Rotwang art

The great technologist C.A. Rotwang is with little doubt the most interesting character from Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis (1927). He has the most complex motivation and the deepest backstory of all the characters therein, and unsurprisingly he’s a principle literary hero for this site, celebrated with his own commissioned image. The coming-to-be moment of his creation, the Maschinenmensch, appears at the top of every page here. So I’m delighted to be able to link to a post of Rotwang concept art by Nathan Heigert.

If you’re a fan of this theme, it’s worth checking out the entire post and indeed, Heigert’s entire blog of Metropolis art.

New art for Erotic Mad Science

You might have noticed a few minor design changes here at EroticMadScience lately, as I’ve decided to go a level or so deeper in indulging my inner weirdness and commission art with an appropriate mad science theme. (It’s always a good day, really, when you can spare something that’s merely money and get art in exchange.) Most readily recognizable (since she now appears in the header bar as a sort of presiding spirit for the site) is this:

(Image above Creative Commons licensed.)

Yes, it’s the Maschinenmensch from Fritz Lang‘s Metropolis, at a critical moment in her transformation into a virtual Maria. Albeit done a little more explicitly than might have been possible for the big screen in 1927.

The artist who created this image is Hugo Araújo, working for Glass House Graphics. [Faustus May 11, 2018: The original link for Hugo is dead, but there is a modest gallery of his work to be found here, and he has a blog here and a DeviantArt site here.] And I must say, if you ever want to do bespoke fantasy art of your own, I can recommend these folks highly. They’re creative and they’re fun and a joy to work with.

Of course, where would robot Maria be without her mad scientist creator, also rendered for me by Hugo:

(Image above Creative Commons licensed.)

Rotwang, that very image of the mad scientist. I really like what Hugo’s done with all those glowing tubes.

I hope you enjoy these images. I might commission more in the future.

Welcome

Welcome to all and sundry. I am your host; kindly call me Dr. Faustus.

Do cheesy science fiction movies do something for you? Would you go (or have you ever gone) to see a midnight performance of Invasion of the Bee Girls? Have you ever shared the monster’s point of view in Creature from the Black Lagoon? Did you find it at least mildly titillating Virginia Bruce was (theoretically) running around without any clothes on in the 1940 film The Invisible Woman? Have you ever thought perhaps that H.P. Lovecraft might even cooler if he weren’t so damn sex-negative? Do you infer a line of artistic influence from Katsushika Hokusai to Toshio Maeda? Do you think it would be sexier to be Victor Frankenstein than Elvis?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then perhaps this site is for you.

This is the formal opening post at EroticMadScience.com, a site which I am intially opening as an experiment in the self-publication of some of my own fiction and my musings on a peculiar topic, to wit the topos of “mad science” or the “Mad Scientist”

as a source of kink.

If you want a detailed account of what this is and why I am doing it, I invite you to look at The Thaumatophile Manifesto, which I lay all this out in detail. And if you just want to jump in and see the kink in action, take a look at The Apsinthion Protocol, which is the first of seven long stories in my “Gnosis College” mad science series. It is written as a screenplay, because that’s the way things play out in my head.

More things will be coming here in the future: I’ll try to explain the various literary (?) antecedents of my fiction as well as provide people who find the erotic mad science thing appealing suggestions for future reading and viewing. In the future, I hope to offer a forum for people interested in what is going on here.

I feel great excitement at starting this site. As I was planning it, an aphorism of Nietzsche‘s from Beyond Good and Evil came to mind.

Die grossen Epochen unsres Lebens liegen dort, wo wir den Muthgewinnen, unser Böses als unser Bestes umzutaufen.

Jenseits von Gut und Böse, #116

The great epochs in our lives come when we find the courage to rebaptize our our evil (this being Nietzsche, perhaps that should be implicitly read as our “evil”) as what is best in us. I guess today is just one of those days.

Comments on this an other posts will be welcome, subject of course to moderation (see the Manifesto for more detail on what might or might not be appropriate here).

So perhaps I shouldn’t say just welcome to all and sundry. Instead, welcome friends.