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ABPOLIS
Abpolis is an extremely open-ended ongoing creative project , made to inform and inspire the designs and experiments I've been doing with model making.
It's open-ended in the sense that I'm not letting myself get stuck on "having" to make it a campaign setting , a blog series , or a commercial product (or typically all three) , instead making up just enough about it to give a direction to the design of figures and material experiments.
But importantly still have enough space to pivot around what the materials themselves offered in creative direction.
That's not to say it can't or won't be turned into something else at some stage.
But as I've kept finding myself ensnared and burdened with speculative project bloat and vasts trees of " Oh I'll need to include/do this" , and it's resulted in doing fuck all, Abpolis is a change in approach.
You may of already been aware of all this seeing VARIOUS FIGURES on the instagram, and regardless if YOU ARE here's a link for both your convenience and elucidation :
IT IS ALSO going to be included in the exhibition in Nottingham I'm part of:
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| Some of the dudes going to be shown |
I'm including various figures I've making , and big mess of sketches, speculative design notes, lore dumps and some bigger developed drawings.
SPEAKING OF lore dumping , I'm using this (and future posts ) to force myself to consolidate the nearly coherent jotting and text fragments that currently exist about Ab-polis into something approaching readability and even informability.
As that's something to be included in this exhibition as well. BIG WOW!
The Frogs:
Hungry protean fellows, driven by assimilative cannibalism and consciousness blurring fungal infection. Sing and talk about being One and The Song of All and they spend most of their time fighting and eating other in state of hunger, desperate mania and celebratory joy.
The frogs blessed with the largest forms and stable forms gain strength and power from eating other frogs (and anything else) , in a fairly conventionally "eat and grow bigger" lifestyle.
Less conventional is when the eaten frog is incorporated into the eater , not by digest , but just kinda growing out of them somewhere.
The frogs that manage only to get mostly eaten from these predations have their insufficient forms and injuries tended and reinforced by the latent fungal infection they share, potentially becoming nigh unrecognizable masses of fungal what-ever.
A third vocation exists of just biting or pulling off parts of other frogs that they fancy , running away and then sticking them on their body.
The Song Of All :
I will eat you and you will live with me, we will grow and eat and become
no death
Only death
the death of the skin-lie
The eaten is the eater is the eaten is the eater
the song is all all is the song
DESIGN NOTES:
Chaos frogs / body horror mutant hive mind / messy goons aren't a staggering new concept , but thing about Ab-polis is that it wasn't about impressing anyone with my creative brilliance as was creating something to inspire some fun model building. And mutant frogs are a great shape for that, with their simple cartoonishly expressive forms (oversized mouths and limbs) .
Then add fungus and general wacky body plasticiness and you got yourself a gay old time.
I don't know if the name is a reference , exactly, to Aristophane's play other than I like the play. Like there's zero thematic matching here ? "The Frogs" is sinister in its innocuousity though and I'm sticking with it.
BITU-MEN
Terrible results of reusing/failing to properly dispose of an adaptive smart material, that was otherwise being wonderful for making appliances, industrial machinery, pets, "domestic" servants, etc.
The tanks and other storage facilities to contain, dispose, and research were already showing inadequacy even before the epistemological rupture . Now they present an unpredictable danger to an environment already full of unpredictable dangers.
Each bitu-men is barely stable amalgam of half-remembered roles and purposes, which they will still try and follow.
Resulting in something potentially harmless (sucking up dust and attempt to clean the glass on empty window frames) , to far less harmless (sucking up internal organs and trying to clean and sort human bone) .
They can be really worrying when they have grudges or emotion fixations from some of their previous uses, especially if they were misused or abused in their role.
DESIGN NOTES:
These are 100% the result of playing with Shoe-goo, a difficult material to use , but one that gives alot in weirdness and texture. They've got a wire frame underneath them.
I'm not sure if the figures really match the lore at this stage, they look a little too protean and don't particular suggest their past uses. However if I start including basic looking machine parts they start blurring into the visual design space of the Scrunges (ooze that makes junk forms for itself) . Maybe I should include some kind of Pompeii event where the smart material entombed and their dying psychic echoes imprinted on them?
Or lean into some kind of tar-pit or petrochemical industry horror?
The lore was developed around trying to make them into something more than a unstable flailing ooze that just tries to kill you. Anyway this an example of when the material inspires some world building but then the world building starts going against the potential of the material.
There's then a whole mess of creative choices around trying to push the material into doing something against the result (which can result in something amazing or just a tepid mess) or readjusting the lore (which could result in going in an exciting new direction or compromising into something generic ) .
They also feel pretty similar to the Gilgamash from Veins of The Earth.
But this is why Abpolis is currently opened ended, so things can be scrapped , pivoted , reworked, etc. Or just left behind if there's deeper and richer mines to exploit.
NEXT POST WILL COVER : The Immurement Cults and Elemunters
