Toxico Cultura

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]