Tuesday, November 04, 2014

Unravel

Today marks the start of a long haul; the creation of twelve new Lost Impossimals that will make the collection called Revelations. This will be the biggest and grandest collection yet carrying on the stories and imagination from all the previous Lost Impossimals only with a twist - it will feature augmented reality.

Technology has advanced enough for entire paintings to be virtually tagged so imagine if you will approaching a new Lost Impossimal painting and pointing your smartphone at it, not only will your phone tell you the title but it will automatically give you the story and show you interesting features automatically and virtually. Essentially a small world of information will hover over the painting for you to explore.

Sounds far fetched? Not really, yesterday I tagged items around the house with text and sounds so as I walked around my smartphone highlighted objects and spoke to me. A strange experience but one that is set to become incredibly powerful over the next few years with items like the Occulus Rift and Google Glass, augumented reality is the next logical technology step.

So with that in mind I am building my first gigantic set, a four foot long table on which to host a tea party in the twisted Lost Impossimal version of the Mad Hatters quite peculiar event as you have never seen it before. It will be followed by a trip to the land of Oz, a tour of a curious shop that sells childhood, a carriage gunfight in victorian London and a pitched battle on Tower Bridge for the Whatabanker. All the sets once created will be kept and stored to hopefully go on display later next year along with the new paintings.

To whet your appetite I thought we would pull a short story from the archives that is not on our website, the story of the...

Bored Tiddlyrockers – Arctic, 1881

During our research into the Crystal Tipped Unicone and the Arctic regions Lost Impossimals we came across the old crew roster for the Vigilant, Charles Burroughs charted ship for his 1880-82 expedition to the Arctic Circle. Included in the list is the name Joseph Fincher underlined in red ink with the year 1881 written beside it, a practice normally used when a crew member has gone missing whereabouts unknown. Unusual because Charles does not mention this in his diaries, even more unusual because the disembarkation and paymaster records at the Maritime Institute in Bristol show that when the Vigilant returned Joseph Fincher was onboard. Two other names Milton Bradley and George S Parker are also highlighted, this timewith a small red tick.

We could find no link between the three men until we found a torn note behind the cover of one of Charles diaries. It’s difficult to make out most of it but what we have deciphered is this.

‘...approached. We watched from a distance, they had managed to combat the long days and nights in the region by creating amusement and simple games from a selection of curious shaped objects. They slide along gracefully on curved legs and dine on spongy wrapped rolls full of what looked like our ice cream. These ‘Arctic Rolls’ as we have dubbed them will form part of the collection when we return; if we can we will also manage to bring some of the curious objects along too.

JF.’

It’s not much but we think there was a secret expedition that Charles didn’t write about as we have discovered that all the three men are linked. We believe that all three men bought back with them several objects which were split accordingly, we also believe that Charles was involved but why and what he wished to gain we don’t yet know. Milton Bradley was in the game industry, he had already successfully released The Game of Life in 1860 so if he had heard rumours of the Tiddlyrockers that would have been his reason to jump at the chance to join Charles. Geroge S Parker was a young cabin boy on the expedition, upon his return he immediately and unexpectedly created his own board game, a year later in 1883. he had his own gaming business Parker Brothers. But the lynchpin is Joseph Fincher, he lay dormant for a number of years until 1888 when he filed a patent for Tiddlywinks, one of the games now identified in the Bored Tiddlyrockers painting.

We have a pattern emerging, these groups of people are not here by chance and the more we dig into the files we are uncovering more groups of linked individuals all tied inexplicably to several other Lost Impossimals.

Hold on tight, my minds about to unravel!

 

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