PLA, wood, vinyl, LCD screen, speakers, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, hardware
contains copies of Inter Ice Age 4 (1969) by Kobo Abé and Googiewaumer Comics (1969) by Wendell Allen Pugh
4’x2’x1’
a platform for upholding discrete pieces of media
Inter Ice Age 4 is a science fiction novel by Kobo Abé, an author often referred to as “the Kafka of Japan,” for his work’s existential and uncanny qualities. The book, originally serialized in the journal Sekai from 1958-59, was prescient in combining subject matter as wide ranging as AI, climate change and genetic engineering. The convoluted plot follows Professor Katsumi of the Institute for Computer Technique, who, as “the only person in Japan specialized in programming,” has been tasked by the government to create a “forecasting machine” capable of predicting the future. Katsumi’s quest to gather data for testing the machine leads to him discovering a conspiracy involving scientists genetic engineering a new species of amphibian humans. These scientists have observed the climate warming (due to an increase in underwater volcanic eruptions is their theory), and with it the melting of polar ice caps. Homo sapiens are destined to perish as the world floods and this new species, with their gills and webbed feet, will allow a semblance of humanity to survive in underwater societies among drowned ruins.
Inter Ice Age 4 cover and illustrations by Machi Abé, wife of Kobo Abé
Having grown up moving between different locations in Japan and China, Abé described himself as rootless and eventually came to reject all forms of nationalism and ceremony. In a 1986 interview he claimed for this reason to have refused to attend his daughter’s wedding, and that he likewise planned on not attending his mother’s funeral after her death. He was a leftist, and at one point a member of the Japanese Communist Party, but became politically disillusioned after, what in one interview he claimed to be a visit to Soviet-era Prague, and in another a visit to Budapest just before the Hungarian uprising. For many years he was also best friends with Yukio Mishima before the rift between their politics grew irreconcilable. In addition to publishing dozens of novels, short stories, plays and essays, as well as two poetry collections, Abé also created an internationally touring theatre company, writing and directing plays that he would perform live music for on his EMS and Moog synthesizers.[2][3]
The only footage of Abé I can find online. (If you know of any others please send them to me)
Googiewaumer is an obscure underground comic book created by Wendell Allen Pugh and published by The Print Mint in 1969. Most of the comic consists of "The Adventures of Super Ghurb” following a blobby creature with ambiguous and plastic features. The strips are broken up by shorter pieces of hippie-commentary on American consumerism and conformity. Storylines are nonsensical and a diverse mix of industrial and natural imagery is depicted, cohered by Pugh’s “ligne claire” illustration. Vaccume cleaners, televisions, computers, cars and soft drinks proliferate a setting of forestry where lumpy Super Ghrubs inhabit dens several soil layers below the surface. This coexistence of the natural and technological evokes the emergence of the field of ecology from that of cybernetics in the 60‘s, the utopian visions of which were captued in Richard Brautigan’s 1967 poem “All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace,” and later critiqued in the 2011 Adam Curtis documentary series named after Brautigan’s poem.
Pugh is a far less recognized and prolific figure than Abé. Ranking among the most marginal members of the 60’s underground comics scene, Googiewaumer is Pugh’s only published material outside of a few short strips featured in other publications. The only interview he ever gave appears to have been for Mark James Estren’s A History of Underground Comics where he commented on the influence of his education, a fine arts MFA at Southern Illinois University, explaining; "My stuff is all fucked up because I went to school for six years and got all involved in aesthetics and professionalism, which I've decided is all bullshit. Wish I'd never learned to draw.”
Googiewaumer Comics cover and select pages
In addition to Estren’s book, the one other text I can find discussing the comic is its entry on the database comixjoint.com:
“Googiewaumer is a good example of The Print Mint being willing to print anything that walked through the door. They printed 10,000 copies of this comic book at the beginning of the underground frenzy and three years later, after millions of undergrounds had been sold, The Print Mint still had copies of Googiewaumer gathering dust in their warehouse.”
Despite the comic’s unbeloved status among enthusiasts, as well as its own creator, Googiewaumer stands out as one of the most avant-garde works to emerge from the 60’s underground scene, pushing the medium into territories rarely seen before or since. Boarders between panels are organically shaped, ornamented by characters’ fungal appendages breaking out into the page’s construction. Illustration styles and orientation of panel layouts change within the same page, and speech bubbles are as likely to be filled with coherent sentences as with made-up words and icons. Googiewaumer is a testament to the freedom found by some within 60’s counterculture, that, preceding the zine culture of the 90’s or proliferation of internet platforms that followed, afforded artists the ability to create and distribute uncompromisingly strange work, regardless of its commercial viability or lack-there-of. The comic is also a story of the limits of that freedom. In Pugh’s interview with Estren, he reveals the existence of a second issue of Googiewaumer, never to be published due to lack of interest: “Googiewaumer #1 was the kind of comic I would like to do but sales were pretty shitty. No one understood it. I would like to do it again. But no will will print it. #2 is wating at the printer for financial assistance. It is much straighter and obviously verbal rather than visual. I’m still doing it but in a more limited sense.”
Pugh is number 8
Letter from Pugh to Estren
Sources:
[3]David Remnick. “Kobo Abe: A Figure Apart”. Washington Post. 1986
[2]Henry Scott-Stokes. “Japan’s Kafka Goes On The Road”. New York Times. 1979
M. Steven Fox. “Googiewaumer Comics”. Comixjoint
Mark James Estren. A History of Underground Comics. 1974
[1]Nancy Shields. Fake Fish: The Theater of Kobo Abe. 1996.
back