Do these fleshy works of art manipulating human body parts into unnatural shapes make you uncomfortable? That’s probably just what the artist was going for. It’s difficult for us, as humans, to look upon images of our own flesh with emotional detachment, seeing it as we would the meat of other animals, or even as an organic medium for art and architecture. Don’t worry – most of these are not made of actual humans, but rather silicone, polymer clay and wax. Read on for a tent modeled on human intestines, a pillow made of human skin and the world’s grossest pair of stiletto heels.

Jonathan Payne

Jonathan Payne calls these deeply repulsive sculptures ‘FLESHLETTES,’ and that name says a lot. They’re basically lumps of human viscera, teeth, eyes and hair put together into little miniature packages. You probably never wanted to see a nipple with teeth, but here one is, nonetheless.

Andrea Hasler

A tent made of flesh, a giant lump of what looks like human fat serenely overlooking a cliff, and a series of disgusting handbags are among the organic works of Swiss artist Andrea Hasler, who aims to humanize objects with ‘emotional surfaces.’ The tent was modeled upon human intestines and is made of polystyrene and wax as well as leather and real blood.

Felix Deac

Romanian artist Felix Deac creates amorphous blobs of flesh replete with veins, moles, wrinkles and hair. While some might look like deformed human body parts, most are just abstract shapes reminiscent of nightmarish tumors that have taken on a life of their own.

Patricia Piccinini

Patricia Piccinini’s work is so shockingly realistic, photographs of it are often passed around the internet as clickbait, with people wondering ‘what the heck am I looking at?’ The controversial Australian artist creates sculptures of fantastical creatures with extremely human-like skin and hair.

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Art Made Flesh 35 Sculptures Rendered In Human Skin Hair

Magnificent, surreal stages rise from the depths of Austria’s Lake Constance, rotating, glowing, rising and falling in time with the plots of famed operas, plays and musicals. Unparalleled in their scale and complexity, these stages are built every two years for the Bregenz Opera Festival, which began in 1946. With each season that passes, the sets get even more impressive. Here are 10 standouts.

Andre Chenier

Looking like the remains of some fallen civilization, a statue emerges from the lake, its head draped. Then the fabric begins to fall away, revealing a set of stairs that lead right up to the figure’s eye. This interactive set for Andre Chenier, an opera set during the French Revolution, grows even more amazing as the night goes on: the neck of the statue is severed, the head falling back to reveal an additional set.

A Masked Ball

A massive skeleton looms over an open book as the scene for A Masked Ball, an opera by Guiseppe Verde. One of the Bregenz Festival’s most iconic sets, this one from 1999 is fairly simple compared to the amazingly complex ones seen in more recent years.

Tosca

Puccini’s Tosca played out against this unforgettable backdrop, which featured a giant eye with an iris that actually rotates to reveal a hidden room. Scenes for the James Bond movie Quantum of Solace were filmed in the front of the building and in the audience while this stage was still active, in 2008.

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Performance Architecture 10 Dramatic Opera Sets Stages

A single sheet of paper becomes a complex three-dimensional object in the hands of Jun Mitani, a computer scientist who uses geometric modeling software to aid him in his designs. Mitani has been studying algorithms and user interfaces for generating 3D shapes that can be realized with folding paper in a twist on the traditional craft of origami.

Not only does Mitani fold these mathematical origami objects himself, he also designs computer software to come up with the shapes. Mitani’s origami designs have ‘rotational symmetry’, meaning they look the same after a certain amount of rotation.

Mitani scores folding lines in a sheet of paper and then folds it by hand. While large sheets of paper don’t work well for complex origami shapes due to a lack of structural strength, Mitani is beginning to experiment with other materials, collaborating with industrial companies. That might reduce one issue that plagues Mitani in his work – he has suffered from, he says, “a few thousand” paper cuts.

“When I was a kid, I didn’t have much interest in folding origami, but in papercraft,” says Mitani in an interview with The Creators Project. “I fabricated a lot of paper models, such as cars, ships, buildings, and animals, etc. by cutting and gluing pieces of paper. I felt that origami, just folding, was too restricted. On the other hand, I was enthusiastic about the computer, which my father bought when I was a first-year student in elementary school. As a fusion of two objects of interest, papercraft and computer, the theme of my Ph.D. thesis became a method for designing paper models with the computer.”

It looks like a work of art – a sculpture meant to represent, perhaps, a cloud of smoke being blown from a pipe. But what you’re looking at is actually a recreation of the vocal chords of a 50-million-year-old ‘walking whale.’ ‘Proposal for Resuscitating Prehistoric Creatures’ is an exhibition by Marguerite Humeau that enables us to hear just what extinct animals would have sounded like.

“I’m not only recreating a shape, but also the data that has disappeared — we’ll never be 100 per cent sure this is accurate,” Humeau told Wired Magazine UK. “But when I heard it roar, it felt real.”

The London-based interactive designer has created full-scale, working sculptures for three extinct creatures: the entelodont, known as the ‘hell pig’, the mammoth imperator and the ambulocetus, known as the ‘walking whale.’ The long tube mimics the larynx. Determining just what the vocal chords would have looked like was a puzzle that took Humeau many years to solve.

Because vocal chords are made of soft tissue, there are no fossils that indicate their shape. The designer consulted experts like paleontologists, veterinarians, engineers and ear, nose and throat specialists. A French explorer who searched Siberia for woolly mammoth carcasses gave Humeau MRI scans that he had taken of a 10,000-year-old mammoth, which she combined with fossil data to create a digital 3D representation. The sculptures are made of polyurethane foam fitted with silicon membranes that vibrate to produce sounds just like biological vocal chords do.

The project will be on display at Cité du Design in Saint-Etienne, France through January 2013, so visitors can hear what these creatures sounded like first-hand. For the rest of us, here’s a video that’s almost as exciting.

If you were to travel today through the area that was once Yugoslavia, you would come across some incredible massive objects that allow an unexpected look directly into the area’s past. Before dissolving into several smaller countries in the 1990s, Yugoslavia became home to a number of large-scale futuristic monuments.

(all images via: Human’s Scribbles)

The monuments, scattered all throughout the former Yugoslavia, were erected in the 1960s and 1970s by then-Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito. The Spomenik, which literally translates to “monuments,” are commemorative markers which immortalize WWII battle sites and locations of concentration camps.

Although the events marked by the monuments were dark, the sculptures themselves are utterly fantastical and otherworldly in nature. They were created by a number of different sculptors and architects, each piece imbued with a unique sense of cultural history.

The highly abstract objects take many unexpected shapes, appearing to represent giant models of microbes, huge crystals, deconstructed architecture, even alien plant life. The gigantic, mostly concrete, shapes reflect what was then a very strong, proud country. The form of each monument was selected for its symbolic meaning, having some sort of connection to the site on which it stands.

Throughout the 80s, the monuments were visited by millions of Yugoslavians, especially younger people who were pursuing their patriotic education. But when Yugoslavia dissolved, visits to the monuments dropped off almost entirely – and upkeep of the structures was abandoned.

Since the early 1990s, the monuments have been completely neglected. They sit there now, rising high above the surrounding trees and before majestic mountains, their historic origins becoming more obscured with every passing generation. Many of the desolate structures are crumbling into inscrutable ruins. Will these mysterious objects become the Stonehenges of the 20th century?

This series of Spomenik photos was created by Jan Kempenaers, a photographer who felt compelled to make the difficult journey through the Balkans to document the forgotten Yugoslavian giants. Using an old map of the monuments from 1975, he traveled to each of them in turn, capturing them in their current state of sad, melancholy glory.

Though the monuments themselves – the sculptures, completely removed of their meaning – are still quite striking, it is hard to ignore the pain and suffering that they represent. When they were erected, they were meant to bear witness to the atrocities that took place during WWII. Today, their meaning is nearly lost to time and political upheaval. Many incorrectly believe the structures to have been Communist propaganda material, but in fact the monuments were meant as tributes to the anti-fascist uprisers and everyone else who died in the second world war.

These lonely monoliths no longer immediately call to mind the approximately one million Yugoslavs killed in World War II. Over time, they have begun to look almost like natural parts of the landscape rather than the testament to human resilience and national pride they were meant to commemorate.

Insofar as it is possible to enjoy a work of art without knowing what it represents, stumbling across one of these monuments in the Balkans must be a truly awe-inspiring experience for foreign visitors. But we like to think that there are also some adventurous historians out there, still visiting the monuments to pay their respects to the fallen people they memorialize.