Nietzschean Mutations by Dromsjel

"Drømsjel" means “dream soul” in Norwegian. It’s the moniker of Pierre Schmidt, a German born digital artist who takes the vintage 1940s and 50s advertising aesthetic to heady and surrealist place. Dromsjel fucking loves to rip people's faces off.  Then he replaces them with wild flora and fauna: flowers, lichens, fungi, parakeets.  The faces are straight from magazine advertisements, but the wildlife illustrations are encyclopedic, scientific illustrations. He melts it all together using a mixture of collage, illustrations and digital blending. His website claims his work is “partly inspired by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who challenged ideas about individuality and the meaning of our existence”.

Dromsjel has been kind enough to provide us with before and after images of his modifications, walking us through the face ripping process. 

Why does Dromsjel hate makeup so much? Why is a rainbow waterfall on this lady's face so much better than Revlon's revolutionary "demi-textures"? I feel like it would help to look into Dromsjel's purported influence to figure it out. I need a quote, but I'm not a Nietzsche scholar, so... 

“Mathematics would certainly have not come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no actual circle, no absolute magnitude.”

Thanks Wikiquote.com, that'll do fine. 

Advertisers are mathematicians of desire, calculating images with the perfect ratio of beauty and mass appeal. The subjects are ideal, especially in all the older magazine ads. Scientific illustrations, likewise, want to get as close to an ideal form as possible, that which was provided by nature upon observation. But nature hates a straight line, like our buddy Nietzsche knows. Maybe that's why it sometimes feels like a perfect thing is begging to be broken, just because it's so perfect. Think of cute aggression, those kittens and puppies so cute it that internally they make you want to bash something against a wall. I think Dromsjel can relate. In his images recognizable perfection has been invaded and reshaped by a contagous hyperactivity. He saw this perfectly illustrated parakeet and this hip young couple on their motor bike, and he thought "FFFFUCK SOMEONE NEEDS THEIR FACE RIPPED RIGHT THE FUCK OFF."

So, there is a sense in which these pictures are utterly violent. They look like awful new creatures from a planet where boundaries have trouble respecting each other. Nietzsche is relevant here too, because Nietzsche loved vitality, and knew that the true power of life was in it's ability to overtake, to grow, to remain vital in the face of mediocrity. These advertisements are begging to be infected with life, because they represent compromise with the masses, with mediocrity. 

You can enact the Drosjel philosophy, as I see it, by going out today or tomorrow (no later, please) and looking at every thing you see, from hottest hottie you see walking down the street, to the pigeons waiting for you to drop crumbs from your sandwich at lunch, to the subway train that's getting ready to take you home -- imagine each thing in existence has a personal agenda as well as the potential to utterly change you and be changed by you. Do not go around stuffing chrysanthemums and finches people's faces. You will be punched. Stay in your head, and imagine how much different you would be by the end of the day, after having had everything you pass try to actively invade you, it's vital energy interacting with and fighting with your own in a day long argument with a multitude of participants, natural and unnatural, sentient and non-sentient. That's the struggle of life that Nietzsche believed in, and that's illustrated in Dromsjel's images. 

You could say that, in these images, consumer culture is being dismantled and re-purposed in order to expose the manipulations of capitalism, but there's no need to be such a college socialist about it. He's just creating beauty from dead left over beauty, from artifacts that have no ability to fight back any more. Dromsjel is recycling, re-energizing and building upon images that still have a little vitality left to wring out. These ads, the drained ephemeral left overs of a previous generations' consumer culture, are now historical artifacts, obsolete tools for an old machine. Likewise, the old necessity to illustrate the natural world in order to spread knowledge of it was filled by photography. It's largely a dead art, but an art nonetheless. All that's left of these tools is that flat beauty, which Dromsjel rejuvinates with visual commentary. It doesn't feel like an attack. It feels like a party is breaking out on the surface of these familiar, now cliched figures and fashions. He's like a medium. With his manipulations and alterations, Dromsjel is having a lively visual conversation with the dead.  

 

Even the obsolete has value when it's dismantled, invaded, rearranged. It's how flowers grow, from the rot of what came before. Remember how tenacious life is, how much bigger nature is than you, how it's going to keep fighting against you, and how you need to fight back and not stand there like some jerk off on a moped in an advertisement selling a life that isn't real. The bland need not be bland so long as you're alive to perceive it and ballsy enough to impose your specific weirdness onto it. There's always the excitement of the act of perceiving, and the desire to interact, to let the party going on in your head play with the party going on outside, to perceive actively, without dead time. Why let perfectly good leftovers go to waste?