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Archive for the ‘Film/Video/New Media’ Category
OK Go’s Needing/Getting = 1000 instruments over two miles
February 10, 2012The new music video from OK Go, made in partnership with Chevrolet. OK Go set up over 1000 instruments over two miles of desert outside Los Angeles. A Chevy Sonic was outfitted with retractable pneumatic arms designed to play the instruments, and the band recorded this version of Needing/Getting, singing as they played the instrument array with the car. The video took 4 months of preparation and 4 days of shooting and recording. There are no ringers or stand-ins; Damian took stunt driving lessons. Each piano had the lowest octaves tuned to the same note so that they’d play the right note no matter where they were struck. Many thanks to Chevy for believing in and supporting such an insane and ambitious project, and to Gretsch for providing the guitars and amps.
For more information visit http://www.okgo.net
Director: Brian L. Perkins & Damian Kulash, Jr.
Director of Photography: Yon Thomas
Editor: Doug Walker
Producer: Luke Ricci
My…MY… by RAYDESIGN
February 9, 2012
Animation: Lei Lei
Music: Li Xingyu
Year of Production: 2011
Running Time: 4:38
raydesign.cn
Dialogue list:
My… My…
Well, my clothes
Ah, my pants
Give them back, give them back
Oh, my hat
Hum, could you give me back my hat?
2011 Ottawa International Animation Festival showcase program
Urban Food Growing in Havana, Cuba
February 9, 2012A clip from the BBC’s “Around the World in 80 Gardens” (2008) showing some of the urban food gardening in Havana, Cuba. Presented by Monty Don.
Earthmoving: A Sierra Zulu Prequel
February 6, 2012
Another day at the United Nations Offices in Vienna. The Austrian Foreign Affairs Ministry invited members of the European Protocol Service, the UN Strategic Command Center for Central Europe, the United States Air Forces and a regional politician from Lower Austria to talk about the future of Soviet Unter-WHAT?!
Via Sierra Zulu
The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
February 6, 2012“If you design with a view to optimize anything, it is bound to end up suboptimal, because it can’t cope with change. This applies as much to political constitutions, universities and buildings”
~ Jeff Mulgan
It began as a housing marvel. Two decades later, it ended in rubble. But what happened to those caught in between? The Pruitt-Igoe Myth tells the story of the transformation of the American city in the decades after World War II, through the lens of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe housing development and the St. Louis residents who called it home. At the film’s historical center is an analysis of the massive impact of the national urban renewal program of the 1950s and 1960s, which prompted the process of mass suburbanization and emptied American cities of their residents, businesses, and industries. Those left behind in the city faced a destitute, rapidly de-industrializing St. Louis , parceled out to downtown interests and increasingly segregated by class and race. The residents of Pruitt-Igoe were among the hardest hit. Their gripping stories of survival, adaptation, and success are at the emotional heart of the film. The domestic turmoil wrought by punitive public welfare policies; the frustrating interactions with a paternalistic and cash-strapped Housing Authority; and the downward spiral of vacancy, vandalism and crime led to resident protest and action during the 1969 Rent Strike, the first in the history of public housing. And yet, despite this complex history, Pruitt-Igoe has often been stereotyped. The world-famous image of its implosion has helped to perpetuate a myth of failure, a failure that has been used to critique Modernist architecture, attack public assistance programs, and stigmatize public housing residents. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth seeks to set the historical record straight. To examine the interests involved in Pruitt-Igoe’s creation. To re-evaluate the rumors and the stigma. To implode the myth.
Koyaanisqatsi in 5 minutes
February 6, 2012Video: Koyaanisqatsi (1982) at 1552% speed. (The year 1552 marks the publication of “A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies,” an account of the mistreatment of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas)
Audio: “The Holy Egoism of Genius,” from the 1999 Art of Noise album The Seduction of Claude Debussy.
Wyatt Hodgson: I have only the highest respect for Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass (as well as The Art of Noise). This experiment is not meant in any way to diminish the emotional and atmospheric power of the original film, and I highly recommend anyone who has not seen it to do so before viewing this.
Golan Levin’s AMA Video Uses Experimental 3D Cinema
February 3, 2012
Golan Levin is a creator, performer, innovator, engineer and MIT graduate whose work has been seen around the world, and FITC gave you the opportunity to ask him anything via Reddit. Golan has answered your questions in the video below, which was created by James George (@obviousjim) and Jonathan Minard (@deepspeedmedia), artists-in-residence at Golan’s lab who are researching new forms of experimental 3D cinema.
The work of James George and Jonathan Minard explores the notion of “re-photography”, in which otherwise frozen moments in time may be visualized from new points of view. Despite the sometimes wildly moving camera, the video was in fact shot with a stationary Kinect-like depth sensor coupled to a digital SLR video camera. To compose their shots, the filmmakers developed custom openFrameworks software that aligns and combines color video and depth data into a dynamic sculptural relief.
In a process of “virtual cinematography”, James and Jonathan rephotographed Golan’s 3D likeness — selecting new angles, dollying, and zooming — to compose new perspectives on the data as if playing a video game. Fixed camerawork is thus transformed into a malleable and negotiable post-process, in which shots can be carefully recomposed to highlight and inflect different latent meanings.
This experiment developed out of concepts and collaborations born at Art && Code, a conference on 3D sensing and visualization organized by Golan’s laboratory, the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University. Artist-hackers assembled to explore the artistic, technical, tactical and cultural potentials of low-cost depth sensors, such as the Kinect. As an outcome of the conference, James George, a creative coder interested in cinema, and Jonathan Minard, a documentary filmmaker interested in new-media technology, are now collaborating on the development of open-source tools and techniques for augmenting high-resolution video with depth information.
Via FITC
The First cycle: From the yarn to the show
February 3, 2012The first cycle. A visualization of a creative production process, made for fashion designer Borre Akkersdijk.
An animation where the viewer is being taken by fiction and reality into the creative concept of it’s designer.
The animation was the introduction of his fashion show ‘The first cycle’ -from the yarn to the show- at the fashion week in Paris.
This animation was realized on the Motion cabinet by Niels Hoebers.
Boardwalk Empire VFX Breakdowns
February 2, 2012
The Emmy award-winning team at Brainstorm Digital has put together the before and after shots from season 2 of HBO’s hit series “Boardwalk Empire”. Boardwalk Empire is an American television series from cable network HBO, set in Atlantic City, New Jersey, during the Prohibition era.
A Film Unfinished: Outtakes can show historical truth
February 1, 2012
SYNOPSIS
At the end of WWII, 60 minutes of raw film, having sat undisturbed in an East German archive, was discovered. Shot by the Nazis in Warsaw in May 1942, and labeled simply “Ghetto,” this footage quickly became a resource for historians seeking an authentic record of the Warsaw Ghetto. However, the later discovery of a long-missing reel, inclusive of multiple takes and cameraman staging scenes, complicated earlier readings of the footage.
A FILM UNFINISHED presents the raw footage in its entirety, carefully noting fictionalized sequences (including a staged dinner party) falsely showing “the good life” enjoyed by Jewish urbanites, and probes deep into the making of a now-infamous Nazi propaganda film.
A FILM UNFINISHED is a film of enormous import, documenting some of the worst horrors of our time and exposing the efforts of its perpetrators to propel their agenda and cast it in a favorable light.
The film
“A Film Unfinished first emerged out of my theoretical preoccupation with the notion of the “archive”, and the unique nature of the witnessing it bears.” – Yael Hersonski
The Holocaust confronted humanity not only with inconceivable horrors, but also for the first time, with their systematic documentation. More than anything else, it is the photographic documentation of these horrors that has changed forever the way in which the past is archived. Atrocities committed by the Nazis were photographed more extensively than any evils, before or after. Yet since the war, these images, created by the perpetrators have been subjected to mistreatments: in the best of cases they were crudely used as illustrations of the many stories; in the worst, they were presented as straightforward historical truth.
The Gomeran Whistle, a Landscape-generated Language
January 31, 2012The whistled language of La Gomera Island in the Canaries, the Silbo Gomero, replicates the islanders habitual language (Castilian Spanish) with whistling. Handed down over centuries from master to pupil, it is the only whistled language in the world that is fully developed and practised by a large community (more than 22,000 inhabitants). The whistled language replaces each vowel or consonant with a whistling sound: two distinct whistles replace the five Spanish vowels, and there are four whistles for consonants. The whistles can be distinguished according to pitch and whether they are interrupted or continuous. With practice, whistlers can convey any message. Some local variations even point to their origin. Taught in schools since 1999, the Silbo Gomero is understood by almost all islanders and practiced by the vast majority, particularly the elderly and the young. It is also used during festivities and ceremonies, including religious occasions. To prevent it from disappearing like the other whistled languages of the Canary Islands, it is important to do more for its transmission and promote the Silbo Gomero as intangible cultural heritage cherished by the inhabitants of La Gomera and the Canary Islands as a whole.
Landscape-related professions that deal with constant loneliness, such as shepherds, hunters or fishermen, profit from this system to warn the others from dangers, emergencies, wolf attacks or enemy invasions.
There are whistled communication methods in every main family of languages: French Pyrenees, Turkey, Mexico, Greek islands, Amazon forests, North Vietnam Hmong peoples, or desert zones in West Africa. Listen HERE
The Spanish Canary Islands inscribed on the list of UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009.
Photo by TONY FRENCH
Seventh Sense (Excerpt) / 第七感官 (五分鐘版)
January 28, 2012Anarchy Dance Theatre + UltraCombos
安娜琪舞蹈劇場 + 叁式
Nov. 2011, TAIWAN.
——————————————
Choreograph by Chieh-hua Hsieh
AnarchyDanceTheatre@gmail.com
This piece is still under progress. Premiere on Nov. 2012, TAIWAN.
First Woman On The Moon, 1999 by Aleksandra Mir.
January 26, 2012
The day when heavy machinery and manpower transformed a Dutch beach into a lunar landscape of hills and craters. At sunset the labor stopped, and a live drumbeat announced the ceremony of a woman, gracing this imaginary moon with an American flag. The same evening, while the party still went on, the landscape was flattened out again, leaving no physical trace of the event behind—save the memories and a story to tell future generations.
First Woman On The Moon, 1999 by Aleksandra Mir.
Earthflight – Peregrine Falcon Hunts Starlings in Rome
January 25, 20125 million starlings stream into Rome every winter evening. They form some of the most mesmeric aerial displays to confuse and avoid a peregrine falcon on the look out for his evening meal.
Earthflight uses many different filming techniques to create the experience of flying with birds as they reveal some of the greatest natural and man-made monuments of the planet.
Sue Coe: Art of the Animal
January 25, 2012
New York-based British artist, Sue Coe, in sketching, drawing, and painting what she has seen in factory farms, slaughterhouses and other places where animals are made to suffer all over the world, is both witness and change agent. Our Hen House, the internet’s hub of all things vegan and animal rights (which was just named by VegNews Magazine the Indie Media Powerhouse of 2011), is proud to announce the latest installment in our Art of the Animal series: a new video-short, “Sue Coe: Art of the Animal.” Our Hen House’s ongoing Art of the Animal video series speaks with artists of all kinds who speak up for animals through their medium. Now, we invite you and your site’s visitors to experience the revelatory images that document the reality of animal exploitation, and to learn first-hand from Sue Coe how her journey into this oftentimes dark, but very real world, manifested.
Directed by Our Hen House’s Executive Director, Jasmin Singer, the video-short takes the viewer on a journey narrated by Sue Coe, and features selections from her vast body of work. Coe describes the impetus behind her life’s work – growing up next door to a hog farm and hearing the hogs’ screaming as they were led to slaughter. These experiences left an indelible mark on the artist. In turn, Coe leaves her own mark on the hearts and minds of anyone who views her images, which have been shown in galleries and museums all over the world. The unapologetically graphic nature of Coe’s work results in viewers bearing witness to suffering – a fate that began for Coe so many years ago – yet also leaves many feeling inspired to create change. For Sue Coe, and for many of us who take in her images, complacency is no longer an option. Though many vegans and animal rights advocates are already aware of these realities, even seasoned activists will be moved and inspired by Coe’s artistic explorations of animal suffering.
Sue Coe
http://www.ourhenhouse.org/
Image above: King Tusko: Life in Chains, 2008
By Sue Coe, Oil on canvas, 30 x 42 inches.
Performing Data, the Book
January 24, 2012
Performing Data, the exhibition, was a review of Fleischmann and Strauss´ body of work from Virtual Reality (Home of the Brain) up to Mixed Reality (Murmuring Fields or Energie-Passagen), from Fluid (Liquid Views) to Rigid (Rigid Waves) up to Floating Interface (Media Flow).
Monika Fleischmann and Wolfgang Strauss from the Fraunhofer IAIS Research Institute show an intersection of the body and immaterial digital data. From Body Space (Virtual Striptease) to Knowledge Space (Semantic Map): Interactivity as an extension of touch is a central strategy of their work – interactivity with its complex relationship to reality, re-presentation and presence.
The body as interface and intersections to the disembodied digital information. Immersion in data flow causes productive moments of disturbance and suspension, and consequently – a feeling of real physical presence.
The exhibition Performing Data included works from the early 1990s, when the artists/scientists were co-founders of the ART+COM collective in 1987 in Berlin. Since 1992 they developed their work as research artists at KHM and GMD – the German National Research Center for Information Technology, since 1997 as directors of the Media Art & Research Studies (MARS) department and since 2001 at Fraunhofer Society, in the Institute for Media Communication (IMK) and the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems in Sankt Augustin, Germany.
whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir
January 24, 2012
RC: Eve Sussman and her collaborative team Rufus Corporation are touring their latest film project whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir, to the Sundance Film Festival, Berlinale, and Site Santa Fe in January and February 2012.
An expedition to the banks of the Caspian landed Rufus Corporation in a dystopian “future-opolis” that became the location for their experimental film noir. Pushing the envelope of cinematic form, the film is edited live in real time by a custom programmed computer they call the “serendipity machine.” whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir delivers a changing narrative – culled from 3,000 clips, 80 voice-overs and 150 pieces of music – that runs forever and never plays the same way twice. The unexpected juxtapositions create a sense of suspense alluding to a story that the viewer composes. Driven by key words, the work seamlessly comes together as a movie – that is not a movie.
The film follows the observations and surveillance of the central protagonist, a geophysicist named Holz (Jeff Wood), stuck in a 1970’s looking metropolis operated by the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company. Voiceovers and dialogues (in English and Russian with English subtitles) forge the implied narrative – wire tapped telephone conversations, reel-to-reel tapes, snippets of a job interview between Mr. Holz and his employer and a mysterious woman referred to simply as “Dispatch”. A narrator describes various impositions on the citizens including strangely manipulated time keeping, a language ration, lowered suicide statistics, the effects of lithium, and the workings of the water factory. It becomes evident that the character is controlled by the city and the factory he is working in, as the course of the story is controlled by the machine that edits the film.
Lapdogs by Neil Cummings
January 20, 2012
Lapdogs is constructed as a broadcast ‘trailer’, a synopsis of a future program in a ‘reality’ television style. It’s a clone of a popular broadcast media format entitled Faking It.
Lapdogs collapses down two versions of class, one historic and the other contemporary. The historic is that inscribed within the premise of the Faking It series – borrowed from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalian, itself based on a scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and better known as My Fair Lady with Audrey Hepburn – class marked by education, occupation, taste, aspiration, and – after Marx- rights over ‘the means of production’. In this traditional sense of class, the labor of the working class person is expropriated by RDF media.
RDF media also own the property rights to the Faking It TV format. They sell those broadcast rights worldwide. Immaterial properties have been described as ‘the oil of the 21st Century’ and the beginning of a new class divide. So the contemporary figure of the working class [the street waiter Abbas] is doubly exploited. First labor as entertainment, second as property.
The Lapdogs film, part of the exhibition Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie curated by Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr, was at the Arnolfini in Bristol and the Townhouse Gallery in Cairo.
Touch and Go, Leonardo Electronic Almanac. Call for Papers
January 17, 2012
Suguru Goto, Cymatics
Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with Watermans and Goldsmiths College in occasion of the Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012 announces a special issue titled: Touch and Go.
The Watermans’ International Festival of Digital Art, 2012, will coincide with the Olympics and Paralympics in London, and Watermans is pleased to host a Festival of ground-breaking installations exploring interactivity and participation in New Media and Digital Art. This year long project is showcasing the work of six international artists and collectives and initiates discussions around the impact of technology in art as well as the meaning, possibilities and issues around human interaction and engagement inviting responses from artists, academics, students, art professionals and the public. The project will include a series of seminars in collaboration with Goldsmiths, University of London and a publication with the Leonardo Electronic Almanac.
Touch and Go, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
The Drowning Room
January 16, 2012
Synopsis:
“A sequence of domestic vignettes from the sunken suburbs. In the house, the stagnant atmosphere has slowly thickened to liquid. The inhabitants try to carry on as normal but beyond the borders of asphyxiation, communication is limited and expression difficult. Filmed entirely underwater in a submerged house to create an atmosphere unlike any other film.”- Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley. Shot in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn
Shot entirely in a submerged house, this is a story from the sunken suburbs. Tension, repression, depression and a domestic atmosphere so thick it has turned liquid.
In classic film melodrama, the characters’ powerful, deep-seated, and usually unacknowledged emotions are often displaced onto aspects of the mise-en-scène, not unlike the condensation and displacement of meaning that occur with dream symbols and figures of speech. In Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley’s black-and-white film The Drowning Room (An Underwater Soap Opera) (1999), a seemingly ordinary family is seen going about its daily business in a house that is completely filled with water. The family members, either refusing to notice this fact or simply taking it in stride, continue their activities as best they can: shoveling their fish dinner into their mouths as tiny food particles waft around their faces like plankton, reading waterlogged newspapers, and petting their suspiciously stiff-limbed cat as if all this were perfectly normal. They seem to exist in a state of suspended animation, perhaps thinking that if they pretend the water isn’t there, it won’t drown them. When viewed in the context of recent global events, the family’s domestic isolation can be seen as a metaphor for political isolationism and a willful disconnection from the events of the world outside.
“The Drowning Room, by Reynold Reynolds and Patrick Jolley, is a lush fantasy of underwater life, in which mundane moments are transformed into dynamic poetry.” – Sundance Film Festival 2000
The Drowning Room
Reynold Reynolds
Patrick Jolley
USA, 2000, 10 min
transferred from Super8mm
The Future of Firefighting – Mask gives firefighters “bionic” vision
January 16, 2012A “Start Small, Think Big” report that demonstrates Tanagram’s vision for an Augmented Reality Firefighter’s SCBA Mask.
GOLDEN AGE – SOMEWHERE
January 12, 2012
Within ‘Somewhere’ We are transported to a time where the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated are blurred. We live online and download places to relax, parks and shopping malls. We can even interact with our friends as if they were in the same room with simulated tele-presence. Everyone is connected and immersed in nanorobotic replications of any kind of object or furnishings, downloadable on credit based systems. Distance and time become as alien as the ‘offline’ The local becomes the global and the global becomes the local. Consumer based capitalism has changed forever. A truly ‘glocolised’ world. The singularity is near.
The film places us into this vision, observing an average inhabitant within the ever changing environment of the latest SimuHouse. From a painting to a park and from a telephone call to a shopping mall. That is until there is a leek in the system and everything malfunctions. The film concludes with the house being forced to reset, giving the character and viewer a stark reminder that nothing is ‘real’ even her dog, which re-materialises in front of her.
CREDITS:
Directed By: Paul Nicholls
3D, 2D, Tracking, Post Production, Compositing, Camera Work: Paul Nicholls
Cast: Indre Balestuta, Iffy
Sound Design: Jesse Rope
Narration: Robert Leaf
Greek Vocal Talent: Lia Loanniti
Serbian Vocal Talent: Mina Micevic
Store Voice: Guillaume Nyssens
System Voice: Anita Shim
Music By: Kourosh Dini, Twighlight Archive, Pete Berwick
http://www.factoryfifteen.com/
ANTS in my scanner: a five years time-lapse
January 11, 2012François Vautier: Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.
The ants are still alive : the process will continue…
Part of the WORLD EXPO Shanghai 2010, presented by “OPEN THIS END”
Music : Franks – Infected Mushroom.
How to Start a Revolution
January 11, 2012About the film: Half a world away from Cairo’s Tahrir Square, an aging American intellectual shuffles around his cluttered terrace house in a working-class Boston neighbourhood. His name is Gene Sharp. White-haired and now in his mid-eighties, he grows orchids, he has yet to master the internet and he hardly seems like a dangerous man. But for the world’s dictators his ideas can be the catalyst for the end of their regime.
Few people outside the world of academia have ever heard his name, but his writings on nonviolent revolution (most notably ‘From Dictatorship to Democracy’, a 93-page, 198-step guide to toppling dictators, available free for download in 40 languages) have inspired a new generation of protesters living under authoritarian regimes who yearn for democratic freedom.
His ideas have taken root in places as far apart as Burma, Thailand, Bosnia, Estonia, Iran, Indonesia, Zimbabwe, Venezuela and now in Syria, Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East as old orders crumble amidst the protests of their disgruntled citizens.
Text from How to Start a Revolution
Gene Sharp
Not Here Not There, Leonardo Electronic Almanac
January 11, 2012
Leonardo Electronic Almanac in collaboration with The Samek Art Gallery and with Kasa Gallery announces a special issue titled: Not Here Not There. This issue arises out of the territory between two cultural streams.
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is inviting proposals for an issue on these themes with Senior Editors Lanfranco Aceti, Director of Kasa Gallery, Sabanci University and Richard Rinehart, Director of the Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University. Artists that work with AR technology and curators and writers that work on issues related to AR, sited art in relation to new media, or site-specific interventions are particularly welcome to submit proposals for consideration.
The Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) will produce an online and printed issue, as well as host curated images and videos online.
Proposals:
a) Subject heading: Not Here Not There
b) 500 hundred word abstract for articles – submission of full articles preferred for this special issue by proposal deadline January 31, 2012
c) Deadline for proposal submission: January 31, 2012
d) Deadline for submission of full article: March 1, 2012
e) 2 images at 72 dpi resolution no larger than 700pixels width for artists
f) Links to previous work, videos or personal sites
Our publication formats allow for full-color throughout and we encourage rich pictorial content where relevant and possible. Note however that all material submitted must be copyright cleared (or due diligence must be evidenced). For online publication a wide variety of media content may be considered (animation, mp3, flash, java, etc…)
• For scholarly papers please submit the final paper ready for peer review. Your contribution will be reviewed by at least two members of the LEA board and revisions may be requested subject to review.
• For themed and pictorial essays please submit an abstract or outline for editorial consideration and further discussion.
• Please keep your news, announcements and hyperlinks brief and focused – include contact details and a link to an external site where relevant. We reserve the right to sub-edit your submissions in order to comply with LEA policies and formats. Where material is time-sensitive please include both embargo and expiry dates.
• In all cases specify special system considerations where these are necessary (platform, codecs, plug-ins, etc…)
They look forward to hearing from you!
More info at LEA
Time-Lapse of Construction of 30 Story Hotel Built in 15 Days
January 11, 2012Optional soundtrack by [interrupt: Jumper]. Mute the youtube one…or not.
What can you accomplish in 360 hours?
The Chinese sustainable building company, Broad Group, has yet attempted another impossible feat, building a 30-story tall hotel prototype in 360 hours, after building a 15-story building in a week earlier in 2011.
You may ask why in a hurry, and is it safe? The statistics in the video can put you in good faith. Prefabricated modular buildings has many advantages over conventional buildings.
Higher precision in fabrication (+/- 0.2mm).
More coordinated on-site construction management.
Shorter construction time span.
Lower construction waste.
Also many other health and energy features are included in Broad Sustainable Buildings (BSB)
The building was built over last Christmas time and finished before New Years Eve of 2012.
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An Illustrated Review of War Horse, a film by Steven Spielberg
January 11, 2012
Illustrated by Lisa Hanawalt. She lives in Brooklyn and does illustrations + funnies for publications like the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Vice, and Chronicle Books. She’s best known for her comic book series I Want You.
Via The Hairpin
Do We Really Need the Virtual in Art?
January 9, 2012
Darren Tofts essay has proved to be a really interesting reading, and I’m grateful to him for writing it. Ideas that were still dispersed and fragmentary in my mind found an order there. However, the essay left me with a couple of concerns, both related to the term “virtual”. I must confess that I’m allergic to labels in art, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not just that.
Tofts brilliantly addresses a whole line of thinking in Western culture, that goes from Henri Bergson to Philip K. Dick through Cicero and Baudrillard, in order to address a complex, layered reality of which the actual reality, for lack of a better term, is just one of the many manifestations (and dreams, “the palace of memory”, parallel universes, simulacra, the Matrix, Truman’s world, media spectacle and virtual environments are just a few of the others).
I’m wondering about the opportunity of reducing this extraordinary complexity, that Tofts knows and describes very well, to the classical, binary opposition “real vs virtual”. Contemporary life is already beyond this binary opposition: we live parallel lives in parallel worlds, some “real”, some simulated; we move fast from the one to the other, simply switching on and off our mobile phones. We kill monsters in videogames and help a disabled person to cross the street. We are kind here and perverse there. We adapt to different environments, different living conditions, different languages. We eat cheeseburgers every day, and drink Barolo during the summer holidays. We store our memories in tiny, well designed gadgets that we add to our key-case. What is real? And what is virtual?
Furthermore, and this brings me to my second argument, though having a long and honored history, the term “virtual” has strong roots, in our… ehm… memory, in the Eighties and Nineties technology and media theory. When I read it, I recall data-gloves and virtual reality; and when I read “Virtual Art”, I recall Frank Popper and Jeffrey Shaw. I find no way out of it. So, my question is: does it make any sense to rescue this term from its (un)glorious past? Why not use another term? Or simply call it “art”? If Tofts is right when he says “contemporary art is always already virtual”, why do add this prefix at all?
The answer, of course, can be that the term is needed by those who recognize themselves as “virtual artists” in order to promote their work against the limitations of the art system, against the requirements of the art market and outside of the tight borders of the art worlds. My opinion is that they don’t need it. They are already on the right way. As the “Manifesto of Virtual Art” proves, they have an understanding of the structures of contemporary life that is way more advanced than the one of most “traditional” fine artists. They understood that it’s not a matter of medium, but of understanding and picturing the world we are living in; but they are framing themselves in a way that will probably bring only artists using “virtual technologies” such as synthetic environments and augmented reality to join the crew. The binary opposition “real vs virtual”, if kept as such, can be a curse for them, and for a better understanding of their work.
I’m aware that I’m writing this in the columns of the inaugural edition of an ambitious editorial project called The Australian Journal of Virtual Art (AJVA), to which I wish long life and success. So, what I’m writing should not be intended as a critique, but as an invitation for my host to clarify its assets, and to answer some questions that, I’m sure, are not harassing my own mind only.
Written by Domenico Quaranta. Via The Australian Journal of Virtual Art
OBJET SANS CORPS by fAbrizio sAiu
January 9, 2012
Fabrizio Saiu works with Italian and European musicians and in some ensembles: Radici Ensemble, Ligatura and Pasceri Rinaldi Saiu Trio. In Perform Art he collaborates with ClgEnsemble; in Video Art and Photo with Alessandro Ligato, Stefano Mazzanti and Paolo Asaro; In Theater/Dance with the TIDA. He works within improvisation and contemporary music he works with Phi4, Ligatura and with the composer M. Montalbetti. Currently he is working on Objet sans corps: a performance focused on the dynamics of matter transformation, of movement, and of resonance in the relationship between man and environment.
Objet Sans Corps III and IV
The audio-visual document Objet sans corps is composed of 5 scenes and it lasts 14 minutes. The document is the Trace, the residue, the Supplement of a research on the dynamics of
matter transformation, of movement, and of the resonance on the link between man and environment. Every scene is focused on the circular repetition of the same movement and it is characterized by a precise and essential displacement of the body in the environment. The corporal acts do not have a ultimate aim, and their self-referential frees the body that on them produce itself from every functionality, canceling it inside itself. Is it through this alienation that Objet sans corps become an effect of the process instead of his outcom.
Fabrizio Saiu – suono/azione
Sergio Fedele – suono/azione
Roberto Dani – suono/azione
Paolo Asaro – video/azione
Video di Paolo Asaro
Text from his website. http://fabriziosaiu.tumblr.com/
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