H. R. Giger and the Biomechanical Soul

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow
your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb, and my name
is Christian Sager. Robert, When did you first encounter the

(00:23):
work of hr Geeker? He must have been adolescent younger,
Oh man, it would have been when I saw the
Alien movies, or at least began to pick up on
their existence. Uh. And I don't remember in what order
I saw them. I think I might have actually seen
Aliens first, like on TV, yeah, before moving into almost positive.
That was the same experience I had, was I saw

(00:46):
Aliens before I saw Alien, but probably saw both before
I was like, I don't know, twelve or thirteen years old,
but like, uh, I also always thought of him as
that guy like you would go to the mall and
there would be like precursors to hot topic where like
they would have like t shirts or posters and stuff
with hr geegers art on them, And that was just

(01:08):
something I always thought of, like kind of industrial kids
loved that stuff. They would be like these big hr
Geeger kind of tapestries that you could get for your
room or something like that. The other big memory I
have of of learning about Giger is that I would
go to bookstores a lot, especially with my dad, and
he would he would go to the history section and
look around, and I'd really get into looking at horror

(01:31):
books and sci fi and fantasy. And then I would
also check out the the art and photography section, and
there was all sorts of weird and interesting things to
discover their, including Geeger. You'd beend up picking up, you know,
a copy I don't remember if they had a copy
of I feel like a Barnes and Noble and Huntsville,
Alabama had a copy of Necronomicon, which was is one

(01:52):
of his books that was just filled with all of
these these designs that would lead to aliens, but they're
so surreal, they're and uh and and engage all of
this uh this, these these obscene and uh and beautiful
and alien themes in them. Um And as a as
a young kid, you're looking at it and you just
don't even know what to think about it. No, absolutely,

(02:14):
I was looking over the notes before we came in here,
and I realized that when I first saw his artwork,
it made me feel like it was something I wasn't
supposed to be looking at it made me feel shameful
because I was a kid and it was probably that
point in my life where it was like like if
you saw like another person naked, you were like, oh,
I'm terrible, I'm a bad person, you know, like uh,

(02:38):
And Geeger's art felt like that somehow, maybe that's uniquely American.
I wonder if, like the Swiss culture that he came
from had that same kind of puritanical uptightness about nudity. Well,
I think based on some of the material we looked
at here for this episode, that that you saw a
split there and there were those that they were certainly

(02:58):
more you know, buttoned down, and then those who understand
what he was going for. But I also remember in
college getting on the Internet for the first time and
discovering a lot of these these especially fantasy and sci
fi artists, and Giger really stands out from a lot
of them because a lot of the stuff I was
getting into it was still basically you know, like beautiful princess,

(03:22):
beautiful wizard, beautiful barbarian people and then monsters. But but
Geger's stuff was the beauty and the monstrosity all smeared together. Um,
it was challenging. You know, there were there were certain
images that were that were less challenging than others. But
because there's certainly deep gieger out there, there's certain works

(03:43):
that you really have to to puzzle over to figure
out how you feel about them. Um. But yeah, I
always felt like his work was was certainly more more
challenging and maybe maybe in a sense more you know, artistically, um,
relevant than a lot of the stuff that it's often
grouped with. It's funny you use that term challenging because
I think, like I obviously was aware of aliens and

(04:04):
alien but I don't think I knew that he was
a person who did these things until like the Dead
Kennedy's used his artwork for their album Franken Christ and
that was like a big incident where I mean, this
is the like late eighties early nineties in general, but
just Jello Biafra constantly getting into trouble and like going

(04:25):
in and I think that he had to go to
trial over the artwork. Because essentially, this is probably a
good point for us to say, like this might not
be the safest of episodes to listen to with your kids,
but this artwork is just a series of of orifices
and phalluses like filling one another, right, and then there's

(04:45):
a lot of that in his work, but this is
an example where it's far more explicit. And I think, uh,
I think the afra of originally brought it up almost
as a joke, like, well, this should be our album cover,
and then the joke kind of spiraled out of control. Yeah,
and then uh we So we're gonna get to the
point pretty soon here on who hr Gieger is and everything.
But one of the things that we researched for this

(05:07):
episode was this documentary that came out recently called Dark Star.
It's on Netflix right now. It's all about him sort
of in the waning years of his life and his wife.
I want to say, there's a point where she's talking
about the frankln Christ album cover and she said that
that her impression was that the people who wanted a
band thought it was a photo. They didn't realize it

(05:29):
was a painting. And she was like, how would you
possibly arrange all of these people's bodies to be able
to pull this off? Like, if you've seen this, this thing,
it would just be it would be impossible. It would
be like the weirdest game of twister you've ever played. Yes,
oh yeah, and we should probably before we before we
get into it too, we should also say both Robert

(05:50):
and I are fans of Super Egos version comedy version
of hr Gieger, which is done by Matt Gorley, so
we may occasionally uh slip been to that. If you
like Geiger and you've never heard of it, I totally
recommend it. Super Egoes a comedy podcast a couple of
years old now, but that was like one of their
running bits was Matt Gorley doing hr Geeger as if

(06:10):
he had to interact with with very mundanely events like
like what's it like if he goes through McDonald's drive through,
or what's it like when he has to sign paperwork
for his kid to go on a field trip. And
will include some links to the videos related to this
on the landing page for this episode is Stuff to
Blow your Mind dot com. So obviously we're talking about
hr Geiger today, but but I just want to reiterate

(06:32):
why we're talking about Geeker, and I basically comes down
to this, we've pretty much all seen alien or aliens,
or we've seen the imagery from it. Uh, we're at
least all familiar surface level with Geeger's work, and it's
so popular, and it's been so popular in mainstream for
so long, and I say mainstream and just mainstream awareness. Now,

(06:52):
obviously there are different levels of appreciation for Geeger, but
I think it's easy in the midst of all of
this um, this mainstream presence, to forget to lose track
of or even not appreciate like what the man was about,
what his work was about, and what sort of of
legacy it has, especially as we as we move on

(07:15):
through the twenty first century and look back at the
twentieth century, look at this this century. Uh, the Gieger
and his work emerged from. Yeah, this is gonna sound pretentious,
but I going over these notes and reading up on
the real deep psychological look at his work and what
it means and what it kind of brings out in
people who come to it. I can't imagine another artist

(07:40):
right now who is as transgressive as Gieger was, but
was simultaneously evoking the themes of the of the modern age,
you know, like he was really capturing themes of the moment,
but at the same time presenting them in such a
way that they seemed like, like I said, things you
shouldn't be looking at um. I know, I'd love to

(08:01):
hear from the audience if there's somebody out there that
I'm just unaware of. It's like this outsider artist that's
totally doing that. But Gieger maybe it's just because it's
our generation to Giger really captured that for me. Yeah,
I like that you mentioned outsider artist because something that
that definitely came up in the research and comes up
and watching that documentary Dark Star, is that Geeger is

(08:22):
kind of in a class all his own because he
started off, you know, is you know, very much like
a localized artist, and then he starts getting some success
shipping posters off to New York, kind of having some
success as a poster artist, but still he's he's very
much small time and then he just skyrockets to the
top via his involvement in an alien and so he

(08:43):
never is So he was he kind of was a
was an outsider to the entire arts scene for a
very long time really until the last few decades of
his life, because he had kind of skipped over it,
you know, like like a like a rock skimming across
the water. So he was he was not quite an
artist startists, and he was mainstream but also very challenging

(09:04):
and difficult for a lot of people. He also had certain,
uh you know, outsider artists sensibilities, especially in the documentary
when you see his backyard, you know, it reminds you
of some of these you know, classic examples of say
Southern outsider artists who are just creating stuff because they
have to and uh and and there maybe not as
interested in how it matches up to uh, you know,

(09:27):
artistic sensibilities at all. This is going to be the
second time in like two weeks that I've mentioned this
podcast on the show, but it reminded me of S Town.
So without spoiling S Town, the main sort of focus
the protagonist, I guess the character piece that s Town
the podcast is is an artist in a way who
lives kind of in the middle of nowhere and constructs

(09:47):
these crazy things in his basement and in his backyard,
very similar to geeger Um. And there's there's a there's
a question in s Town of whether or not the
like chemicals that he was exposed to over the time
that he was working on his projects may have affected
his mental health. And it was something I absolutely thought
of about Gee, girls, we're watching this and then did

(10:09):
you put it in the notes or did somebody else
mention it to us that there's some thought that because
he spent so much time and enclosed spaces doing airbrushing,
that he might have inhaled a lot of chemicals. I
have heard that, but I couldn't find any official source
that that back that up. So yeah, but he did.
He lived in this wonderland. Uh. And it's if you

(10:33):
haven't seen dark starts fascinating. Let's let's just put it
that way. But this episode is really gonna be us.
We're gonna if you've never heard of geeger before, We're
gonna spend a little bit of time just walking you
through like who this guy was, how his life played out,
and then we're gonna do a dive into the sort
of psychological academic look at his work and how it

(10:54):
represents the human experience. Before we move on, I'm gonna
read a quick quote from Timothy Leary from his intro
to Geegers Alien, which is a book of of his
artwork that he created his commission to create for for Alien,
as well as his thoughts on the filmmaking process Leary says,
and here's my best Leary voice. In doing this, Visionaries
like Geeger overstand too much. They overlook, they oversee, they overstate,

(11:19):
they overthrill, They physically frightened dutiful hive members and often
become nauseous or screamingly panicked by this simple exposure to
the tissue fact and cellular fabric of life. Giger, we
bless you for taking us back down to meet and
coil and intertwine with our old Darwinian relatives. That was

(11:40):
pretty good. It sounded a little bit like Carl Sagan
to me though, too. Yeah, which is another is a
little more akermity. Okay, if you if you try and
do a Kermit the Frog, do a bad Kermit the
Frog voice, you may Yeah. So this is another thing
that that came to mind as we were doing the
research for this. Is again like all of these sort

(12:02):
of outsider thinkers and artists that you and I grew
up with the influence, the people who influenced us, they're
all gone now. Geeger's dead, Leary's dead. Yeah. Like when
I was thinking about all the people who worked on
Alien behind the scenes, Mobius Um, Dan O'Bannon, just the

(12:24):
people who really like came to it and like imagined
that movie into existence through sheer willpower of decisions by committee.
You know, like they're almost all gone except for Ridley Scott,
and you know he's still going strong. Well yeah, I
mean one of the reasons we're doing this episode is
Alien Day is the week that we're releasing it, and
then like two weeks after that Alien Covenant is going

(12:46):
to come out directed by Ridley Scott. He's still cranking
out these xenomorph movies and we're still watching them. Uh yeah,
it's it's it's interesting. And I again, like I kind
of stepped back and I wonder, and I go, like,
who are the people today who are really like the
the really gonzo weird thinkers that are influencing kids out there? Well,

(13:09):
for those of you listening, uh, maybe some of you
are not as similiar with Gegeger's work. And I'm just
gonna attempt to briefly describe his work to sum it
up in one quick statement. An entire man's life work here,
but essentially most of his work was it boiled down
to surrey surrealistic bio mechanical realms in which humanoid entities
shift in and out of an alien landscape, a place

(13:32):
of cold flesh where birth, sex and death intermingle and
are at once one and his most famous works are
an airbrush, but he later abandonedness for pastels and inc Yeah.
I he worked in so many different kinds of media,
used the sculptor as well, but I think of him
mainly as a painter. And one of the astonishing things

(13:53):
I learned about him from watching this Dark Dark Star
documentary was that he didn't do any underdrawings. He just
sit down at the canvas with an airbrush and go.
And some people might go, well, yeah, I mean, look
at his stuff. It's so abstract and surreal. Of course
that he could get away with that, but like, there
is an anatomical precision to his work. Even if he's

(14:15):
exaggerating like how long an arm should be, or like
the way teeth are formed in a mouth, he's thinking
about actual anatomy and then exaggerating it, and it's it,
and he's doing all of this improvisationally. It's it's fascinating
to think about that, just as like a process. Uh.
And then outside of you know, the obvious sex, death details,

(14:39):
Geeker as a painter had this amazing ability to translate
texture in whatever medium he was working in, and that
really impresses me to like imagine what it would be
like to reach into one of his paintings and touch
one of the monstrosities. What would what would it be
like to pet the head of a xenomorph? I would

(15:00):
a wet, cold, and ribbed That's what That's the general
idea I get from most Like, I can't I can't
decide if the texture would be like hard or brittle
or gooey or you know, it's just it's all those
things simultaneously. And you're getting that from I mean that's
a three dimensional you know, image captured on film, but
from his two dimensional images you're getting the same thing.

(15:22):
I mean, he really one of the things that I
think is great about his work is he really captured
reflection of light. Most of everybody knows his artwork is
just being like, oh, it's just a lot of dark
things and a lot of like phallus is you know, uh,
going into things, but all of that darkness like captured
these like you know, unseen beams of light on his

(15:45):
canvas and then reflected them back. Yeah, and I feel
like these are these are details that, for a lot
of us are kind of lost on us when we look,
especially we don't have an artistic background. You just kind
of become lost in what he has created and not
so much the mastery involved in bringing it to life.
In that documentary, there's scenes where you you get to
see him more or less starting from scratch, using the

(16:07):
airbrush to create something, and it's it's amazing just how
you don't think of an air brush as a precision instrument,
not at all, and like this, this is what I
think of when I think of the airbrush. When you
go to the beach and you get those like custom
made T shirts, Like that's what I think of as
air brush art. And then you look at what Gieger

(16:27):
did with an air brush and it's just this amazingly
precise detail for a tool that's really I mean, it's
just spitting ink out and paint, you know. Okay, why
don't we get into just sort of how this guy
was made, like like like how he was born into
the world, how the world gave us hr Geeker. All right,

(16:52):
we're back, So hands Rudolph Geeger a ka hands Rudy
to his friends. Um let's talking about Yeah, where he
came from and uh and how he became the the
the the icon. So he was born on February five
in nineteen forty in Sure, Switzerland. I'm not sure if

(17:13):
that's the right pronunciation. His full name is Hans Rudy Geeger.
The joke in those super Ego videos is that his
his real name is hey, really Geeger. But but it
was Hans Rudy, and everybody in in his life, you know,
close by, they just referred to him as Hans Rudy
all the time. Nobody called him Gieger like we do
here in the West. We're just like Gieger. That's the

(17:35):
only way we can describe this guy. Um. Yeah, he's
just this fascinating character. Yeah. So he he had a
loving mother who was very close with the all her life.
His father was by all counts a bit distant. He
was a pharmacist and according to a standards Lav Groff,
a psychiatrist and gear author who will get into later,

(17:57):
Geger's father was was strict a little distant. Uh but
he but he only ever struck Geeger once. This crazy,
this story is crazy. Yeah. So I don't want to
to go into it in too much of detail, but essentially, uh,
Hans Rudy, the young Hans Rudy was was stealing power
cables from a street construction project and he was trying

(18:18):
to to burn the cables down in the cellar of
his parents house to get to get lead for making bullets.
And then the smoke ended up a rising up and
it polluted and destroyed most of his uh a lot
of the stuff in his farm in the pharmacy. Everything
was black and sticky and oily, and they had to
spend a fair amount of money getting everything cleaned up.
And so um, that was It was a very tense moment,

(18:41):
but it just Dad was pretty upset about that one. Yeah. Uh.
And then tell the story about him with the skull.
Oh yeah, so a little little kid with a skull. Yeah,
his father gave him a human skull when he was
a small boy. And I guess you know, this is
kind of the pharmacist uh reference coming into play here.
So he gr has said in interviews that he was

(19:02):
he was kind of terrified by this because here's death
in your hands. So he tied a string to it
and he would drag it through the streets like it
was you know, some sort of a toy boat or something.
And then he built a ghost train in his backyard
to scare into the light neighborhood kids. And then he
would he would later build another ghost train in his
backyard as a as an old man. Yeah, and and

(19:23):
so all of these seemed to be attempts of a
child to conquer his fear of death or things that
scared him, like like tunnels or asphyxiating enclosures, things like that. Yeah, Um,
something I didn't know about him about his childhood. As
a kid, his uncle Otto taught him how to make
homemade weapons through lead casting and working with wood and

(19:47):
other metals. And there was also an antique dealer that
lived in this same town, and that guy taught him
how to handle these weapons and also provided him with
like a bunch of weapons for his personal collection. This
little kid is handmaking like blades and knives and stuff like.
Of course, he like becomes this guy who goes on

(20:10):
to design you know, Zeno morph It's pretty fascinating. But
then he goes on to get an education. Yeah. So
his father, his mother was just you know, completely supportive
of everything he did his whole life. They are these
wonderful pictures of of him a younger geeger and his
his his elderly mother and she's she's wearing black as well,

(20:32):
attending a showing of his work, and so she just
you know, kind of embraced it no matter, you know,
how weird. Uh the work actually was, would be pretty
great if she like put corpse paint on and his
his bar. Uh. But but his father, you know, a
getting far more sensible, and he said, all right, you
need to study industrial design and architecture, and so he

(20:53):
did at the School for Applied Arts and Zurich. Yeah,
and he also attended military college to learn to be
a mortar gunner. So this guy has like, uh, this
trace background in his younger years of like really dealing
with weaponry. And my understanding was like once he went
to that military college, like his fascination with guns completely disappeared. Um.
This is the school though, where he first started doing

(21:16):
his ink drawings that later became uh titled Adam Kinder.
A lot of people have seen these and maybe didn't
know this was the name. Or Atomic Children is how
it translates into English. And they represented his ideas about
nuclear war and the mutating effects that it would have
on humanity. Before he graduated. He also became super interested
in Freud, which we're gonna talk about a lot. Uh.

(21:37):
And he started keeping a dream journal that he used
as a resource for years to come. He would just
mind this for ideas for all of his creations. So
he graduates from school, he goes on to work for
Andreas Kristen, designing office furniture for the Knoll International Company. Uh.
And he during this time he had his first solo

(21:57):
gallery exhib exhibition. This was like a year or after
he graduated school. Uh. So it's a nineteen sixty eight
and a friend persuades him and says, look, give up
that job making office furnitures, commit fully to art. And
immediately afterward he got his first gig, creating monster effects
for a short Swiss film. Now an important part of

(22:18):
his biography here is his relationship with Lee Tobler. So
she was his partner for many years, who was his
first great love, mused for so many of his depictions
of the feminine form. But they had kind of a
temptestuous relationship, allegedly involving, you know, an alchemy of both individuals.
These things, uh, you know, tend to because he was

(22:39):
a young determined artist with a fanatical devotion to his craft. Uh.
And he also recognized no boundaries in his work obviously. Uh.
She was a young woman with a traditional Catholic upbringing,
but she was immersed in this world of permissive exploration.
She suffered from depression and she attempted suicide once and

(22:59):
then Gieger was was deeply affected by this. But while
his his his art, such as his famous um Lee
Too and Lilith, they served as an outlet for him
after this, but it didn't work for her. Uh. There's
a moment in the documentary where Giger reflects on this,
and it's it's rather poignant because he says, you know,
he was not able to help her with his art,

(23:20):
and you really see the here's the guy who's who
always turned to art like art was the thing that
that made his life possible and and that's how he
explored his fears and his anxieties. Often we are unable
to help someone that that is in need of serious
professional help for their problems. Uh. But but he felt

(23:42):
kind of I think, kind of trapped that he that
he and and felt terrible that he could not help
her with the the one tool that that he really
knew how to use. Yeah. He struck me as the
kind of guy who like was able to sort of
self care through his own art, but he didn't know
how to help other people, and so he would try
to help them with his art and they were like,

(24:04):
that's that's not what I need. That works for you,
you know. Uh. And so yeah, I mean when you
look at the body of work that was inspired by
this woman, you can see her features and so many
of his paintings. There's this series of photos of her
where she's topless and he's airbrush painting parts of her
body so that she's got this kind of biomechanoid appearance.

(24:28):
And I believe that even like that artwork ended up
being part of a show that they did to memorialize her. Yeah,
because in seventies six, she she did commit suicide and
that was a major traumatic event in his life. Yeah,
and he described it as a terrible emptiness. Uh. He
and his friends through memorial for her. That was called

(24:49):
the Second Celebration of the Four And then what I
have seen, you know, titled under this are these various
photos that were taken from this session with her where
she's covered in this bio mcanoid makeup kind of kind
of like what we think of today as body paint,
but I think he was using different techniques. Um. And
then his friend Friedrich Kon also died in nineteen seventy three,

(25:12):
So the early seventies were just filled with tragedy for
this guy. Uh. And then he gets to work on
Alejandro Jodorowski's Dune, the ill fated Dune movie that never
was made. Yeah, for and for extensive details on that,
definitely check out the documentary that came out about this,
this grand but doomed project that that you know, ultimately,

(25:36):
even though it didn't come to fruition, it ended up
fueling so many other projects, including Alien. It's really the
main bridge for Geeger to Alien because he was paired
with Dan O'Bannon, Mobius a k a J. Jim Garrard,
and Chris Fosse who did spaceship designs and also did
the Joy of Sex illustrations from the classic Joy of Sex,

(25:57):
and I think Ron Cobb also worked on both of them.
I'm not sure Ron Cobb was illustrator. He did some
the preliminary work on just like the Egg design. Yeah,
that guy's work is great, Like he Uh. One thing
that I didn't learn until I was working at a
library here in Atlanta that had like this great special
collections archive was Ron Cobb was actually like an underground

(26:19):
zene artist for a long time, like writing for these
civil rights znes uh. And he did these like he
would basically do like little like one shot panel uh,
comedy things like the kind of things that you'd see
in like The New Yorker nowadays, but they were like
intensely detailed. That guy was pretty fascinating as well. And yeah,
so just before Alien comes out, he publishes this book,

(26:42):
it's his big art book, Necronomicon, in nineteen seventy seven,
and it's seen by Dan O'Bannon who had previously worked
with him on Any or Sorry on Dune. And then
Dan O'Bannon shows it to Ridley Scott and they look
at it and they go, this has got to be
the inspiration for this the creature that we're gonna have
in this film. Specifically, the painting necronom four is the

(27:04):
main inspiration for the Zeno morph. So all of you
out there who have you, you've you've totally seen a
zeno more even if you've never watched any of the
Alien movies, you know what they look like. This is
where it originates from. This one guy's like weird obsessions,
all right, So this leads us to Alien and uh,
you know, I think everyone is familiar with this with

(27:25):
this film. But he was brought on to design a
number of key elements, so an ancient temple, exterior and
interior temple, spore pods, Alien first phase, Alien second phase,
Alien third phase and uh, you know that so far
this sounds like a lot of our artists Hollywood um relationships, right,

(27:45):
brings them on and do some conceptual designs for the film. Well,
the Giger was was far more demanding than that, and
he he insisted on a rather large fee. He was
arguing that his designs would be the star of the film. Uh.
And you know, and at the time can say, I
think even his lawyer was like, you gotta calm down, gig.
You can't ask for too much money. You're you're just
doing designs for a monster and some sets. But he

(28:08):
was like, no, no, this is gonna be the star.
And and really, you know, not to discount Sigourney Weaver's
iconic performance or the or the whole host of fabulous
character actors that that help bring that that movie to like.
But he wasn't completely wrong, Like his designs are our
front and center because it's everlasting. I mean, think about
how many movies have been made from that franchise and

(28:31):
are still being made. Uh, not to mention all of
the spinoff work, Like there's hundreds of comics that aren't
done all because of like the gravitas of that design
combined with this sort of like very interesting sexual horror
sci fi tail that Dan O'Bannon and the other writers

(28:53):
put down. Yeah, everything was just the the synergy of
his artistic division and the plot. It all came together
perfectly and and Geeker put a tremendous amount of work
into this. I mean not only that the initial designs
for the film, which alone or pretty pretty large tasks
for any artists, but also in it is the physical
construction of costumes and sets, and this entail just constant

(29:15):
changes and improvements, some of the behest of Ridley Scott
or just the necessities of shooting others fueled by his
own perfectionism. Plus is, everything was was pretty much caked
and goo for these shoots. The colors would leach out
and it was this would require him to repaint everything
each night so it would be fresh and and look
exactly as Geeger thought it should look and as as

(29:37):
the filmmaker's thought it should appear. Yeah, if you've ever
seen any of the like special behind the scenes extras
for Alien, I have the Quadrilogy set and I've watched
almost all of that stuff, if not all of it. Um. Yeah,
geekers just like constantly there in the workshop, either like
tinkering around with the Alien costume and painting it or
I mean he like, I want to say, the scene

(29:58):
with the space jockey chamber, he hand painted that with
an airbrush all by himself. Yeah. And those are enormous sets, huge.
I mean, it's easy to lose sight of it. As
awesome as the the set looks like it was. Really
they really constructed this cathedral out of the man's artwork
and Uh. Geeger would later acknowledge his fussiness on the

(30:19):
set and apologize for being a bit difficult uh. And
he attributes much of this to just not understanding the
demands and UH and often improvisational aspects of film production. Like.
One example of this is that Ridley Scott decided that hey,
they we can just use the underside of the derelict
ship set uh and repurpose it as a corridor in
the ship and this sort of thing, which drove Gieger
crazy at the time because it felt cheap and rushed

(30:41):
to him using his work in ways that were not intended.
But again, this is this is often what happens when
you're making a film, like the directors saying, all right,
we need to we need to shoot this. What do
we have. Let's let's just tilt this a different ways.
Like a known best talents to is like, yeah, he
makes he's like huge budget films, but he really figures

(31:03):
out how to make them in like a really um
quick production fashion. Like he's noted for setting up cameras
at multiple angles for each shoot so he doesn't have
to like constantly be shooting the same scene over and
over and over again. And then yeah, on that set,
like they were doing everything they could to repurpose things
and make it look like something else, like these mirrors

(31:23):
in a lot of places so that it looked like
the corridors were longer than they were. And Scott actually
got them to double the budget for that film solely
based on storyboards that he drew himself, so, like you
think about it, like going into it, they had like
a four million dollar budget, which sounds like a lot,
and then he himself drew some stuff and showed it

(31:45):
to them. This is even before Giegers involved, and they went,
this sounds a lot cooler than we thought. Here's another
four million. So they've got eight million dollars to make
this movie and it looks still to this day, it
looks astonishing. Now. One of the questions that you have
to ask is what what would Alien have been like
if Geiger had not been there, if we had not

(32:06):
had Geeger's designs, And it's it's difficult to say, but
you can consider a few things. You consider the the
ball monster in uh, you know, An Abandon and John
Carpenter's Dark Star, which is a great film, but it
has a really ridiculous looking alien, and that was one
of the main reasons why Dan O'Bannon wander write this, Yeah,
because he felt like like that movie just didn't capture

(32:29):
what he had in his head for Alien. Yeah. You
can also consider that, like Ridley Scott's one of his
original ideas that they were testing was let's just take
an adult, We'll strap a bunch of children to him
and then we'll cover him rubber to make dan and
that would make a good effect. So we can imagine
what if that had taken off. You can say, well,
Mobius was on board, what if Mobius had done the design.

(32:50):
And certainly Mobius drew lots of cool aliens in his
time and even did some production work I think on
designing aliens from time to time. Wayne Barlow was around
at the time time. It's you might say, what if
Wayne Barlow had been brought on, But none of these
it's hard to imagine any of these guys like creating
something that would have been on par with Geegers designs. Yeah,

(33:11):
I mean this is this is like not meant to
be a pun. But there's nothing quite as alien as
the xenomorph design. It perfectly captures the idea of something
that is other than us from somewhere else, but that
unfortunately comes out of us. And you know, the script
is perfect for Geeger because it really ties into all

(33:33):
of his themes of birth and sex and death. Yeah,
because and that's something to keep in mind. Here is
we we we briefly, you know, roll through some of
his his later works. And one of the things is
that no matter how awesome his design work was, he
just didn't intended to not really jive with the overall picture,
with the overall project. Uh, that that was utilizing his vision. Okay,

(33:56):
let's take a quick break and when we get back,
we're gonna talk a little bit about his work after Alien,
and then we're going to really get into the psychological
sort of matrices of hr Geeger's world. Alright, we're back,
so post Alien, uh, Geeger kind of just has in

(34:18):
a sense, he's got it made. You know, he can
basically devote his life to his work now. And that's
not saying it was definitely made in the shade. Based
on the documentary and the uh some of the uh,
the accounts that his wife gave. Geeger was the kind
of person who when money came in, he would he
would spend it on his art. He would buy some
sort of cool supply or a bone and start creating

(34:39):
with it. And it was it was kind of, you know,
it was kind of paycheck to paycheck to us in
a certain extent. What was one of the stories that
like his assistant came into the house one day and
there was a like rotting lion carcass on ibex or
you know there was an ibex in the bathtubt it
was a lion carcass by the door because he needed
the lion's spine for one of of the pieces that

(35:00):
he did. I think it was that that furniture piece.
It's like a big chair. So yeah, he was buying
dead lions. Yeah, you mentioned the furniture. We already mentioned
some of the furniture designs that that he did. Uh.
You added in here that he made harcone and furniture
based on his done design. Yeah. I I don't know,
like if this was just specialty stuff. I don't think
there was like a line that you could buy. I

(35:22):
think these were these were pieces that he you know,
made individually. And then yeah, he made so many album covers. Uh.
That Debbie Harry record The Dead Kennedy's one I mentioned.
Uh oh, yeah, we were talking about this over email. Uh.
He was heavily involved with Celtic Frost and then subsequently

(35:43):
tripped to con because that lead guy, Thomas Gabriel Fisher
was his assistant. Yeah. And then of course any Danzig
fans out there probably remember Danzig three. How the gods
Kill that uses one of one of Giger's creations there
on the front. And then this one. I didn't know
about this, that he didn't Emerson Lake and Paul Cover
Oh god, yeah, um yeah, brain Salad surgery. Uh. It

(36:04):
seems like he kind of said yes to anyone who
would sort of get his vision out there, even if
it didn't necessarily jive with the I don't know. This
is me looking at Geeker's art and trying to figure
out what what I would pair with it, and right
not necessarily what another person would or even Gigger himself.
So he made his own film, although I haven't really
been able to track it down, The Mystery of Sin

(36:26):
Guitara though, yeah I have, I have not seen this.
And then he was heavily involved in a video game
that came out in the nineties called Dark Seed. Yeah.
I read a review of this that says that it
was is a game. It was pretty bad, like it
it made the worst choices in puzzle games of the time,
So it was kind of like missed or something like that. Yeah,
less you know, like I guess, less graphically advanced. But

(36:48):
that being said, one thing that everybody tends to say
is like the look of the game was great. It
really made wonderful use of Geeger's art. He also come
to me to do a number of different film projects.
There's a movie that came out eighty nine, Tokyo The
Last War, and there's like a big wheel creature that's
kind of based on his designs um He also was

(37:11):
a creative consultant on the German horror comedy Killer Condom.
Have you never heard of that until it's? Uh? I
think I saw trailer for it once. Maybe if we
do a trailer. He also did poster art for Future Kill,
which is a comedy horror film about mutants hunting frat
boys in a futuristic city. It stars two actors from

(37:33):
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, including Maryland Burns, and it's a it's
total USA up, all night material, eighties trash cinema. It's
thoroughly a geeker, but it's it's still kind of the
trailer is still kind of awesome. And then there's the
infamous stories from poulter Geist to Oh Yeah. He did
several different designs and really made the best moment in

(37:55):
poulter Geist Too Possible, where Coach a k Dad from
Poulter guys, he vomits, and the vomit like is this
thing that quickly grows into this like limbless humanoid creature
that scuttles off after making this horrifying face at him.
And it's a you can find YouTube clips of this.
It's a it's a wonderful scene. And then of course

(38:16):
there's Species, which is an interesting project to to look at.
He designed the female alien sill as well as this
ghost train for a gream dream sequence and the sequence
was going to be cut. They were Gigger was telling them, look,
we have to have this ghost train in the film
and uh, and they're like, no, no, no, we the
budget is shrunk. We we don't have time. So Giger

(38:38):
eventually he just contributes a hundred thousand dollars of his
own money just to to me to film this scene
and then forces them to put it in, like or
convinces them to put it in. And it's an and
it's an interesting Uh, it's an interesting scene. But the
film itself was I believe it was. It was a
success of the box office or five or six of these, right,

(39:00):
it must have been successful. Yeah, I think it was
financially successful, but I don't think Species is anyone's favorite film,
and um, and and you know it's it's a shame
because this was the only chance we really had to
see what one of Geeger's feminine creations come to life
on the screen. So I kind of hold out hope
that maybe somebody will reboot Species down the Road, down

(39:23):
the road and do it right, or if if not
silled in, some other biomechanical female will crawl up out
of his work and into a movie. What was that
movie that came out a couple of years ago. I
never got a chance to see this, but it was
very similar to Species, and it had uh my wife
jokingly called it like the b York Baby, uh these

(39:45):
Sarah pallyis in it, and like there's so it's very
similar plot and like their genetic engineering splice splice, that's it. Yeah. Yeah,
that seems like the closest thing to like re envisioning
Species that I've seen so far. And then there was
also that movie with Scarlett Johansson that I've seen it
have seen compared to it Ghost in the show No,

(40:06):
the one when she plays an alien of some sort
and oh yeah, yeah, yeah, um under the Skin, that's
the one. Yeah, that's a great movie. Yeah, I haven't
seen it yet. You you should really watch that. You'd
love that movie. Now. One of the things though, with
with all these gig Gieger films, that my theory is
the reason that none of them really quite work. And
the reason that Alien worked is that Geeger's paintings, uh

(40:29):
and in the sculptures they involved these these strange creatures,
but they're also a part of this realm. They're a
part of this landscape, they're part of this setting. And
if you just have still the alien lady as cool
as she looked, if you if she's running around the
streets of l A, it's just not gonna work. Vomit
monster crawling across a bedroom floor, it's not gonna work

(40:50):
as well. Whereas Alien, you either had scenes where the
monster or the or the the creations are within a
Giger environment or there at least in an in human
spaceship environment. It is a little more in keeping with
with Geegers whirld and thematically again, like Alien very much
revolved around the same kind of ideas that we're spinning

(41:11):
out psychologically from Geeger's work. I think Species tried to
do that, but it like ultimately became like an action
adventure film more than any kind of like psychological look
at I mean, it was about birth, sex and death, sure,
but I don't know, it didn't capture it in the
same way and ended. So you know, before we go on,
we should just say, like how things sort of ended

(41:33):
up for him. He opened a museum in nine in
the Chateau Saint Germain, part of Grier's Switzerland. Uh. This
museum also hoses his private collection of other artists work.
In two thousand three, they added a museum bar there
that features his interior design. This whole thing looks totally awesome.
I I would love to visit it one day. Uh.
And unfortunately he died on May after sustaining injuries from

(41:57):
a fatal fall. He was survived by his wife, Carmen
Maria Geeger, and she is the director of the museum.
And from what we've read, it seems like his wife
and his assistants are still continuing his work and they're
running the museum, they're putting on exhibitions, they're working together
and getting books published, you know, but he's no longer

(42:18):
obviously creating new work. Yeah. Now, watching that documentary that
It makes me wonder how much new stuff is going
to emerge because one of the one of the the
individuals that they're interviewing, they're one of one of his
assistants or archive is like he just points to something
on a shelf and it's like, here's a here's a
picture that he drawing that he drew years ago, like
no one's ever seen. So there's no telling how how

(42:40):
many curios and wonders are are are left to uh
to emerge from that that house. Yeah again, Like if
you see the documentary, his home is top to bottom
covered in his artwork, Like it's just filled to the brim.
That's one of the things that strikes me as odd.
I'm always thrown by artists who surround themselves with their
own art. Uh. It feels, i don't know, somehow egotistical

(43:04):
to me, But with Gieger it felt right. It's kind
of like a Z's I'm sorry talking about hanging out
with Kanye and Kane's listening to his own music. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
The yeah that this is just always weird to me. Huh, Well,
I guess you could say like Geeger is a guy
who knew what he liked. He knew what he wanted
and he created it on the canvas and lived in it.
So uh in terms of living in one's art, though,

(43:27):
this is a good time to to break off and
start discussing some of the psychological and cultural interpretations of
his work. Now, we mentioned Stanislav Graff earlier, UH, psychiatrist
and he uh and he has written about Geiger. Uh.
There's Hr Geger and the zeit guys to the twentieth century.
This is a book available in German and English, The

(43:48):
Visionary World of Hr Geiger, and you can find that
in PDF form at Stanislav Graff dot com. Uh. He
and he also shows up in the documentary and he
was you see scenes of him working with Giger and
the rest of the sort of Geeker family to decide
which illustrations to use in the book. And we're not
going to attempt to to roll out all of standards

(44:09):
law of grows ideas. UH certainly refer to his work,
but I thought we might touch on the broad strokes
here and a few areas that tie in with previous
stuff about your mind discussions. Yeah, he especially is really
interested in the theory of psychological birth trauma, which I
feel like lines up very nicely with Geeger's work and

(44:29):
also adds a layer of scientific understanding to what's going
on here. Yeah. Yeah, The the idea here, if you're
not familiar with it, is it runs contrary to older
notions of infants is clean slates or or tabular razza. Rather,
the idea here is that that birth itself is the
first great physical and psychological trauma for a new human life,

(44:51):
were forcifully ejected from a place of safety and warmth,
pushed screaming into a frightening new world. So Graff is
really routed in this idea that Geeger portrayed the soul
of modern humanity, and in that way he sees his
art as being about technology, human life, ecology, self destruction, violence,

(45:11):
sexual excess, mass consumption, drugs, and alienation. And yes, birth
trauma is the real big one here, because Graf says
that powerful memory is what influences everything else. I think
it's worth remembering here too that Geeger's work, no matter
how surreal it is, it's always surrounded by human anatomy. Uh.

(45:33):
And that's replicated on such a perfect level, like even
when he distorts it, like I mentioned earlier, he does
it proportionally in such a way that it feels real. Now,
Groff identifies four distinct characteristic experiential patterns, which he refers
to as basic perinatal matrices or bpms, and these are

(45:55):
the stages of of trauma that did an infant, a
new born goes through to this theory, So the first
BPM bp M one is associated with, uh, your existence
before birth, before the onset of delivery. Yeah. So the
idea here is that like, while we're in the womb,
we experience the world as an amniotic universe that's crops words, uh,

(46:18):
and we don't know anything else. And so when you know,
we're born and we're in the real world. He relates
this to regions that have no boundaries or limits. So
for instance, like when you're just floating in the middle
of the sea or outer space, these are places that
remind us of that room like experience or a bathtub

(46:40):
with Yankee candles burning and on your music playing perfect. Yeah,
that was exactly what my moving sperience was like. So
the second BPM, BPM two is uh the cosmic engulfment
and no exit or hell uh. And this is this
is basically contractions taking place yeah, So it's based on

(47:00):
you know, we we think of it more of like
from the external perspective of like, oh, the mother's going
through contractions, but you know, we experience those contractions while
we're in the womb. So this is associated with imagery
of archetypal monsters that devour us in some kind of
claustrophobic nightmare very Geeger uh. And it leads to anxiety
in a general mistrust that borders on paranoia. So people

(47:23):
who suffer from this kind of anxiety, it takes the
form of them feeling like they're always caught in a trap.
And in Geeger's work we see a lot of imagery
of tight headbands and steel rings holding together things by
screws and heads and vices and bodies wrapped up in
chords and straps. So this is Groff saying, like Geegers

(47:43):
really capturing that moment. And then we have the BPM three,
the death rebirth struggle, and this is basically when you're
pulled through the birth canal, right, and this is all
about that propulsion after the cervix opens and the head
descends into the pelvis. It involves crush pains and suffocation
and reliving it manifests itself. Again, this is Graff not

(48:05):
I'm not saying this, but that reliving it manifests itself
as sado masochism and deviant sexuality. UH. It's are typally
portrayed as Titanic struggles between light and darkness, as well
as raging forces of nature and technology that wields enormous energy,
so think of like rockets, bombs, power plants, that kind

(48:27):
of thing. He also connects it to the demonic aspect
of mental health, and that's something we've been talking about
recently on the show, both with our Exorcism Addorcism episode
and the episode that we recently did on the demon
Haunted Mind. So potentially there's a connection between this third
perinatal matrix idea and those things that we've previously talked about.

(48:50):
And then finally we have BPM four. This is the
death rebirth experience and this is the actual birth and
uh and the severing of the umbilical cord. So Graff
he characterizes this as this explosive liberation that we feel,
followed by an emergence into light. He says, this is
just a constant reminder of our vulnerability, our inadequacy and

(49:10):
our weakness. Now. Gruff also notes that it would be
hard to see Geiger's mother in the same roles that
Geiger places women in his art, even with all of
this sort of application going on here. This convinces Gruff
even more that these themes come from Geiger's primal memories
of being born. So, like, you you meet Geiger's mother

(49:33):
in this documentary, and she seems just like a very
kind old Swiss lady, right, super supportive of her son.
Her son seems to love without his heart. There's not
some sort of at least there's no apparent like twisted
understanding of his mother. There's yeah, it doesn't feel like
there's um some kind of Freudian impulse that like he
wants to have sex with his mother or anything like that, right,

(49:55):
Like she's not the image of his sexual sexual at ration. Um.
So Graph translates us then into like it's really all
about birth and memory for Geeger, right, and and he
spends a lot of time just comparing these these theories,
these models, these matrices two Geeger's work, pointing out, of

(50:16):
course that at any stage during birth, there's often the
possibility of of of death being present. And uh and so.
So you see these symbols and elements throughout his work,
infants and birth, vaginas and breasts, tunnels and emergence, mouths
and gateways, all of it sheathed in a sense of
horror and trauma. All of it kind of takes on

(50:40):
this necro flesh kind of feeling where it's alive but
it's dead, it's new but it's old, um, you know.
All at the same time, there's a lot of category
confusion in Geeger's work, and I think that's that's something
we feel when we look at it, you know, especially
some of these larger tryptic type pieces, where you just
go from detail to detail, form from form, and they're

(51:01):
kind of becoming the same form. You don't know where
one thing in is and one thing begins, and you
just kind of set there gritting your teeth. Yeah. I mean,
I'm reluctant sometimes to to apply the word Freudian to something,
but Geeger's work seems inherently Freudian. I mean, he talked
about Freud's influence on his work. So much of it

(51:22):
was born out of dream journals, and it really revolves
around those same themes of birth, sex, and death. Then
you add in the merger of biology and mechanics to that.
Graff takes into account the strange human nature that translates
suffering into sexual excitement too. So you know, he asked
the question, well, why is sex so linked to our

(51:43):
fear of death? And it seems like Geeger is exploring
that question. That's why he's got this fascination with tunnels
and quarters and ghost rides. Graff speculates that it's all
related to Geeger's memory of his own birth. Remember this
is a guy we talked about this earlier, just kind
of been passing. He built his own ghost ride in
his backyard and I didn't know what this was until
I saw the documentary. He literally built like a children's

(52:06):
train set that like ran around his backyard but through
like these like haunted house tunnels and stuff. Oh yeah,
And I think graffs Graff's idea here too, that he's
getting across it's not that the Geiger has this special
background of this special trauma, the ideas we we all
have this strange entrance to a cavern in the back

(52:26):
of our mind. Most of us don't go in there,
some of us go in there a little bit but
gieger Is is one of those artists who really put
on the like the coal mining helmet and uh and
and spend his life exploring those tunnels. Now, this theory
of birth trauma itself, it has its roots in and Freud,
who called birth quote the first experience of anxiety and

(52:48):
thus the source and prototype of anxiety. Austrian psychoanalyst Auto
Rank expanded on this idea in and later British psychoanalyst
Wilfred Byan also I'm den so the idea is that
again we're born into trauma. We have this proto trauma
buried inside as primal and potent in our experiences and

(53:08):
nurturing afterwards, they help us, They help determine how we're
going to bounce back from all of that, and how
we're going to understand that trauma. So this might be
a good point for me to ask a question that
I have of you, but also of our audience. I'd
be curious to hear what you all think. Do you
feel that Geegar's work was inherently misogynistic in any way?
That's a good question. I was thinking a little bit

(53:31):
about this yesterday, and I think one could make a
good case for it just based on the portrayal of
of feminine bodies, but at the same time, like masculine
bodies are are kind of equally treated. And I'm talking
about his core work here, not some of his sketches. Um,
there's such a surrealist quality and at times it's like
the feminine body is part of the male body. There's

(53:56):
hard to iron it down. And yeah, he's just exploring
like all of human an anatomy. That's sort of how
I felt about it too, until watching the documentary, and
then when I saw how he managed his relationships with
women throughout his life, it really dawned on me that
he had this this very strange codependent relationship with his muses. Right,
so you had Lee Tobler and then you had his

(54:18):
his first wife. But who was after Lee Tobler And
they interview her in this documentary, she basically says like, Yeah,
there's this point where I got like super sick. I
had to go into the hospital and Gieger came to
me and was so unsupportive. He was essentially like, look,
when you're sick, it drives me crazy and I can't
do my work. And if I can't do my work,
it drives me even more crazy. So I'm just not

(54:41):
gonna be with you anymore so I can do my work. Yeah.
He That was an interesting bit in the documentary, just
learning about how he approached his relationships. But at the
same time he also I believe that was the same
uh that was his first wife. He did marry Lee,
but he ended up like leaving her a house and everything,

(55:04):
a very cordial relationship. Yeah, but there's just something strange
about the relationships that he had with these muses throughout
his life. And I had not thought of it as
being misogynistic, And then I kind of wonder if he
took these women for granted. Maybe I don't know, maybe
there's more out there on this that I just am

(55:24):
unaware of. Oh, I'll probably come back to this as
we proceed, But I kept looking at his work and
I was thinking, well, a lot of this is it's
not really heteronormative. It's more maybe if you could go
in the term hetero abnormative, because it's it's very much
depending on traditional interactions of male and female anatomy. But

(55:46):
but in a way way that doesn't really line up
with any kind of certainly not you know, the classic
examples of misogyny or classic examples of of of heteronormative attitudes. Yeah, yeah,
that's true too. Huh. I there's somebody out there who's
written about this, but and we just missed missed it
when we were doing the research. Um. But yeah, Grap

(56:07):
is all over all this other stuff, especially concerning the
birth issues, but also the dreams. Right. Yeah. He points
out that Geiger, we we touched on this a little bit.
He he engaged in a lot of Freudian dream analysis
early on, uh, and engaged in a high level of
self exploration when it came to matters of anxiety and fear.
A number of his familiar motifs emerged from this, and

(56:29):
some of them are not not as obvious as others.
You if you've looked through a lot of his work,
you may have run across safety pins or there's a
there's a picture of of Gieger. He's made sunglasses shaped
like a safety pin. And uh. There's this quote from
from Graf's work where Geer is talking about his dreams
and he says, most of the time in those dreams,
I was in a large white room with no windows
or doors. The only exit was a doc metal opening, which,

(56:52):
to make things worse, was partially obstructed by a giant
safety pin. So that's that's such an interesting motif because
it's so clearly personal, and he's not he's not worried with, well,
how are how's how's the the viewer or the you know,
the the gallery visitor. How is the average person going
to react to my symbol of the safety pin? You know,
he just jumped in like it was all kind of

(57:14):
self exploration. Yeah, that it would all kind of play
out on its own in a different language that we're
not all speaking. Yeah. And and so Groff argues that,
you know, all of this is Gieger getting down to
the to the root of his fear, following it to
birth trauma. Uh And and there are a number of
anecdotes in there that are that are pretty pretty cool,
talking about him looking back on his upbringing. There's a

(57:36):
wonderful bit where he's talking about overhearing people talking about
subterranean passages in in Sure, Switzerland, where he was born,
and so he starts thinking about the possible tunnel connections
to his own basement, and he has dreams about this,
and again this gets into visions and and uh, you
know arguably, you know, a proto traumatic memories of tunnels. Yeah,

(58:01):
and that's the thing that's like a lot of people
see his work and they think, oh, this is just
some like total weirdo freak, right, But it's ultimately, like,
when you boiled down to it, he's a scared little
boy who like things like being told that there were
tunnels under his home or hey, here's a human skull
my six year old kid or whatever, like things like
that traumatized him so much that he had to process

(58:24):
it mentally as an adult through art. And it wasn't
like he loved what he was creating. It was like
part of the process for him to get over his
own fear. Yeah, well to in his own words, if
I don't if I don't create, I I go matt,
you know. Yeah. So at this point, let's turn to
to one more area of discussion, and that that is

(58:44):
trans humanism and cyborgs. We've discussed trans humanism and cyborgs
quite a bit here on stuff to blow your mind
and uh, and just to remind everybody, the two real
lynch pins for our conversations about cyboards, uh, as well
as just sort of the roots of of the the
idea itself come down to two things. So we have
a nineteen sixty paper Cyborgs in Space by Manford de

(59:07):
Klins and Nathan S. Klein. This is a pivotal work
of futurism that coined the word cyborg and explored then
the necessary transformation of Homo sapiens for life beyond Earth. Yeah,
we have a whole episode that we did last year
about this, but also just like this sort of philosophy
of cyborg ism in general. And then I also wrote
something that's on our site that is about the superhero

(59:31):
Cyberg It's about to appear in all these DC movies
and how hopefully some of this cyborg philosophy translates into
that somehow. The other big piece that we talk about
in these episodes is Donna Jay Harraway essays Cyborg Manifesto,
and this centers around the ideological cyborg identity. So we're
talking about the realization that personal identity can itself be

(59:54):
an intentional hybrid status. It's unbound by the didactic expectations
of the past. Now, I think when we we we
take both of these into account and we look at
Geeger's work, uh, you know, we can recognize elements present
in his work resonates with with so many of the
concerns of of twentieth century post war existence. Flesh and

(01:00:15):
machine become intertwined, but not in a way that feels encouraging.
There's a sense of of parasitism, with breathing tubes shoved
into faces, bodies seemingly mutilated by the robotic hybridization. And
at the same time, Geeger's work is is unflinching in
its sexuality. So there's such a as we discussed, there's
such a melding of individual and identity in his work.

(01:00:37):
It's not always easy to to pinpoint, but you certainly
run across images where entities are absorbed by this category confusion,
or there seems to be some sort of hybridization of
gender um and more often than not, one sees a
masculine figure and a female figure seemingly copulating but also

(01:00:58):
becoming one in a way that confus usually confuses whose
parts are who's Yeah, absolutely not and not to mention
too like that. He sort of applies the issues of
modern mass production to biology and sexuality. Yeah, and there's
a there's a paper that I ran across that explores

(01:01:18):
this that this is a paper by Elizabeth MARGETHA. Borst
and it's her PhD In philosophy thesis at the University
of Wakato, Hamilton, New Zealand. And she explores a number
of different cyborg artists, including Gieger. So she points out
that in looking at cyborgs and art, first of all,
you have to consider Geeger, because she says, quote, there

(01:01:39):
were fewer artists creating cyborg or interface artworks in the
nineteen seventies comparable to today. Yeah, and she specifically mentions
the cyborgs or biomechanical babies they're in one of his
pieces called birth Machine. Uh. She's pretty focused on it.
It has themes of birth and death and production, as
we've already mentioned earlier. But it's this production line of

(01:02:01):
cyborg babies that are being loaded into a gun like bullets. Uh.
And there's a lot to unpack there about the human condition.
She also cites Eric Gelberg as suggesting that this is
a symbol of humanities increasing coexistence with technology and that
our self destructive nature and our incessant desire to procreate
is what's leading to overpopulation and environmental chaos. I'd also

(01:02:24):
add war and violence to that list, especially when you
note that the cyborg babies and Geeger's work have their
own little guns, and then I wonder, well, what kind
of bullets are in those? Are they tinier little cyborg babies? Yeah?
I saw a quote where Geeger said that the part
of the idea behind that work was he kind of
viewed He said, he kind of viewed babies as a
clean slate um, which you know, that kind of runs

(01:02:48):
counter to what we're talking about earlier, but but still
he was saying that even if you look at a child,
is this fresh, uh, you know, untarnished soul, it's still
going to become something that is part of perhaps a
negative and destructive world. Yeah. Well, and then that leads
into his work with Death Machine. Death Machine is another

(01:03:08):
series he did in Death Machine one is his homage
to the synthesis of life and death with machine acting
as mediator. This is about the encroachment of technology and
production on the birthing process at this time. Rather than
it being you know, a machine of babies, it's a
machine that connects to a birthing woman, taking over the
entire biological processes in a very factory like manner. This

(01:03:31):
is when I realized that there's something inherently Marxist about
his stuff that's criticizing the sort of capitalistic mass production
of life. And there's one last piece in there, which
is this is connected. But it's a bronze sculpture that
he did that many people have probably seen, called the
birth Machine Baby follows similar themes. There's very you know,

(01:03:52):
dystopian stuff going on there. It's basically the same babies
that were in the gun and the original painting, but
they're in sculpted form. And his his second wife points
us out in the documentary that if you look closely,
the babies are all based on him. They have his
facial structure. Now, one last thing I want to I
want to point out we we mentioned movie The Cat,

(01:04:15):
and if you if you go deep enough into Geeger's work,
you're gonna run across two pieces in particular, one titled
Behemoth and one titled Minion. When I first saw one
of these, I think on Facebook, just you know, a
few years back, I thought it was a fake. I
thought somebody making a clever joke, because they look like
traditional Giger paintings, you know, bio mechanoids and you know,

(01:04:37):
and and the typical uh category confusion flesh going on,
and then in the foreground a big, kind of goofy
looking cartoon cat that slightly zombified like some of these
strange babies that he created, but it's just staring at
you with big cartoon eyes. And yeah, I saw one
of these for the first time. I thought I was like, oh, well,

(01:04:58):
that's clever. Somebody's having a little but it turns out
the person having a little fun was hr Geeger. Yeah. Yeah,
this reminds me of Um jungji Edo, who I've talked
about a couple of times on the show before. He's
this Japanese manga artist who specializes in horror stuff. This
is the Spiral guy. Yeah, he did Spirals, he did
Guio Um, he did Tony, And he has this book

(01:05:18):
that's all about his cats, and it's it's it's not
meant to be a horror book because but because he's
a horror writer and artist. He's writing about him and
his wife bringing cats into their home and what it's
like living with cats. But his imagination sees these cats
in these sort of like otherworldly forms. It's fascinating. I
love it. Um, and that brings me to a question

(01:05:40):
that I'd like to ask the audience. Maybe I'm answering
it for myself here in you too, if you have
an answer, But who has Geeger's mantle passed on too? Like?
Who is taking on this transgressive art about the human condition?
The best I could come up with this early Cronenberg,
But you know, the stuff Cronenberg's working on right now

(01:06:02):
isn't really like that. And so then I think Jongi Edo.
If you look at his work, it's very similar. It's
hard to say like some of the artists that come
to mind, like I instantly think of of older artists. Yeah,
I think of like Irving Norman, who I've mentioned on
the podcast before, who who had a very you know,
it's a different, unique aesthetic. But as far as just

(01:06:24):
surrealism goes in dark surrealism, and it had a similar
vibe to Geeker's work. But I can't I'm not aware
of anyone out there today who's really working with the
same energy. But though obviously I would, I would love
to explore someone's work if they are so, certainly let
us know, Yeah, let us know, send us some examples
if you've seen them before. Um, I'm always looking for

(01:06:45):
new stuff like this, and I would love to know
if there's something like this out there that I'm just
missing out on. Now, before we go here, we thought
we'd just take a few minutes to chat with a
friend of the show, um ec Steiner, who's worked with
us before, or he did. He recently did uh landing
page illustrations for our book on on on Flesh Bound

(01:07:06):
Tombs and uh and he has also helped out with
the Monster Science series in the past. Yeah. Yeah, so
he's built stuff for the show. Uh. And he is
honestly the closest thing to hr Geeger I've met in
real life, and I know that it's a huge influence
on him. So we wanted to speak to him more
about sort of like the process and artistic influence of Geeger.
So let's talk to him briefly and then we will

(01:07:29):
end the episode. All right, we're welcoming ec Steiner to
the show, an artist, a friend of the show. Uh,
he's uh, he's helped us out with a few things
in the past, including prop for Monster Science. Welcome, thanks

(01:07:49):
for talking with us, Hey, thanks for having me today.
I'm I'm really excited to come in and talk about
Geeger's life and his work. Yeah, we go way back.
We've known each other for god like almost ten years now.
I think he worked on collaborative projects together. So it's
cool to get you in here, because while we were
doing the Gigger research, I immediately thought, oh, we've got
to talk to him. We've got a good Steiner in here,
because he knows more about Gigger than anybody I know.

(01:08:12):
And like Eager, you're an artist that works in illustration,
in paint and in sculpture, so you're you're you're working
in all this different kind of media very similar to him.
And I think that's critical too, because when you look
at giegers appears and his his influences, they're transisplary artists
as well. They're not blocked in the just oh I

(01:08:34):
just do painting or I just do sculpture. They they're
truly artists in a sense that they're going to use
whatever tools and media they have available to convey that
vision as as fully as possible. So let's talk about Yeah, actually,
like his influence on you, how it impacted you, how
it led to the kind of art that you make.

(01:08:55):
And then I'm also really curious on what his influences
are what's the through line, because this is an area
we didn't we didn't really discuss, and I think this
is this is great because, um, when you look at
his influences, and I think the key distinction to make
between influence and inspiration is the inspiration is it's the
gas and the engine. It's it's what's lit the fire

(01:09:15):
for you to go out and create something. Where influence
is these little fingerprints all over your work, where if
you tell someone, hey, I really like this guy's work,
or I've I've really grown up on on this guy's
approach to creating things, you can then look at my work,
look at that individual's work, and draw very clear lines. Um.

(01:09:36):
And and in terms of of Giger, um, my kind
of love affair with with Hans Rudy uh is really
at a at a point where it's it was more patronage. Um.
I would buy his prints, I would purchase his books.
I would go see films that he collaborated in or
had some part in, or what we're inspired by what
he was doing. Um. But I made a very um

(01:09:59):
real decision in my my own work to avoid developing
a gigg Er esque approach, because you've seen it yourself.
You can go online, you can type you know, Gigger
into a Google image search and not only find his works,
but it works with other artists that are rooted in
his style and his approach, either through his his applications

(01:10:19):
or just the kind of bio mechanical black flag that
he stamped into his creative domain. Yeah. So I would say,
like it seems like and we talked about this briefly
on the show, but that like there's this um affinity
for Gieger that rose up through sort of like the
dark art and the goth scenes in the eighties and nineties.

(01:10:40):
And I imagine, given what I know about other arts scenes,
that there's plenty of Giger imitators out there. Oh. Absolutely there.
There are artists who've made fifteen twenty of your careers, uh,
replicating that kind of biomechanical style. And you you specially
see it in in the tattoo community. How they've really
kind of grabbed on to that biomechanical style. And I

(01:11:02):
often wonder if it's because Giger so often worked with airbrush,
and he he air brushed his his muse lee he
you know, I know we've all seen those photos of
where he airbrushed Debbie Harry in the nineteen eighties. Um,
it's just his application applies so well to the human
form and then wanting to take that and apply it
to yourself. It's just a very easy line to draw,

(01:11:23):
um from one to the next. But yeah, there's definitely
an affinity there um both. I think from the uh,
the visual themes that he grabs onto his kind of
personal iconography that translates very well in anyone who's interested
in in the occult or in interested in kind of
dark visions you obviously see through his techniques uses a
lot of bone imagery, He uses a lot of um

(01:11:46):
kind of uh mutagenic elements that hearken to a very
kind of dystopian post human future of sorts. So when
you think about the who's gonna be attracted to it,
it's it's not just people from those communities, but it's
anyone who has just an appeal for seeing something that's
that's off putting. UM For me personally, what I really

(01:12:09):
enjoy about his work and what I find uh fascinating,
especially in this time period that we're in where we're
talking about trans humanism and post humanism and looking at
kind of dystopian futures, is that his work really appeals
to different aspects of of our our culture. If you
have if you're a deep seated, very religious individual, you

(01:12:31):
may find a sense of existential terror in his work
because he grabs so heavily on us maybe satanic imagery
or a cult symbolism. UM. If you look at what
he's done with UM, kind of just the blending, morphing,
melding of of two or more figures. If you have
a fear of maybe body horror, something like you're afraid

(01:12:53):
of an autoimmune disease or cancer, something else, to see
something like that could create a lot of psychological terror.
So there's this right um element to his work where
it both appeals and repels people UM on different levels
because of the symbolism, the approach to his subject matter,
and just his application creating these fast worlds. And this
is something that we talked a little a little bit

(01:13:15):
about in the end the episode, is that you'll have
an individual piece of his that will inspire all of
these these feelings in you, or at least they do
in me, where it's like, oh, well when I focus
on this detail, yeah, that's that's that's awesome, that's beautiful.
I can get behind that idea. This section of this
triptic troubles me more. It makes me ask a lot
of questions and uh and and so you get I

(01:13:37):
feel like you get a lot of counter category confusion
out of his work and uh. Above all, I I
always found his work very very challenging compared to certainly
other you know, so especially this sort of sci fi
and fantasy artists that are thrown into the same rough categorization. Absolutely.
In fact, I think what's what's so valuable about his
work is here this guy who went to school to

(01:13:57):
study architecture and interior design. So you look at his
work and you're not just dealing with with subjects. You're
not just looking at portraiture. You're looking at completely self
contained environments that give you a glimpse of this other
other world. And it's it's a window, it's a threshold,
it's a portal into something beyond. And I think that
makes this work so immersive and accessible because it's not

(01:14:21):
just these these concepts are drawings that give you a
hint of what's there. He's fully enveloping you in his
vision um and you again with his design background. You
see how Um, through his his sculptural techniques as design techniques,
that he's taken those images and then pulled them into
a physical space where they occupy a three dimensional space.
You can interact with them, you can sit in them.

(01:14:42):
I think that's why the Geeger Bar had such an
appeal for people, Why his museum is is is such
a great, you know, kind of destination stop on a
European tour, is because you're not just seeing something through
the safety of a two dimensional plane. You are now
able to circle it and interact with it and feel
so if it's it's coming into your world, it's crossing

(01:15:02):
that threshold and Um some of that that wonder and
fear that he can create in his work is now
coming at you in a different way. So this is
actually like one of the reasons why we wanted you
to come in and talk to us is that you
understand the process of what he was doing way more
than us. And one of the things I was astonished
by was watching him work with airbrush and documentaries because

(01:15:26):
he didn't do any under drawings. And it's just to
me as like I sort of just like fledgling artists.
It's it's insane watching him come up with this, just
like meticulous anatomy, just with this like the loosest of
possible tools, just going over and over and over again
with it until it's just refined perfectly. And so I'd like,

(01:15:48):
you know, can you speak to that and and also
speak to you know, just his process in general of
also like you know two D to three D work. Sure, well,
I think again, what's what's wonderful at his background is
and he goes to the university to study architecture and
interior design, and you know, when you're presenting those those

(01:16:09):
architectural sketches, those design sketches, you have to be meticulous.
The draftsmanship quality of that really comes out. And when
you look at his early work, certainly in like the
nineteen sixties mid sixties, it's a lot of of pen
and egg again very well rendered, immaculate lines. Its just
exciting work. So when you look at him, and I again,

(01:16:29):
I have in my studio, I have a photo of
him where he's working and he's just right there, going
right on the canvas with an airbrush. Um. I think
the training and the skill that he had going into
that allowed him to just look at a blank canvas,
not as something to be afraid of and figure out
what all, g where am I going to start with this?
But actually he could already see I'm putting lines here,

(01:16:50):
I'm putting lines here, I'm gonna deep in this area.
I'm gonna go in in shade. So it's again a
very organic process, which again it helps contribute to his
very organic results. Where um, it's it's not all hard edges.
Even some of his hard edges seemed very round, almost
like the kind of like the thorax of a bug
or a carapist of of some kind of exoskeleton creatures

(01:17:12):
we see and you know, certainly his later work. But um,
in terms of his process, I I truly believe it
was just his um, his comfort and his command of
what he wanted to do, and the techniques he added,
his disposal that he knew when I put this line
down here, I mean it to be there. It's supposed
to be there. I trust it's gonna it's gonna work
with where I'm going with this. So he could just

(01:17:34):
dive right in and go to town. So tell us
a little bit about Geiger's influences. Sure, Um, what's what's
fascinating about Geiger's influences. And as I mentioned earlier, you
can find the fingerprint of his his peers, his friends, uh,
the artists that he looked to as inspirators as well
as supporters in his work. And when you when you

(01:17:55):
see their work and just you know, I'm gonna give
you some names of people who really impacted what he did. It.
When you do, for instance, of Google image search or
you you find a book of their work and you
flip through it, you're going to see proto gig Or
work in those in those drawings and those paintings and
those sculptures. Uh. The first one that comes to mind
is a gentleman by the name of dado U. And

(01:18:16):
I can't even pronounce his Yuo Slavia names, So I'm
not gonna butcher that um. But was what critical about
him was that he created these beautiful deformed beings UM.
And that's when you look at it, you clearly see
some of those kind of blending, melded uh creatures or
or beings that Gigger created. There's such a parallel there,

(01:18:38):
and you can almost see Gigger being very um enamored
with how he approached the his his designs of these
figures and began playing with that in his own work
and again filtering that through his creative prism. So you're
not just seeing this these kinds of abstract surreal figures,
but beings that exist in his his world and his vision.

(01:18:59):
And so they aren't taking on more of those those borny,
organic biomechanical elements, while still harkening back to kind of
Dato's approach and style. Someone else that I I you
really see in his work is Earnest a few Fuchs,
who is an amazing Austrian um draftsman, painter, um printmaker, sculptor. Again,

(01:19:23):
one of these these individuals who just wasn't bound into
one creative box UM. And what's fascinating about earnest influence
on Hans Ruti's work is the way he presents his
his women, as you know, geegers women uh, even the
pieces he did with UH with his musically UM, they're

(01:19:45):
always presented in these very almost serene, uh commanding, regal,
uh sensual and alluring um compositions. Sometimes they're elongated and leaning,
sometimes they are reclining. Sometimes they're looking at you head on.
And when you look at work and you look at
how he approached his female subjects. It's almost as if

(01:20:05):
you're looking at an underdrawing for one of Um Geger's paintings,
because you can see right away where now we start
adding all of the biomechanical elements on top of this UM.
It's just it's such a very clear fingerprint on how
Gieger approached his his more feminine subject matter. Someone else

(01:20:25):
it's it's really important to talk about is a guy
by the name of Austin Osmond spare Uh and I
hope I'm pronouncing his last name correctly. Um. He was
an artist who really embraced kind of these occult themes
and symbolism and building on the psychology that that an
artwork can have, and I think Geiger really pulled from that.

(01:20:49):
When you look at some of his um some of
the work that begins to reach out more into very
clear occult realms. You see the repetition of symbols, You
see the repetition of certain visual elements that create a
visual language that kind of deepen his vision his world
that he's trying to share with you, but also challenge you.

(01:21:10):
As I know you guys have already touched on some
of the psychological elements of his work. But again that
all plays into this. You know, how do you apply
uh kind of esoteric themes to your work so it's
not just disposable pop culture. There are clear timeless messages
in this work that resonate, which again goes back to
why I think when we talk about things that are
gigar esque, they are ultimately always going to be derivative

(01:21:32):
and in some ways inferior because they lack the message
of the work. They're just replicating the artifice. I mean,
anyone can sit down with an airbrush or with clay
and create these wondrous biomechanical creatures, but they're lacking the
very personal, occult themes and kind of the secret messages
that Geiger was folding into his work, both to challenge

(01:21:55):
individuals but as well as maybe introduced into things that
we're a little uncomfortable. Yeah. I think that's a great point,
because when I think of of of stuff that's derivative
of Geeger, it is kind of like someone saying, oh, well,
these are the parts of this painting that I like
and don't have any issues with that. You know, they
don't challenge me too much. I'm going to take those,
boil those down into into into this work exactly. Yeah.

(01:22:19):
And one of the things that I've noticed, and we
talked about this in the episode, is that there's these
really broad themes of identification through Geeger's work that even
if you look at it and it and it seems
repulsive to you, you know, they're themes that every human
being can identify with birth, death, sex, biology, right, all
of these things. And what I'm trying to think of

(01:22:40):
is somebody today who's working with broad themes like that,
but is also transgressive in the way that Geeger was,
and that like, you look at their work and you go,
I don't feel like I'm supposed to be looking at this,
and yet it has a broad appeal. Is there anybody
you can think of? The best I could come up
with was John J. E in the episode. Yeah. Jong

(01:23:03):
Eto is great. Um He He definitely exists in his
in his own again, his own visual realm. He's created it,
he's expanding it with every release. Um I. It's it's
very hard to point to someone in particular who it
has the same residence that that Geeger has right now,
or even anyone who's come before him. Um because with

(01:23:26):
the unfortunate time period that we end, we're losing a
lot of those very strong talents who set a tone
and a pace for not just pop art or fantasy
art or dark art, but for the art world. Um.
And I think today, especially when you look at the landscape,
so much of art seems to be made for quick digestion.

(01:23:49):
It's I'm I'm going for social media likes, so I'm
gonna do something that's derivative of of someone else's work
or stranger things art, stranger things fan art. I mean,
how many how many waffles and elevens can we see
on them? My Instagram is full of that stuff exactly. Uh.
And again there's nothing wrong with that, but the artist
has to accept the fact that why I'm doing this

(01:24:11):
is I want to appropriate the momentum of some other
property and use that cultural currency. It has to perhaps
elevate my own uh, my own role. Unfortunately though, and
ultimately that's disposable. Are there people who get work from
doing fan art from doing derivative work? Absolutely, but are

(01:24:33):
they going to have a timelessness that someone like Gieger,
like Mobius um, you think about even you know Georgeowski,
who has such an important role for bringing all these
guys together and then from that, even though that project failed,
and again we're talking about his his Doom project. Um
what came out of it alien Uh, some of Blade Runner, um,

(01:24:56):
certainly some of David Lynch's Dune. But you think about
in terms of contemporary film Prometheus, because Radley Scott went
back to some of those early Dune concepts and said,
we need to put these in in this film because
they fit. And I believe one of them is like
this this giant harcon in um, you know, kind of
dome that made an appearance in the film. And again

(01:25:18):
it's it's a great way of looking at someone who
has such a fingerprint on that film. And in fact,
um there's a great documentary I think you can find
like YouTube about the making of Aliens. And what surprised
me was James Cameron's reaction to questions about, you know,
Geiger's involvement. Oh no, no, no, no, no, he we
we didn't bring him in this one. It's his design,

(01:25:40):
but we we want to go in the other direction.
We want to change things, but you can't because his
fingerprint is so strongly and and Scott even has like
recognized that now that he's back on that franchise. Like
Prometheus and Alien Covenant both have Giger back front and center.
And I think in Prometheus, don't they have that big

(01:26:02):
alien mural that he usually Yeah, yes, yes, yeah, And
I understand from my understanding is that there's similar stuff
that's supposed to be in Covenant. So movie I'm hoping
the movie murals. This is a good place for us
to end. So yeah, So Mooviie has a huge influence
on He has three movies throughout the course of his life. Yes,
there are three cats with the same name. Uh so

(01:26:24):
what about you? I know you have two cats, So
are you planning to just have cats throughout the rest
of your life and name them with various numerals after them.
You know that that's probably a great idea. Um, just
Draco one, Moxi five. UM. I can't admit though, that
when you create what they called plastic arts, the sculpture,
or you know, something where it's tactile and you have cats,

(01:26:48):
every time you sell a work of art or you
take on a commission, your client is ultimately going to
get something that is just filled with cat hair. It's
in there. You try to covered up Oh, that's just
veins or I you know, that's just a stray hair.
You know, it's you know, it'll be fine. But UM,
I don't know. There's something fascinating about artists and cats too.

(01:27:09):
Emery hard conan chair comes with one hair from the movie.
I kept wondering watching The Dark Started documentary. It's like,
how how is movie not just scratching the hell out
at everything? Like my cat If I had artwork sitting
around on the uh you know, touching the floor. And
granted some of this was wood and sculpture and all,
but I would just think, oh, my cat would just
tear at the pieces. You know what's fascinating is um.

(01:27:30):
I I used to let my cats in my studio originally,
and I would find that when they want attention, that's
when I would start seeing sculptures on the floor. Arms
are blown off, legs are are shattered. UM. So I
would would keep them out, but now certainly, UM, in
my home where I have my studio, they'll come in
and I'm more or less just like a recliner or

(01:27:50):
a bed. Um, why don't get in a chair next
to me? The other has to sit in my lap
while I work? Um, I've developed an entire kind of
postural approach to how I create so that I'm not
you know, bumping their heads or unsettling their dreams. Um.
But yeah, it's it's fascinating how and you certainly see
with with Geeger he has a strong affinity for cats.
And also, um, something else that really to look at

(01:28:12):
his is his home. UM. I know in your research
you may have touched this already. Early on he was
living in Squalor. It was like he went from one
condemned building to the next. And then when he has
this very kind of fortuitous moment of receiving an inheritance
and buying a house. UM, I think a lot changed
for him in that moment because now he has a
creative base of operations. UM. He doesn't have to worry

(01:28:35):
about maybe being transient in another week or so when
they tear down the building. UM. And I think maybe
some of that that pressure, that environmental pressure, was playing
onto his work and certainly driving his relationship with Lee together. Uh.
And then when he got stable, he had a foundation,
he had his his his fortress of creativity. UM. That's

(01:28:56):
when things really changed with this work. I think I
think he there was a sense of part minutes, there's
a think of this is my my entire studio U.
And when you look at the Dark Star documentary, you
look at that house and it is just standing room
only because the art lives there. He just kind of
lives around it. And when you've got art in your
sinks and in your bathtubs and um, you know folded

(01:29:17):
up behind you know, dinner tables and art stacked on
top of art on top of art, it's you really
get a sense that that was his, his creative palace
and he uh even his his ghost train in the backyard.
And you go out back and that's not a normal
patio set up for a lot of people, maybe a
couple of chairs and a firepit. Not at Geeger's house.
So so thanks for being with us today. Uh where

(01:29:38):
can people find your art online? Where can they find
you know, follow you see the stuff that you're working on? O? Great? Well,
um again, thank you for having me here today. I
love talking about Geeger. Um. He's he's such an important
influence on my own work and certainly early on and
trying to you know, find my own creative path and
my own voice and and and not just replicate what

(01:29:58):
he's done. But if anyone's interested in taking a look
at what I've done, you can find me online at
caski glass dot com. Uh. That's my my main weight
set that I'm I'm going through and doing some alterations
with right now. But from there you can link off
to my social media account, uh my store where you
can you know, take a look at some of the
small artworks that I have available for sale and um
connect with me there because of course I want to

(01:30:20):
connect with other Giger fans and anyone who's interested in
dark art and no kind of promote the scene as
best I can. Yeah, and if you're a fan of
our show and you've seen some of the video stuff
that we've done, especially Monster Science, you're gonna want to
check this stuff out because the cyclops head that shows
up in Monster Science, that's Steiner. Also the Cathulu of
the house stuff works now, that's true. Yeah, it's in

(01:30:41):
our now studio as well, so a lot of good stuff.
Go check it out. Well, thanks for coming in chatting
with us that discussing Gieger and uh we'll include links
to to those websites we mentioned on a landing age
for this episode. It is stuff to Blow your Mind
dot com. Alright, today you have it, Thanks again Derrick
Steiner for chatting with us there. And if you want

(01:31:01):
to check out some of the links we've been discussing here,
go to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com go
to the landing page will include some some interesting gateways
to depl deeper explorations, including standars Lav Graff's website standars
Lav Graff dot com and the hr Gieger Museum itself
hr Giger Museum dot com. And if you want to

(01:31:21):
get in touch with us and talk to us about
Gieger or other artists that you think are working in
this realm where all over social media, you can find
us on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, and Instagram. Or you can
just write us the old fashioned way, send an email,
not a letter. Uh. And that would be at Blow
of the Mind at how stuff Works dot com. Yeah,
and I say there's a ninety chance we will do
a trailer talk episode this Friday in which we look

(01:31:45):
at the trailers for some of these Giger related films
we discussed, uh And that will take place on our
Facebook page and then later I'll upload it to YouTube
and as always, shoot us an email at stuff to
blow your mind dot com for more on this and

(01:32:07):
thousands of other topics. Is that how stuff works dot com.
The fi

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}H. R. Giger and the Biomechanical Soul