Friday, August 22, 2008

"The Passion Project" by Reid Farrington

Read from: http://broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=31262

The Passion Project is a vibrant archival film experiment spun from the reels of the last great silent film, Carl Th. Dreyer's 1928 immortal masterpiece, "The Passion of Joan of Arc." Exploring the intersection of live performance, film, and installation, The Passion Project includes every frame of Dreyer's film - his outtakes and the reels that were eerily lost to fire - and explodes the film into three dimensions, placing the audience inside the action and surrounding them with the relentless rhythm of 30mm projections. The Passion Project features a mesmerizing and meticulous performance by Shelley Kay, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the Melle. Falconetti, the actress in the film.

Directed by Reid Farrington and performed by Shelley Kay, production includes costumes by Sara Jeanne Asselin, set by Janet D. Clancy and dramaturgy/technical assistance by Stephen O'Connell and Austin Guest. The piece had its initial workshop production at the PS/K2 Festival, last November in Copenhagen, Denmark and continued workshop showings at the 3LD Art and Technology Center in June and July.

For the past seven years Reid Farrington has been a technical artist and collaborator with the Wooster Group. He has designed video and created hardware and software systems for the playback of video and sound for To You the Birdie!, Brace Up!, Poor Theater, House/Lights, WHO'S YOUR DADA, and Hamlet. He has toured productions to Moscow, Paris, Berlin, Istanbul, Amsterdam, Melbourne, Brussels, and Athens. He has edited has authored interactive DVDs of The Wooster Group's performances, Brace Up! and House/Lights. In addition to being a video artist, he is a director, set, light, and costume designer for various theater and dance companies in NYC.

For more information, visit http://www.reidfarrington.com.

Watch video extract from Wooster Group's "Hamlet" and "The Passion Project"

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Monday, August 18, 2008

Steve Ballmer Microsoft's CEO attacked with eggs

Just as soon as the Microsoft CEO started his speech at the Corvinus University, in Budapest, Hungary, a protesting student wearing a "Microsoft=Corruption" shirt stood up and threw eggs at the Microsoft CEO. Not exactly a sign of the famous "Hungarian hospitality". Ballmer showed great reflexes and dodged the attack, hiding behind the desk.

The video of the accident on youtube was introduced with the following words: Steve Ballmer attacked by Nagy Gyorgy, a hungarian idiot who can't even speak english:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wUZNw7h96WU&feature=related

The explanation of the attacker:Why I raised my voice against the contract between Microsoft and Hungarian government: http://nagyorgy.uw.hu/

RAQS MEDIA COLLECTIVE

Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, ShuddhabrataSengupta) is a collective of media practitioners based in New Delhi thatworks in art practice, new media, filmmaking, photography, media theory& research, writing, criticism and curation. Raqs are currentlyco-curators of the MANIFESTA 7 in South Tyrol/Trentino.
The origins of Raqs Media Collective’s practice lies in documentaryfilmmaking, and though they have traversed a long distance from theempiricist imperative of mainstream documentary making, documentsthemselves, and other forms that gesture to the notionally real,continue to intrigue them.Raqs are interested in documents because of the rhetorical spaces thatcan be prised open while handling documents. These include the elaboratedisguises and ruses that the rhetoric of documents sometimes carry withand within itself.
www.raqsmediacollective.net
www.manifesta7.it

Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Motionplex: On-line Collaborative Video Lab

http://www.dance-tech.net/motionplex
This is an on-line collaborative editing platform in development phase that will allow you to create on-line video collaboratively by adding video, stills and sound. The user is able to edit, re-sequence and remix the online content up-loaded by him/her and by other users
Motionplex allows you to search for media in the whole Kaltura network, Flickr (photo sharing site), google images and the New York City Public Library and the Internet Archives.
You are welcome to test it adding and re-mixing media.
You can also create a new mix!

Monday, August 4, 2008

Anamorphic parking garage signage...

...is the kind of thing that wins design award...


...but shouldn’t—for several reasons:


(1) Signage in this kind of environment is most useful to those who are in the wrong place and/or on the wrong path; not only does this signage fail to serve them, but it introduces additional ambiguities and disorientation. (2) It assumes clear lines of sight, but they’re likely to be obscured by other traffic. (3) This signage uses color in arbitrary or counterconventional ways: green for “in” contrasted with red for “out” rather than green for “go” and red for “stop” (and for fire equipment), blue for “up” and yellow for “down” (which conflicts with other use of yellow for stop lines, warning on pylons, etc). (4) It obscures practical geometries (for example, tight turns on ramps) and introduces lots of unresolved factors (red lines that run across walkways into the roadway). The whole idea privileges the distracting satisfaction of watching a discombobulated illusion ‘fall into place’ rather than helping to drivers to find their way while watching out for other traffic as it enters and exits at unexpected angles).

The Salt Satyagraha by Joseph Delappe

Over the course of 26 days, using a treadmill customized for cyberspace, Joseph Delappe reenacted Mahatma Gandhi's famous 1930 Salt March. The original 240-mile walk was made in protest of the British salt tax; the update of this seminal protest march took place at Eyebeam and in Second Life, the Internet-based virtual world. For this performance, Joseph Delappe walked the entire 240 miles of the original march on a converted treadmill at Eyebeam in New York City and online in Second Life. My steps on the treadmill controlled the forward movement of my avatar, MGandhi Chakrabarti, enabling the live and virtual reenactment of the march.

Realized in several stages, DeLappe's virtual re-creation of The Salt Satyagraha, Mahatma Ghandi's Salt March to Dandi, a journey 240 mileslong, is part installation and part performance art. His historical re-enactment reveals more about how virtual space is navigated from real
space than it explains the politics of Mahatma Ghandi's protest against British salt tax in 1930, utilizing travel in real space, a blog, and images from the journey housed on Flickr.
More of the article:
http://www.furtherfield.org/displayreview.php?review_id=308


On joining a “real” march in NYC…
May 6, 2008 by delappe
Long delayed in writing about my experience on April 6th, 2008, walking in a march in “real life” sponsored by the NYC based “Satya Graha Forum”. The march was the inaugural event of a month of activities surrounding the production of “The Satyagraha”, the Phillip Glass opera from 1977 that was being revived by The Metropolitan Opera here in New York. The march involved starting at any one of four gathering points, walking a few miles and circling Union Square Park with all four groups converging on the Gandhi statue at the Soutwest corner of the park for a rally and speeches.
Keep in mind this was the day after completing the 240 miles of the reenactment in Second Life and on the treadmill - I was tired! All the same, it was quite an amazing experience to break out of my daily regimen of walking at Eyebeam (indoors), sleeping, getting up the next day and walking again. I made my way to Houston and 2nd avenue to gather with my fellow marchers. I immediately found myself feeling very self-conscious and shy in only the way that gathering with a group of complete strangers can do to me. Oddly, this was the complete opposite of my behavior and demeanor within Second Life during the course of the reenactment where I was completely at ease in approaching others in the online space to chat and invite them to be my “friends” and perhaps join me in walking.

Sunday, August 3, 2008

FINISTERRE by Saint Etienne


FINISTERRE from Plexifilm on Vimeo.
Presented by Saint Etienne, Finisterre takes us on a journey through London, from the suburbs into the heart of the city over an imaginary 24 hours. Featuring the observations and reminiscences of Lawrence from Felt/Denim, Mark Perry, the editor of original punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue, singer Vashti Bunyan, and many more...
http://plexifilm.com/media.php?id=77