The exploded bust of Ferdinand Marcos
At the height of his power in the 1970’s former president/dictator of the Philippines Ferdinand E. Marcos commissioned the construction of a 99-foot concrete bust in own image, situated on a cliff overlooking the South China Sea around 130 km North of Manila. In 2002 it was torn apart in an explosion, the eyes, forehead and cheeks blown to bits- suspects included left-wing activists, members of a local tribe – or possibly looters hunting for one of Marcos’ legendary treasure troves. The bust was completed in the early 1980s when Mr Marcos was still in power, but fell into disrepair …
Painting the Ruins of NYC
Cities can be destroyed at the click of a mouse button. The ruins of New York are nothing new, we’ve seen them in countless movies as the stunning backdrop to end of the world tales. But how hard are these images to make? For film they typically do it with computers, and frame-by-frame paint what they want. Here I take a lesson in that kind of frame-by-frame painting- with just one cell. This is my first effort at destructing a city through Photoshop. I followed an indepth tutorial online here, and if you go to check that out you’ll notice …
Ruins of Tokyo’s Apocalypse
Tokyo has been ravaged. It was meteors or earthquakes, tsunami or nuclear holocaust, though the cause hardly matters- no one’s left alive to remember it anyway. The apocalypse came and killed everyone, leaving only bits of our cities behind. Tokyo Genso is the site of a Japanese game artist who is passionate about the apocalypse. His site features huge amounts of his often excellent art, occasionally describing his destructing technique, and show-casing his work in magazines like ‘Liberal Time’ and at otaku conventions. He takes photos around Tokyo, and via Photoshop kills all the people and ages the city through …
The mist-wreathed ruin of Matsuo mine
Matsuo mine in the north of Japan opened in 1914 and closed in 1969. In its heyday it was the biggest mine for sulfur in the Eastern world. It had a workforce of 4,000 and a wider population of 15,000, all of whom were accommodated in a make-shift city in the mountains of Hachimantai park. The city was known as the ‘paradise above the clouds’ for its comparatively luxurious apartment blocks and near-constant ebb and flow of mist. That same mist nearly prevented us from finding the place at all.