Saw this at the film seminar last week!
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Will Self: Walking is political
"She stumbles through the city streets, her eyes now unfocused – absorbing a confusion of grey, brown and red parallelograms, that she knows to be crushingly weighty, and yet which she feels to be as insubstantial as dandelion spores – and now locked on the faces of those others who pass by her with such fixity that, if she concentrates on a single physiognomy, she senses that with only a little further effort she would be able to deduce everything about that individual: his age, occupation, sexual history, political affiliations, the names of his family and friends. For milliseconds she is transfixed by the uniqueness of his personality – and then he is subsumed once more into the crowd. In the roadway beside her the traffic courses: buses whoosh, lorries grind, cars bounce, motorcycles swerve – yet there is no mechanical noise at all, these steely parallelograms interleave, shuffle and montage to the accompaniment of electronic peeps, beeps, burbles and thrums – a soundtrack that our walker can choreograph all the traffic to, human and vehicular, her deft, darting eyes seamlessly stitching order out of the chaos so that everything around her skips to her divinely ordained beat. She is completely lost: she could not tell you the name of a single street or notable building.
She is disoriented – and yet her progress is a perfectly plotted trajectory through urban space: she looks into the glowing multifaceted jewel in the palm of her hand and here other parallelograms interleave, shuffle and montage in response to the tweezer motions and baton-flicks of her fingers. It tells her where to go, the jewel, and when she places it to her ear it speaks to her, so that in turn she can command her own faltering legs to carry her to the right, to the left, straight ahead, until at last there is a face she recognises – or does she? Unbidden, his age, his occupation, his sexual history, his political affiliations, the names of his family and friends all come to her. And yet in the milliseconds before they intercept one another she is transfixed by an awful sense of the stereotypy of his personality – then he is mercifully released from the crowd and into her arms. "Sorry I'm late," she puffs – she knows she is precisely three kilos overweight. "It was miles to get here from the tube." She has, in fact, walked exactly 723 metres.
I hope the above will be taken for what it is: a lightly poeticised account of the mental state of an average young woman negotiating her way through the urban environment. Her responses to her fellow city dwellers, to the road traffic, to the business of finding her way using a handheld GPS system while listening to music on her MP3 player are all quite normal, and yet, set down like this they seem to me to be indisputably analogous to a clinically defined psychotic state. Like a sufferer from psychosis, our young woman's conception of reality radically diverges from her environment: she is surrounded by actual buildings, with a defined and apprehensible nomenclature; the people she passes are neither clones nor individually known to her but a mass of strangers; neither these people, nor their vehicles are moving in synch with the music she listens to; and finally: her perception of distance is distorted, while her ability to negotiate her environment is dependent on systems external to her own mind that, for all their technical efficacy, are as opaque to her as the magical rituals of a shaman. Indeed, so long as the rendezvous with her boyfriend is made, it would make no difference to our young woman if it were effected by her consulting a fetish, or flinging a handful of bones on to the pavement and directing her footsteps in accordance with their arrangement."
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A century ago, 90% of Londoners' journeys under six miles were made on foot. Now we are alienated from the physical reality of our cities. Will Self on the importance of walking in the fight against corporate control.
Wednesday, March 28, 2012
Grey Walter's tortoises
Dr. Grey Walter was a neurologist, robotics pioneer, and a bit of a mad scientist. Living in Bristol, England in 1949, without the aid of modern day computer processors, he built reactive, autonomous robots that could wander about and avoid obstacles. Each robot had two simulated neurons, sufficient for them to display complex behavior. Significantly, Walter's tortoises represent the first real world demonstration of artificial life.
Friday, March 23, 2012
Simon Faithfull: Escape Vehicle no.6 2004
"Commissioned by Artscatalyst, Escape Vehicle no.6 started as a live event developed from the previous balloon film 30km. The live audience first witnessed the launching of a weather balloon with a domestic chair dangling in space beneath it. Once the apparatus had dissapeared into the sky they then watched a live video relay from the weather balloon as it jouneyed from the ground to the edge of space (30km up).
Now presented as a non-live video work, the footage shows the chair first rush away from the fields and roads, ascend through clouds and finally (against the curvature of the earth and the blackness of space) begin to disintegrate. The chilling nature of the film is that the empty chair invites the audience to imagine taking a journey to an uninhabitable realm where it is impossible to breath, the temperature is minus 60 below and the sky now resembles the blackness of space."
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
Callum Cooper
The faces of class, wealth, history and the tensions between individualism and conformity in British society are explored in this visual journey from East to West London. Consisting of almost 3600 images of the city’s residences taken in 2009 and 2010, the film records my daily journey from my home in Clapton (e5) to the Royal College of Art in Kensington (SW7).
Part of a series of works in a Taxonomic series. I would walk past Matthias working on his film on a daily basis and decided to take a photo each day.
For more in the series check out.
For more in the series check out.
Paradoxical Plane (Excerpt)
Tuesday, March 20, 2012
Planet in a Bottle
"
At 8:15 am on 26 September 1991, eight “bionauts,” as they called themselves, wearing identical red Star Trek–like jumpsuits (made for them by Marilyn Monroe’s former dressmaker) waved to the assembled crowd and climbed through an airlock door in the Arizona desert. They shut it behind them and opened another that led into a series of hermetically sealed greenhouses in which they would live for the next two years. The three-acre complex of interconnected glass Mesoamerican pyramids, geodesic domes, and vaulted structures contained a tropical rain forest, a grassland savannah, a mangrove wetland, a farm, and a salt-water ocean with a wave machine and gravelly beach. This was Biosphere 2—the first biosphere being Earth—a $150 million experiment designed to see if, in a climate of nuclear and ecological fear, the colonization of space might be possible. The project was described in the press as a “planet in a bottle,” “Eden revisited,” and “Greenhouse Ark.” http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/41/turner.php Obsessively reading Cabinet magazine currently |
Sunday, March 18, 2012
Project: Social Computing
Developed from our social computing project for Intel run by Onkar Kular http://www.onkarkular.com/and Matt Jones from Berg http://berglondon.com/
Also shown at the work in progress show.
THE MASS ORNAMENT
"Taylorist ideologies combined with advances in technology have lead to a world where our actions, behaviours, decisions and interactions are largely dictated by computers and premeditated algorithms. The Mass Ornament is a display of this social computing where the performers, choreographed by technology, create a spectacle for their own and the viewer’s entertainment."
Brian Eno Talk @ RCA
A lot of talking about nothing really. But I enjoyed it!
Philosophy and haircuts. Surrender and control. His first art school. "Fine art is like the punchline without the joke"
Visited: John Wood and Paul Harrison @ Carroll / Fletcher
Bored astronauts on the moon
Film - 10 x 10
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Tuesday, March 6, 2012
Friday, March 2, 2012
Workshop: Design meets Science
Design Interaction students went to Imperial to talk to some synthetic biologists for our current project.
Speed Dating from nathan on Vimeo.
Thursday, March 1, 2012
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