Liz Miller & Martin Allor at Concordia University ask: “How can human rights activists best reach audiences in a multichannel universe that is increasingly inundated with images of war, tragedy and suffering? How to avoid having your campaign lost in the sea of nonstop reality media? The Witness model of advocacy promotes “narrowcasting,” the idea that it is not always how many people see a video but who sees it and what they do with it.
Produced by onformative and chopchop the “unnamed soundsculpture” is a project by Daniel Franke & Cedric Kiefer, building from the simple idea of creating a moving sand sculpture from the recorded motion data of a real person.
For the work the team asked a dancer to visualize a musical piece (Kreukeltape by Machinenfabriek) as closely as possible by movements of her body. She was recorded by three depth cameras (Kinect) using Processing, in which the intersection of the images was later put together to a three-dimensional volume (3d point cloud) in 3D Studio Max, so they were able to use the collected data throughout the further process.
Text and Images via Creative Aplications. Click HERE for more info.
Featuring: Mary Elise Hayden, Marissa Merrill & Dustin Edward
Executive Producers: David Lyons & Andrew Huang
Producers: Laura Merians & Stephanie Marshall
Cinematographer: Laura Merians
Production Designer: Hugh Zeigler
Costume Designer: Lindsey Mortensen
Hair & Makeup Designer: Jennifer Cunningham
Sound Design & Original Score: Andrew Huang
‘Silk’ depicts the reeling of the Golden Orb Weaver a spider unique for the golden hue of the web it weaves. According to folklore the web is so strong that fishermen use it to catch fish in the Indo-pacific isles: The web is thrown into water and unfurls catching prey. Silk is currently the subject of biomedical investigations because of its high tensile strength (stronger than steel of an equivalent diameter) and potential use as a biomaterial for example as scaffolds for tissue formation. The 16mm film moves between shots of the spider’s fly infested lair, its body during the act of extrusion, and a hypnotic rotating prism on which the silk is gathered.
Dragoş Lumpan: I started this project for several reasons. The first was curiosity. Travelling by train or by car I have seen sheep in the fields. Sometimes I have played “sheep” – that is a sort of Romulus and Remus numbering game, but with sheep. Close to the sheep was a shepherd. I was curious to know more about shepherds: where they sleep, what they eat, what they do during all day long, during the entire year … I have found out that there are shepherds who roam every day with their sheep, hundreds of kilometres in a year, who sleep wherever the night covers them, under the sky, regardless of the season. They live in a different realm, in a different time, following a quasi-cosmic calendar. Yet, from time to time, we come across them.
Another reason is that I like cheese. It seems that cheese is one of the oldest staples of Romanian exports. Etymologically the word “cheese” originates most probably from the Geto-Dacian language; it was adopted by almost all the languages that surround us. The Slavonic languages use bryndza; this word entered into German as Brinse, Brimsenkäse in dialect. Sometimes it appears as Brinzenkäse. In German Käse means cheese, so that, most probably, the word is a tautology. However, this product is usually thought of as coming from Switzerland, from a town named Brinz, so that Brinzen-Käse could have meant “the cheese from the town of Brinz”. The most likely hypothesis is that the city was named after the staple it exported. That staple was prepared by the Romanian shepherds. In Southern France the word brousse is used for cottage cheese. Its etymology seems to be the Romanian word brânza that reached France via Switzerland”. (The Dictionary of Travelling Words by Alexandru Graur). Due to my visual arts background, I have tried to narrate the story of cheese and its authors in my language, that is to say through images.
The third reason is the extinction of transhumance. Due to social changes, shepherds do not want to be shepherds anymore. Or, at least, they do not want to travel every day, every year, throughout their lives. Shepherding is more than a job. It is a hard way of life. It is very intense. Fewer and fewer shepherds are prepared to make the sacrifice.The title of this project “The Last Transhumance” came from a Romanian shepherding family which had been travelling for generations. I followed them for 18 months. After that they told me they wanted to give up transhumance, or “transformance” as they were calling it. They have remained shepherds, but now they are sedentary ones. In the Torah, the Bible, and the Quran we read that: “Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain was a worker of the ground”. Ancestrally, somewhere along the line, we all had a shepherd in our families. We are witnessing the extinction of an ancient way of life, when people were content to live around a camp fire. I cannot stop the fire from going out, but I can try to record its dying embers.
I always found absolutely soothing to contemplate a master ceramist in action, especially in times where 3D printers are booming. Isle of Wight based artist Sue Paraskeva is one of this masters. The pleasant video above succeeds in transmitting what Paraskeva might feel while working in her studio. Equally satisfying is this conscientious paragraph by Bobby Solomon from The Fox is Black: “I’ve become recently enamored with ceramics, dreaming of creating perfect little vessels with which to litter around my apartment. Being a web designer by trade and running a blog I live in an extremely ephemeral world, mostly made up of zeroes and ones. So seeing Sue Paraskeva, who to me seems like an expert class ceramicist, the romantic notion of making bowls and cups all day in my ranch house burns brightly.”
BeetleCam is a remote controlled buggy with a DSLR camera mounted on top. After the first model was destroyed by a lion, Will Burrard-Lucas created a new model one with more advanced capabilities and an armored shell.
An innocent man is accused, tried, and convicted of an unknown crime; the more he investigates the accusations, the farther he falls into a pit of bureaucratic red tape. Screenplay by Orson Welles, from the novel by Franz Kafka.
The horrors of the twentieth century left artists and thinkers preoccupied with the problem of evil. How could Germans herd Jewish families into the gas chambers? How could Serbs turn on their Bosnian neighbors, or Hutus pick up machetes and carry out the bloody work of genocidaires?
In Beautiful Souls, Eyal Press takes on a different challenge, more suited to the twenty-first century: He suggests that the true mystery is not what impels ordinary people into the moral abyss, but rather how some people manage to avoid the abyss altogether, by refusing to participate in atrocities. For every horror, there are courageous, conscientious resisters: Germans who hid Jews, Hutus who saved Tutsis, Serbs who saved Muslims. Even the more quotidian forms of evil always generate some resistance: Consider the Enron scandal’s whistle-blowers.
But what enables some to resist while most go along? Beautiful Souls, Press writes, is about “nonconformists, about the mystery of what impels people to do something risky . . . when thrust into a morally compromising situation: stop, say no, resist.”
Press is right to view this as an abiding mystery. Today, thanks to decades of meticulous research by historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and psychologists, our understanding of how ordinary people come to participate in—or turn a blind eye toward—atrocities and crimes has become fairly sophisticated. In contrast, our understanding of how and why some ordinary people turn into resisters remains mostly a matter of guesswork.
Excerpt of an article written by Rosa Brooks at Bookforum. Read it HERE
”Give off / Give out” documents an intervention in Jakarta January 5th 2011, dealing with the problems of fine dust after the demolition of buildings. Indonesia is the second biggest importer of asbestos which is extremely dangerous when inhaled. In the video you see a small team trying to prevent the fine dust, which carries asbestos in it, of spreading through the air by watering the site. This intervention gets repeated in different parts of the city.
Give off / Give out, video, 3’30″. Video & Text by Philippe Van Wolputte, 2011
Wherein a few brave souls watch entire horror-movie franchises in a twenty-four-hour period, risk their sanity, and suffer from total narrative dislocation, but maybe, too, remember what it’s like to be in love.
Discussed: The Failed Commodification of WASPy New England Recluses, Swarming Narrative Cosmoses, The Persistent Re-incubation of Evil, Resident Bad Shrinks, The Ominous Whisper-Creep, Final Girl Nancy, Talking to the Fourth Wall, Arguably Feminist Clown Suits, Gropings in the Dark.
The Method
Primary objective: to reexamine five representative horror-movie franchises released on the heels of horror cinema’s Golden Age (1968–1981), beginning with the first installments: Friday the 13th (released in 1980, dir. Sean S. Cunningham), Halloween (released in 1978, dir. John Carpenter), Hellraiser (released in 1987, dir. Clive Barker), A Nightmare on Elm Street (released in 1984, dir. Wes Craven), and Night of the Living Dead (released in 1968, dir. George A. Romero).
The Amsterdam Museum has opened an entire new department: Amsterdam DNA. This exhibition will take you on a three-dimensional 45-minute journey through our capital’s history. The versatile story of the city is presented in seven intriguing films, which we created. Above you can see the second film: Revolt Against King and Church.
In close cooperation with the curators, we developed seven scripts of about two minutes each, which shed light on the most important elements from more than 1000 years of Amsterdam history. Typical core values of Amsterdam were used as the theme for the films: entrepreneurship, freethinking, creativity and citizenship.
Visual material was collected based on the scripts. International collections were used in addition to the collection of the Amsterdam Museum, which has resulted in a selection of international renown. When visual material was not available or suitable, we had to develop the content ourselves.
The challenge was to bring the masterpieces to life without affecting their identity, or rather, their soul. We chose to add an extra dimension by making the images three-dimensional. Another dimension, sound, was added to make the whole even more appealing. Lifelike sounds and soundtracks that fit the spirit of the age add luster to the scenes.
Next to the seven films we also produced a trailer and a video-wall of approximately seven by three meters, in which past en present blend.
Commissioned by: Amsterdam Museum
Agency: PlusOne
Direction: Martijn Hogenkamp
Production: Marcel Vrieswijk
Motion Design: Sander van Dijk
Lead 3D: Tim van der Wiel
3D: Noam Briner, Chris Rudz, Hans Willem Gijzel, Richard Lundström
Music: Lennert Busch
Sound Design: Mauricio d’Orey
Thanks to: Harold van Velsen
Client: Bianca Schrauwen, Joost van de Weerd, Norbert Middelkoop, Laura van Hasselt
I was now about to form another being of whose disposition I was alike ignorant; she might become ten thousand times more malignant than her mate and delight, for its own sake, in murder and wretchedness…and she…might refuse to comply with a compact made before her creation…She might also turn with disgust from him to the superior beauty of man…trembling with passion, tore to pieces the thing on which I was engaged… I left the room, and locking the door, made a solemn vow in my own heart to never resume my labours (Mary Shelly – Frankenstein, 1818)
From the earliest days of film, story tellers have been fascinated with the image of the mechanical woman. Maria, the dark and destructive fembot of Metropolis (1927) requires little introduction and has thoroughly captured the cultural imaginary.
We may say that Maria is the prototype of all “bad girl robots” who follow her. Bad girl ‘bots seem to be pathologically preoccupied with the destruction of humanity and this remains a dominant character trait of robot women in film. Unlike her male counterpart (i.e. Bionic Man; Dekkard; Robo Cop; etc.), she is seldom charged with keeping/restoring order on behalf of the State. And if she is, she inevitably malfunctions or rebels (or both).
Andreas Huyssen argues that technology represented as female monstrosity or maschinenmensch emerged at the turn of the 18th century as the literary imagination appropriated the image of the human-like automaton, popularized during the 17th and early 18th century, and transformed it from the symbol of Enlightenment, “testimony to the genius of mechanical invention,” to an image of terror and “threat to human life” that is so familiar to us today.
Blade Runner’s (1982) Pris and Zhora are bad girl ‘bots in that one is a mercenary and the other a “basic pleasure bot” (prostitute: but without pay) who defy rules concerning replicant (cyborg) autonomy.
Contemporary films like Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), continue this trend with such memorable female machines as the TX.
The No Image Commercials were originally conceived as a back-story for the girlfriend character (played by Busy Gangnes) in the No Image performance who mysteriously dies. The idea was to imagine this character as having a career as an actress and so she lives on in these commercial sequences. We drew from the narrative this idea that she committed suicide because she was tired of being a stay at home girlfriend. We wanted the commercials to reflect the sensibility of the stay-at-home mom.
We find that commercials targeting this demographic are very depressing. They speak to a solitary female and suggest all of the things that are lacking or need improvement in her life. You aren’t happy enough, your house smells bad, your hair doesn’t have enough bounce. We wanted to use the language and production value of high end commercials to promote these thoughts. To achieve this we worked with a team of directors, animators, photographers, stylists, and hair + makeup artists who were well versed in the language of commercials.
Artist/photographer Shinichi Maruyama and his team captured the high speed camera live action footage. Stylist Alice Bertay created a house wife inspired by typical Hassidic clothing. Co-director Jonathan Turner created all of the camera movement and 3d animation while co-director Alan Bibby assembled the pieces into the final composition and added the final coat of polish. Finally Busy Gangnes created the soundtrack, attempting to use the emotional effect of a new age sound aesthetic to pull at your heart strings and encourage the consumer to take the pill.
The Pharmaceutical Commercial references an amalgamation of commercials targeting everything from ant-depressants to Glade air fresheners. We were most interested in an existing commercial that presented a dilemma between the comfort of being inside and the dangerous, allergy-filled outside. Only a drug could help you bridge the gap. We thought this really connected with the depressed girlfriend character and her dilemma with her relationship. She was seemingly stuck inside and powerless to get out. The product the commercial is selling helps the consumer straddle that line in a state of harmony (or confinement). The room setting, designed by Shawn Maximo, incorporates objects from past, present and future Yemenwed projects. This helps to tie it further into the narrative taking place as viewers can see the similarity between the items on stage and in the commercial.
John Cage answers 19 questions on a variety of subjects using chance operations to determine the duration of his answers. From the film ‘From zero’, by Frank Scheffer.
Looking at the different ways to shoot videos. Part of a workshop at the RCA led by Rosario Hurtado and Quique Corrales. May 2010.
Instead of making a normal movie, I am trying to get a colour gradient of what the camera is shooting. There is no postproduction involved, the effect is achieved by connecting the lens of the camera to a drilling machine. The video is taking 15 frames per second, whereas the drill is spinning at more than 20 turn per second.
A film about place and memory, a farmhouse in Japan, and the lives of the people who called it home.
MINKA is a short documentary about a remarkable Japanese farmhouse and the memories it contains. In 1967, an American journalist and a Japanese student rescued the ancient house from the snow country of Japan, and their lives were forever changed.
The film begins when Associated Press foreign correspondent John Roderick became the unlikely owner of an enormous rundown farmhouse, a building type known as a “minka.” Working with a young university student named Yoshihiro Takishita, who would later become his adopted son, Roderick transported the massive timber house from the Japanese Alps to the Tokyo suburb of Kamakura. It defined both their lives: for Roderick, it was the backdrop for a remarkable career as the leading “China watcher” of the Mao era. For Takishita, it inspired a life spent collecting and rebuilding similar houses, work that continues today. But MINKA is more meditation than history. Filmed just following Roderick’s death at ninety-three, it uses this one house as a vessel of memory to explore the power of place, memory, architecture, and the meanings of home.
Tilt shift of the Carnaval party in Rio de Janeiro.
Made by Keith Loutit and Jarbas Agnelli.
Captured during Carnaval of 2011.
Music by Jarbas Agnelli.
Special thanks to Rede Globo, Liesa and Jodele Larcher.
“Every time history repeats itself the price goes up.”
Surviving Progress, a film made by Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks, presents the story of human advancement as awe-inspiring and double-edged. It reveals the grave risk of running the 21st century’s software — our know-how — on the ancient hardware of our primate brain which hasn’t been upgraded in 50,000 years. With rich imagery and immersive soundtrack, filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks launch us on journey to contemplate our evolution from cave-dwellers to space explorers.
Ronald Wright, whose best-seller, “A Short History Of Progress” inspired this film, reveals how civilizations are repeatedly destroyed by “progress traps” — alluring technologies serve immediate needs, but ransom the future. With intersecting stories from a Chinese car-driving club, a Wall Street insider who exposes an out-of-control, environmentally rapacious financial elite, and eco-cops defending a scorched Amazon, the film lays stark evidence before us. In the past, we could use up a region’s resources and move on. But if today’s global civilization collapses from over-consumption, that’s it. We have no back-up planet.
Surviving Progress brings us thinkers who have probed our primate past, our brains, and our societies. Some amplify Wright’s urgent warning, while others have faith that the very progress which has put us in jeopardy is also the key to our salvation. Cosmologist Stephen Hawking looks to homes on other planets. Biologist Craig Venter, whose team decoded the human genome, designs synthetic organisms he hopes will create artificial food and fuel for all.
Distinguished Professor of Environment Vaclav Smil counters that five billion “have-nots” aspire to our affluent lifestyle and, without limits on the energy and resource-consumption of the “haves”, we face certain catastrophe. Others — including primatologist Jane Goodall, author Margaret Atwood, and activists from the Congo, Canada, and USA — place their hope in our ingenuity and moral evolution.
Surviving Progress leaves us with a challenge: To prove that making apes smarter was not an evolutionary dead-end.
An Honest Liar profiles the life of famed magician turned professional skeptic James “The Amazing” Randi as he embarks on a series of public crusades to expose the world’s beloved psychics, mentalists, preachers, and faith healers with religious fervor. Along the way, the film will show how easily our perceptions can be fooled – by magicians, con artists, and even documentaries.
“Nazis on the moon” sounds like a punchline. But it’s actually the premise of the most talked-about feature at this year’s Berlin International Film Festival. The plot of Finnish entry “Iron Sky” revolves around “a group of Nazis who escape to the moon at the end of World War II to plan a new assault,” according to BBC News. “Added to the farce is a US President with more than a passing resemblance to former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, and a navy cruiser called the USS George W Bush.”
The most expensive film in Finnish history, “Iron Sky” has, according to BBCNews, “been hailed by some members of the international press as a sign that Germans are now at peace with their Nazi past.” But some Germans felt less comfortable. “Although I heard that audiences were laughing out loud, in my screening… it wasn’t like that,” Kerstin Sopke of the Associated Press told the BBC.
The film’s director, Timo Vuorensola, doesn’t see it that way either. “No, I absolutely think that’s not what’s it about,” he told The Arty Semite in an email.
I think that Germans have as a people moved away from the times, and have learned perhaps more than any other people in the world the horrors fascism brings, and know that history needs to be respected, but that the Germans living now (other than some very special cases) are not the ones who did the horrors. So they haven’t gotten ‘a peace with Nazi past,’ as BBC strangely words it, but they’ve understood that the current German youth did not do the bad things, thus making it possible to approach the subject with other emotions than the well-known ‘German guilt’. It’s time now to make sure it will never happen again.
Written by Michael Kaminer, The Jewish Daily Forward. Continue HERE
A short film based on The Flame Alphabet, a new novel by Ben Marcus. Video by Erin Cosgrove.
“The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.”
Seven individuals who participated in what’s being called the “first annual love competition” all agreed to follow the same set of instructions:
Climb inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and spend five minutes trying “to love someone as hard as they can.”
As the contestants–who ranged in age from 10 to 75–pondered the objects of their affection, their brain neurochemistry was closely monitored by scientists at the Stanford Center for Cognitive and Neurobiological Imaging. The person who showed the greatest neurochemical activity in the brain region associated with feelings of romantic love was declared the victor.
Who climbed out of the scanner with best-lover honors? To find out, you can watch the short film about the competition, above— the competition and the film were masterminded by San Francisco-based filmmaker Brent Hoff. As to why Hoff wanted to make “The Love Competition” in the first place, he told Wired, “With the way we view sports, we look at them in such a hard, unforgiving way–you win or you don’t–and the idea of taking love and making it either you win or you don’t’ is, I agree, kind of horrible. But that’s not what this film is.”
And he’s right. The film–which includes scenes in which the contestants talk about the objects of their affection–is actually quite touching. And it provides a fascinating glimpse inside the world of neuroscience research as well as into the contestants’ brains.
A Night-time Snowboarding Short Lights Up the Last of the Winter Snow
Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes. The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher. “I was really drawn to the idea of a lone character made of light surfing through darkness,” says Sutton of his costume choice. “I’ve always been excited by unusual ways of lighting things, so it seemed like an exciting idea to make the subject of the film the only light source.” Sutton, who has created work for the likes of Hermès, Burberry and The New York Times, spent three nights on a skidoo with his trusty Red Epic camera at temperatures of -25C to snap Hughes carving effortlessly through the deep snow, even enlisting his own father to help maintain the temperamental suit throughout the demanding shoot. “Filming in the suit was the most surreal thing I’ve done in 20 years of snowboarding,” says Hughes of the charged salopettes. “Luckily there was plenty of vin rouge to keep me warm, and Jacob’s enthusiasm kept everyone going through the cold nights.”
The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, seen in this artist’s rendering, will be built on the peak of the Cerro Pachon mountain in Chile and will survey every patch of the night sky. The data the telescope will collect will allow researchers to “answer fundamentally different questions about the universe,” says one astronomer. Image: Todd Mason/LSST Corp.
Every 10 years, about two dozen of this country’s top astronomers and astrophysicists get together under the auspices of the National Research Council and make a wish list. The list has on it the new telescopes these astronomers would most like to see built. At the last gathering, they said, in essence, “We most want the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.”
Here’s why. A synoptic survey is a comprehensive map of every square inch of the night sky. The Large Synoptic Survey — LSST — will do that multiple times.
“We want to scan the entire sky over and over again for 10 years,” says Sidney Wolff, president of the LSST Corp., who is in charge of building the new telescope. “And we will get over 800 images of every patch of the sky.”
Why would you want 800 pictures of the sky over 10 years? Well, it’s like taking a time lapse picture of the sky. Anything that moves or changes will be easy to see. “So one of the things we can do is, if there are any potentially hazardous asteroids out there that might impact the Earth and do significant damage, we will find them,” she says.
The telescope’s unique, compact design allows it to swivel very quickly to different parts of the sky. This gives astronomers the ability to capture images quickly. LSST Corporation.
A first glimpse at Pierre Laffargue’s musical documentary (currently in production) about Congotronics vs Rockers, which follows the entire process, from the initial encounters between the musicians (Konono N°1, Kasai Allstars, Deerhoof, Juana Molina, Wildbirds and Peacedrums, Matt Mehlan from Skeletons and Hoquets) to shows around Europe and the recording of the album.
Orson Welles and Anthony Perkins on the set of The Trial, 1962.
The telescope’s unique, compact design allows it to swivel very quickly to different parts of the sky. This gives astronomers the ability to capture images quickly. LSST Corporation.
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