(Click to enlarge)
Illustrations from one of two journals kept by a German recruit to the Dutch East India Company (VOC). Jörg Franz Müller was a gunsmith from Alsace who enlisted as a midshipman aboard VOC vessels that sailed between Europe and Batavia [in Indonesia] from 1669 to 1682.
Via BibliOdyssey.
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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’.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42hgPLL8IrA[/youtube]
Muy bello. Via Tomo y Mr. G Rivero.
[youtube]http://mx.youtube.com/watch?v=I9jyv6WIxUY[/youtube]
Short film by Matt McCormick.
(Amateur series by Mexican photographer Jose Luis Cuevas.)
Jose Luis has been shooting home-made Mexican porn for some years now. Ah, those strange little worlds from the underground.
After break you can read interview I did with him, Galileo (producer, director, actor of “Cartel ParaÃso”, a successful amateur porn series that uses non-professional actors for its productions, such as teachers, managers, and all sorts of “normal” people) and Copernico (accountant of Cartel ParaÃso, actor); a shorter and edited version appeared sometime ago, in Vice Magazine ,worldwide.
(Jose Luis was enrolled in the Tóxico Master-Class and portfolio review by Martin Parr and Chris Boot.)
(Copérnico is the guy next to the bunny-woman. Galileo is the one with the bandana and the dark glasses.)
Scotty Reifsnyder has created a children’s book that is based on the lyrics of a Johnny Cash song entitled “The Man Who Couldn’t Cryâ€. The book has a die cut that runs throughout adding a dimension of interactivity for the reader. More of his work here.
Via design-milk blog.
"On the assumption that my technique is either complicated or original
or both, the publishers have politely requested me to write an intro-
duction to this book. At least my theory of technique, if I have one, is very far from
original; nor is it complicated. I can express it in fifteen words, by
quoting The Eternal Question And Immortal Answer of burlesk, viz.
"Would you hit a woman with a child?--No, I'd hit her with a brick."
Like the burlesk comedian, I am abnormally fond of that precision
which creates movement.
If a poet is anybody, he is somebody to whom things made matter
very little--somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions,
the Making obsession has disadvantages; for instance, my only interest
in making money would be to make it. Fortunately, however, I should
prefer to make almost anything else, including locomotives and roses.
It is with roses and locomotives (not to mention acrobats Spring
electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagara
Falls) that my "poems" are competing. They are also competing with each other,
with elephants, and with El Greco. Ineluctable preoccupation with The Verb gives
a poet one priceless
advantage: whereas nonmakers must content themselves with the
merely undeniable fact that two times two is four, he rejoices in a
purely irresistible truth (to be found, in abbreviated costume, upon
the title page of the present volume)"
E.E. CUMMINGS
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De la serie Tinta, de Juan Carlos López Morales
“En estas imágenes retomo parte del acto de escribir. Asà como trazamos las palabras pescado, cuchara o hielo con tinta sobre una hoja en blanco, en estas fotografÃas hago uso de los mismos materiales (tinta y papel), pero sustituyo a las palabras por los objetos que nombran. Las manchas negras están a punto de secarse y los cuerpos se están consumiendo. La intervención de la tinta y el papel es, como en la escritura, un intento por adormecer la fugacidad de esta colección de objetos.“
Juan Carlos López Morales
(Juan Carlos fue seleccionado para el Tóxico Workshop de Colors y Fábrica.)
“French photographer Diane Ducruet has come up with a series of staged portraits that play with the ideas of family dynamics, identity, control, influence, postures of power, and more. The work becomes a kaleidoscope of subtext as members of the family slip in and out of expected roles: mother, father, sister, brother, daughter, son, husband and wife.” More here.
Says the we make money not art blog:
Athanasius Kircher, a 17th century German Jesuit scholar, described the cat piano in the Musurgia Universalis (1650).
“In order to raise the spirits of an Italian prince burdened by the cares of his position, a musician created for him a cat piano. The musician selected cats whose natural voices were at different pitches and arranged them in cages side by side, so that when a key on the piano was depressed, a mechanism drove a sharp spike into the appropriate cat’s tail. The result was a melody of meows that became more vigorous as the cats became more desperate. Who could not help but laugh at such music? Thus was the prince raised from his melancholy.”
(Photo by Gigi Gatewod)
—
“…and if ever again he sees them from afar it will be I think with other eyes, and not only that but the within, all that inner space one never sees, the brain and heart and other caverns where thought and feeling dance their sabbath.”
-S. Beckett-
A few years ago we curated an exhibition in the Museo Carrillo Gil, in Mexico City: a critique to American foreign intervention policies; the war was raging in Iraq, US elections were around the corner, and Bush was in the midst of running for his second term. The poster above, by Shepard Fairey, was included in our selection.
And today we found a few more W-related design stuff via the Osocio blog. Let it not be said that he was completely useless. Señor Bush: a world-wide muse.
(By Jetcomx)
(The They Also Ran Gallery)
Says the Amy Stein blog:
Yesterday, John McCain got his proper recognition when his photograph was hung in the hallowed halls of flopitude known as the They Also Ran Gallery. McCain’s photo now hangs its head on the mezzanine level of the First State Bank in Norton, Kansas alongside such notable nobodies as Horatio Seymour, Rufus King, and Alf Landon.
( Now in stores in the USA.) (Proceeds from Yes, Pecan!, by the way, are being donated to the Common Cause Educational Fund.)
Dubai under construction. Image by Bret Oliver.
Las subjetividades hoy: arrancadas del suelo, tienen el don de la ubicuidad. Fluctúan al sabor de las conexiones mutables del deseo con flujos de todos los lugares y todos los tiempos que transitan simultáneos por las ondas electrónicas. Filtro singular y fluido de este inmenso océano también fluido. Sin nombre o domicilio fijo, sin identidad: modulaciones metamorfoseantes en un proceso sin fin que se administra dÃa a dÃa, incansablemente.
El extrañamiento se adueña de la escena, imposible domesticarlo: desestabilizados, desacomodados, desamparados, desorientados, perdidos en el tiempo y en el espacio es como si todos fuésemos homeless, sin casa. No sin la casa concreta (grado cero de sobrevivencia en el que se encuentra un contingente cada vez mayor de humanos) sino sin el “en casa†de un sentimiento de sÃ, osea, sin una consistencia subjetiva palpable, sin la familiaridad de ciertas relaciones con el mundo, de ciertos modos de ser, de ciertos sentidos compartidos, de una cierta creencia. De esta casa invisible, pero no menos real, carece toda la humanidad globalizada.
Voces en todas las lenguas, de todos los rincones de la tierra, de todos los especialistas y, también, de los no especialistas se entreveran en una conversación infinita, entre afligida y excitada, alrededor de una misma pregunta: ¿nos hemos vuelto todos homeless, de hecho? ¿Se disolvió la casa subjetiva, se desmoronó, desapareció? ¿Dónde está la identidad? ¿Cómo recomponer una identidad en este mundo en el que los territorios nacionales, culturales, étnicos, religiosos, sociales, sexuales perdieron su aura de verdad, se desnaturalizaron irreversiblemente, se mezclan de todas las formas posibles, fluctúan o dejan de existir? ¿Cómo reconstituir un territorio en este mundo movedizo?
-Suely Rolnik, Más allá del principio de identidad. La vacuna antropofágica-
(Gracias ChofirÃn)
Una selección de videos a la casi media noche de un martes de enero de mister Juan Manuel Torreblanca
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYB2Mqs24ss[/youtube]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJrV-yKKNYI[/youtube]
Y un video de cómo azotaron al corazón aquÃ.
.
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at the typewriter and open a vein.”
.
-Red Smith-
Se ha vuelto una de las diseñadoras más reconocidas hoy en dÃa.
Obsesiva y meticulosa como pocos.
Puedes ver una entrevistaen video con ella aquÃ.
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De la serie “Verticalidades¨, de Pavka Segura
La manera en que nuestros ojos estan dispuestos para mirar tiende a la horizontalidad. Asà mismo cuando nos paramos frente a un paisaje el horizonte nos sugiere que el mundo continúa, de alguna manera, a través de esta lÃnea; tenemos la perscepción de que el mundo es horizontal y vasto. Quizá no fue hasta la invención del elevador automático como consecuencia del desarrollo de edificaciones de gran altura como los rascacielos de Chicago o Nueva York que la posibilidad real de desplazarse de manera vertical no pasaba de la inquietud como niño de trepar los árboles para mirar desde lo alto “el mundoâ€, o de los más intrépidos escaladores que a fin de cuentas, en algún momento postraban la mirada sobre esta lÃnea horizontal.
Esta selección de imágenes son parte de un ejercicio que me he propuesto, donde la primera condición formal para fotografiar es la verticalidad. Es entonces en este sentido que me gustarÃa darle la vuelta a como encuadrar y confrontar el horizonte. Más allá de esta formalidad como punto de partida, la serie pretende hacer un juego visual de correlaciones entre situaciones distantes. Que al mismo tiempo reflejen un solo estado emocional persceptivo que responde al accionar del mundo de “afueraâ€. Cabeza, corazón y visceras en vertical conectados con aquellos instantes de la “realidadâ€.
Pavka Segura, Enero 2009
(Pavka tomó el Tóxico Master-Class de Martin Parr y Chris Boot.)
In the early 1970s, artist Kazuaki Saito’s fantastic alien landscape illustrations graced the covers of SF Magazine, Japan’s first successful and longest running science fiction periodical. More at SF Magazine review. Via Pink Tentacle blog.
Says Pink Tentacle blog:
Japanese scientists have successfully cloned a prize beef cow more than 13 years after it died, it was announced on January 6. The legendary steer — named “Yasufuku†in his first life (1980-1993) — is regarded as the father of Hida beef, a high-quality meat from Gifu prefecture famous for its marbled texture and rich flavor.
During his 13-year life, the prize bull’s sperm was used to sire 40,000 calves, helping to establish Hida as a high-class brand of beef. It is believed that more than 30% of the nation’s Japanese black cattle can trace their roots back to Yasufuku.
To produce the clones, researchers from the Gifu Prefectural Livestock Research Institute and Kinki University (Osaka prefecture) employed a somatic cell nuclear transfer method using the nuclei of cells extracted from the bull’s testicles, which had spent 13 years in deep-freeze. The first clone of Yasufuku was created in 2007. In all, four clones of Yasufuku have been born, although one died from complications after birth.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y78FztTd414[/youtube]
Golden Cage by The Whitest Boy Alive, hand drawn animation by Geoff McFetridge. Expect their new album “Rules” soon.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6b1X-83QFjc[/youtube]
From his 1963 film Talent Competition.
De Retour, by Loan Nguyen
My father had never returned to Vietnam since his arrival in Switzerland 38 years ago. I was born in Switzerland. In 2005, after my father got his Swiss citizenship, we took two trips to Vietnam together and visited his native country. During these stays, I photographed the landscapes, the objects and the people we met as so many clues or signs of what still bound us to this country. I also photographed my father rediscovering familiar but forgotten places, meeting friends whose faces had changed as much as the country itself.
—
(“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.”-T.S. Eliot-)
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FV799cwkhCY&feature=related[/youtube]
Trailer de pelÃcula de Jonás Cuarón, hecha enteramente a partir de fotos en las que documentó un año de su vida, y luego reconfiguró en una historia ficticia.
Y una entrevista con él aquÃ:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPtYxUuJGDU[/youtube]
(Architecture of Density)
(Transparent City)
The Asian- and European-based photographer Michael Wolf is known for his fine-art and editorial photographs depicting rapid growth in Asian cities.
“THE EXPERIENCE OF PHOTOGRAPHING in America was not much different from photographing in Asia, really. The challenge was more conceptual: After working so long in Hong Kong and China, I wasn’t sure I was capable of working somewhere else. I feel in tune with what is happening in the East, and am so inspired by the architecture, food, people, and flux of life there, that I was afraid I’d feel disconnected from an urban landscape in another part of the world. Luckily, when I came to Chicago in 2006 to install some photographs, I rode an elevated train into downtown from the airport. It was a wonderful visual experience, looking out and seeing everyone through the office windows. I remember arriving at the museum and meeting the curator, and by my third or fourth sentence they asked whether they could arrange an artist residency for me. A year later, the deal was done.
“Life is merely a fracas on an unmapped terrain, and the universe a geometry stricken with epilepsy. Man starts over again everyday, in spite of all he knows, against all he knows.”
E. Cioran
Any professional photographer whose primary source of income is his or her photography is eligible. Applications will be accepted from Nov. 1, 2008, through Feb. 15, 2009. The application process will require a written statement outlining a proposed or current project and examples of the applicant’s photography. The work presented should demonstrate an ability to competently photograph the project being undertaken or proposed.
Grant for photography $ 50,000. Deadline for application 15 February 2009.
“We will be looking for a photographic project that improves our understanding and appreciation of the unique world in which we liveâ€, said David Griffin.
Read all on the website and download the rules and application
Winner 2008 : Jonas Bendiksen, who is documenting the population explosion in Chongqing, a city in western China. View his portfolio.
Winner 2007 : Eugene Richards, has covered people profoundly affected by the conflict in Iraq.
Says the You Might Like This Blog:
“Hong Hao is a Chinese artist who likes organising and grouping things. In this photographic work “my thingsâ€Â thousands of scanned images are arranged together on a massive scale. when placed on a black background they become micro universes; personal-size objects to create distant galaxies or river deltas across a rubbish strewn landscape.”
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 perÃodo 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
Continue reading
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaiq_ZZ_eM[/youtube]
70s Polaroid commercial by Ray and Charles Eames.
