Biomechanics

Product Information

Irem's horizontal scrollers R-Type and X-Multiply feature weird pulsating landscapes – part geography, part living beings – as well as giant swollen-headed aliens with phallic extrusions. The album cover scares the viewer with the image of Baphomet, a goatlike demon who had allegedly been worshipped by the Templars. R. Giger Necronomicon were to be remembered by only one piece of art, it would absolutely have to be Necronom IV.

The influence was surely there too in Valve's atmospheric Half-Life adventures, with their repulsively transmogrified humanoid creatures, and face hugger-like Head Crabs. In it, reproduction is also connected with violence – not only towards the creature being birthed, as mentioned before, but also the one which gives birth and is therefore a “host”. His art visualised the human-machine interfacing of cyberpunk, and it saw the crossover as one of sexual rather than intellectual-technological coupling.As you may or not know, I have been sorting through boxes of books that have been collected by me and fam over the last decade or two, and I am desperately trying to thin the collection. R Giger’s book in that particular publishing niche, but the unnerving exploration of the deepest, darkest fantasies says otherwise. The first-person shooter Doom mixed demonic monsters with claustrophobic sci-fi environments, and Giger's weird organic interior designs doubtless inspired the game's miles of intestinal corridors and womb-like interiors.

Incidentally, many will have had the opportunity to see a number of the artworks in Biomechanics from exposure to his HR Giger ARh+ book. The Polish reflection on literature and art has cultivated the term turpism (from Latin “turpis” – “ugly”) which describes the exploration of the disgusting, revolting, and shocking.Tightly bound and exceptionally neat in crisp edged and uniformly bright color pictorial dust jacket. The character is closer to a robot than a living creature, though the slime it exudes appears unbearably biological – and is used to immobilise victims, much like a spiders’ web. The lickers, the ooze, the Medusa-like Uroboros and the invasive Duvalia all played on the themes of bodily transgression and oral sexuality that Giger explored.

The airbrush stuff is arresting to one seeing Giger's art for the first time, but it pales a little after one sees his 70s airbrush murals. Giger’s fascination with all things surreal and macabre began at a young age and this led to an interest in expressing himself through visual arts.

The nightmarish, industrial installations are then a metaphor of an unknown, terrifying environment we enter during birth. We have to take into account, however, that the pop-culture which made us familiar with ugliness (and may have even bored us with it) owes its openness to anti-aesthetics in part to Giger.