Plot Synopsis: Max is a genius mathematician who’s built a supercomputer at home that provides something that can be understood as a key for understanding all existence. Representatives both from a Hasidic cabalistic sect and high-powered Wall Street firm hear of that secret and attempt to seduce him.
π was written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, and filmed on high-contrast black-and-white reversal film.
In 1996 Aronofsky began creating the concept for his first feature film “π”, a psychological sci-fi thriller. After the π script received great reactions from friends, he began production. The film re-teamed Aronofsky with Sean Gullette, who played the lead. During production, Aronofsky and crew realized they didn’t have enough money to complete the film. Associate Producer Scott Franklin came up with the idea to raise completion funds by asking every person they knew for $100. Later in production certain individuals put in more cash, which let Aronofsky complete the film. After π was completed (with a budget somewhere around $60,000), it premiered at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival and Aronofsky won the Directing Award. The film was picked up by distributor Artisan Entertainment and released in selected cities. The film later won an Independent Spirit Award and the Open Palm. $100 investors were said to be subsequently re-paid with $150. However, certain crew members complained that they were never paid at all. Crew members confronted Aronofsky about this, and he claimed he was suing his distributor. Use of the SnorriCam is one of Darren Aronofsky’s trademarks, as featured in π.
Run Lola Run (original German title Lola rennt, translates as Lola Runs) is a 1998 film by German screenwriter and director Tom Tykwer, starring Franka Potente as Lola.
In the movie “Run Lola Run” (Lola rennt in German-1998), the butterfly effect is represented more clearly. There, minor and almost sub-conscious actions in everyday life can be seen to have gross and wide spread effects upon the future. For example, the fact that Lola bumps into someone instead of passing by may lead to a painful death after suffering paralysis. As such, seemingly inconsequential actions can be seen to have drastic long-term results.
Lola’s boyfriend Manni is trying to prove his loyalty to a gang boss. Manni’s final task in a particular job is to deliver 100,000 Deutsche Marks to his boss Ronnie. Everything goes wrong. Lola’s moped is stolen and she is unable to transport Manni to the meeting place. After waiting for her Manni decides to use the metro. He accidentally leaves the bag, with its 100,000 Marks, in the underground after an encounter with a bum and two ticket-controllers. The money is then found by the homeless man. Manni realises what he’s done and soon makes a desperate phone call to Lola, asking her to think of something, to help him. If he does not have the money by the meeting at 12 noon, he will certainly be killed. Lola promises to get him the 100,000 marks. Manni warns her that he will rob a supermarket on the street corner if Lola has not come in 20 minutes. Can Lola get him the money and save his life? It is at this point that the three sequential alternative realities begin.
The film features several allusions to Alfred Hitchcock’s film Vertigo. Like that film, it features recurring images of spirals, such as the ‘Spirale’ Cafe behind Manni’s phone box and the spiral staircase down which Lola runs. In addition, the painting on the back wall of the casino of a woman’s head seen from behind is based on a shot in Vertigo: Tykwer disliked the empty space on the wall behind the roulette table and commissioned production designer Alexander Manasse to paint a picture of Kim Novak as she appeared in Vertigo. Manasse could not remember what she looked like in the film and so decided to paint the famous shot of the back of her head. The painting took fifteen minutes to complete.
There are also several references to German culture in the film. The most notable is the use of Hans Paetsch as a narrator. Paetsch is a famous voice of children’s stories in Germany, recognized by millions. Many of the small parts are cameo roles by famous German actors (for example the bank teller). Also, two quotes by German football legend Sepp Herberger appear: “The ball is round, the game lasts 90 minutes, everything else is pure theory,” and, “After the game is before the game.” (wikipedia)
_________
The meaning of the butterfly
Why pop culture loves the ‘butterfly effect,’ and gets it totally wrong
By Peter Dizikes
June 8, 2008
SOME SCIENTISTS SEE their work make headlines. But MIT meteorologist Edward Lorenz watched his work become a catch phrase. Lorenz, who died in April, created one of the most beguiling and evocative notions ever to leap from the lab into popular culture: the “butterfly effect,” the concept that small events can have large, widespread consequences. The name stems from Lorenz’s suggestion that a massive storm might have its roots in the faraway flapping of a tiny butterfly’s wings.
Image Credit: © Kurt Schwitters, Merzbau, 1924-37
Schwitters is very well known for his monumental Merzbau, a structure which was his own house. And so Kurt Schwitters picked refuse up off the ground and attempted to build a place in which he could live. Is this not the very task that faces modern society the vitality of which depends upon urban infrastructure and city planning?
“[E]verything had broken down in any case and new things had to be made out of the fragments: and this is Merz. It was like an image of the revolution within me, not as it was, but as it should have been.”
–Kurt Schwitters
Image Credit: © Marcel Duchamp, Mile of String, 1942, New York
In 1942, Andre Breton organised a retrospective exhibition of Surrealist art in New York: First Papers of Surrealism. For the vernissage Marcel Duchamp created this installation – a gigantic web – called the Mile of String. He and Breton furthermore arranged for a number of children to ball in the room thereby making it very difficult for the guests to see the paintings.
Man with a Movie Camera, sometimes The Man with the Movie Camera, The Man with a Camera, The Man With the Kinocamera, or Living Russia (Russian: Человек с киноаппаратом, Chelovek s kino-apparatom; Ukrainian: Людина з кіноапаратом, Liudyna z kinoaparatom)) is an experimental 1929 silent documentary film by Russian director Dziga Vertov.
Dziga Vertov, or Denis Arkadevich Kaufman, was an early pioneer in documentary film-making during the late 1920s. He belonged to a movement of filmmakers known as the kinoks, or kinokis. Vertov, along with other kino artists declared it their mission to abolish all non-documentary styles of film-making. This radical approach to movie making led to a slight dismantling of film industry: the very field in which they were working. This being said, most of Vertov’s films were highly controversial, and the kinoc movement was despised by many filmmakers of the time. Vertov’s crowning achievement, Man with a Movie Camera was his response to the critics who rejected his previous film, One-Sixth Part of the World. Critics declared that Vertov’s overuse of “intertitles” was inconsistent with the code of film-making that the ‘kinos’ subscribed to.
Contemporary Project: Man With a Movie Camera: The Global Remake is a participatory video shot by people around the world who are invited to record images interpreting the original script of Vertov’s Man With A Movie Camera and upload them to this site. Software developed specifically for this project archives, sequences and streams the submissions as a film. Anyone can upload footage. When the work streams your contribution becomes part of a worldwide montage, in Vertov’s terms the “decoding of life as it is”.
“It was at Harvard not quite forty years ago that I went into an anechoic [totally silent] chamber not expecting in that silent room to hear two sounds: one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation. The reason I did not expect to hear those two sounds was that they were set into vibration without any intention on my part. That experience gave my life direction, the exploration of nonintention. No one else was doing that. I would do it for us. I did not know immediately what I was doing, nor, after all these years, have I found out much. I compose music. Yes, but how? I gave up making choices. In their place I put the asking of questions. The answers come from the mechanism, not the wisdom of the I Ching, the most ancient of all books: tossing three coins six times yielding numbers between 1 and 64.”
–John Cage, 1990
Luigi Russolo with his assistant Ugo Piatti and their Intonarumori (noise machines)
The Art of Noise
by Luigi Russolo February 22, 2004
Luigi Russolo (1885 – 1947), Italian futurist painter and musician and inventor of the “intonarumori” expounded his musical theories in 1913 in this manifesto entitled “L’arte dei rumori” (The Art of Noises) in which he presented his ideas about the use of noises in music.
Dear Balilla Pratella, great Futurist composer,
In Rome, in the Costanzi Theatre, packed to capacity, while I was listening to the orchestral performance of your overwhelming FUTURIST MUSIC, with my Futurist friends, Marinetti, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Soffici, Papini and Cavacchioli, a new art came into my mind which only you can create, the Art of Noises, the logical consequence of your marvelous innovations.
Ancient life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent.
Amidst this dearth of noises, the first sounds that man drew from a pieced reed or streched string were regarded with amazement as new and marvelous things. Primitive races attributed sound to the gods; it was considered sacred and reserved for priests, who used it to enrich the mystery of their rites. And so was born the concept of sound as a thing in itself, distinct and independent of life, and the result was music, a fantastic world superimposed on the real one, an inviolatable and sacred world. It is easy to understand how such a concept of music resulted inevitable in the hindering of its progress by comparison with the other arts. The Greeks themselves, with their musical theories calculated mathematically by Pythagoras and according to which only a few consonant intervals could be used, limited the field of music considerably, rendering harmony, of which they were unaware, impossible.
More on Theremin Vox
Robert Frank (American, b. Switzerland, 1924)
Trolley—New Orleans, 1955
Gelatin silver print; 8 5/8 x 13 1/16 in. (21.9 x 33.2 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gilman Collection, Purchase, Ann Tenenbaum and Thomas H. Lee Gift, 2005 (2005.100.454)
Photograph © Robert Frank, from The Americans
This provocative documentary, a regular on the film-festival circuit, examines the history of suburban life and the wisdom of this distinctly American way of life. A post-World War II concept, suburbia attracted droves of people, giving rise to sprawl and all that comes with it — good and bad. How has the environment been affected by this lifestyle, and is it sustainable? Canadian director Gregory Greene dares to ask all the tough questions.
Minor White
Cobblestone House, Avon, NY
Vintage Gelatin Silver Print, 1957
7 1/4 x 9 1/4″
No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen. – Minor White
The Six Feet Under Storyboards are an excellent example to begin the process of organizing our video works and to learn about storyboards.
“We wanted something that you would see week after week and be entertained enough to keep watching. Something that wouldn’t completely reveal itself on the first viewing.” Alan Ball, Six Feet Under
And Digital Kitchen helped to make that happen
http://www.d-kitchen.com
La jetée (English: The Jetty and The Pier) (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.
In the movie, the survivors of a destroyed Paris in the aftermath of World War III live underground in the Palais de Chaillot galleries. They research time travel, hoping to send someone back before the devastating war to recover food, medicine, or energy for the present, “to summon the past and future to the aid of the present.” The traveler is a male prisoner; his vague but obsessive childhood memory of witnessing a woman (Hélène Chatelain) during a violent incident on the boarding platform (“The Jetty”) at Orly Airport is used as the key to his journey back in time. He is thrown back to the past again and again. He repeatedly meets and speaks to the woman who was present at the terminal. After his successful passages to the past, the experimenters attempt to send him into the deep future. In a brief meeting with the technologically advanced people of the future, he is given a power unit sufficient to regenerate his own destroyed society.
On his return, he is cast aside by his jailers to die. Before he can be executed, he is contacted by the people of the future, who offer to help him escape to their time, but he asks to be returned to the time of his childhood. He is returned, only to find the violent incident he partially witnessed as a child was his own death as an adult.
La jetée has no dialogue aside from small sections of muttering in German; the story is told by a voice-over narrator. It is constructed almost entirely from optically printed photographs playing out as a photomontage of varying pace. It contains only one brief shot originating on a motion-picture camera. The stills were taken with a Pentax 24×36 and the motion-picture segment was shot with a 35mm Arriflex. The film score was composed by Trevor Duncan. (wikipedia)
(originally posted on 1/10/07):
Today we watched Chris Marker’s Le Jette – ON FILM – this was a surprise to know that the school has a copy. You probably are wondering what’s the difference? Well we were able to watch the film the way that it was created and not transfer to vhs or dvd – the noise of the projector is all part of the experience. So this was our major transition from the still to the moving image. The film 12 Monkeys gives credit to Le Jetee as inspiration. Any thoughts?
Joseph Nicéphore Niépce.
View from the Window at Le Gras.
ca1826.
Heliograph, in original frame.
25.8 x 29.0 cm.
Harry Ransom Center
University of Texas at Austin
Long before the first public announcements of photographic processes in 1839, Joseph Nicéphore Niépce, a scientifically-minded gentleman living on his country estate near Chalon-sur-Saône, France, began experimenting with photography. Fascinated with the craze for the newly-invented art of lithography which swept over France in 1813, he began his initial experiments by 1816. Unable to draw well, Niépce first placed engravings, made transparent, onto engraving stones or glass plates coated with a light-sensitive varnish of his own composition. These experiments, together with his application of the then-popular optical instrument, the camera obscura, would eventually lead him to the invention of the new medium.
Description:
An Inside Look at the Lives of the Heirs to The World’s Greatest Family Fortunes
Jamie Johnson, 20-year-old heir to the Johnson & Johnson pharmaceutical empire, turns in a remarkable documentary about the lives of the children of the wealthiest families in the world. This 2003 Sundance Film Festival Selection and Emmy-nominated documentary shows Johnson turning the camera on himself and 10 of his friends. Born Rich candidly reveals the great privileges and the excess baggage that go along with their high net worth. For the first time ever in a feature documentary, hear Trumps, Bloombergs and Vanderbilts discuss the one subject everybody knows is taboo—money, and lots of it.
The Thaumatropic Theater, 2006
Sara Barry
The THAUMATROPE is a toy that was popular in Victorian times. A disk or card with a picture on each side is attached to two pieces of string. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers the two pictures appear to combine into a single image due to persistence of vision.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit06.htm
The ZOETROPE is a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures. It consists of a cylinder with slits cut vertically in the sides. Beneath the slits, on the inner surface of the cylinder, is a band which has either individual frames from a video/film or images from a set of sequenced drawings or photographs. As the cylinder spins, the user looks through the slits at the pictures on the opposite side of the cylinder’s interior. The scanning of the slits keeps the pictures from simply blurring together, so that the user sees a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, the equivalent of a motion picture. Cylindrical zoetropes have the property of causing the images to appear thinner than their actual sizes when viewed in motion through the slits.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit10.htm
The PRAXINOSCOPE is an animation device, the successor to the zoetrope. It was invented in France in 1877 by Charles-Émile Reynaud. Like the zoetrope, it used a strip of pictures placed around the inner surface of a spinning cylinder. The praxinoscope improved on the zoetrope by replacing its narrow viewing slits with an inner circle of mirrors, placed so that the reflections of the pictures appeared more or less stationary in position as the wheel turned. Someone looking in the mirrors would therefore see a rapid succession of images producing the illusion of motion, with a brighter and less distorted picture than the zoetrope offered.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit11.htm
The PHENAKISTOSCOPE (also spelled phenakistiscope) is an early animation device, the predecessor to the zoetrope. It was invented in 1831 simultaneously by the Belgian Joseph Plateau and the Austrian Simon von Stampfer. One variant of the phenakistoscope was a spinning disc mounted vertically on a handle. Around the center of the disc was drawn a series of pictures corresponding to frames of the animation; around its circumference was a series of radial slits. The user would spin the disc and look through the moving slits at the disc’s reflection in a mirror. The scanning of the slits across the reflected images kept them from simply blurring together, so that the user would see a rapid succession of images with the appearance of a motion picture. Another variant had two discs, one with slits and one with pictures; this was slightly more unwieldy but needed no mirror. Unlike the zoetrope and its successors, the phenakistoscope could only practically be used by one person at a time.
http://courses.ncssm.edu/gallery/collections/toys/html/exhibit07.htm
The STEREOSCOPE is a device for viewing stereographic cards, which are cards that contain two separate images that are printed side-by-side to create the illusion of a three-dimensional image. This is an example of stereoscopy. When stereographic cards are viewed without a stereoscopic viewer the user is required to force his eyes either to cross, or to diverge, so that the two images appear to be three. Then as each eye sees a different image, the effect of depth is achieved in the central image of the three. This is the oldest method of stereoscopy, having been discovered in the mid-19th century by Charles Wheatstone. In the late 19th and early 20th century stereo cards, stereo pairs or stereographs were popularly sold. The cards had a pair of photographs, usually taken with a special camera that took the pair of images from slightly separated views simultaneously. Cards were printed with these views (often with explanatory text); when the cards were looked at through the double-lensed viewer, called a stereoscope or a stereopticon (a common misnomer), a three-dimensional image could be seen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscope
The MAGIC LANTERN is an ancestor of the slide projector. With an oil lamp and a lens, images painted on glass plates could be projected on to a suitable screen. By the 19th century, there was a thriving trade of itinerant projectionists, who would travel across the United Kingdom with their magic lanterns, and a large number of slides, putting on shows in towns and villages. Some of the slides came with special effects, by means of extra sections that could slide or rotate across the main plate. One of the most famous of these, very popular with children, was the Rat-swallower, where a series of rats would be seen leaping into a sleeping man’s mouth. During the Napoleonic wars, a series was produced of a British ship’s encounter with a French navy ship, ending patriotically with the French ship sinking in flames, accompanied by the cheers of the audience.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_lantern
Artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to net art and digital arts, and an online gallery space for commissioned net art projects. The site consists of five major areas:
* The archive of “gate pages,” which function as portals to net artists’ works. Each month, an artist is invited to present their work in the form of a gate page with links to the artist’s site and most important projects.
* The “commissions” area, which presents original net art projects commissioned by the Whitney Museum.
* The “exhibitions” space, which provides access to and information about current and past net art and digital arts exhibitions at the Whitney.
* The “resources” archive, which links to galleries, networks and museums on the Web; past net art exhibitions at venues world-wide; Web publications relating to net art and digital arts; as well as new media festivals. This archive is constantly evolving as new organizations and resources are added.
* The “collection” area, which archives the works of net art and digital art in the Whitney Museum’s holdings.
The current Artport site, designed by treasurecrumbs, was launched in February 2002. Artport 1.0 (March 2001 – February 2002) is accessible as an archive.
Norman McLaren, Neighbours/Voisins, 8:02 mins, 1952
Norman McLaren here employs the principles normally used to put drawings or puppets into motion to animate live actors. The story is a parable about two people who come to blows over the possession of a flower. Film without words. McLaren won an Oscar for Neighbours/Voisins
Norman McLaren was born in Scotland in 1914. His interest in filmmaking began early in life after he became acquainted with works by the great Russian filmmakers Eisenstein and Poudovkine and the German animator Oskar Fischinger. While a student at the Glasgow School of Fine Arts, McLaren’s fascination with dance led him to make such stylized documentaries as Seven Till Five (1933). He subsequently joined the General Post Office Film Unit (GPOFU) in London, where he worked under John Grierson. It was there that he created Love on the Wing (1937), using the technique of drawing directly on the filmstrip. In 1939, McLaren immigrated to the United States, where he made several abstract films, including Stars and Stripes (1940) and Dots (1940). In 1941, he came to Canada and met up once again with John Grierson, who, at the request of the Canadian government, had founded the NFB. Grierson asked McLaren to put together the NFB’s first animation team.
This project was started by Barrett Lyon as a response to a conversation with my colleagues. Over a lunch we were discussing William Cheswick and Hal Burch’s Internet Mapping Project. I was inspired by their beautiful maps but they did not seem to be very useful nor do they release their code freely. Their mapping also was not much of a public affair, and there reports that the images took months to make. (According to Bill Cheswick, the Internet Mapping Project runs now with 20 minute daily scans and has a much improved image creation system.) My comment during the lunch was that, “I can write a program that can map the entire net in a single day.” The comment was met with some hostility. Thus, this project was born. – Barrett Lyon
This graph (image above) is by far our most complex. It is using over 5 million edges and has an estimated 50 million hop count. We will be producing more maps like this on a dialy basis. We still have yet to fix the color system, but all in due time.
Graph Colors:
Asia Pacific – Red
Europe/Middle East/Central Asia/Africa – Green
North America – Blue
Latin American and Caribbean – Yellow
RFC1918 IP Addresses – Cyan
Unknown – White
Art That Has to Sleep in the Garage
By EDWARD LEWINE
Published: June 26, 2005
New York Times
San Francisco
Video art by Doug Aitken in Norman and Norah Stone’s garage. (Ethan Kaplan for The New York Times)
ONE day last month, Pam Kramlich tried to serve lunch to two guests, but the artwork kept interrupting. A gentle rain tapped the windows of her stone house atop one of the city’s best hills. The antique table was set with salads prepared by the housekeeper, and the video art simply wouldn’t shut up.
On one screen, the artists Gilbert and George, filmed in crude 1972 video, sipped cocktails while classical music played and a voice intoned over and over, “Gordon’s makes us drunk.” To the right was a 1969 piece by Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, in which Ms. Holt schlepped the camera through a field of reeds, the soundtrack booming with her stomping and puffing, while Mr. Smithson gave her barely audible directions.
piece by Bill Viola. (Ethan Kaplan for The New York Times)
Mrs. Kramlich, a slender 62-year-old with a serene smile, and her gruff venture-capitalist husband, Dick, 71, own what may be the single largest private collection of art that uses electronic sound or moving images. This is known as video art, or media art, or time-based art, and the Kramlichs share their labyrinthine California Tudor home with it. Screens flash from a snarl of tubing atop the dark-stained oak staircase. Slides scroll above the fluffy duvet on the guest bed. A boy’s face flickers on a movie screen in the otherwise muted calm of the cream-colored master bedroom.
When all the art is activated, the house hums, thrums, squeaks and squawks, gibbers, moans and shouts. In fact, the effect is so overwhelming that the Kramlichs are more or less forced to leave most of their expensive, impeccably chosen collection turned off most of the time. But when the pieces are on, as they were during lunch, Mrs. Kramlich says she savors the cacophony. “I enjoy having these works on,” she said. “This is fun. It’s playtime.”
Norman and Norah Stone with Matthew Barney’s video art from their collection. (Ethan Kaplan for The New York Times)
As eccentric as the Kramlichs’ domestic situation may seem today, 10 years ago it would have been a downright oddity. Back then, video art was an outlier, a market that collectors barely touched. But now, video art is widely bought and exhibited by collectors and museums alike, and there are those who say flat screens may soon be as common on household walls as picture frames.
“Video is where still photography was in the 1970′s,” said Bruce Jenkins, a dean at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. “There used to be a hesitance to purchasing photos. Now photography is the rage.”
Yet, as the first generation of video collectors is discovering, video remains a confounding, ornery medium – especially when it’s placed between the silver-framed vacation snapshots and the door that leads to the laundry room. Most artworks sit, mute and distinguished, on a mantel or behind a couch. Video pieces demand attention, and they never blend into the background the way even the most monumental Rothko or vibrantly colored Stella can.
“They remind me of my Jack Russell terriers,” said Norman Stone, another avid collector. “You can’t ignore them.”
THE first odd thing about collecting video art is this: the medium came into being partly because artists wanted to make work that couldn’t be collected. It was born in 1965 when Sony introduced the first portable video camera, attracting artists like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Joan Jonas and Vito Acconci. “The dream we had was art that couldn’t be sold, but broadcast on television,” the video artist Bill Viola said in a recent phone interview.
A work by Dara Birnbaum, also from the Kramlichs’ collection. (Ethan Kaplan for The New York Times)
By the 1980′s, however, dealers and artists were turning video into a commodity. Now prices range from a few thousand dollars to six figures. Though collectors aren’t talking money, the Kramlichs’ curator allows that the couple have spent “millions” amassing some 250 pieces.
The pair, who married in 1981 after just seven weeks of courtship, began collecting art when they discovered they had nothing in common. In consultation with curators from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and their adviser, Thea Westreich, they chose to amass video art, because it fit in with Mr. Kramlich’s interest in technology, the museum needed patrons in this area, and there was little competition from other collectors.
At first Mrs. Kramlich assumed that video art would be easy to deal with. “You just pop the tape into the recorder and play it,” she said.
Soon she discovered that it wasn’t quite that simple. Buy a painting, and you get the painting sent to you in a crate. When the Kramlichs buy a video installation, say one of Bill Viola’s – they own several – they are typically buying one of an edition of anywhere from 3 to 10. They’ll receive a master copy of the piece, in digital Beta or the highest-fidelity format available; a DVD home-viewing copy; the equipment needed to show the piece; and an archival box that includes setup instructions, blueprints and a signed certificate of authenticity…….
remainder of article and more images here
Installation view – Playing the Building, Battery Maritime Building, New York, NY, 2008
Creative Time presents Playing the building, a sound installation in which the infrastructure, the physical plant of the building, is converted into a giant musical instrument. Devices are attached to the building structure — to the metal beams and pillars, the heating pipes, the water pipes — and are used to make these things produce sound. The activations are of three types: wind, vibration, striking. The devices do not produce sound themselves, but they cause the building elements to vibrate, resonate and oscillate so that the building itself becomes a very large musical instrument.
Statement Excerpt:
… Conflicts between reason and belief are n ot new but never have they been held in such dramatic constrast as they have in the genomic age. The situation, such as it is, provides fertile ground for the artist and it is why I pursue the project with such urgency.
The entry point into my work is the idea of optical illusion as metaphor. I produce a different type of conceptual still life – one in the manner of a science demonstration or imaginary physics experiment. To accomplish this ….
For More Images and Full Statement:
http://www.chervinsky.org/angleofrepose.html
Double Exposure
A Moment With Diane Arbus Created A Lasting Impression
By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 12, 2005; Page C01
NEW YORK They remember none of it. Not the lady with the camera, arranging them by a wall at the Knights of Columbus hall in their home town of Roselle, N.J. Not the chocolate cake they had just finished, which is very faintly visible in the picture at the creases of their lips. The Wade sisters, as they were known before they each married, recall nothing about the day they gazed into the lens of Diane Arbus and became part of American photographic history. Unless you count the dresses.
“We still have them,” says Colleen.
“Our mother made them,” says Cathleen. “They look black in the photograph but they’re actually green.”
They were 7 years old in 1967, when Arbus found the girls at a Christmas party for local twins and triplets. Nobody is quite sure how Arbus heard about the gathering, but a few parents obliged when she asked their children to pose. Which is how the Wade sisters wound up on a sidewalk, standing close enough to seem joined at the shoulder, their expression a kind of spectral blank.
The remainder of the article can be found here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/11/AR2005051102052.html
