, with all the attendant sensations. (At times you can almost smell it.) The liberated familiarity of these scenes in our less-prudish age makes it a little jarring when Lin reminds us of the difference a couple of decades make. 'By the year 2000,' he writes, 'when we rented our first weird, damp apartment, eighteen states still had sodomy laws on the books.' He and his boyfriend — who overstayed his visa by years to remain with Lin in California — dreaded immigration authorities so much that they became 'convinced you couldn't go to a hospital without being deported.' 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When James, our sensitive, stammering hero, comes out in 2002, Britain is still a year away from repealing Section 28, a sliver of legislation that effectively quashed discussion of sexuality in England's schools, and he is left feeling like a stranger in the only home he's ever known. While delivering milk bottles one morning before school, he meets Luke, a boy lodging with his aunt and uncle while his dad is in prison. Before long the strong-jawed Luke is all James can think about — but does Luke feel the same way? The book's appeal may depend on its readers' willingness to take adolescent romantic longing as seriously as we do when we're young. It succeeds because Hewitt knows when to stop — he casts a spell, like first love, that he knows can't last forever. Or can it? 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Business Mayor
27-04-2025
- Business Mayor
ulises studio's digital images stage hypnotic procession of golf carts tracing invisible lines
Curious Conformity, the latest digital work by Ulises studio, meditates on repetition, order, and quiet resistance. The studio presents a series of looping digital images and videos where white golf carts glide across saturated green fields in perfect, hypnotic formation. Empty of drivers, the vehicles trace silent trajectories in line, a surreal ballet of repetition and quiet coordination that evokes both harmony and unease. The work continues Ulises' exploration of surreal minimalism and speculative worlds, inviting viewers to question the systems we follow and the illusions we live inside. Rendered with the studio's signature digital aesthetic, Curious Conformity places movement at the center of its conceptual inquiry, not as freedom, but as habit. The perfectly looping motions mimic rituals we perform without noticing, drawing attention to the tension between aesthetic satisfaction and philosophical disquiet. all images by Ulises studio Curious Conformity reflects on structures of routine The project reflects on deeper structures of routine and alignment, through a guiding statement that serves as its philosophical core: 'In the garden of order, not all harmony is freedom. We follow lines drawn long before us, mistaking movement for meaning. But the perfect path rarely asks questions. Let the loop unsettle you. Let the pattern reveal its silence,' add the designers. Ulises frames the work as a meditation on conformity, not as oppression, but as seduction. In the world of Curious Conformity, the loop is beautiful, the alignment comforting. And yet, beneath the surface, a question lingers: who drew these lines? Why do we follow? With no clear beginning or end, the fields in Curious Conformity become symbolic landscapes of obedience, scenes where progress dissolves into pattern, and calmness conceals control. Drawing from speculative design and digital animation, Ulises studio blurs the lines between visual pleasure and conceptual tension, crafting a work that is as charming as it is quietly subversive. Read More Phaidon's Forthcoming "Mid-Century Modern Designers" Book white golf carts glide in perfect formation across green fields the vehicles move without drivers, tracing silent, looping paths a surreal ballet of repetition and alignment unfolds loops repeat endlessly, inviting deeper reflection READ SOURCE
Forbes
27-03-2025
- Forbes
Phaidon ‘Defining Style' Book Offers Singular Look Into An Array Of Interior Possibilities
Pop art, street art, recurring curious characters and motifs, and a blend of traditional Japanese art and contemporary pop culture and anime, co-exist in a colorful array of hundreds of collectible figures. The playful cast — created by artists such as Kenny Scharf, Ron English, Matt Gondek, KAWS, and Takashi Murakami — is carefully curated and displayed on shelves or mischievously placed on an eclectic selection of sofas, chairs, and rugs, that delight our inner art-loving child. Mixed-media artist Móyòsóré 'Moyo' Martins invites us into his 3,00-plus-square-foot studio in Mott Haven, Queens, replete with framed prints and his own inimitable large-scale paintings that convey complex narratives that look to his family's legacy in his native Lagos, Nigeria, his ongoing artistic journey which has taken him to world-leading auction houses and European galleries, and the future of art and humanity. 'The figures are representations of childhood and evoke nostalgic memories,' says Martins. Martins' inimitable inside peek is among 150 residential interiors from leading designers and artists around the world featured in Defining Style: The Book of Interior Design, a tour through 25 design styles. The 296-page hardback book with 260 illustrations published by Phaidon is available for $69.95. For design geeks and folks who enjoy creative interiors and seek to learn more, this book chronicles a wide range of styles from modernist and minimalist to biophilic (which strives to bring the outdoors into homes, creating a sense of harmony between the built environment and the natural world) and textured (utilizing various textures to evoke different moods). Organized alphabetically by style, Defining Style showcases rooms from designers such as Pamela Shamshiri, Lorenzo Castillo, Laura Gonzalez, and Vincenzo De Cotiis, and welcomes us into the homes of musicians Alicia Keys and Swizz Beats, artist Mariko Mori, and writer Umberto Pasti, revealing how personality and tastes can influence personal space. Author Joan Barzilay Freund opens each chapter with introductory text describing characteristics of each style, empowering readers to identify and implement featured design elements in their homes. 'Wow, it's just so amazing to be in a room with all of you. I've been writing about you, and you've sprung to life right here. So it's really exciting. I want to start by thanking Alex and Michael Schuman. I can't think of a more beautiful place to celebrate design and style and art and beauty and these lovely rooms. So we are here to talk about defining style. The room above us is featured in the book. … and it really does encapsulate the kind of magic that happens when a designer, in this case, Jeffrey Bilhuber, meets the public clients, Alex and Michael, who are the most discerning people, and just something beautiful happens,' Freund said at a March 5 launch event at the Moroccan-flared New York townhouse of Alexandra and Michael Shuman, co-sponsored by Phaidon, online luxury marketplace 1stDibs, and fine art management services company UOVO. 'So thank you to all the designers and photographers and artists who are here tonight. Thank you for contributing your work. This is about you. This is your book. This is very much your moment.' 'This book offers an antidote to that more passive way of looking and offers an opportunity for context,' Asad Skyrett, former editor-in-chief of Elle Decor writes in the introduction. 'Under the direction of a gifted designer, a room's decor speaks its intention clearly.' The book's textural paper cover, replete with a debossed foil type and a color wheel referencing a particular color assigned to each style within the book, underscores the goal of informing and engaging and informing readers. Take a dose of maximalism on 1980s steroids with architect and designer Sig Bergamin, whose brazen Brazilian style that's true to his mantra, 'mix, mix, mix,' color, pattern, and provenance. Or indulge in the dreamy elegance of London-based multidisciplinary artist Faye Toogood's collector's flat, engaging with her with exploration of materiality and experimentation. Whether it's inspired by one design spread, or an amalgam of many, you'll find your style with Phaidon. Rising Master-Painter Móyòsóré Martins Takes Europe By Storm With Concurrent Exhibitions In Geneva And ParisMóyòsóré Martins Solo Show Celebrates A 'Better Painter Than Basquiat', Renowned Art Expert Declares
