Toxico Cultura

Photo series by Stefan Ruiz.

(Click to enlarge.)

(Stefan and Tóxico have collaborated on various projects, and will again soon as soon as we can get him back down to Mexico City. He travels the world at an insane pace, taking pictures of wide-ranging subjects from African Vice-Presidents to Donald Trump to inmates at high security prisons. And he says these ladies ride em ponies like no other, without ever smearing their perfectly glossed lips.)

(Continue reading after the break for an interview published in Código 06170 magazine)

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“I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather that my spark burn out in a brilliant blaze than be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. For the proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.”

Imagen de Olaf Breuning. Más aquí.

THE HIGH LLAMAS – OVER THE RIVER

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Theodore Seuss Geisel. Born a hundred and five years ago in Springfield, Massachusetts. Wrote over 60 children’s books. But was also a political cartoonist after World War II started. Eventually he designed and illustrated posters to support the war effort, and joined the U.S. Army where he was the leader of the animation department. Or as he would have said: “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.”

“A Field Guide To Getting Lost.”

Tóxico Lecture at Instituto Europeo de Diseño.

(About our projects, and things that move us and such.)

Torrent De L’Olla, 208

Barcelona

Tel: +34 93 2385889

info@bcn.ied.es

6.30 pm

[nggallery id=35]

From Richard Nicholson’s “Last One Out, Please Turn On The Light”

This project, shot on 4″x5″ film, documents London’s remaining professional darkrooms. It is based on my nostalgia for a dying craft (there are no young printers). It is in these rooms that printers have worked their magic, distilling the works of photographers such as David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Nick Knight into a recognisable ‘look’.

ID+consonni, convocatoria de proyectos de producción en Euskadi

La productora de arte consonni (Bilbao) quiere desarrollar una convocatoria pública como otra fórmula de trabajar con artistas y el programa de arte IDENSITAT quiere compartir acciones con otros proyectos afines y que tienen su base en otros territorios fuera de Cataluña.  Se abre por tanto, ID+consonni, una nueva convocatoria internacional de proyectos de producción dirigida a creadores/as que aporten propuestas en el ámbito del espacio público.

El período para la presentación de propuestas finaliza el 13 de febrero de 2009.

Cada artista o grupo de artistas seleccionado recibirá un importe de 4.000 euros (impuestos incluidos) en concepto de honorarios

Más información en idensitat@consonni.org

www.consonni.org/intrahistorias y www.idensitat.net
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“As the dictionary says, the womb is the place where anything is engendered and brought to life. As far as I can make out, there is never anything but womb.”

-Henry Miller-

La lista de los seleccionados para el workshop de Reymondes (Fabrica) y Ravelo (Colors Magazine) quedó así:

Says the New York Times:

In Roald Dahl’s novel “The B.F.G.,” the title character, a big friendly giant, captures dreams in glass jars. At Pennsylvania State University, a professor of engineering has captured something less whimsical but no less ephemeral – a cough – on film.

The image, published online Oct. 9 by The New England Journal of Medicine, was created by schlieren photography, which “takes an invisible phenomenon and turns it into a visible picture,” said the engineering professor, Gary Settles, who is the director of the university’s gas dynamics laboratory.

Schlieren is German for “streaks”; in this case it refers to regions of different densities in a gas or a liquid, which can be photographed as shadows using a special technique.

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Para diseñadoras industriales (profesionales y estudiantes).

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Berlin Today Award 2010: Short Films for the Big Screen
“Straight to Cinema” is the theme for the short film competition of the Berlinale Talent Campus in 2010

Call for entries – Berlin Today Award 2010

The short film competition of the Berlinale Talent Campus – supported since 2003 by Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg – invites directors from all over the world to submit short film ideas inspired by the theme “Straight to Cinema”. In a digital age where film culture is undergoing fundamental changes, the cinema remains a unique public space, a centre for collective experiences and sensations. The Berlin Today Award theme for 2010 encourages young filmmakers to seek inspiration in the cinema and all its possibilities, and develop a short film for the big screen. The top five film ideas will be realised by five production companies from Berlin and Brandenburg – with support from Medienboard and the film industry.

Berlinale Talent Campus current applicants and former participants, as well as producers from the Berlin-Brandenburg region, can apply until November 25, 2008, to realise a short film project. Talents and producers can go to www.berlintoday.de to access the online application and participation conditions.

15 pre-selected Talents will have an opportunity to present their film ideas and convince producers attending the “Producers’ Meeting” held during the Berlinale Talent Campus 2009 (February 7-12, 2009). Five projects will be selected and have until the end of 2009 to make the final leap toward realisation. The short films will celebrate their world premiere during the opening of the Berlinale Talent Campus 2010. The winner, selected by a jury, will receive the Berlin Today Award 2010.

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(Gracias al apoyo del Goethe-Institut Mexiko, el año pasado Tóxico asistió al Berlinale Talent Campus de Alemania, comenzando así una investigación sobre diferentes modelos de conferencias y talleres dedicados a las áreas creativas. La calidad de este evento es excelente, y les recomendamos a todos los jóvenes cineastas aplicar. También estén al tanto de la versión Latam que se hace en Buenos Aires cada año y–a partir del año pasado–en Guadalajara paralelamente al festival de cine.)

(From the series More Turns by Bill Sullivan. Click to enlarge)

I was tired of the conventions in which most photographs of people are taken. And I was tired of the results that often seem to pass for poetry. I needed something to be objective : I wanted the context to be clearly established . I wanted play a role in the situation, but I wanted the situation to take a photograph of itself for me . I would design the scenarios in which this could happen, and then the situation could be responsible for creating the picture. The poetry would be as much in the design of that scenario as from any photograph that might come from it. These situations would include me but I would disappear as any kind of typical photographer. I would simply play a role in the scenario. I would become someone waiting for an elevator, a man reading the New Yorker waiting for a friend to pass through the turnstile, or simply another tourist watching someone having his or her portrait done. The situations were mapped out, tests were made, and special clothing was worn. I became a spy for the obvious.

I developed a situation so that various subjects could be defined by the constraints of exactly the same mechanical apparatus. The scenario consisted of someone passing through a subway turnstile. At the moment that the subjects passed through the turnstile, unknown to them, I took their picture stationed at a distance of eleven feet. I stood there turning pages of a magazine observing subjects out of the corner of my eye, waiting for only the moment when they pushed the turnstile bar to release the shutter.

(Subway Portrait, Walker Evans: 1938-41)

Walker Evans (1903-75) photographed a ruinous, time-worn, battered America, an anonymous country of road trips, peeling-paint churches, frayed movie posters. He is the legendary visual chronicler of the Depression. Between 1938 and 1941 Evans surreptitiously shot portraits of strangers in the New York subway, riding trains with a camera concealed under his coat, fitted with a shutter release running inside his sleeve. In 1966, he finally published a book of the pictures, entitled Many Are Called; in the same year they were exhibited at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.

- Jonathan Jones, The Guardian

Sí, todos esperamos con ansia tener en nuestras computadoras el nuevo Adobe Creative Suite CS4 pero en lo que juntamos los $20,000 que costará o a que alguien tenga a bien hacer copias que funcionen, podemos por lo menos ver los estupendos gráficos que Vasava hizo para promocionar este producto.

Interesante documental de los hermanos Mitchell de San Francisco sobre un tour de universidades que hizo Hunter S. Thompson durante 1988.

[googlevideo]http://video.google.es/videoplay?docid=-7866174144124486320&ei=-fPkSMbwOofA-wGhzr0F&q=The+Crazy+Never+Die[/googlevideo]

I talk now about Reality, but I know there is no getting at it, leastwise by writing. I learn less and realize more: I learn in some different, more subterranean way. I acquire more and more the gift of immediacy. I am developing the ability to perceive, apprehend, analyze, synthesize, categorize, inform, articulate–all at once. The structural element of things reveals itself more readily to the eye. I eschew all clear cut interpretations: with increasing simplification the mystery heightens. What I know tends to become more and more unstable.

I give all I have to give, voluntarily, and take as much as I can possibly ingest. I am a prince and a pirate at the same time. I find that there is plenty of room in the world for everybody–great interspatial depths, great ego universes, great islands of repair, for whoever attains to individuality. On the surface, where the historical battles rage, where everything is interpreted in terms of money and power, there may be crowding, but life only begins when one drops below the surface, when one gives up the struggle and disappears from sight. Now I can easily write as not write. Whatever I do is done out of sheer joy: I drop my fruits like a ripe tree. What the general reader or the critic makes of it is not my concern. I am not establishing values: I defecate and nourish. There is nothing more to it. This condition of sublime indifference is a logical development of the egocentric life. I lived out the social problem by dying: the real problem is not of getting along with one´s own neighbor or of contributing to the development of ones country, but of discovering one´s destiny, of making a life in accordance with the deep-centered rhythm of one´s own cosmos: beyond definitions, alibis, proofs, duties.

-H. Miller

(Hand-painted woodblock print from a 5-volume anatomical work from 1813 called ‘Kaitai Hatsumou’ by Mitsutane. Via Bibliodissey.)

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We Make Money Not Art nos ofrece una selección de los mejores videos que han visto en la edición 2008 de Pictoplasma.

Aquí una animación diseñada por Tom Gauld con música de Ed Harcourt

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqTjYZHNtMg[/youtube]

Más videos por acá.

Crossed Combs tiene una extensa y selectiva sección de folders de LPs de antaño.

Miniaturas de sintetizadores hechas por Dan McPharlin, más imágenes en su Flickr.

(Para ver este increíble video, click en la imagen. Gracias Julia por el dato.)

“Y si llueve saldremos a la lluvia a lavar las minas que van acumulando mugre de palo de gallinero. Tanta mentira, tanto fingir, tanto desastre… Desnudos sobre el mascaron de proa. Lamiendo con la punta de la lengua, el tinte que desprende la máscara. Se arrecia el viento norte abajo telas, calzarse botas y escribir las archas sobre la superficie caminamos, que sobre la superficie nos salvamos.”

-m. garcía