A Story of the Red Hills
The story of a disheartened dancer and a disabled boy--both of whose lives are transformed by the magic and power of Chhou, a traditional Bengali dance of great spectacle and color-is recounted movingly, if improbably, by a renowned Bollywood choreographer. » Read More
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Monday, April 28, 2008
Oska Bright Film Festival
The Oska Bright Film Festival is run by people with a learning disability. Oska Bright screens short films made by people with learning disabilities.
http://carousel.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=148
High Spin Dance Company
High Spin is a Dance Theatre Company of six learning disabled dancers. We perform with other learning disabled performers, too.
http://carousel.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=180
Carousel inspires people with learning disabilities to achieve their artistic ambitions.
http://carousel.org.uk/
http://carousel.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=32&Itemid=148
High Spin Dance Company
High Spin is a Dance Theatre Company of six learning disabled dancers. We perform with other learning disabled performers, too.
http://carousel.org.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=79&Itemid=180
Carousel inspires people with learning disabilities to achieve their artistic ambitions.
http://carousel.org.uk/
The Lament Project
http://integr8dmedia.net/viralnet/
The Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts announces the release of its new online sound/art collaboration called ‘The Lament Project.
’'The Lament Project' is part of the 2008 release of Viralnet.net, the Center's online journal and project space.
‘The Lament Project’ is curated by Cindy Bernard, Kathy Brew, Beth Rosenberg, Martha Wilson and Tom Leeser.
The curators invited fifty artists from various media to submit a one-minute original sound work that they could describe as a lament, a wail, a moan or a cry.
'The Lament Project' grew from a desire to work with a wide variety of interdisciplinary artists to produce a unique online project that could respond to the personal and social anxiety found in today's contemporary global culture. We thought that the best way Viralnet.net could cut through the corporate media's commodification of suffering and conflict, would be in a personal and visceral way, using sound.
The lament is one of the world’s oldest musical and poetic forms for expressing sorrow and grief. It is found in both the east and the west, in classical traditions as well as folk traditions. It has evolved over the centuries informing new genres along the way, like the blues. It is a primal sound that is born from a place deep inside the individual and reflects the cries of the larger collective.
The Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts announces the release of its new online sound/art collaboration called ‘The Lament Project.
’'The Lament Project' is part of the 2008 release of Viralnet.net, the Center's online journal and project space.
‘The Lament Project’ is curated by Cindy Bernard, Kathy Brew, Beth Rosenberg, Martha Wilson and Tom Leeser.
The curators invited fifty artists from various media to submit a one-minute original sound work that they could describe as a lament, a wail, a moan or a cry.
'The Lament Project' grew from a desire to work with a wide variety of interdisciplinary artists to produce a unique online project that could respond to the personal and social anxiety found in today's contemporary global culture. We thought that the best way Viralnet.net could cut through the corporate media's commodification of suffering and conflict, would be in a personal and visceral way, using sound.
The lament is one of the world’s oldest musical and poetic forms for expressing sorrow and grief. It is found in both the east and the west, in classical traditions as well as folk traditions. It has evolved over the centuries informing new genres along the way, like the blues. It is a primal sound that is born from a place deep inside the individual and reflects the cries of the larger collective.
ResCen, the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts
ResCen, the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts, is a multi-disciplinary, artist–driven research centre. It is designed to be a bridge between academia and the practices of professional performing artists. Established in 1999, its base is at Middlesex University, London.
ResCen, the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts, exists to further the understanding of how artists research and develop new processes and forms by working with professional artists and others.
http://www.rescen.net/index.html
ResCen, the Centre for Research into Creation in the Performing Arts, exists to further the understanding of how artists research and develop new processes and forms by working with professional artists and others.
http://www.rescen.net/index.html
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Friday, April 25, 2008
SCAN
SCAN is an agency developing media arts in the South of England. It works in partnership with a broad range of individuals, groups and institutions nationally and internationally to commission innovative projects that cross and merge disciplines drawn from arts, media, humanities, science and technology. SCAN explores ideas, sites and tools showing the creative potential that media arts offer in our changing society.
SCAN welcomes approaches from organisations or individuals who wish to develop their ideas or would like to be involved in SCAN’s initiatives.
http://www.scansite.org/scan.php
SCAN welcomes approaches from organisations or individuals who wish to develop their ideas or would like to be involved in SCAN’s initiatives.
http://www.scansite.org/scan.php
MULTIVERSITY, or the Art of Subversion.
In fact, if we concentrate on contemporary art, this undoubted importance can be seen on at least three levels.
The first is the central role which immaterial assets and knowledge, creativity and affections, relational and communicational talents assume for contemporary forms of production: artistic production cannot get away from this centrality.
The second is the relationship between cultural production and the metropolis where the interlacing between town-planning and architecture, fashion and design, art and literature, in that productive social space par excellence – the urban basins – becomes on the one side a crucial element in the process of subjectification through which are built the multiplicity of forms of life which inhabit it, to the other decisive factor for defining the strategic positioning of each metropolitan area in the economic competition between global cities.
The third is the relationship between the art market and the financial capital: at a global level, banks and multinationals are the among the main investors in a sector which today seems to be the only one to have not been even slightly touched by the crisis which has overrun the world system of money circulation.
What we are now seeing is a complex capturing system, which capital has brought into play in the multiple flow of informal cultural production, from the appropriation of the ability to cooperate of individual intelligences and individual ways of life, to ensure the valorisation of what has been defined as the "symbolic collective capital".
The complexity of these dynamics depends on a double mechanism of exploitation, where the first aspect is made up of the barriers of intellectual property and from each further moment of private appropriation of general social knowledge, while the second is the parasitic rapport which is established towards the creative production by those speculative interventions occurring in the body of the metropolis, there where state and private institutions, large events and art fairs, and cultural zones and meta-zones are established.
Here the main question is to understand widespread behaviours and the methods of intervention which could change a social composition, already central in the forms of contemporary production, in a political composition. Examined also will be the core issues of the role of university training on the one side, and the communication network on the other side, played within the most complex organisation of the work of the "culture factory".
An indispensable requisite for this discussion is the comparison around contemporary art understood as a "wider social institution": from the historical-artistic events which drove art in the post-war period from the transcendental space of medial specificity to the social space with its relationships of strength, to the relationships established between art, social movements and cultural activism outside of any avant-garde rhetoric, to the methods of capture by the institutional artistic system and by the financial ciruits of a vast heritage of critical thought and conflicting ways of life.
1. Art and activism
2. Art and the market: between creative freedom and financial capture
3. Art and metropolis
4. Art and multitude: for the enquiry into social composition, conflicts and organisation of live work in the "culture factory"
All this to get to the key point: how to transform this social composition into a political composition?
All this to get to the key point: how to transform this social composition into a political composition?
The first is the central role which immaterial assets and knowledge, creativity and affections, relational and communicational talents assume for contemporary forms of production: artistic production cannot get away from this centrality.
The second is the relationship between cultural production and the metropolis where the interlacing between town-planning and architecture, fashion and design, art and literature, in that productive social space par excellence – the urban basins – becomes on the one side a crucial element in the process of subjectification through which are built the multiplicity of forms of life which inhabit it, to the other decisive factor for defining the strategic positioning of each metropolitan area in the economic competition between global cities.
The third is the relationship between the art market and the financial capital: at a global level, banks and multinationals are the among the main investors in a sector which today seems to be the only one to have not been even slightly touched by the crisis which has overrun the world system of money circulation.
What we are now seeing is a complex capturing system, which capital has brought into play in the multiple flow of informal cultural production, from the appropriation of the ability to cooperate of individual intelligences and individual ways of life, to ensure the valorisation of what has been defined as the "symbolic collective capital".
The complexity of these dynamics depends on a double mechanism of exploitation, where the first aspect is made up of the barriers of intellectual property and from each further moment of private appropriation of general social knowledge, while the second is the parasitic rapport which is established towards the creative production by those speculative interventions occurring in the body of the metropolis, there where state and private institutions, large events and art fairs, and cultural zones and meta-zones are established.
Here the main question is to understand widespread behaviours and the methods of intervention which could change a social composition, already central in the forms of contemporary production, in a political composition. Examined also will be the core issues of the role of university training on the one side, and the communication network on the other side, played within the most complex organisation of the work of the "culture factory".
An indispensable requisite for this discussion is the comparison around contemporary art understood as a "wider social institution": from the historical-artistic events which drove art in the post-war period from the transcendental space of medial specificity to the social space with its relationships of strength, to the relationships established between art, social movements and cultural activism outside of any avant-garde rhetoric, to the methods of capture by the institutional artistic system and by the financial ciruits of a vast heritage of critical thought and conflicting ways of life.
1. Art and activism
2. Art and the market: between creative freedom and financial capture
3. Art and metropolis
4. Art and multitude: for the enquiry into social composition, conflicts and organisation of live work in the "culture factory"
All this to get to the key point: how to transform this social composition into a political composition?
All this to get to the key point: how to transform this social composition into a political composition?
A BRIEF HISTORY OF OPTICAL SYNTHESIS
INTRODUCTION
The technology of synthesizing sound from light is a curious combination of research from the realms of mathematics, physics, electronics and communications theory which found realization in the industries of motion picture films, music, surveillance technology and finally digital communications. As such, it's history is an interesting cross section of 20th century history, reaching from the euphoria of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century inventors (who often struggled between "scientific" and "supernatural" explainations of their work) through the paradigm-smashing experiments of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920's and 1930's to the cynical clash of ideologies of the Post-war years and finally to the dawn of the digital era in the 1970's.
This history has its fair share of eccentric and fascinating characters, such as Lev Theremin, Arseny Abraamov and Daphne Oram--the first woman to create and run a sound studio, as well as the first woman to "design and build an entirely new sound recording medium" (Jo Hutton in Organized Sound). There is quite a bit of work left to do, particularly in recognizing and translating the legacies of the Russian avant-garde artists such as Boris Yankovsky, Evgeny Scholpo, Nikolai Voinov and the forementioned Abraamov, whose works are largely unknown outside the former Soviet Union. A forthcoming article on "Russian Graphical Sound" for the Computer Music Journal by Andrei Smirnov could be one of the biggest English-language breakthroughs in this area.
Quite clearly, the connection with filmmaking is very close. Optical sound technology was developed first solely for recording soundtracks for early "speakies", and every one of the Russian innovators used their graphical sound techniques to provide music scores for the kino. But the connection with the "Visual Music" movement in cinema is also very close, with perhaps the works of Norman McLaren providing the strongest bridge. But the "direct cinema" techniques of many filmmakers from the 1920's and 1930's on through the 1960's and 1970's show more than a casual relationship with the techniques of direct optical sound synthesis. The works of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, John Whitney, Hy Hirsch, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Larry Cuba and many others all reflect an ongoing lineage of this "visual music" tradition. (The "Kinetica" screening programs, available from the iotaCenter of Los Angeles, provide the most comprehensive overview of this fascinating film history, and the Visual Music website gives an excellent synopsis and timeline as well.)
MORE: http://umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html
The technology of synthesizing sound from light is a curious combination of research from the realms of mathematics, physics, electronics and communications theory which found realization in the industries of motion picture films, music, surveillance technology and finally digital communications. As such, it's history is an interesting cross section of 20th century history, reaching from the euphoria of the late 19th Century and early 20th Century inventors (who often struggled between "scientific" and "supernatural" explainations of their work) through the paradigm-smashing experiments of the Soviet avant-garde in the 1920's and 1930's to the cynical clash of ideologies of the Post-war years and finally to the dawn of the digital era in the 1970's.
This history has its fair share of eccentric and fascinating characters, such as Lev Theremin, Arseny Abraamov and Daphne Oram--the first woman to create and run a sound studio, as well as the first woman to "design and build an entirely new sound recording medium" (Jo Hutton in Organized Sound). There is quite a bit of work left to do, particularly in recognizing and translating the legacies of the Russian avant-garde artists such as Boris Yankovsky, Evgeny Scholpo, Nikolai Voinov and the forementioned Abraamov, whose works are largely unknown outside the former Soviet Union. A forthcoming article on "Russian Graphical Sound" for the Computer Music Journal by Andrei Smirnov could be one of the biggest English-language breakthroughs in this area.
Quite clearly, the connection with filmmaking is very close. Optical sound technology was developed first solely for recording soundtracks for early "speakies", and every one of the Russian innovators used their graphical sound techniques to provide music scores for the kino. But the connection with the "Visual Music" movement in cinema is also very close, with perhaps the works of Norman McLaren providing the strongest bridge. But the "direct cinema" techniques of many filmmakers from the 1920's and 1930's on through the 1960's and 1970's show more than a casual relationship with the techniques of direct optical sound synthesis. The works of Oskar Fischinger, Len Lye, Stan Brakhage, John Whitney, Hy Hirsch, Harry Smith, Jordan Belson, Larry Cuba and many others all reflect an ongoing lineage of this "visual music" tradition. (The "Kinetica" screening programs, available from the iotaCenter of Los Angeles, provide the most comprehensive overview of this fascinating film history, and the Visual Music website gives an excellent synopsis and timeline as well.)
MORE: http://umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html
on Beckett-ing
"'Charlie Rose' by Samuel Beckett."
Using appropriated footage from a single episode of "Charlie Rose," filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical
Endgame Scene 1
The first scene of the play by Samuel Beckett animated with lego!
Using appropriated footage from a single episode of "Charlie Rose," filmmaker Andrew Filippone Jr. creates something both disturbing and farcical
Endgame Scene 1
The first scene of the play by Samuel Beckett animated with lego!
POST FUNDING EASTERN EUROPE CENTER FOR CONTEXT AND COMMUNICATION
http://www.ccc-k.net/
The Center for Communication and Context Kyiv (CCCK) and its investigation Post Funding Eastern Europe emerged in response to the Center for Contemporary Art Kyiv and its exemplary economic and political position. Since August 2006 CCCK has in publications, discussions, exhibitions and articles aimed to encourage to debate the values and roles possibly assigned to contemporary art in relation to the ideological background of its financial stake-holders in Ukraine.
In its prospective extension CCCK aims to instigate a further re-reading of East European and Central Asian Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), which were established through Soros funding during the 1990s and had to re-position themselves since the final cease of Soros funding for the Art Centers during the 2000s.
With the emergence of Soros Art Centers in the 1990s local art-scenes experienced a sudden increase of resources, enabling the freshly founded Centers to give out grants, realize productions, to foster local art-scenes and to organize large-scale exhibitions. Whereas Soros Centers proved added values in relatively stable and developed cultural scenes of countries as Slovenia or Poland, especially in countries at the outskirts of the Soros program such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazachstan or Russia the final cease of funding forced those centers to close down or to persist without substantial funding.
The Center for Communication and Context Kyiv (CCCK) and its investigation Post Funding Eastern Europe emerged in response to the Center for Contemporary Art Kyiv and its exemplary economic and political position. Since August 2006 CCCK has in publications, discussions, exhibitions and articles aimed to encourage to debate the values and roles possibly assigned to contemporary art in relation to the ideological background of its financial stake-holders in Ukraine.
In its prospective extension CCCK aims to instigate a further re-reading of East European and Central Asian Soros Centers for Contemporary Art (SCCAs), which were established through Soros funding during the 1990s and had to re-position themselves since the final cease of Soros funding for the Art Centers during the 2000s.
With the emergence of Soros Art Centers in the 1990s local art-scenes experienced a sudden increase of resources, enabling the freshly founded Centers to give out grants, realize productions, to foster local art-scenes and to organize large-scale exhibitions. Whereas Soros Centers proved added values in relatively stable and developed cultural scenes of countries as Slovenia or Poland, especially in countries at the outskirts of the Soros program such as Ukraine, Belarus, Kazachstan or Russia the final cease of funding forced those centers to close down or to persist without substantial funding.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
SwanQuake - the user manual by Igloo
SwanQuake - the user manual, is a collection of essays regarding a major interactive virtual installation art project by igloo (Ruth Gibson & Bruno Martelli) and their collaborators. SwanQuake is, as its name suggests, a meeting of computer game technology and dance. It consists of a series of interactive virtual environments built using the Unreal Engine 3D game system and populated by characters animated using motion capture techniques.
SwanQuake is a unique project involving the ongoing making of an interactive artwork comprising 3-D computer graphic environments and motion-capture driven characters created from a variety of materials and methods by an interdisciplinary team gathered together and led by igloo.
In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments.
The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces.
However, despite the title 'mashup' of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here......
http://www.swanquake.com/
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=300
SwanQuake is a unique project involving the ongoing making of an interactive artwork comprising 3-D computer graphic environments and motion-capture driven characters created from a variety of materials and methods by an interdisciplinary team gathered together and led by igloo.
In each of the pieces, using a game controller, the viewer navigates freely throughout the 3D computer graphic environments.
The spaces are comprised of both exterior and interior landscapes, each thematically, visually & sonically distinct where users can interact with avatars to create new performances / performance spaces.
However, despite the title 'mashup' of computer game Quake and traditional ballet Swan Lake, there are no targets, health points, wins or dying swans here......
http://www.swanquake.com/
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=300
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
JUDGE DISMISSES MAIL FRAUD CASE AGAINST BIO-ARTIST KURTZ
Buffalo, NY—A process that has taken nearly four years may be coming to an end. On Monday, April 21, Federal Judge Richard J. Arcara ruled to dismiss the indictment against University at Buffalo Professor of Visual Studies Dr. Steven Kurtz.In June 2004, Professor Kurtz was charged with two counts of mail fraud and two counts of wire fraud stemming from an exchange of $256 worth of harmless bacteria with Dr. Robert Ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health.
Dr. Kurtz planned to use the bacteria in an educational art exhibit about biotechnology with his award-winning art and theater collective, Critical Art Ensemble.Professor Kurtz’ lawyer, Paul Cambria, said that his client was “pleased and relieved that this ordeal may be coming to an end.
”The prosecution has the right to appeal this dismissal. How the prosecution will proceed is unknown at this time. If an appeal were undertaken the case would move to the New York Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City.Lucia Sommer, Coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, which raises funds for Kurtz’ legal defense, said, “We are all grateful that after reviewing this case, Judge Arcara took appropriate action.” She added that “this decision is further testament to our original statements that Dr. Kurtz is completely innocent and never should have been charged in the first place.”
BACKGROUND ON DR. STEVEN KURTZ AND CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE
Critical Art Ensemble (which Kurtz co-founded in 1987 with Steven Barnes) has won numerous awards for its bio-art, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, honoring more than two decades of distinguished work. The group has been commissioned to exhibit and perform in many of the world's cultural institutions—including the London Museum of Natural History; The ICA, London; the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; der Volksbüne, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; El Matadero, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Museo de Arte Carrilo Gil, Mexico City and many more.
For more information about the case, please visit: caedefensefund.org
Dr. Kurtz planned to use the bacteria in an educational art exhibit about biotechnology with his award-winning art and theater collective, Critical Art Ensemble.Professor Kurtz’ lawyer, Paul Cambria, said that his client was “pleased and relieved that this ordeal may be coming to an end.
”The prosecution has the right to appeal this dismissal. How the prosecution will proceed is unknown at this time. If an appeal were undertaken the case would move to the New York Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York City.Lucia Sommer, Coordinator of the CAE Defense Fund, which raises funds for Kurtz’ legal defense, said, “We are all grateful that after reviewing this case, Judge Arcara took appropriate action.” She added that “this decision is further testament to our original statements that Dr. Kurtz is completely innocent and never should have been charged in the first place.”
BACKGROUND ON DR. STEVEN KURTZ AND CRITICAL ART ENSEMBLE
Critical Art Ensemble (which Kurtz co-founded in 1987 with Steven Barnes) has won numerous awards for its bio-art, including the prestigious 2007 Andy Warhol Foundation Wynn Kramarsky Freedom of Artistic Expression Grant, honoring more than two decades of distinguished work. The group has been commissioned to exhibit and perform in many of the world's cultural institutions—including the London Museum of Natural History; The ICA, London; the Whitney Museum and the New Museum in NYC; the Corcoran Museum of Art in Washington, DC; Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt; Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; der Volksbüne, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; El Matadero, Madrid; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Museo de Arte Carrilo Gil, Mexico City and many more.
For more information about the case, please visit: caedefensefund.org
3 Documentaries and 2 Art Films at the Tribeca Film Festival
Standard Operating Procedure
Can a photograph change the world? Can an exposé also be a coverup? In Standard Operating Procedure, Academy Award®-winning director Errol Morris turns the camera on the American soldiers who took the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs.
Followed by a conversation with Errol Morris. » View Film Details
2001: A Space Odyssey
Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Kubrick’s 2001 caught the imagination of a generation with its near-hallucinatory depiction of space, artificial intelligence, and the human condition. The 40th anniversary of this film finds us once again confronting profound questions about the effects these things have had on our culture and our future.Followed by a conversation with scientists about the realities of Kubrick’s futuristic masterpiece and of artificial intelligence. » View Film Details
Celebrating Berlin
Hosted by the School of Visual ArtsLou Reed’s critically acclaimed 1973 album Berlin was yet another musical step forward in the career of the man who brought the darkest themes of literature to rock and roll. For years, Berlin was considered one of the more eclectic works in Reed’s extraordinary catalog, but one that clearly cried out for a theatrical presentation. In 2006, backed by a full orchestra, Reed performed the mini-opera in its entirety over five nights at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. And, under the direction of painter/director Julian Schnabel, this historic event was captured on film.
Followed by Lou Reed in a conversation with Vanity Fair's Lisa Robinson. » View Film Details
Empire II
Although inspired by a monument of cinematic stasis, Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire (1964), this new three-hour experiment is an astonishingly beautiful and unexpectedly lively tone poem paying unforgettable tribute to the sights and sounds of the mythical, magical place called Manhattan. » View Film Details
Everywhere at Once
Renowned photographer Peter Lindbergh and experimental filmmaker Holly Fisher, with actress Jeanne Moreau, weave a tapestry of images shaping one woman's deepest sense of selfhood. Music by Lois V Vierk. » Read More http://www.peterlindbergh.com/everywhereatonce/
Can a photograph change the world? Can an exposé also be a coverup? In Standard Operating Procedure, Academy Award®-winning director Errol Morris turns the camera on the American soldiers who took the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs.
Followed by a conversation with Errol Morris. » View Film Details
2001: A Space Odyssey
Sponsored by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Kubrick’s 2001 caught the imagination of a generation with its near-hallucinatory depiction of space, artificial intelligence, and the human condition. The 40th anniversary of this film finds us once again confronting profound questions about the effects these things have had on our culture and our future.Followed by a conversation with scientists about the realities of Kubrick’s futuristic masterpiece and of artificial intelligence. » View Film Details
Celebrating Berlin
Hosted by the School of Visual ArtsLou Reed’s critically acclaimed 1973 album Berlin was yet another musical step forward in the career of the man who brought the darkest themes of literature to rock and roll. For years, Berlin was considered one of the more eclectic works in Reed’s extraordinary catalog, but one that clearly cried out for a theatrical presentation. In 2006, backed by a full orchestra, Reed performed the mini-opera in its entirety over five nights at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. And, under the direction of painter/director Julian Schnabel, this historic event was captured on film.
Followed by Lou Reed in a conversation with Vanity Fair's Lisa Robinson. » View Film Details
Empire II
Although inspired by a monument of cinematic stasis, Andy Warhol's eight-hour Empire (1964), this new three-hour experiment is an astonishingly beautiful and unexpectedly lively tone poem paying unforgettable tribute to the sights and sounds of the mythical, magical place called Manhattan. » View Film Details
Everywhere at Once
Renowned photographer Peter Lindbergh and experimental filmmaker Holly Fisher, with actress Jeanne Moreau, weave a tapestry of images shaping one woman's deepest sense of selfhood. Music by Lois V Vierk. » Read More http://www.peterlindbergh.com/everywhereatonce/
Monday, April 21, 2008
Hollington & Kyprianou
The Invisible Force Field Experimentshttp://www.electronicsunset.org/
http://www.electronicsunset.org/published/saigsed_booklet/iffe_experiments_closed_down
http://www.scansite.org/scan.php?pid=106
http://www.scansite.org/scan.php?pid=106
"The Invisible Force Field Experiment"s is being toured as part of '' in 2008-9 to TATE Modern, Showroom, Sheffield, Chapter Arts, Cardiff, Cinemateque, Brighton, Bureau, Salford, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Vivid, Birmingham, Hull Film, FACT, Liverpool, Dell Gallery, Brisbane, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane. A publication will also folllow.
There are a few different theories as to how to go about making an invisible force field. Some observers have come across them as naturally occurring phenomena, others through the by-product of industrial processes, as well as the many people who have imagined them into existence. There are several versions of how / why they might exist and some serious differences of opinion between the scientific communities about why they occur. We are looking at a few different technologies and phenomena in order to construct ours using related ideas. Arts funding being what it is, we have to enter this sideways, usually with a bit of string and a flashlight so that we don’t get lost on the way.
There are a few different theories as to how to go about making an invisible force field. Some observers have come across them as naturally occurring phenomena, others through the by-product of industrial processes, as well as the many people who have imagined them into existence. There are several versions of how / why they might exist and some serious differences of opinion between the scientific communities about why they occur. We are looking at a few different technologies and phenomena in order to construct ours using related ideas. Arts funding being what it is, we have to enter this sideways, usually with a bit of string and a flashlight so that we don’t get lost on the way.
Harmony Korine's "Gummo", "julien donkey-boy" & "Mister Lonely"
"I make a policy of not featuring in the magazine films I’ve produced. But, hey, it’s the newsletter, not the magazine, and when some of those films gain retrospective status I suppose it’s justified to let my conflict-of-interest guard down and mention then. Harmony Korine’s Gummo, which Robin O’Hara and I co-produced is screening at the IFC Center April 25 and 26th at midnight, while julien donkey-boy, which Robin, Cary Woods and I produced, is screening at the Silent Movie Theater in Los Angeles on the 26th. The midnight and special screenings are apt because that’s how Harmony’s first two films built their audiences. I still remember the weeks before Gummo’s release. We had gotten great quotes for people as diverse as Bernardo Bertolucci and Marilyn Manson, a fantastic first review from Matt Zoller Seitz in the New York Press... and then came The New York Times review by Janet Maslin, which read like the film had just tracked dirt all over her new living room carpet. The distributor, New Line, punted, the release was short, but then the programmers at the Angelika held it over, and the film played midnights for months where it built up and solidified its cult following.Over the years I’ve met a lot of young filmmakers who think Gummo is some kind of production model to follow, but everything about the film and the way it got made was unique. The script was unconventional – and, yes, the film was very much scripted – but it was a time when everyone on the money side was willing to take a chance on something they might not understand in the hopes of making something different. And while the film is full of non-actors, seemingly improvised scenes, and collage-like Super 8mm and VHS insertions, it was also a film made pretty much “by the book,” with location and artwork clearances, releases from everyone involved, and a SAG contract in order to have the film’s two professional actors in the movie. This led to some unusual situations. For example, because of the film’s storyline, which involved kids killing cats, we were required to deliver a movie with the American Humane Association logo on it. That meant an AHA rep was on the set the whole time ensuring that the cats in the movie were prosthetics or... um, road kill. It also meant that when we shot in a house that had the biggest cockroach infestation I’d ever seen, we couldn’t fumigate. The location was booked for two days and on the second we had to offer some members of the crew haz-mat suits in order to go back inside and finish the scenes. But as much as some critics attacked the film for outlandishness, I can assure you that that film did represent a particular community without much exaggeration. There’s a great piece of film advice that, in the story I heard, was told to a young Bertolucci by Renoir: “Always leave the door to the studio open.” Harmony has always been great at this, and much of Gummo just reflected the environment, both physical and psychological, we were surrounded by when we made it. (In fact, I’d further say that what was off-screen was more extreme than what made it on screen.)julien donkey-boy was a very different experience. After the full-on crew of Gummo, Harmony wanted to try something very different, and julien was shot on miniDV with a tiny crew that included the great cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle. There were tons of cameras – regular miniDV cameras along with hidden cameras and spy cameras. People were filmed without their knowledge and releases (yes, we had to have them) were gotten later. There was the loosest of outlines – I remember one scene reading in its entirety, “The sound of wind” – and the film was mostly improvised. Shooting days were short. Once Harmony, the actors and crew hit a groove, scenes would just sort of come together like magic. There’s easily another film (or two) on the cutting room floor.Anyway, all of this is just a preamble to notice of Harmony’s latest, Mister Lonely, which premieres this month in theaters from IFC Films. For his return to moviemaking, Harmony went to Europe (Paris and Scotland) and Panama for one story (yep – don’t believe those who don’t understand what skydiving nuns have to do with celebrity impersonators) about faith and identity in the modern world. We’ve got it on the cover of the new Spring issue of Filmmaker, with inside a Harmony interview by director Michael Tully along with a chat with star Diego Luna by Jason Guerrasio. I caught up with the film at SXSW and really like it a lot. It’s creative, emotional, and oddly but appropriately sweet. Please go see it and if you haven’t seen the previous films, check them out too in these repertory screenings or get them from Netflix.
Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor"
FILMAKER MAGAZINE Editor's Note
Best,
Scott Macaulay
Editor"
FILMAKER MAGAZINE Editor's Note
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Public Preparation
http://www.publicpreparation.org/
Public Preparation is an international platform for knowledge-production and network-based communication. First and foremost, it is a space for self-education focusing on current practices of critical thinking and production in the field of contemporary art. The practice of Public Preparation is mainly based on creating situations for experience, reflection and discussion in various formats. The project is a method for recognising, discussing and establishing intellectual and professional connections. In that sense, it is a collective exercise in order to get ready for the upcoming future – a continuous preparation process that can never be complete but is always ready to take action.
The main agenda of Public Preparation is to concentrate on the questions linked to the concept of artist as a citizen. If we think of the society as a democratic communal project, then everybody who participates in this project is responsible for it – when noticing that something is wrong, one needs to speak up immediately. Contemporary art is a crucial part of the public realm and artists have the power and responsibility to be actively engaged in the process of imagining and changing the social reality. The current phase of Public Preparation activities is dealing critically with the growing tendencies of nationalism in contemporary Europe, aiming to envision alternative ways to think about global community.
Public Preparation started in February 2007 as a sequence of informal encounters which at the same time constituted the publicly visible preparation process of the Biennale of Young Artists (Oct 2007, Tallinn) as well as the course of preparing and educating the public for the Biennale. After the Biennale of Young Artists is over, Public Preparation continues as an independent collaborative project between Rael Artel and Airi Triisberg.
Public Preparation is an international platform for knowledge-production and network-based communication. First and foremost, it is a space for self-education focusing on current practices of critical thinking and production in the field of contemporary art. The practice of Public Preparation is mainly based on creating situations for experience, reflection and discussion in various formats. The project is a method for recognising, discussing and establishing intellectual and professional connections. In that sense, it is a collective exercise in order to get ready for the upcoming future – a continuous preparation process that can never be complete but is always ready to take action.
The main agenda of Public Preparation is to concentrate on the questions linked to the concept of artist as a citizen. If we think of the society as a democratic communal project, then everybody who participates in this project is responsible for it – when noticing that something is wrong, one needs to speak up immediately. Contemporary art is a crucial part of the public realm and artists have the power and responsibility to be actively engaged in the process of imagining and changing the social reality. The current phase of Public Preparation activities is dealing critically with the growing tendencies of nationalism in contemporary Europe, aiming to envision alternative ways to think about global community.
Public Preparation started in February 2007 as a sequence of informal encounters which at the same time constituted the publicly visible preparation process of the Biennale of Young Artists (Oct 2007, Tallinn) as well as the course of preparing and educating the public for the Biennale. After the Biennale of Young Artists is over, Public Preparation continues as an independent collaborative project between Rael Artel and Airi Triisberg.
Videodance (Post I)
La Chambre - Bouvier/Obadia, Paris
siobhan davies performance
Alex Reuben
Video "Routes"
http://www.myspace.com/alexreubenfilms
http://www.directorsnotes.com/2008/01/09/routes-alex-reuben/
Montage Video Dance Festival http://www.wgp.co.za/montage.html
DanceXchange (dx) is a dance house dedicated to the production and distribution of high quality dance. http://www.dancexchange.org.uk/
International Dance Festival Birmingham http://www.idfb.co.uk/
"Planet B-Boy"http://www.planetbboy.com/
Physical TV
The Physical TV Company is Australia's premier company for the production and distribution of screendance, dancefilm, video dance or dance on camera...we make "stories told by the body".
http://www.physicaltv.com.au/PhysicalTv_491_1071_3_0.html
Thursday's Fictions - "A shining example of putting the art back in arthouse." www.thursdaysfictions.com
The Kamikaze Mind - "A dazzling reflection of a mind bristling with ideas." www.thekamikazemind.com
Thursday's Fictions in Second Life - Inhabit your imagination and glimpse the future of art. Click on the link to enter -http://www.thursdaysfictions.com/ThursdaysFictionsInSecondLifeHowDoIGetThere_530_n_3_0.html
http://www.realtimearts.net/contents/84/performance
siobhan davies performance
Alex Reuben
Video "Routes"
http://www.myspace.com/alexreubenfilms
http://www.directorsnotes.com/2008/01/09/routes-alex-reuben/
Montage Video Dance Festival http://www.wgp.co.za/montage.html
DanceXchange (dx) is a dance house dedicated to the production and distribution of high quality dance. http://www.dancexchange.org.uk/
International Dance Festival Birmingham http://www.idfb.co.uk/
"Planet B-Boy"http://www.planetbboy.com/
Physical TV
The Physical TV Company is Australia's premier company for the production and distribution of screendance, dancefilm, video dance or dance on camera...we make "stories told by the body".
http://www.physicaltv.com.au/PhysicalTv_491_1071_3_0.html
Thursday's Fictions - "A shining example of putting the art back in arthouse." www.thursdaysfictions.com
The Kamikaze Mind - "A dazzling reflection of a mind bristling with ideas." www.thekamikazemind.com
Thursday's Fictions in Second Life - Inhabit your imagination and glimpse the future of art. Click on the link to enter -http://www.thursdaysfictions.com/ThursdaysFictionsInSecondLifeHowDoIGetThere_530_n_3_0.html
http://www.realtimearts.net/contents/84/performance
drinkpeedrinkpeedrinkpee
The installation entails a large scale physical diagram that shows the role our bodies play in the water cycle. At the entrance, visitors are invited to sit down on a toilet facing a water fountain, as if to drink while peeing. Their bodies close a physical loop between tubing that forms a circle around the installation - beginning at the toilet and ending at the water fountain. In between, the tubes pass through 2 functioning aquariums, a biochemical reaction mechanism, and a plant that is fertilized by the reaction's byproducts. The reaction illustrates the extraction from urine of nutrients that are harmful to aquatic ecosystems for use as a local fertilizer.
http://www.submersibledesign.com/drinkpee/installation.html
DIY Kit http://www.submersibledesign.com/drinkpee/diy.html
The project was created by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray, artists and collaborators who also own a company called submersible design.
www.ecotronica.net
http://www.submersibledesign.com/drinkpee/installation.html
DIY Kit http://www.submersibledesign.com/drinkpee/diy.html
The project was created by Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray, artists and collaborators who also own a company called submersible design.
www.ecotronica.net
Friday, April 18, 2008
www.geobodies.org/
Ursula Biemann is an artist, theorist and curator who has in recent years produced a considerable body of work on migration, mobility, technology and gender. In a series of internationally exhibited video projects, as well as in several books "Geography and the Politics of Mobility" (2003), "Stuff It - The Video Essay in the Digital Age“ (2003), „The Maghreb Connection“ (2005) she has focused on the gendered dimension of migrant labour from smuggling on the Spanish-Moroccan border to migrant sex workers in the global context. Her experimental video essays connect a theoretical macro level with the micro perspective on political and cultural practices on the ground.
Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis in the curatorial project "Geography and the Politics of Mobility" (2003) at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, „The Maghreb Conncection“ on migratory systems in North Africa, Cairo/Geneva (2006) or the recent art research projects “Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil politics at Kunstwerke Berlin (2005) and „Sahara Chronicle“ on trans-saharan mobility. Biemann's practice has long included discussions with academics and other practitioners, she has worked with anthropologists, cultural theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of sonic culture. Her video essays reach a wide and diverse audience through festival screenings, art exhibitions, activist conferences, networks and educational settings.
http://www.geobodies.org/
Insisting that location is spatially produced rather than pre-determined by governance, she made space and mobility her prime category of analysis in the curatorial project "Geography and the Politics of Mobility" (2003) at the Generali Foundation in Vienna, „The Maghreb Conncection“ on migratory systems in North Africa, Cairo/Geneva (2006) or the recent art research projects “Black Sea Files” on the Caspian oil politics at Kunstwerke Berlin (2005) and „Sahara Chronicle“ on trans-saharan mobility. Biemann's practice has long included discussions with academics and other practitioners, she has worked with anthropologists, cultural theorists, NGO members, architects, as well as scholars of sonic culture. Her video essays reach a wide and diverse audience through festival screenings, art exhibitions, activist conferences, networks and educational settings.
http://www.geobodies.org/
"Passing Drama", by Angela Melitopoulos
"Passing Drama", by Angela Melitopoulos, 1999,
Experimental documentary on refugee history of refugees from Asia Minor (1923) who fled to Greece and became work slaves in Hitler's Germany in WWII. The film translates the sound-picture of my family's migration history that was passed by voice from one generation to the next
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=5023106219120789424&hl=de
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pAqy4U0xjg
Short text
Passing Drama a videoessay directed by Angela Melitopoulos 66 min, PAL, Digibeta, 1999, (German and Greek language, subtitled in English) contact: nc-melitoan@netcologne.de
„PassingDrama“ is based on different recollections told by refugees. This videoessay is the woven sound picture of the migration of Angela Melitopoulos’family. Drama is the name of a small city in Northern Greece. The city is inhabited by refugees who are survivors of deportations from Asia Minor to Greece in 1923. In World War II their children escaped the Bulgarian occupation and became workeslave in Hitler’s Germany. Interviews with those refugees connected to Melitopoulos father’s recite of his departure from Greece to Vienna are tracing a diagonal path through Europe crossing four different national states. The homeland of these refugees was changing continuously. Their storytelling relates to the local condition of integration. To choose recites from people who have experienced an exodus nearly forgotten in European history meant to consider ways of making the process of forgetting a part in the process of notation (montage). Telling a story, which has been transmitted, retold, re-memorised from one generation to the next meant to make a film on the subject of refugee narration itself. Fragments of recorded interviews formed the voice level in that the story appears as a texture made out of different densities of concret or superfluous „thought-flows“. In their narration the refugees connected their own words with generated word-constructions of others. The recalled words of others intensified through the melody of their voices.
Award of the German Filmcritics for experimental video 2000 Award of the Council of Europe, VideoArt Festival Locarno Award of Internationale Mediafestival Medi@terra Athens
http://www.videophilosophy.de/
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0107/melitopoulos/en/#_ftn3
http://www.eipcp.net/bio/melitopoulos
http://www.videophilosophy.de/tc-geographies.net/workshops/istambul_03.html
http://www.projektmigration.de/
http://www.transitmigration.org/
http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/v2v/Timescapes_Angela_Melitopolous
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/rcfr13b.htm
http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/melitopoulos01_en.pdf
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001760.php
http://freebitflows.t0.or.at/f/participants/angelamelitopoulos
http://www.fdk-berlin.de/en/arsenal-experimental/news-display/article/486/273.html?cHash=12ba233e05
Full Play is a Multimedia Installation performance that took place at the Villette Numerique, which means “Digital Village” at the Parc de la Villette located in Paris, France on September 24th thru September 29th, 2002. http://actioncamfilms.com/fullplay/fullplay.htm
Experimental documentary on refugee history of refugees from Asia Minor (1923) who fled to Greece and became work slaves in Hitler's Germany in WWII. The film translates the sound-picture of my family's migration history that was passed by voice from one generation to the next
http://video.google.de/videoplay?docid=5023106219120789424&hl=de
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pAqy4U0xjg
Short text
Passing Drama a videoessay directed by Angela Melitopoulos 66 min, PAL, Digibeta, 1999, (German and Greek language, subtitled in English) contact: nc-melitoan@netcologne.de
„PassingDrama“ is based on different recollections told by refugees. This videoessay is the woven sound picture of the migration of Angela Melitopoulos’family. Drama is the name of a small city in Northern Greece. The city is inhabited by refugees who are survivors of deportations from Asia Minor to Greece in 1923. In World War II their children escaped the Bulgarian occupation and became workeslave in Hitler’s Germany. Interviews with those refugees connected to Melitopoulos father’s recite of his departure from Greece to Vienna are tracing a diagonal path through Europe crossing four different national states. The homeland of these refugees was changing continuously. Their storytelling relates to the local condition of integration. To choose recites from people who have experienced an exodus nearly forgotten in European history meant to consider ways of making the process of forgetting a part in the process of notation (montage). Telling a story, which has been transmitted, retold, re-memorised from one generation to the next meant to make a film on the subject of refugee narration itself. Fragments of recorded interviews formed the voice level in that the story appears as a texture made out of different densities of concret or superfluous „thought-flows“. In their narration the refugees connected their own words with generated word-constructions of others. The recalled words of others intensified through the melody of their voices.
Award of the German Filmcritics for experimental video 2000 Award of the Council of Europe, VideoArt Festival Locarno Award of Internationale Mediafestival Medi@terra Athens
http://www.videophilosophy.de/
http://eipcp.net/transversal/0107/melitopoulos/en/#_ftn3
http://www.eipcp.net/bio/melitopoulos
http://www.videophilosophy.de/tc-geographies.net/workshops/istambul_03.html
http://www.projektmigration.de/
http://www.transitmigration.org/
http://dictionaryofwar.org/en-dict/v2v/Timescapes_Angela_Melitopolous
http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/rcfr13b.htm
http://www.republicart.net/disc/representations/melitopoulos01_en.pdf
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001760.php
http://freebitflows.t0.or.at/f/participants/angelamelitopoulos
http://www.fdk-berlin.de/en/arsenal-experimental/news-display/article/486/273.html?cHash=12ba233e05
Full Play is a Multimedia Installation performance that took place at the Villette Numerique, which means “Digital Village” at the Parc de la Villette located in Paris, France on September 24th thru September 29th, 2002. http://actioncamfilms.com/fullplay/fullplay.htm
AETHER9 remote realtime video transmission.
Developed by an international group of visual artists and collectives working in a dozen of different locations (disseminated throughout Europe, North and South America, the Middle East) and communicating primarily through the Internet, Æther9 intends to become a functional framework for collaborative video performance.
Initiated in May 2007 during a workshop at the Mapping Festival in Geneva,Switzerland, Æther9 is an experiment in collaborative realtime storytelling through the use of networked video transmission.
http://1904.cc
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aether9
a short history of teleperformance: http://1904.cc/aether/timeline.html
Aether9 emergency mirror sites:
http://aether.x-xx---x.info
http://aether.dudac.org
http://aether.smtp.ru
http://aether.front.ru
Initiated in May 2007 during a workshop at the Mapping Festival in Geneva,Switzerland, Æther9 is an experiment in collaborative realtime storytelling through the use of networked video transmission.
http://1904.cc
http://sourceforge.net/projects/aether9
a short history of teleperformance: http://1904.cc/aether/timeline.html
Aether9 emergency mirror sites:
http://aether.x-xx---x.info
http://aether.dudac.org
http://aether.smtp.ru
http://aether.front.ru
Slobodnakultura.org
Slobodnakultura.org (freeculture.org) is a meta-organization, a collective for the enhancement of free culture, free software and free knowledge that was initiated by artists, theorists, activists, media and law experts and organizations: Kuda.org Novi Sad <http://kuda.org/?q=en>, Dez.org Belgrade <http://www.dez.org.yu/>, Wikimedia Serbia <http://rs.wikimedia.org/>, Biro Belgrade <http://birobeograd.info/about.html>, Žene na delu (Women at Work) Belgrade <http://zenergija.org/>, Act Woman Belgrade, Mreža kreativnih ljudi (Creative Network) Belgrade <http://www.creemaginet.com/>, Free Software Network FSN <http://ngo.fsn.org.yu/>, Linux User Group Novi Sad <http://www.ns-linux.org/> and Linux User Group Belgrade (LUG) <http://www.linux-beograd.org.yu/>, GNU Club Niš <http://gnu.elfak.ni.ac.yu/>, BG Wireless <http://www.bgwireless.net/en/>, Gradilište Niš.
Slobodnakultura org is member of Druga scena (drugascena.org) (Other Scene) a platform that brings together formal and informal organizations and groups from Belgrade that work on the field of contemporary art and culture, activism and theory.<http://drugascena.org/>
Slobodnakultura org is member of Druga scena (drugascena.org) (Other Scene) a platform that brings together formal and informal organizations and groups from Belgrade that work on the field of contemporary art and culture, activism and theory.<http://drugascena.org/>
Jacqueline Saburido
http://liondani.blogspot.com/2008/04/email.html
Jacqui Saburio - Oprah Winfrey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TFBeB8egk
Jacqui Saburio - Oprah Winfrey
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x8TFBeB8egk
Telekommunisten
Welcome to Dialstation
Dialstation is a flexible and cheap calling service, independent of any cellphone provider. Dialstation is the ideal way to make international calls from your mobile telephone. Inexpensive and convenient, dialstation works with any normal telephone and does not require any special software to use. Dialstation is designed to be used worldwide, with a local simcard you can easily avoid high roaming fees.Remember when making a phone call was easy? Just pick up the phone, dial and talk. Simple! Well, that was good enough for a world where long distance calling was an uncommon thing. Those days are over. The long distance rates charged by the incumbent telecommunications corporations are simply far too expensive.
http://www.telekommunisten.net/
Dialstation is a flexible and cheap calling service, independent of any cellphone provider. Dialstation is the ideal way to make international calls from your mobile telephone. Inexpensive and convenient, dialstation works with any normal telephone and does not require any special software to use. Dialstation is designed to be used worldwide, with a local simcard you can easily avoid high roaming fees.Remember when making a phone call was easy? Just pick up the phone, dial and talk. Simple! Well, that was good enough for a world where long distance calling was an uncommon thing. Those days are over. The long distance rates charged by the incumbent telecommunications corporations are simply far too expensive.
http://www.telekommunisten.net/
Friday, April 11, 2008
Navigating the Space of the Future
LIVE STREAM: http://www.montevideo.nl/st/player.php
What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one's immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one's body, one's senses, one's conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium 'Navigating the Space of the Future' will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.
Yolande Harris – Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk)Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one's environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments “satellite sounders” developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. 'The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.
'http://sunrunsun.nimk.nl/
http://www.yolandeharris.net/
David Dunn
David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.”
http://www.davidddunn.com/
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5399
Atau Tanaka
Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.
http://www.xmira.com/atau
What does it mean to navigate? What is the importance of location specificity? What does it mean to get lost? The increasing accuracy of satellite navigation strives to eliminate the possibility of human error, but it also produces a sense of dislocation from one's immediate environment by abstracting location as the coordinates of longitude and latitude. What place is there for one's body, one's senses, one's conscious and unconscious awareness of space, if this knowledge is so apparently made redundant by GPS? What, if any, role can historical skills of navigation at sea, of observation, choice, intuition and improvisation play in navigating the spaces of the future? The symposium 'Navigating the Space of the Future' will take these questions as its starting point to see if we can find our way within the dense environment of global positioning technologies. The field is open but the practice is just starting to form itself by looking at ways to counter locative media strategies where geographical walks are organised that use the city and the street as a playing field negating the relation between space, architecture, time, body and mind. The presentations will focus on new ways of interpreting data of location and navigation by relating these directly to the physical (space) through the use of sound.
Yolande Harris – Sun Run Sun (Artist in Residence NIMk)Sun Run Sun explores the individual experience of current location technologies through a personal experience of sound. It seeks to (re)establish a sense of personal connectedness to one's environment, and to (re)negotiate this through an investigation into old, new, future and animal navigation using sound. Sun Run Sun investigates the split between the embodied experience of location and the calculated data of position. A series of portable personal instruments “satellite sounders” developed for the residency, transform satellite data directly into a sonic composition. This composition constantly varies in response to the changing location of the player as they move through their physical environment. 'The experience of sound is internal, as a process that influences the relationship between the self and the environment. True navigation consists of a continuously coherent relationship between the two.
'http://sunrunsun.nimk.nl/
http://www.yolandeharris.net/
David Dunn
David Dunn takes his research into the bioacoustics of bark beetles and entomogenic climate change, and on ultrasonic audio phenomena in both human and non-human environment as starting points to talk about Acoustic Ecologies. He wants to bring forth the sonic presence of these worlds for human contemplation of their inherent aesthetic beauty and to show the amazing continuity of life, with its capacity for infinite variation in audible communication. “Given the superabundance of how music as a human activity has been used, I believe that music has simultaneously been a strategy to evolve our capacity to structurally-couple with our environment through our aural perception, and a significant force for defining the boundaries of group affiliation and for the affirmation of cultural status, giving voice to an evolutionary heritage of an abundance of other coupling modes that are greater than the rational mind alone.”
http://www.davidddunn.com/
http://www.newmusicbox.org/article.nmbx?id=5399
Atau Tanaka
Atau Tanaka bridges the fields of media art, experimental music, and research. He creates music for sensor instruments, wireless network infrastructures, and democratized digital forms. Tanaka is best known for his performances where he uses physical gestures to articulate music and sound synthesis and real-time image transformation. For the past years, inspired by the ever-changing social, geographic, ecological, emotional context of using mobile technology for creative ends Tanaka focusses his attention towards mobile media projects. He is exploring the creative, critical and commercial potential of mobile music. “My interest is to take interactive music practice off the stage and outside the concert hall into the urban sphere. Mobile communications devices are meant to connect groups of people. Musical concerts, similarly, are situations that bring people together for a common purpose. Can we elicit commonalities to make a community-based musical process, creating a shared experience among users?” In his presentation he will pay attention to the description of the architecture of an audio-visual hard- and software framework that was developed for the realization of a series of locative media artworks, and eliciting from this, he brings afore fundamental issues and questions that can be generalized and applicable to the growing practice of locative media.
http://www.xmira.com/atau
Media and Dance festivals network.
http://www.media-dance.com/
Movement Research at the Judson Church
http://www.movementresearch.org/
Performance Journal
http://movementresearch.org/performancejournal/
Movement Research at the Judson Church
http://www.movementresearch.org/
Performance Journal
http://movementresearch.org/performancejournal/
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Difference Is Normal
and "Dreams" of course on http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_-P4t2jR1g&feature=related
Commercial -- Autistic Child
Autism Drama
Sunday, April 6, 2008
"Contrapolis; or, Creativity and Enclosure in the Cities"
"Displacement of residents, whether they are gentrifying artists priced out of Soho or the poor and unemployed excluded from New York altogether, is no random by-product of gentrification but its structural condition. Decay, disinvestment, abandonment . . .prepare the way for profitable reinvestment . . . Like all the social relations that art supposedly transcends, housing is one of the historical circumstances of its existence". Rosalyn Deutsche, "Alternative Space"
"And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me". Achim Felz, "IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition"
The core question of the event would be "how is art, and cultural production more broadly, at once driving capitalist valorisation in the city and able to project forms of social relations that do not produce value for capital?"
http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/projects/view/15
"And howsoever oppositional we architects may be, as long as we fail to challenge basic elements of society, such as the concept of private property, nothing will improve. This is a great paradox for me". Achim Felz, "IKAS: An Experiment in Extra-Parliamentary Architectural Opposition"
The core question of the event would be "how is art, and cultural production more broadly, at once driving capitalist valorisation in the city and able to project forms of social relations that do not produce value for capital?"
http://www.enoughroomforspace.org/projects/view/15
Thoughts on Curating - How to Bring About a Shift in Perception
This ability to create new meanings and connections between things is especially important for promoting a relatively obscure genre like screendance. In order to educate viewers and attract new audiences we need to give them a window for entry and help them connect with the form. We are a media savvy culture, in which the average viewer can identify the genre and conventional structures of any given media clip in a matter of seconds. Screendance is just different enough to feel strange and foreign to the typical viewer, but only a slight shift of perception is necessary to make it seem familiar and identifiable.
http://greatdance.com/movetheframe/2008/03/thoughts-on-curating-how-to-br.php
More videos: http://www.youtube.com/profile_favorites?user=malindarayallen
http://greatdance.com/movetheframe/2008/03/thoughts-on-curating-how-to-br.php
More videos: http://www.youtube.com/profile_favorites?user=malindarayallen
Second Life Dance2
a hilarious video of real people impersonating the way avatars move in Second Life
Turkish Parliament Adopts Headscarf Reform
Is Freedom Now at Hand – or the Religious Police?
The Turkish parliament has lifted the headscarf ban in Turkish universities. The Kemalist opposition sees this as a threat to basic democratic values, and intends to appeal to the supreme court.
The headscarf is a symbol of this social revolution. The proportions of Turkish society have been shifted. Two out of three Turkish women now wear headscarves, three out of four Turks approve of allowing the headscarf at universities, four out of five members of parliament voted for the constitutional amendment getting rid of the ban.
Susanne Güsten in Istanbul looks at the background to the issue:
http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-476/_nr-930/i.html
The Turkish parliament has lifted the headscarf ban in Turkish universities. The Kemalist opposition sees this as a threat to basic democratic values, and intends to appeal to the supreme court.
The headscarf is a symbol of this social revolution. The proportions of Turkish society have been shifted. Two out of three Turkish women now wear headscarves, three out of four Turks approve of allowing the headscarf at universities, four out of five members of parliament voted for the constitutional amendment getting rid of the ban.
Susanne Güsten in Istanbul looks at the background to the issue:
http://www.qantara.de/webcom/show_article.php/_c-476/_nr-930/i.html
Book Review Ilan Pappé: "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine":
NotJust Collateral Damage
The Israeli historian Ilan Pappé takes a new look at the expulsionof the Palestinians in 1948. According to Pappé, the Palestinians'exodus was not an unfortunate side-effect of the war, but an act ofethnic cleansing planned long in advance. Martina Sabra reports on the book
Saturday, April 5, 2008
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer artist's talk at the Tate Mondern
Mexican-Canadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (b1967) presents his recent interactive art installations, including Wavefunction a kinetic sculpture premiered at the Venice Biennale 2007, and the large public art project Under Scan which toured the East Midlands in 2006. Lozano-Hemmer creates platforms for public participation by perverting technologies such as robotics, computerised surveillance or telematic networks. Inspired by phantasmagoria, carnival and animatronics, Lozano-Hemmer describes his huge light and shadow works as 'anti monuments for alien agency'.
http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/rafael_lozano_hemmer_artists_talk/default.jsp
http://www.tate.org.uk/onlineevents/webcasts/rafael_lozano_hemmer_artists_talk/default.jsp
A Fake is a Fake
http://fake.isafake.org
DISILLUSION 2.0?
You were told that a new democracy of communication was possible, that thelies of corporate media were to disappear and that your voice was going toplay an active role in the formation of public discourse.You were deluded into believing that even the world, this world, wouldbecome a better place through detailed diffusion of low-cost technologies,through the birth of telematic networks and the establishment of blogs andsocial networks.While the watered-down fantasies that came with the rise of web 2.0 arebeing dissolved, a bitter consciousness remains:that communication itself, after all, is an illusion. That information,however probable it may seem, is still a fiction and that a fake, in theend, is only a fake. Anyway.
EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF DETOURNING COMMUNICATION!
Rising directly from the ashes of the blogosphere, the imaginary art groupLes Liens Invisibles is proud to present A Fake is a Fake, the ultimateplatform dedicated to fake publishing, that will finally render yourcommunication strong, incisive, and paradoxical. Thrust your voice beyondthe limits of reality and explore the new frontiers of detourningcommunication: you can finally speak with the voice of Power.
Les Liens invisibles <http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org> is an imaginary art-group from Italy. Their artworks are based on the invisible linksbetween the infosphere, neural synapsis, and real life.
DISILLUSION 2.0?
You were told that a new democracy of communication was possible, that thelies of corporate media were to disappear and that your voice was going toplay an active role in the formation of public discourse.You were deluded into believing that even the world, this world, wouldbecome a better place through detailed diffusion of low-cost technologies,through the birth of telematic networks and the establishment of blogs andsocial networks.While the watered-down fantasies that came with the rise of web 2.0 arebeing dissolved, a bitter consciousness remains:that communication itself, after all, is an illusion. That information,however probable it may seem, is still a fiction and that a fake, in theend, is only a fake. Anyway.
EXPERIENCE THE POWER OF DETOURNING COMMUNICATION!
Rising directly from the ashes of the blogosphere, the imaginary art groupLes Liens Invisibles is proud to present A Fake is a Fake, the ultimateplatform dedicated to fake publishing, that will finally render yourcommunication strong, incisive, and paradoxical. Thrust your voice beyondthe limits of reality and explore the new frontiers of detourningcommunication: you can finally speak with the voice of Power.
Les Liens invisibles <http://www.lesliensinvisibles.org> is an imaginary art-group from Italy. Their artworks are based on the invisible linksbetween the infosphere, neural synapsis, and real life.
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
History Will Repeat Itself
History Will Repeat Itself. Strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performanceHMKV at PHOENIX Halle Dortmund: June 9 - September 23, 2007
In contemporary (media) art there has been an almost ‘uncanny’ longing for the performative repetition or re-creation of historical situations and events. The exhibition History Will Repeat Itself focuses on current strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance, and presents the positions and strategies of 30 international artists. It is a cooperation between Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, and is the first comprehensive exhibition in Germany dealing with the topic, or strategy, of re-enactment.
In contemporary (media) art there has been an almost ‘uncanny’ longing for the performative repetition or re-creation of historical situations and events. The exhibition History Will Repeat Itself focuses on current strategies of re-enactment in contemporary (media) art and performance, and presents the positions and strategies of 30 international artists. It is a cooperation between Hartware MedienKunstVerein in Dortmund, and KW Institute for Contemporary Art Berlin, and is the first comprehensive exhibition in Germany dealing with the topic, or strategy, of re-enactment.
In general, a so-called re-enactment is a historically correct recreation of socially relevant events, such as important battles or other historical events. In a re-enactment, the audience that normally remain passive or at a certain distance of the documented event become immediate witnesses of a (repeated historical) event, which unfolds in front of their eyes, or they become participants in an action, in which they actively participate.
In contemporary art there has been an increasing number of artistic re-enactments – the performative repetition or re-creation of historical situations and events. For example, in his work "The Battle of Orgreave" (2001) the British artist Jeremy Deller had a violent clash between miners and police from the year 1984 re-enacted by ex-miners, ex-police and other re-enactors.
Unlike popular historical re-enactments, like e.g. the re-enactment of historical battles, artistic re-enactments are not performative re-stagings of historic situations and events that occurred a long time ago; rather, events (often traumatic ones) are re-enacted that are viewed as very important for the present. Artistic re-enactments are not simply affirming what has happened in the past, but rather they are questioning the present via repeating or re-enacting historical events that have left their traces in the collective memory. Re-enactments are artistic interrogations of media images that try to scrutinise the reality of the images, while at the same time pointing towards the fact that collective memory is essentially mediated memory.
Architecture in Metaverse "Archidemo" (Second Life Dance 1)
http://mapping.jp/archi/
"Archidemo" is experimental demonstration and research for the possibility of the architecture and environmental design in Metaverse(=the virtual-world). developed by Hidenori Watanave and project member. All the activities are done on NikkeiBP and NikkeiBP way SIM in Second Life(Aug.01/2007~Jan.09/2008). In addition, "Archidemo" is Pre-event of "Digital design competition 2007" (Nikkei Architecture sponsoring).
To expand the possibility of "Architecture in Metaverse" that was the concept besides "Imitation of the Physical world", various demonstrations that used LSL (Linden Script Language) were developed by a lot of creators.
In "Archidemo", the field crossing collaboration was achieved. Trial of Inworld (=in the virtual-space) photograph exhibition by photographer and metaverse-architect, In-world activity, installation of media art, scientific visualization, trial of realization of world of Sci-Fi novel, chatbot space, workshop by student, and so on.
Contents Oriented Space
"Contents oriented space" is a new concept and design method of space.
In Architecture in Metaverse, the following points are requested - "Contents of architecture" can be recognized visually, and be accessed directly from the outside of architecture. "Wall and ceiling" that obstructs the view and restrains the action is essentially unnecessary.
Instead of wall and ceiling, “Navigation” composes an architectural space. People can do flighting, walking, and teleporting and “landing on the contents”, in Metaverse - Just like in the WEB space.
Translating real space into virtual space
In “Archidemo”, there were a lot of architectural experiments that used photograph and movie of a real-space as a “material” of the construction of a virtual-space.
"Wall and ceiling" is unnecessary in Architecture in Metaverse, as being described in the preceding chapter. In a word, It is not effective reproduction that even if the construction of the real world is reproduced by Realistic 3-D modeling.
As an alternative idea, There is very effective method - composing the space with “Navigation” by using “Material” from the real-world. The program ties the photograph and Movie.
This is a method of reproducing not "Shape" but "Experience". It can be paraphrase of "Translating the real-space into the virtual-space".
Watch the "Dance-Performance in the weightless space"
http://mapping.jp/archi/2008/03/danceperformance_in_the_weight.html
Avant-garde/like "Super-flat"/ Web2.0 media dance performance tool inArchidemo (project page: http://mapping.jp/archi/ ) by "Gekitora Gackt"from "inetdance Japan". Gekitora intends "Dance-performance that can beappreciated from any angle 360 degrees", and does various experiments inArchidemo.Gekitora choreographs both dancers and avators. It is fantastic experiencefor him to choreograph avators, because artist can share only pure movementof motion with many users in Internet. Now, A series of four dances can be tested with the dance-pad.A free body expression act is done in the weightless space. Those expressions reminds users of the space suit of "2001:A SpaceOdyssey".
"Archidemo" is experimental demonstration and research for the possibility of the architecture and environmental design in Metaverse(=the virtual-world). developed by Hidenori Watanave and project member. All the activities are done on NikkeiBP and NikkeiBP way SIM in Second Life(Aug.01/2007~Jan.09/2008). In addition, "Archidemo" is Pre-event of "Digital design competition 2007" (Nikkei Architecture sponsoring).
To expand the possibility of "Architecture in Metaverse" that was the concept besides "Imitation of the Physical world", various demonstrations that used LSL (Linden Script Language) were developed by a lot of creators.
In "Archidemo", the field crossing collaboration was achieved. Trial of Inworld (=in the virtual-space) photograph exhibition by photographer and metaverse-architect, In-world activity, installation of media art, scientific visualization, trial of realization of world of Sci-Fi novel, chatbot space, workshop by student, and so on.
Contents Oriented Space
"Contents oriented space" is a new concept and design method of space.
In Architecture in Metaverse, the following points are requested - "Contents of architecture" can be recognized visually, and be accessed directly from the outside of architecture. "Wall and ceiling" that obstructs the view and restrains the action is essentially unnecessary.
Instead of wall and ceiling, “Navigation” composes an architectural space. People can do flighting, walking, and teleporting and “landing on the contents”, in Metaverse - Just like in the WEB space.
Translating real space into virtual space
In “Archidemo”, there were a lot of architectural experiments that used photograph and movie of a real-space as a “material” of the construction of a virtual-space.
"Wall and ceiling" is unnecessary in Architecture in Metaverse, as being described in the preceding chapter. In a word, It is not effective reproduction that even if the construction of the real world is reproduced by Realistic 3-D modeling.
As an alternative idea, There is very effective method - composing the space with “Navigation” by using “Material” from the real-world. The program ties the photograph and Movie.
This is a method of reproducing not "Shape" but "Experience". It can be paraphrase of "Translating the real-space into the virtual-space".
Watch the "Dance-Performance in the weightless space"
http://mapping.jp/archi/2008/03/danceperformance_in_the_weight.html
Avant-garde/like "Super-flat"/ Web2.0 media dance performance tool inArchidemo (project page: http://mapping.jp/archi/ ) by "Gekitora Gackt"from "inetdance Japan". Gekitora intends "Dance-performance that can beappreciated from any angle 360 degrees", and does various experiments inArchidemo.Gekitora choreographs both dancers and avators. It is fantastic experiencefor him to choreograph avators, because artist can share only pure movementof motion with many users in Internet. Now, A series of four dances can be tested with the dance-pad.A free body expression act is done in the weightless space. Those expressions reminds users of the space suit of "2001:A SpaceOdyssey".
The Few and the Many
http://www.nictoglobe.com/new/home/The%20Few%20and%20the%20Many.htm
http://www.nictoglobe.com/
Culture as the social outcome of tensions between the few and the many obviously has a firm political component. This component has various meanings; one of them is the ability to generate change. This changing or generating component can be misused as a repressing tool in the hands of power, whether this power is applied to the benefits or the destruction of society. Not any human alien order is able to protect or to govern individual independence; this is in strong contrast with the obligations and promises contemporary governments and industries are demanding from 'their' citizens and employees.
Being part of an organization, whether a government or any other alien body, is conflicting with one's need to "be" free, not to "feel" free, but to "be" free.
The illusion of 'being' given by the sensation of feeling is paramount and leading to conflicting tensions both in the individual and in society
Totalitarian mass-culture establishes a terror state.
This 'feeling' of not being, but acting according to the outcome of the influences of sensory impulses is in the hands of the malevolent an easy way to full fill their purposes.
When the naïve and easily pleased masses are manipulated with sense satisfying impulses directed towards the instantaneously consummation of their desires, they turn into willing anthropomorphic machines, who can easily be controlled. This is exemplified by the enormous success of various consumption oriented practises and their intentional propagation of a hedonistic lifestyle as everyone can see on TV, Film and other media.
It is very difficult not to consume. Emphasize is directed towards the notion that to consume is 'good', 'good' for the market, 'good' for the economics. But fundamentally it is neither good nor bad. It is mere an attempt to postpone everyone's nearing end and as such both angst and lust driven.
To be fully aware of the responsibilities one can take for one's own life and independence is the first step towards a freer and less manipulative society, which as a matter of fact is getting increasingly more difficult when the control and angst/lust driven order is gaining more and more control of our individual lives. There is a tendency towards de-individuating society in favour of socializing the individual.
This results in societies where its members are artificially held in a state of angst; fed by their desires which are brutally perverted by pornographic conceptions which at their turn are sold as entertainment by the culture / creative and knowledge industries.
Both the ancient left and right wings are neglecting lessons learned
Lessons learned from the outcome of the global politico-economical status quo after WW II is not being taken seriously enough by the world population simply because of a lack of self-consciousness. The need to be educated is falsely directed towards knowledge in stead of knowing. By objectification of human thoughts mankind loses its ground in a more fundamental way than the threads of so called fundamentalists.
There is a very diffuse intellectual gap between Europe (continental) and the American British alliances which existed before WW II and which is still unresolved.
Ironically the winner of WW II is global fascism, as the bigger brother of its more regional guise; National Socialism. America's role in contemporary society can be characterized by a compulsive attitude towards its own identity, and in that process neglecting the fact that this behaviour is not everyone's concern and not at all to the benefit of the whole. By victimizing the rest of the world it merely shows that it is thinking acting and operating driven by an enormous frustration.
Education and politico-economical programs are build on false premises which do not benefit society as a whole, but on the contrary is building a society where one of the most important tasks for its citizens is not to end their lives homeless, unemployed, addicted to whatever addictions are at hand, doing all this with the very naïve assumption that free market will filter the good from the bad.
Globalization in economics promises Heaven and maintains Hell
The wish of the few for a global economical society results in constructing political ways to force the many in an angst-lust driven society where economical machines easily can reach their goals. Culture, ethics, aesthetics, art, compassion are used as tranquilizers to keep the few reluctant opponents at ease. The dream factory produces 24 hours a day images, sounds, ideologies, documents, papers, and novels about how to be happy in a hellish world.
Super economics is a substitute of super ego
As a logical consequence of the mechanism of industrialization of knowledge, industries are serving the status quo, and are deforming any trend towards a radical departure from the purposefulness and makebility of society to a marketing tool serving their own intentions namely the complete dehumanization and zombification of humankind.
In a world dominated by super economics, superego's come to the foreground to assist the achievement of its program. So we have our Bush's, Blair's, Saddam's and Bin Laden's as a consequence of the political direction the world as a whole is taking.
Hedonism is instrumental of fascism.
The natural state of fascism is a state in which all desires are fullfilable, instead of rejecting the dependencies of desires as a burden and a suffering, by maintaining a more ethical attitude towards its seductions, fascism propagates and fully embraces the orgies, the bacchanal, the bloodshed, the genocide, the total destruction of beauty and is suffocating aesthetics by crossing deliberately the line between the domain of the individual and the domain of society.
Class struggle 'follows' class consciousness
A critical attitude towards the intentions of their employers of a minority of workers ‘inside’ the so called creative/ culture knowledge industries, ironically leads to political involvements, creating artificial role functions, which are gradually incorporated into the politico-economical programs of the very same ursurpating financial and state machines, thereby adding another refinement in the producer-supplier-consumer chain. The ‘Creative Class’ of Richard Florida [1], for example, is heavily read and used as a blue-print in developing city economics, at higher and lower governmental circles around the World.
A possible way out will be to break the chain, to be able to produce without the economics involved, a nearly unimaginable, utopian alternative, to produce works of aesthetical value which are fundamental purposeless, not serving any need whatsoever. Developing a new aesthetical and ethical consciousness in place of redefining cultural and social consciousness will help to separate the aesthetical and the artistical from the creative and the social and in that process regaining an autonomous position.
The creative class does not exist (yet)
When there is (again) an autonomous position of the aesthetical and the artistic the possibility arise to interchange thoughts, means of cooperation and the like between the creative and the social, before that the former has to separate itself from the submissive role is has nowadays.
To be able to play a future role 'creative class' consciousness has to be developed and not taken to be granted.
[1] The Creative Class, Florida, R. , 2004
Andreas Jacobs, Art Ist
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.nictoglobe.com/
Culture as the social outcome of tensions between the few and the many obviously has a firm political component. This component has various meanings; one of them is the ability to generate change. This changing or generating component can be misused as a repressing tool in the hands of power, whether this power is applied to the benefits or the destruction of society. Not any human alien order is able to protect or to govern individual independence; this is in strong contrast with the obligations and promises contemporary governments and industries are demanding from 'their' citizens and employees.
Being part of an organization, whether a government or any other alien body, is conflicting with one's need to "be" free, not to "feel" free, but to "be" free.
The illusion of 'being' given by the sensation of feeling is paramount and leading to conflicting tensions both in the individual and in society
Totalitarian mass-culture establishes a terror state.
This 'feeling' of not being, but acting according to the outcome of the influences of sensory impulses is in the hands of the malevolent an easy way to full fill their purposes.
When the naïve and easily pleased masses are manipulated with sense satisfying impulses directed towards the instantaneously consummation of their desires, they turn into willing anthropomorphic machines, who can easily be controlled. This is exemplified by the enormous success of various consumption oriented practises and their intentional propagation of a hedonistic lifestyle as everyone can see on TV, Film and other media.
It is very difficult not to consume. Emphasize is directed towards the notion that to consume is 'good', 'good' for the market, 'good' for the economics. But fundamentally it is neither good nor bad. It is mere an attempt to postpone everyone's nearing end and as such both angst and lust driven.
To be fully aware of the responsibilities one can take for one's own life and independence is the first step towards a freer and less manipulative society, which as a matter of fact is getting increasingly more difficult when the control and angst/lust driven order is gaining more and more control of our individual lives. There is a tendency towards de-individuating society in favour of socializing the individual.
This results in societies where its members are artificially held in a state of angst; fed by their desires which are brutally perverted by pornographic conceptions which at their turn are sold as entertainment by the culture / creative and knowledge industries.
Both the ancient left and right wings are neglecting lessons learned
Lessons learned from the outcome of the global politico-economical status quo after WW II is not being taken seriously enough by the world population simply because of a lack of self-consciousness. The need to be educated is falsely directed towards knowledge in stead of knowing. By objectification of human thoughts mankind loses its ground in a more fundamental way than the threads of so called fundamentalists.
There is a very diffuse intellectual gap between Europe (continental) and the American British alliances which existed before WW II and which is still unresolved.
Ironically the winner of WW II is global fascism, as the bigger brother of its more regional guise; National Socialism. America's role in contemporary society can be characterized by a compulsive attitude towards its own identity, and in that process neglecting the fact that this behaviour is not everyone's concern and not at all to the benefit of the whole. By victimizing the rest of the world it merely shows that it is thinking acting and operating driven by an enormous frustration.
Education and politico-economical programs are build on false premises which do not benefit society as a whole, but on the contrary is building a society where one of the most important tasks for its citizens is not to end their lives homeless, unemployed, addicted to whatever addictions are at hand, doing all this with the very naïve assumption that free market will filter the good from the bad.
Globalization in economics promises Heaven and maintains Hell
The wish of the few for a global economical society results in constructing political ways to force the many in an angst-lust driven society where economical machines easily can reach their goals. Culture, ethics, aesthetics, art, compassion are used as tranquilizers to keep the few reluctant opponents at ease. The dream factory produces 24 hours a day images, sounds, ideologies, documents, papers, and novels about how to be happy in a hellish world.
Super economics is a substitute of super ego
As a logical consequence of the mechanism of industrialization of knowledge, industries are serving the status quo, and are deforming any trend towards a radical departure from the purposefulness and makebility of society to a marketing tool serving their own intentions namely the complete dehumanization and zombification of humankind.
In a world dominated by super economics, superego's come to the foreground to assist the achievement of its program. So we have our Bush's, Blair's, Saddam's and Bin Laden's as a consequence of the political direction the world as a whole is taking.
Hedonism is instrumental of fascism.
The natural state of fascism is a state in which all desires are fullfilable, instead of rejecting the dependencies of desires as a burden and a suffering, by maintaining a more ethical attitude towards its seductions, fascism propagates and fully embraces the orgies, the bacchanal, the bloodshed, the genocide, the total destruction of beauty and is suffocating aesthetics by crossing deliberately the line between the domain of the individual and the domain of society.
Class struggle 'follows' class consciousness
A critical attitude towards the intentions of their employers of a minority of workers ‘inside’ the so called creative/ culture knowledge industries, ironically leads to political involvements, creating artificial role functions, which are gradually incorporated into the politico-economical programs of the very same ursurpating financial and state machines, thereby adding another refinement in the producer-supplier-consumer chain. The ‘Creative Class’ of Richard Florida [1], for example, is heavily read and used as a blue-print in developing city economics, at higher and lower governmental circles around the World.
A possible way out will be to break the chain, to be able to produce without the economics involved, a nearly unimaginable, utopian alternative, to produce works of aesthetical value which are fundamental purposeless, not serving any need whatsoever. Developing a new aesthetical and ethical consciousness in place of redefining cultural and social consciousness will help to separate the aesthetical and the artistical from the creative and the social and in that process regaining an autonomous position.
The creative class does not exist (yet)
When there is (again) an autonomous position of the aesthetical and the artistic the possibility arise to interchange thoughts, means of cooperation and the like between the creative and the social, before that the former has to separate itself from the submissive role is has nowadays.
To be able to play a future role 'creative class' consciousness has to be developed and not taken to be granted.
[1] The Creative Class, Florida, R. , 2004
Andreas Jacobs, Art Ist
Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)