The Swiss surrealist who fused flesh and machine into a single nightmare image · the painted pole of the machine-body preoccupation the industrial scene shares, from the Necronomicon to Alien to a long line of record sleeves.
H.R. Giger (1940–2014) was a Swiss surrealist painter, sculptor and designer, the originator of the style known as "biomechanical," and the Bureau files him in the Adjacent sub-section as the most complete visual expression of the flesh-and-machine imagination the industrial age produced. Where the archive's sound and its machine-performance figures work the meeting of body and machine in noise and action, Giger worked it in paint, and the preoccupation is recognisably the same.
The biomechanical is a fusion of the organic and the mechanical: human and alien figures intertwined with machinery, drawn from Giger's recurring nightmares and rendered in meticulous, airbrushed detail, dark, erotic and dystopian. It is a vision of the body colonised by the machine and the machine made fleshly, and it gives image to exactly the anxiety, industry, technology, the human reduced to a component, that the founding industrial musicians made audible.
His 1977 artwork collection Necronomicon is the fullest statement of that world, and it led directly to the work he is most widely known for: the creature and environments for Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), which won an Academy Award and made the biomechanical a permanent part of science fiction's dark imagination. The Xenomorph is the biomechanical idea in its most famous single form, a body that is also a weapon and a machine.
Giger's tie to the music world runs through the record sleeve. He was a prolific album-cover artist across genres, from Debbie Harry's KooKoo (1981) to a long line of heavy and underground records, and his imagery has been a standing reference point for the darker, machine-fixated end of electronic and industrial-adjacent music. The machine-flesh image as record packaging is its own small tradition, and Giger is its central figure.
Within this archive he is best read alongside the Performance sub-section's machine-and-body artists. Giger's painted biomechanics, Survival Research Laboratories' machine performances and Stelarc's body-machine interfaces are three media working one preoccupation: the fusion, and the contest, of flesh and machine. Giger is the painted pole of that triangle, and the one whose imagery travelled furthest into popular culture.
The Bureau files Giger on the documentary and adjacency tests: he is not of the industrial scene, but the machine-body aesthetic he defined is inseparable from the scene's visual world, and his influence recurs across its darker reaches. He is filed in the Visual department as the artist who gave the flesh-and-machine imagination its definitive image.