Art of the State @lukelosey2 - Tumblr Blog

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lukelosey2

A murder of crows

#the boy in the oak Lukelosey

lukelosey2

Mercury Rev Nite and Fog video. We shot this in Epping forest in the summertime. One of my favourites, Jonathan was delightfully eccentric, we worked together on the ideas that bind this together. Shot by Denzel Armour Brown.

#lukelosey

jamesjheath

The Fitzroy - Gas Masks at the ready!

lukelosey2

Subject 8 is a film i am working with Dresden pictures, it started life as an idea i had about child stars and how adults live vicariously through them. Justin Villiers has written a feature treatment for it and we are just putting together mood boards and vision statements for it.

Subject 8 is a metaphysical love story about forbidden love between Anton, a peasant boy gifted in sleight of hand and Lilya ‘Subject 8’- spoilt glacial beauty and star pupil of the mysterious but decaying ‘Leningrad institute for psychic research’. The institute itself is mysterious but in decline, its strange studies and experiments overseen by the ambitious Professor Vladimir Bakhtin. Set during the economic stagnation of 1970’s Soviet Russia. It interweaves the raw emotional life of a dystopian world with the enchantments and terrors of a magical one. Vivid, edgy, darkly comic and resonant with enchantment, blurring the lines between the familiar and the unknown, hope and despair.

Subject 8 has universal themes and an unusual backdrop. The story presents like a fairytale, a quest narrative and rite a of passage adventure. It moves us away from everyday realism into a fantastical and often surreal world; Anton is the boy with a quest, the institute like a remote and reclusive earldom dominated by an impotent king (Bakhtin) and Lilya the unmoored and dislocated peacock in the gilded cage. This combined with the backdrop of a failing psychic research centre) all add up to something narratively and visually unique.

The stories historical backdrop weaves a cold war conspiracy with cultural elements of 1970’s Soviet Russia.The architecture, iconography, fashions and graphic language of the period, the unstoppable global trends of the time - fashion, music and art from the west all blending into an already established visual language within the Soviet identity. The look of the film will make much use of this by injecting our own brand of retro futurism into the production design. Influenced by the like’s of Brazil, Delicatessen, Metropolis, Mad men and Tarkvosky’s Solaris.

The institute is presented as a decaying vision of how the future looked from 1960 when it was shiny and new. The staff running this ghost ship have little to do. Nothing works properly and nobody really cares, the once nobel causes of science and metaphysics lost on all but a handful of the loyal but apathetic staff. Severe deficits have turned it into a thrifty squirrel hoarding environment, watched over by water damaged pictures of Soviet leaders and self referential images of its heyday. Everything with a semi-practical function is put to use. The once bright colour coding is now flaking, an obsession with wallpaper creates a patchwork of dreary ill matching hues amongst an absurd cemetery of clutter. Antiquated technology of all kinds fills dirty labs, cracked bakelite exchanges, dusty reel to reel’s and brain machines are attached to hand cranked mechanical arms. Strobe lights flicker behind closed doors, endless equations fill blackboards. Sporadic radio announcements crackle incomprehensibly through grand but audibly hopeless speakers. Furniture is arranged by bored workers using a hotch potch system that calculates the optimal ratio of the furniture’s height versus width, as adjusted to the average human height, rendering comfort obsolete. Pools of water gather in dark corners, patches of darkness line the once bright corridors, unused wings and an overgrown garden stand testament to its once colossal status.

#subject 8 #lukelosey #dresden pictures #james heath #justin viliers

The Box with Tilda Swinton, music by Orbital

#lukelosey #tilda swinton #orbital

The nature of art and motion by Gyorgy Kepes

The inescapable attribute of our time is its runaway pace. Tidal waves of traffic pound us; sprawling cities and exploding populations squeeze us. Wildly erratic migrations, the daily shuttle from home to work, from work to home, the weekend surge from city to country and from country to city, the punctuations of of rush hour deadlocks toss us in accelerating rhythm barely within our control. Streams of speeding objects, data flow, intercontinental missiles, diseases, radio waves, satellites and GPS. Weaving a rapidly changing fabric all around us with spiraling velocities. At night the reassuring calm of the firmament is blotted out by our cities, which are transformed into giant circuses where darting headlights, winking traffic lights, glittering, gaudy displays, and advertising signs whirl and swirl and pirouette in frantic competition for our attention. Compulsively, we try to perform faster, produce more, acquire power and possessions that corrupt and corrode us. Our proudest and most potent possessions, without reliable social guidance, become misused. We live under the terrifying shadow of super-inventions, with their much to easy to push buttons. Our privacy, the sanctuary for our imaginative powers, is invaded, not only by the lashing tentacles of this world of motion as the onrushing images of the television screen, but even more by our own frantic restlessness.

#gyorgy kepes #art of the state

Shot beautifully by Jonathan Bloom and animated by Jonathan Charles, we spent about four weeks shooting this in freezing warehouse in Islington, i based it loosely on Metamorphosis - homage to Kafka in the last shots!

#lukelosey #orbital