Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Parc Central (2006)
A collection of 11 short poetic psycho-geographic portraits of cities and spaces from artist Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster, who's cinematic 2007 solo show at Musée dArt moderne de la Ville de Paris http://www.e-flux.com/shows/view/4008 will be supplemented in 2008 by the Unilever commission for the Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern (joining Carsten Holler's slides, Olafur Eliason's sun, and Doris Salcedo's crack amongst many other prestigious past projects).
Ranging from the revisiting of a scene of Ming-Liang Tsai's 'Vive l'Amour' through the eyes of its protagonist, to a ticker-tape parade in Buenos Aires, from a reflection on the filmic qualities of Brasilia,to an observation of the observers of the 1999 eclipse in Paris. All soundtracked by a sensitive balance of field-recordings and carefully chosen delicate music.
A review of the work Riyo, included on DVD here.
This collection of films from cities across the globe provides further evidence of Gonzalez-Foerster's unmistakable sense of urban ambience and tropical melancholia. In a conversation between the artist and Jacques Ranciere published in Art Press, the philosopher, reflecting on the dialogue between East and West in her work, observes, "What is interesting is what they over there have done with what they borrowed from us here. You don't get that here, maybe because we have the idea that there are no more journeys left." That may be the case, but after seeing Gonzalez-Foerster's films I want to go places: Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, Taipei, and of course Japan, though I'm not sure if her Japan really exists or whether it's a semiotic fantasy after Roland Barthes.
- Daniel Birnbaum, Artforum, 2006
"Parc Central" est composé de 11 films qui offrent un voyage visuel, sonore et poétique à travers 11 villes traversées par l'artiste. Fascinée par la ville, l'espace et l'urbanisme, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster développe depuis plusieurs années le concept de "modernité tropicale", à partir de la cohabitation et de la confrontation entre architecture et végétation. C'est autour de cette recherche qu'elle a conçue "Parc Central"
- MK2 DVD description
Available at KaraGarga.
Originally from ART TORRENTS by noreply@blogger.com (Art Torrents) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 10:42AM
Agent of Change
Geoff Shearcroft, of The Agents of Change, will be coming round tomorrow at 11:30am to speak at the Storefront for Art and Architecture's Pop Up branch here in London. Aside from holding down the fort for Geoffs everywhere, Shearcroft and I were actually guests on the same radio show a few years ago, but this will be the first time we've met in person. I first found Shearcroft's work – and, thus, The Agents of Change – through the book Fantasy Architecture: 1500-2036. There, the image of a mouse with a suburban house growing out of its back, as if grafted there or even cloned, was a glimpse of what Shearcroft called, in a 2001 paper for the Royal College of Art, "the new biology of architecture."  [Image: "Grow Your Own" by Geoff Shearcroft].The Agents of Change themselves have a huge array of noteworthy projects – including the awesome Monsanto New Garden City, in which it's asked: what would happen if global agri-business giant Monsanto were to purchase the London borough of Hackney, turning it into an Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ)? "Costly infrastructural components are replaced with a self-sufficient ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar films and biological compost systems," the architects suggest. The economically depressed borough would present "new growing opportunities," thus "liberating the ground's agricultural potential." Then there's the project known as Roof Divercity in which all the roofs of Croydon are activated as new social, economic, and agricultural spaces for the borough's residents.     [Images: Roof Divercity by The Agents of Change].The AOC's proposal for the recent Birnbeck Island competition is also fantastic, involving a very colorful village and a kind of artificially amplified mountain form on a pier in the west of England.      [Images: From the Birnbeck Island and Birnbeck Village proposals by The Agents of Change].Meanwhile, more germane for this year's London Festival of Architecture, The Agents of Change also designed The Lift, which they describe as "a new Parliament."  [Image: The Lift by The Agents of Change].In any case, I could go on and on, uploading images of their work all day. Shearcroft will be speaking at the Pop Up Storefront tomorrow at 11:30am – so come by to hear what he has to say. Originally from BLDGBLOG by noreply@blogger.com (Geoff Manaugh) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 5:36AM
Art as Intervention: A Roundtable
 “…Brooke Singer: The work I do is also about creating opportunities/platforms to learn, reflect, discuss, and—ultimately—act upon some of the most urgent issues of our time.
For example, a current project of mine, Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data-visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and e-mail alert system (www.superfund365.org) that visits one toxic site active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) each day for a year. In the end, the online archive will consist of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, I am writing an e-mail update with highlights and conducting video interviews…” From Art as Intervention: A Roundtable, NYFA Current. Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jul 3, 2008, 8:16AM
Sedgwick: Touching Feeling
This is a proposal for a reading group focused on Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (2003). Eve Sedgwick is often credited with birthing queer theory as a field of study. Touching Feeling is her most recent book, and is comprised of essays spanning ten years. Major areas of focus include performativity and performance, spatial dynamics/metaphors, texture and affect, and what she calls “techniques for nondualistic thought and pedagogy.” The class would not be “taught.” Rather, it would be a loosely facilitated discussion/close reading group. Ideally, this discussion/reading would take place in three 2 - 3 hour installments. Participants should come to the first session having read a certain amount that we will determine as a group on The Public School list. About Touching Feeling Wayne Koestenbaum has written: “Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s gift is to electrify intellectual communities by reminding them that ‘thought’ has a temperature, a texture, and an erotics.” from Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_Kosofsky_Sedgwick Originally from The Public School by sarahkessler reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 15, 2008, 11:35PM
Iraqi Terrorist Brokered Algeria, Osama Deal
 It's not all that surprising that Algeria's jihadists were energized after they linked up with Al-Qaeda. After all, Osama & Co. had supplied funds and training to militants all over the world. What's eye-opening is that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia -- a group largely thought to be Iraqi home-grown and only loosely connected with the main Al Qaeda outfit -- brokered the deal between Algeria's radicals and Osama. The New York Times reports:
Then the leader of the [Algerian] group… Abdelmalek Droukdal, sent a secret message to Iraq in the fall of 2004. The recipient was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, and the two men on opposite ends of the Arab world engaged in what one firsthand observer describes as a corporate merger.
Today, as Islamist violence wanes in some parts of the world, the Algerian militants — renamed Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb — have grown into one of the most potent Osama bin Laden affiliates, reinvigorated with fresh recruits and a zeal for Western targets.
A lot of folks -- including, um, me -- scoffed when the White House insisted that "Al Qaeda core and Al Qaeda in Iraq are [not] two separate things." But if this Times story is accurate, the two were much closer than we realized. Because of Zarqawi's deal-making, "Al Qaeda’s North Africa offshoot is now running small training camps for militants from Morocco, Tunisia and as far away as Nigeria... just as the Qaeda leadership has been able to reconstitute itself in Pakistan’s ungoverned tribal areas, The State Department in April categorized the tribal areas and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb as the two top hot spots in its annual report on global terrorism."
alex munt interview
I first encountered the writing of Alex Munt while doing research for a post on David Lynch last summer. While googling various ephemera related to Lynch's recent work I came across the article Inland Empire: The Cinema in Trouble?, which stopped me dead in my tracks. This text, which Munt penned for Flow TV, is indicative of his dynamic reading of cinema and related analysis of emerging methods of production and distribution. Alex is a Lecturer in the Media Department at Macquarie University (in Australia) and his focus is on digital low-budget cinema and new directions in screenwriting and feature filmmaking. Alex and I have been emailing back and forth for the last several weeks and the transcript that follows provides a fascinating window into his research. 
One of the most recognizable characteristics of your writing about film is that you spend quite a bit of time "off the screen" addressing new means of distribution (i.e. YouTube) and production techniques (i.e. pro-am gear). A binary that turns up in your Feature Film: A ‘You Tube Narrative Model’? article is the divide between 'Elite Digital' and 'Democratic Digital'. Could you discuss the difference between these paradigms and speculate as to what commercial cinema can learn from YouTube? In terms of staying ‘off the screen’ (at least part of the time) – I think it is important space to occupy, in order to think about ‘the digital’. The digital is a quantity that needs to be situated for each particular medium. For the cinema, there has been two main digital forces – and in opposite directions. That is, the evolution of high-end digital visual effects (as CGI) in Hollywood and the experiments in digital low-budget cinema, since the mid 1990s. (This is not a new idea in itself, one noted by Lev Manovich, who uses the term ‘Digital Realism’ to situate the work of the Dogme95 brethren, and their ‘lo-fi’ approach to digital feature filmmaking). In each case, via altogether different digital production and post-production pathways, we arrive at the long-form narrative feature film. So the digital, for the cinema, is less a revolution, and more of a remediation, or mutation, often subtle – so we need to pay particular attention to what’s going on with the scripts, behind the camera, with the crews and digital kit and then in the edit suite. Hollywood CGI is not a big part of my own research, but there is a lot of interesting work here. Shilo McClean in her book Digital Storytelling argues that digital visual effects (she calls DVFx) far from being extraneous - are actually having a decisive impact on Hollywood narration, scripts, story and style, for CGI Hollywood cinema. And by the same token, for new low-budget cinema – I see the digital as a real catalyst for a reconsideration, and opportunity for innovation, in narrative, film form and aesthetics of the moving image. In this domain, transformations are evident in film-practice: from ‘open’ scriptwriting, to the use of micro-crews and the shift to HD digital cinematography and affordable digital colour-grading, with software like After Effects. I’ve referred to this digital as ‘democratic’ since as film-practice, it is relatively accessible. And what I think is new here, is the evolution of the digital aesthetic for the moving image, at the low-budget end. In the first Dogme wave, the digital aesthetic got harnessed to a polemical, and rather limiting, single aesthetic dictated by the Dogme95 manifesto, and realised as grainy, shaky cinematography cut to abrupt editing patterns, with minor post production treatment. However, in the current wave of micro/low-budget, small-scale digital cinema, since around 2000, ‘the digital’ is given more room to move. For example, iconic directors like Kiarostami and Lynch both rework their distinctive brand of cinema, the Indie movment goes digital – with Mumblecorps in the US or WarpX in the UK, together with the impact of a wider digital culture on cinema - Web 2.0, social-networking and of course the video explosion, synonymous with YouTube. And for me, this is all really exciting stuff.
[Untitled]
 Weng'an, Guizhou, China - Thousands of outraged villagers surrounded and torched, local police stations and Communist Party offices Saturday. The incidents were following the alleged murder and cover up of a 15-year-old girl and her uncle. Rioters also overturned and set fire to 20 cars, many of which were police or government vehicles. Many who participated in the violence were teenagers, and may have been classmates with the young girl. The teen's body was found in a river, after, according to police, she took her own life by jumping off a bridge. Locals claim she was raped and murdered by the son of a senior police official. Her uncle, a high school teacher, was beaten to death by police after he demanded they investigate his niece's death and perform an autopsy. Originally from  by noreply@blogger.com (Bombs and Shields) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 29, 2008, 5:14PM
Baghdad's Teetering Floors
 [Image: A U.S. Army soldier secures a checkpoint at the wall that separates southern Sadr City from the north, in Baghdad / AP photo, Baghdad's walls keep peace but feel like prison, 2008.]If anyone knows where to find a complete map – or, as complete as possible – of all the security walls and separation barriers that have been (and are) being devised within Baghdad by American forces, I’d love to see it. I have found a few maps of some separate districts, but it seems like there must be a project out there tracking this more comprehensively. Anyway, I say this because a recent article for USA Today reports on another wall that began construction just a couple of weeks ago around the neighborhood of Hurriyah. “The new wall ties into two existing walls to prevent Shiite extremists from coming and going at will — and presumably from smuggling in arms,” we are told. Just a few days after construction was underway, however, a truck bomb exploded killing 68 people there. So, again, I scratch my head, and ask – do the walls prevent violence, or just seem to trigger it?  [Image: The Baghdad Table, by Edra Tarazi.]In addition to the 3-mile-long wall in Azamiyah, a wall in Amariyah, and the new one in Sadr City, the article mentions the district of Doura, which apparently “has so many walls and observation towers that some parts resemble a maze.” Nowadays there's hardly a street in Baghdad without a wall — or a cheaper substitute like barbed wire, palm tree trunks, mounds of dirt or piles of rocks. They're even used to control pedestrian and vehicular traffic in risky areas. – USA Today There isn’t much else in the article you probably don’t already know, for instance how the walls “block access to schools, mosques, churches, hotels, homes, markets and even entire neighborhoods — almost anything that could be attacked,” the reporter suggests. They “also lead to gridlock, rising prices for food and homes, and complaints about living in what feels like a prison.” NPR covered the devastating challenges the barriers pose for local economies last week.  [Image: Labyrinth, the game.]Baghdad is starting to remind me a lot of that old wooden board game Labyrinth, I think it was called, or, maybe it was Tilt-A-World. The one you angled two wooden platforms back and forth with rotating knobs to maneuver a little steel marble through a maze of walls without dropping it into a hole. Ultimately, it was a game of delicate touch, floor balance, and tactical wall hugging. Advancing the marble required a strategy of resting it in a sequence of corners, or hold-outs, until you were ready to carefully slope the board again and make a run rolling the it along a fragmented edge hoping to reach another little bunker to pause once more. It was a labyrinth of baby steps and well timed wall crawls, and playing it was a test of nerves since it took a steady hand to ever so gently pitch the platforms together in a combined direction that would roll the marble precisely where you wanted it to go. I imagine it like trying to diffuse an IED with your bare hands. One faulty overturn or misadjustment, and you were dead.  But, it’s almost as if Baghdad has been turned into a mortal-sized version of this game since everyone and everything in the city now moves according to a system of blast walls, security barricades, revolving iron gates, military checkpoints, bunkers, IEDs, car bombs, etc. Perhaps, in this case, the American and Iraqi forces have their hands on one of the dials, while the sectarian militia groups collectively have their hands on the other. Wrestling for control of the city, Baghdad is in a constant state of imbalance and instability, subject to ceaseless shifts of power, while its civilians teeter on the edges of sudden death much like the innocent steel marble whose slippery fate rests in the hands of the war lords. But, don't you think it will take more than the weight of all these walls to bring balance to Baghdad's teetering floors? (Thanks to Mike for the link!) Originally from Subtopia by noreply@blogger.com (Bryan Finoki) reBlogged by caleb waldorf on Jun 29, 2008, 2:33PM
The Google Way of Science
There's a dawning sense that extremely large databases of information, starting in the petabyte level, could change how we learn things. The traditional way of doing science entails constructing a hypothesis to match observed data or to solicit new data. Here's a bunch of observations; what theory explains the data sufficiently so that we can predict the next observation? It may turn out that tremendously large volumes of data are sufficient to skip the theory part in order to make a predicted observation. Google was one of the first to notice this. For instance, take Google's spell checker. When you misspell a word when googling, Google suggests the proper spelling. How does it know this? How does it predict the correctly spelled word? It is not because it has a theory of good spelling, or has mastered spelling rules. In fact Google knows nothing about spelling rules at all. Instead Google operates a very large dataset of observations which show that for any given spelling of a word, x number of people say "yes" when asked if they meant to spell word "y." Google's spelling engine consists entirely of these datapoints, rather than any notion of what correct English spelling is. That is why the same system can correct spelling in any language. In fact, Google uses the same philosophy of learning via massive data for their translation programs. They can translate from English to French, or German to Chinese by matching up huge datasets of humanly translated material. For instance, Google trained their French/English translation engine by feeding it Canadian documents which are often released in both English and French versions. The Googlers have no theory of language, especially of French, no AI translator. Instead they have zillions of datapoints which in aggregate link "this to that" from one language to another.
Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents
Technology has always played a big role in fighting terrorism. Some inventions are truly useful and will undoubtedly save lives, whereas others are so bizarre that one wonders how in the world they got patented. This list is about the latter: Behold the Top 10 Strangest Anti-Terrorism Patents! (Note: yes, most of these patents cite fighting terrorism as raison d'être) Anti-Terrorist Truck U.S. Patent 4667565, Rapid response patrol and antiterrorist vehicle by Reg. A. Anderson. Issued May 26, 1987. 
Problem: Terrorists can pop up at any time, leaving local authorities totally defenseless against their raging attacks. Solution: When terrorists walk past this non-descript truck parked quietly on the street, its roof pops out to reveal a machine gun turret! If that doesn't strike fear into the heart of Jihadis, well ... then we can still mow 'em down! Bonus: Also great for battling zombies. Face Protector Against Poisonous Gas  U.S. Patent 7107990, Portable face protector for protecting human being from poisonous gas and securing visibility by Kuk-Bin Lee. Issued Aug 30, 2004.
Problem: Terrorists may use poisonous gas to terrorize civilians, and gas masks are not very attractive looking. Solution: A portable face protector (10), probably inspired by Robin's mask, and a piece of cloth (22) to cover the mouth and nose.
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