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Water Sculpture

Water Sculpture from Shinichi Maruyama on Vimeo.

Art work by Shinichi Maruyama
Composited by Tetsushi Wakasugi

Ishihara

Ishihara - English version from Yoav Brill on Vimeo.

Yoav Brill has quite extreme colour blindness. He spent his chilldhood being unable to distinguish pink from gray, or even pick out a white flower in a sea of red ones. Brill made this film about his experience called Ishihara -- named after the instantly recognizable test patterns of colored dots that doctors use to diagnose colorblindness.

Supposed to be researching Physiognomy...

Ended up reading -

How much do I want to know about my genes?

Large-scale studies such as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children are playing a fundamental role in helping scientists to identify distinctions between the effects of genes and environment on our bodies and minds. Not only will this point the way to new treatments for disease, it will also illuminate the critical factors that determine who we are.

However, taking part in such studies exploring genetic risk factors for disease could have profound effects on our lives and identities. If the study identified that we had a high risk of a disease, such as breast cancer, but that there was no certainty we would actually get it, for example, would we want to know about the risk?

Would we want to live with the fear of something that may not happen? Would we take drastic preventative action, such as having both our breasts removed, to pre-empt the cancer occurring, even though such operations cannot remove all the tissue that is likely to become cancerous? What about the effects of such 'knowledge' on our sense of safety, our social relationships and life decisions such as whether to marry and have children?

http://www.wellcomecollection.org/whats-on/the-identity-project/more-identity-in-depth/how-much-do-i-want-to-know.aspx

Cold War-era building frozen in time.

The Palast der Republik, or Palace of the Republic, was new in 1976, but largely unloved after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Thorsten Klapsch became the last photographer to capture its interiors before a long period of demolition began. He has now published a book of his photographs.

Audio / Visual. Amazing

Sculpture is an audiovisual performance duo from London – electronic music producer, Dan Hayhurst, and animator, Reuben Sutherland.

Sutherland ‘DJs’ with home-made zoetropic discs, intricate concentric rings of illustrated frames, projecting fragments of looping images at 33, 45 and 78 rpm – pre-Edisonian imaging technology combined with a digital video camera.

Rotary Signal Emitter - Side B from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.
More info:
http://www.tapebox.co.uk/Tapebox/Home.html

NEWS - I have a bedroom! (No door yet though)

In fact all 6 bedrooms have now been built in Unit 6. Just a bit more painting and doors to attach. Our house is really starting to become a home!

The timber frame

With inner plaster board wall attached

Painting a finished room

The room, complete with belongings!

Games, games, games.

In the past few months I have become quite interested in and have been reading a lot about issues relating to gaming, how it's developing and how it's affecting our culture at the moment.

How gaming is being utilised as a tool to solve serious issues and problems and be of benefit to society but how in turn, with its increased involvement in our lives, it has also caused adverse behavior in some people.

Below is a link to BBC Panorama 'Addicted to Gaming".

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/wlmj0/

At first I thought the panorama program was being a bit over the top and extremist but after seeing the interviews with people it seems that in some cases people are displaying all the traits of having an addiction - sometimes playing for more than 12 hours a day, neglecting important responsibilities, even failing to care for pets and children.

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In this photography project called Immersion by Robbie Cooper he takes pictures of people's faces while they are playing computer games. You can see by the emotions displayed on their faces how involved they get with playing the games.

The boy in the photo above cries while he is playing video games because he doesn't blink while playing, so not to miss anything.

More on Serious Gaming

Jane McGonigal’s TED talk on Serious Games.

(This video was the inspiration for the Serious Games Hot Topic event held by NESTA, which I have written about previously on this blog. I have also recently been reading 'Fans, Bloggers and Gamers - Exploring Participatory Culture' a book by Henry Jenkins which links well to this TED video. Both McGonigal and Jenkins talk a lot about utilising collective intelligence, via the internet, for solving bigger real world issues which I'm finding very interesting at the moment).

What if...

http://whatiftheydid.blogspot.com/

Colour A Sound

Color a Sound from blair neal on Vimeo.

I'm already obsessed with those wind up music boxes...

'Color a Sound is a sound installation by Blair Neal, that invites participants to color on a transparency and hear a corresponding sound. Sound is triggered when it passes a line, observed by MaxMSP software running in the background. Different colors control the octave of a note, blue – low, green – middle and red – high. Modes can also be changed so that blue colours trigger 808 drum sounds instead of chimes.'

Heart Chamber Orchestra

Heart Chamber Orchestra from pure on Vimeo.

The Heart Chamber Orchestra – HCO - is an audiovisual performance. The orchestra consists of 12 classical musicians and the artist duo TERMINALBEACH. Using their heartbeats, the musicians control a computer composition and visualization environment. The musical score is generated in real time by the heartbeats of the musicians. They read and play this score from a computer screen placed in front of them. Custom-made software analyzes the data and via different algorithms it generates the real-time musical score for the musicians, the electronic sounds and the computer graphic visualization via 2 projectors in the space.

From http://www.creativeapplications.net/

Dead Drops

‘Dead Drops’ is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. USB flash drives are embedded into walls, buildings and curbs accessable to anybody in public space. Everyone is invited to drop or find files on a dead drop. Plug your laptop to a wall, house or pole to share your favorite files and data. Each dead drop is installed empty except a readme.txt file explaining the project. ‘Dead Drops’ is open to participation. If you want to install a dead drop in your city/neighborhood follow the ‘how to’ instructions and submit the location and pictures.

Berlin based media artist, Aram Bartholl started the ‘Dead Drops’ project during his stay in NYC at EYEBEAM as an artist in residence, October 2010.

http://deaddrops.com/

Black and WTF

Date unknown

Beauty device to shape the nose - $6.00.

From Black and WTF

One Hundred and Eight

One Hundred and Eight – Interactive Installation from Nils Völker on Vimeo.

One Hundred and Eight is an interactive installation made by Nils Völker. It’s made out of ordinary garbage bags which can be selectively inflated and deflated by two cooling fans.

Maria Blaisse - kuma guna 1996, foam costumes for dance

Kuma Kuna, a project initiated by Maria Blaisse for which she developped a specific elastic foam to make a study form in movement. In this project she developed a series of costums with a focus on the stubborn qualities of the material. The costums are trying to find their counterbalance of the strenght of the human body. In movement the wearer is influencing the form of the costumn, and visa versa, together forming a fascinating language.

http://www.mariablaisse.com/

??

"Failure to renew your domain name by the expiration date may result in a loss of your online identity" !!

(time to renew my website it seems!)

High Dynamic Photography

Looks unreal! Produced by merging multiple photographs. So much contrast and detail in the tones makes it look fake.

Bad Things Could Happen

Bad Things That Could Happen from This Is It on Vimeo.

Good fun. Made by some Kingston kids called the This Is It Collective. Their website is here.

Richard Harvey

Nervous Toaster from Richard Harvey on Vimeo.

More of his work here.

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting - Berg

Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.

"This film explores playful uses for the increasingly ubiquitous ‘glowing rectangles’ that inhabit the world.

We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation."

Amazing project by Berg

Areas of outstanding urban beauty

Britain's most beautiful car park

The winner of CABE’s photo competition to find Areas of Outstanding Urban Beauty is The Galleries car park by Christopher Hoare.

The photo competition is part of People and places, a project about involving people in shaping the look and feel of the places where they live. See all of the entries on flickr.

Playing Tetris Reduces Flashbacks From Traumatic Experiences

The computer game Tetris may have a special ability to reduce flashbacks after viewing traumatic images, according to scientists at the University of Oxford.

Full article by the Welcome Trust here.

The Apology Line

Director: James Lees

The most talked-about short documentary of the year: the 'apology line' is where members of the public can anonymously confess to absolutely anything, over the phone. Based on the original apology line project in New York, the apologies are uncomfortably honest, sometimes funny, occasionally shocking, but always fascinating.

http://www.myspace.com/apologyline

Visited: Eric Whitacre @ Barbican Centre

I've seen lots of exhibitions at the Barbican Centre but I've been wanting to see a concert there for ages. Two weeks ago I decided to go see the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Eric Whitacre perform some of his music along with some pieces by other American composers including Barber and Lauridsen. Part of the reason for also wanting to see this concert is I'm currently learning some pieces by Whitacre with the choir that I sing in and I'm also interested in his 'Virtual Choir' project which I have previously written about on this blog here.

It was a very enjoyable concert but at times I felt the choir did not come through enough and the balance between the choir and orchestra could have been better at times. Watch the video below to get an idea of Whitacre's compositions (The piece I am currently learning).

NEWS - Secret Cinema presents Lawrence of Arabia

Last month I worked as part of the art department for Secret Cinema's production of Lawrence of Arabia, that took place at Alexandra Palace. We worked to create the atmosphere and all round experience of Lawrence of Arabia within the location. In particular, I helped to construct the sets, interior decorations and prop making. Audience members arrived at Alexandra Palace dressed for the occasion, some still unaware of what film they were about to watch. Actors in full costume, some complete with horses and camels, helped to immerse the visitors into the event in preparation for watching the film. (Watch the video for highlights).

It was a really cool project to be involved with, especially as it was the first large scale event / project I have worked on. The rest of the team were also really nice people to work with.

Working on this project also tied in nicely with some personal work that I am doing at the moment. I have been looking at how to add physicality to digital interactions through creating real world experiences, peoples physical reactions to digital stimuli and creating social movements through online social networks. All of Secret Cinema's promotion, hype and communication with audience members happens through digital means. They have a very strong online presence and members of their community are asked to carry out certain tasks before they come to film screenings. For example they are asked to dress up accordingly and bring props, but for this film they were also asked to group themselves into 'tribes' according to where they live in London, which in turn then created online and real world interactions. People displayed their 'tribe markings' on their social network profiles to link with other people who were in the same tribe as them. They were then encouraged to display their tribe markings when traveling to the film screening and group together once at the location. I was impressed by how involved the audience got with the whole experience, but this was probably largely due to all the effort Secret Cinema had put into not only creating the amazing environment at the Alexandra Palace but also the communication they had with the visitors in the lead up to the event. People also seemed really excited at the chance to act out of the normal and be part of this collective 'secret' immersive experience.

Visited: Nosaj Thing @ Pattern Cutters Factory

Went to this gig a few weeks ago at the Pattern Cutters Factory, Dalston. Nosaj Thing's debut UK audio visual show. Pretty Amazing. Watch the video to get an idea of what it was like.

Sorry, I got distracted.

I really enjoyed this video of a talk by Steven Johnson called 'Where good ideas come from' especially because it kind of relates to my motivations for this blog. My blog is basically my incubator system for my small hunches I collect from the internet (see the video)! He also briefly talks about how DISTRACTIONS on the internet can lead to 'miraculous and marvelous new ways to connect...So many ways to reach out and find other people who have that missing piece, which will complete the idea we're working on. We're to stumble serendipitously across some amazing new piece of information that we can use to build and improve our own ideas'.

Definitely worth a watch.

Steven Johnson says "Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down; but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let others build on your ideas; borrow, recycle, reinvent." - From BBC News homepage 8th November 2010.

NEWS - Unit 6, Building has Begun

We have started to build the bedrooms in our house (Unit 6). The structures of 4 bedrooms are nearing completion. We still have 2 more rooms to build, there will be 6 altogether. More updates to follow.

NEWS - Making connections

Hopefully my blog is now connected to my Twitter Account - www.twitter.com/AminaNazari