twitter.com/simofloyd:
“La intensidad de la pulsión es proporcional a
la distancia a la que se encuentra el objeto deseado. El deseo es esa
distancia. Alguna vez ocurre a la inversa y se amplifica a medida que se
da una aproximación, a medida que los cuerpos se acercan. Pero siempre
existe un limite autoimpuesto, porque la consumación es la enemiga del
deseo.”
Director:
Gastón Rothschild
Writer:
Javier Zevallos
Release Date:
16 April 2009 (Argentina) more
Genre:
Short | Comedy
Plot:
Javier is in love with Romina. At a party, we hear his thoughts and sometimes he even talks to us. Playing between reality and fantasy, Javier will try to overcome his fears and get the girl of his dreams.
In music, timing is everything. When you’re dancing with an enormous machine, it’s even more important to get the timing correct, down to the microsecond.
For its latest video, released on YouTube Monday night, pop band OK Go recruited a gang of very talented engineers to build a huge, elaborate Rube Goldberg machine whose action perfectly meshes with the band’s song, “This Too Shall Pass,” from the band’s new album, Of the Blue Color of the Sky.
For nearly four minutes — captured in a single, unbroken camera shot — the machine rolls metal balls down tracks, swings sledgehammers, pours water, unfurls flags and drops a flock of umbrellas from the second story, all perfectly synchronized with the song. A few gasp-inducing, grin-producing moments when the machine’s action lines up so perfectly, you can only shake your head in admiration at the creativity and precision of the builders.
Those builders were Syyn Labs, a Los Angeles-based arts and technology collective that has a history of doing surprising, entertaining science and tech projects that involve crowds of people, at a monthly gathering called Mindshare LA.
OK Go developed a reputation for making catchy, viral videos four years ago with the homemade video for “Here It Goes Again,” which features the band members dancing around on treadmills. The company ran afoul of music label EMI’s restrictive licensing rules, which required YouTube to disable embedding, cutting views to 1/10 of their previous level. Now, the new video is up — and it’s embeddable, so the band seems to have won this round with its label — and is already generating buzz on YouTube and on Twitter.
Planning for the video began in November, when Syyn Labs secured a warehouse in the Echo Park area of L.A. But it wasn’t until January that work really got going. The video was shot on Feb. 11 and 12.
“A Rube Goldberg machine is in its essence a trial-and-error thing,” Adam Sadowsky, the president of Syyn Labs, told Wired.
Sadowsky explained how many tiny details needed to be just right for the machine’s timing to work out.
For example, the wooden tracks used to guide metal balls at the beginning of the video had to be cleaned and waxed to keep dust from slowing down the balls and making them stick. And the angle of that board was set at a precise 3.4 degrees of incline, which was perfect for the timing but sometimes led the balls to jump the track.
Given that each of the machine’s dozens of stages need comparably precise adjustments, it all adds up to a lot of labor by a lot of people.
“It took about a month and a half of very intense work, with people on-site all the time,” Sadowsky said.
Sadowsky estimates that 55 to 60 people worked on the project in all. That includes eight “core builders” who did the bulk of the design and building, along with another 12 or so builders who helped part-time. In addition, Syyn Labs recruited 30 or more people to help reset the machine after each run.
Because of the machine’s size and complexity, “We needed to bring in every resource we could to help reset,” said Sadowsky.
Even with all those people helping, resetting the whole machine took close to an hour.
The video was shot by a single Steadicam, but it took more than 60 takes, over the course of two days, to get it right. Many of those takes lasted about 30 seconds, Sadowsky said, getting no further than the spot in the video where the car tire rolls down a ramp.
[Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/]
“The most fiddly stuff, you always want to put that at the front, because you don’t want to be resetting the whole thing.”
OK Go hired Syyn Labs to produce the contraption according to certain specifications. One example: The machine couldn’t use any magic.
“That was really important,” said Sadowsky, “because we are all engineers, and we love magic. We love computers, and servomotors, and fire, and all of that stuff.” All those “magic” tricks — basically anything your mom can’t understand — couldn’t be in the machine.
The band was also heavily involved in the project for the final two weeks of its construction, and the band members are right inside the machine during the video, of course.
“We wanted to make a video where we have essentially a giant machine that we dance with,” said the band’s Damian Kulash, Jr., in a short “making-of” video posted on YouTube.
Otherwise, Synn Labs’ engineers went to town, dreaming up the most outlandish and elaborate mechanisms they could to “dance” along with the music. The results are impressive.
Oh, and OK Go’s treadmill video from last year? It makes a cameo appearance in the machine too.
“It really was a labor of love,” said Sadowsky.
See below for more videos about the making of “This Too Shall Pass.”
Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/03/ok-go-rube-goldberg/#ixzz0knRlzMfo
The artvertiser
The Artvertiser is an urban, hand-held Augmented Reality Improved Reality project that re-purposes street advertisements as a surface for exhibiting art. The project was initiated by Julian Oliver in February 2008 and is being developed in collaboration with Clara Boj, Diego Diaz and Damian Stewart.
The Artvertiser considers Puerta del Sol Madrid, Times Square New York, Shibuya Tokyo and other sites dense with advertisements as potential exhibition space. An instrument of conversion and reclamation, The Artvertiser situates the ‘read-only’, proprietary imagery of our public spaces as a ‘read-write’ platform for the presentation of non-proprietary, critically engaging content.
Logorama (by Marc Altshuler - Human Music)
This is a short film that was directed by the French animation collective H5, François Alaux, Hervé de Crécy + Ludovic Houplain. It was presented at the Cannes Film Festival 2009. It opened the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and won a 2010 academy award under the category of animated short.
In this film there are two pieces of licensed music, in the beginning and in the end. All the other music and sound design are original. The opening track (Dean Martin “Good Morning Life”) and closing track (The Ink Spots “I don’t want to send the world on fire”) songs are licensed pre-existing tracks. All original music and sound design is by, human (www.humanworldwide.com)
Kapitaal (by Studio Smack)
Award-winning Typo-Animation that gives you a clear impression of the enormous amount of visual stimuli that plague us every day. Due to the immense scale of the visual bombardment, the commercial effectiveness has become utterly dubious.
Chema Madoz, surrealist photographer
Not everything is what it seems to be
And Chema Madoz (Madrid 1958) ensures it’s evidence. Hidden among daily things arises new worlds.
New dimensions led by metaphor alters the perception of an immediate reality. The absurd, the paradox, the humor – why not the wittiness – are to be found at the photographers studio. The idea commences it’s process of superiority of the object and establishes a given discontext.
The irony with which madoz assaults recognizible objects creates a relationship with viewers that leads to paths of a parallel universe.
The photographs are not only the reflex of what was there (a luck of portable memory) – quoted by fernando castro – but also related to conscious of disapearing…. That their photographic metaphorisations inframe things of singular symmetry or make us focus in simple items, in points of view modifying real ….
Cristian caujolle underlines that the art of madoz is articulated by unreal objects whereupon behind their normal appearance, recognizible (an envelope, a glove, a matchstick, a pencil, etc.) Which are familiar to us all, hides a weirdness which yields new sensations avoiding to consider the photographs as dead natures.
Copenhagen street style
Collection of pics taken along the streets of Copenhagen to the stylish danes..
http://copenhagenstreetstyle.dk/
A Magritte Museum in Brussels
Since June 2nd 2009, visitors are able to discover the Musée Magritte Museum on 2.500 m² of a building of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. Located at the Place Royale, in the very heart of Brussels, this museum was fitted out thanks to the competences sponsorship developed by the French and Belgian GDF SUEZ subsidiary companies and with the support of the Magritte Foundation. The museum will display the works of the surrealist artist, which belong to the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium and which are mainly the result of purchases as well as of the legacies Irène Hamoir-Scutenaire and Georgette Magritte. Many private collectors, as well as public and private institutions have contributed to the Musée Magritte Museum project by loaning their masterpieces.
This multidisciplinary collection is the richest in the world. It contains more than 200 works consisting in oils on canvas, gouaches, drawings, sculptures and painted objects but also in advertising posters, music scores, vintage photographs and films produced by Magritte himself.
The Musée Magritte Museum will be, in its domain, the world reference centre for the knowledge of the artist. With the support of INEO media system, the Musée Magritte Museum has developed an online research centre, which will give access to the archives in connection with the painter’s life and works.
Hertzian Tales
Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design
by Anthony Dunne
As our everyday social and cultural experiences are increasingly mediated by electronic products—from “intelligent” toasters to iPods—it is the design of these products that shapes our experience of the “electrosphere” in which we live. Designers of electronic products, writes Anthony Dunne in Hertzian Tales, must begin to think more broadly about the aesthetic role of electronic products in everyday life. Industrial design has the potential to enrich our daily lives—to improve the quality of our relationship to the artificial environment of technology, and even, argues Dunne, to be subverted for socially beneficial ends.
The cultural speculations and conceptual design proposals in Hertzian Tales are not utopian visions or blueprints; instead, they embody a critique of present-day practices, “mixing criticism with optimism.” Six essays explore design approaches for developing the aesthetic potential of electronic products outside a commercial context—considering such topics as the post-optimal object and the aesthetics of user-unfriendliness—and five proposals offer commentary in the form of objects, videos, and images. These include “Electroclimates,” animations on an LCD screen that register changes in radio frequency; “When Objects Dream…,” consumer products that “dream” in electromagnetic waves; “Thief of Affection,” which steals radio signals from cardiac pacemakers; “Tuneable Cities,” which uses the car as it drives through overlapping radio environments as an interface of hertzian and physical space; and the “Faraday Chair: Negative Radio,” enclosed in a transparent but radio-opaque shield.
Very little has changed in the world of design since Hertzian Tales was first published by the Royal College of Art in 1999, writes Dunne in his preface to this MIT Press edition: “Design is not engaging with the social, cultural, and ethical implications of the technologies it makes so sexy and consumable.” His project and proposals challenge it to do so.
About the Author
Anthony Dunne is Professor and Head of Interaction Design at the Royal College of At. He is also a Partner in the design practice Dunne & Raby, London.
Buy the book on MITpress: http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?tid=10771&ttype=2
San Francisco Park(ing) Day 2009
The first Park(ing) Day was launched by Rebar in 2005, right here in San Francisco. Watch our latest Streetfilm to see how San Francisco re-purposed parking spots during Friday’s Park(ing) Day. Just imagine if bike parking and expanded outdoor café seating took over our automobile-filled public spaces every day!
The city of San Francisco has just installed its first permanent Park(ing) Day-style “parklet” and has announced plans for at least 11 more this year. See the story on this amazing transformation of space here:
http://sf.streetsblog.org/2010/03/18/newsom-christens-new-mojo-cafe-parklet-pledges-more-to-come/UrbanScreen
‘Kreisrot’ is an architectural projection at the Bauhaus Prellerhaus-facade in Dessau / Germany. It was performed on the 5th of september 2009 in context with the “12th Farbfest Rot”.
Concept: Till Botterweck
Performer: Magali Sander Fett
Art director: Daniel Rossa / Till Botterweck
3D operator: David Starmann
Video footage: Till Botterweck
Music by opiate
Technical support by MXWendler.net mediaserver
ABOUT USSomething to share ..
Large-scale projection on urban surfaces - this is our creative-company’s field of activity. We conceive and produce custom-made media installations using high artistic standards and stylistic devices, a spacious architectural background and a consistently professional completion; in doing so, creating uniquely outstanding impressions.Since 2004 we have been working on media concepts for the public sphere within a dynamic and diverse network of artists, architects and technical experts. Founded in 2008, the creative-company URBANSCREEN develops these concepts and transfers them into a dialog between art and urban communication.
Of course we often touch the area of marketing purpose: we appreciate a charming, low key brand placement at most - basically in modality of a sponsorship that allows a realization in our own laboratories based on an agreed idea, allowing an artistic formulation of our ideas and influences concerning substance and technology. Please understand that we do not provide ‘direct’ advertisement. We furthermore like to mention that we comprehend URBANSCREEN´s activities as manner of a cooperation based on faith and sympathy for this particular communication approach. For that reason we focus on a habile amount of projects that share the URBANSCREEN-perception.
Every installation’s central starting point is the architecture, or more generally said, the surface which it is projected on. The spatial context, the thematic addition to the object and the context of the performance interconnect, becoming the central driving forces behind any creation. We see ourselves not primarily as service providers, but as independent producers who face every order’s requirement with an open and fresh mind.
Through our intensive experience of staging architecture we have developed a procedure for a custom-made projection: LUMENTEKTUR. Through exact measuring the projection is adapted precisely to the locality. This provides direct reference to and interaction with the background.
Particularly in the era of reproducible media the product thereby acquires a clear reference to time and space, which gives it a distinctive uniqueness.
Thus, besides being a registered technical process, LUMENTEKTUR has also become the fundamental approach within our working process. The superposition of material structures with a custom-made virtual skin opens up a creative potential, which we are pursuing intensely. Hence, LUMENTEKTUR represents the central tool and topic of URBANSCREEN.
La Blogotheque
Chryde, founder of the website La Blogothèque, wanted to shake things up and find another way to share music and Vincent Moon wanted to film music differently. Chryde offered Moon to go and film musicians in Paris. The so called Take-Away shows (or the French title Les Concerts a Emporter) exist since April 2006. The large amount of clips is the result of a very fast filmed process with mostly one take recordings in a way comparable to the Dogma 95 concept. Comparable with the field recordings of Alan Lomax or the Peel Sessions of John Peel, Moon has set up a large collection of unique single take recordings enhanced with artistic filmed video footage. The fast filming process he uses is a form of guerrilla filmmaking. The sessions are usually two or three tracks filmed improvised in a unusual environment and as such they often had a rough and ready, demo-like feel, somewhere between a live performance and a finished music video. These live, unusually staged performances differ from the artifice of traditional music videos in favor of single-take, organic and primarily acoustic sessions
Every week, they invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. What makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. They do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead they keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword.
EARTH HOUR 2010 _ 27th march @ 20:30 (local time) _ all over the world
Earth Hour started in 2007 in Sydney, Australia when 2.2 million homes and businesses turned their lights off for one hour to make their stand against climate change. Only a year later and Earth Hour had become a global sustainability movement with more than 50 million people across 35 countries participating. Global landmarks such as the, Sydney Harbour Bridge, The CN Tower in Toronto, The Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and Rome’s Colosseum, all stood in darkness, as symbols of hope for a cause that grows more urgent by the hour.
In March 2009, hundreds of millions of people took part in the third Earth Hour. Over 4000 cities in 88 countries officially switched off to pledge their support for the planet, making Earth Hour 2009 the world’s largest global climate change initiative.
Earth Hour 2010 takes place on Saturday 27 March at 8.30pm (local time) and is a global call to action to every individual, every business and every community throughout the world. It is a call to stand up, to take responsibility, to get involved and lead the way towards a sustainable future. Iconic buildings and landmarks from Europe to Asia to the Americas will stand in darkness. People across the world from all walks of life will turn off their lights and join together in celebration and contemplation of the one thing we all have in common – our planet. So sign up now and let’s make 2010 the biggest Earth Hour yet!.
It’s Showtime! Show the world what can be done.
Earth Hour by WWF
Earth Hour is organized by WWF. With almost 5 million supporters and a global network in over 100 countries, it’s one of the world’s largest and most respected independent conservation organizations. WWF’s mission is to stop the degradation of the Earth’s natural environment and build a future where people
Why get involved?
Put simply, because our future depends on it!
Earth Hour has done a lot to raise awareness of climate change issues. But there’s more to it than switching off lights for one hour once a year. It’s all about giving people a voice on the future of our planet and working together to create a sustainable low carbon future for our planet.
The future can be bright
New economic modelling indicates the world has just five years to initiate a low carbon industrial revolution before runaway climate change becomes almost inevitable. But it can be done, and the long term benefits will be enormous.
So now’s the time to take a stand and give world leaders the mandate they need to make the right climate deal.
“Micmacs à tire-larigot”, latest Jean-Pierre Jeunet movie
“Micmacs” (original french title: “Micmacs à tire-larigot” is the latest dazzlingly cinematic outing from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (AMELIE, DELICATESSEN), a satire on the arms trade which grounds this director’s cinema of fantasy firmly in reality. Dany Boon leads a terrific cast including André Dussolier, Dominique Pinon and the matchless Yolande Moreau in a thrilling comedy about one man’s plan to destroy two big weapons manufacturers, with a little help from his friends.
Bazil (Dany Boon) is the son of a bomb disposal expert who died on a job in Morocco. Years later, Bazil is struck by a stray bullet, which remains lodged in his head, leading to some strange side effects. After losing his job, Bazil assembles a rag-tag team of misfits and sets out on a quest to bring down those he holds responsible for his misfortunes. Breathtaking and inventive, with pacy, edge-of-the-seat storytelling and no end of visual gags and witty wordplay.
CPH PIX international feature film festival - Copenhagen April 15-25 2010
CPH PIX is a feature film festival that aims to bring people together to see good films from all over the world; original, thought-provoking, funny and controversial films that can’t be found in regular cinema programmes.
CPH PIX is an audience-oriented festival that wants to present Copenhagen’s cinemagoers with unique films from all over the world, while adding outstanding international events and a strong competition programme into the mix.
CPH PIX is Copenhagen’s international feature film festival, the result of the merger between the city’s two major film festivals NatFilm Festival and Copenhagen International Film Festival. CPH PIX combines the best of the two festivals.
In 2009 PIX screened 180 films in its first edition: with a new competition programme dedicated to fresh talents; with wild genre films, cult events, thematic series, international guests, sneak previews, extraordinary collaborations, concerts and parties. And with the audience at its core.
CPH PIX will focus on new talents, new ideas, new trends and artistic courage, both in the festival’s film programme and in its collaborations across artistic genres and cultural institutions.
