7/12/2013: WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences & zero economics

This is WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics


Let's start with some art… Brilliant students work from the Bartlett School of Architecture of UCL who won the RIBA President's Medals Student Awards with a range of projects:
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/12/04/riba-presidents-medals-student-awards-2013-winners/
More here: http://www.bartlett.ucl.ac.uk/architecture/news/bartlett-sweep-2013-riba-presidents-medals
I love the Kizhi Island piece:

The timeline itself is a work of art:

While on deezen, a fantastic feature on 'liquid light'
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/06/28/the-liquid-light-of-diego-garcia-by-viktor-westerdahl/
also via Bartlett School of Architecture graduate - Viktor Westerdahl

Innovative, imagination-driven and utterly detached from utilitarian constraints…


Edward Burtynsky's 'Water' reviewed in GuernicaMag is worth reading - fantastic photographer with a deep obsession for human impact on landscape: http://www.guernicamag.com/art/edward-burtynskys-water/
Some images of his work:

 
And his iconic...

From his Water series:

And his webpage: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com/

A quote from GuernicaMag: "Landscape, here, meaning not just the genre of art, but—more importantly—the medium of exchange through which we conceive and represent the physical environment and our relationship to it. A landscape is that which we see and the way in which we see it—a natural scene mediated by culture."

A bit too much of 'academism' there. I prefer to describe this work as forcing the landscape into the frame: powerfully transformative and, thus, powerfully narrative. The visual literally screams at us, and there is not a moment of reprieve from its potent brutality. Which makes it all amazingly beautiful... a sort of hot-cold ice...


And in the same vein of human transformation of landscape, here's AtlasObscura story on Goats of Cingino Dam: http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/goats-of-the-cingino-dam

Having mentioned ice above, here is another landscape photographer: Michael Quinn, profiled in MyModernMet blog: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/michael-j-quinn-greenland-reflection

Now onto science: given the beauty of surreal Earth-scapes, time to move to astronomy and get us some Saturn-scapes…
http://www.theguardian.com/science/video/2013/dec/05/saturn-north-pole-hexagon-jet-stream-nasa-video?CMP=twt_gu

Full story via NASA, absent annoying commercials: http://www.nasa.gov/jpl/cassini/saturn-north-pole-hexagon-20131204i.html#.UqOKMGRdVBw


What beats what: books vs films… I had a nice discussion with a friend recently about two films based on one same book… the merits of Stanisław Lem's original Solaris (the book) are indisputable. The merits of Tarkovsky's interpretation of Solaris (the movie) are of their own accord… and since no one remembers the first Solaris (the movie) by Boris Nirenburg, the debate was really about Steven Soderbergh's third version (the movie)… I am not a fan… my friend is… we had great breakfast chat about it…

Alas, in real life, merits of movies over books (unlike in the case of Tarkovsky's sheer genius) are dubious. And there is 'scientific' proof to this conjecture: http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books-vs-films-the-infographic


So WLASze advice for the weekend - switch off that TV and grab a book…

And don't forget to smile, while reading… or reading for the sake of smiling… here's a candidate:
"‘Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder’: People who think they are drunk also think they are attractive" http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2044-8295.2012.02114.x/abstract
That's right: we fancy ourselves as being hot, when we are drunk… which begs a question: what do we think about our beauty quotient when we are so drunk, we no longer believe we are drunk?..

Enjoy WLASze sensibly...

25/10/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

This is the first WLASze: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics post of this weekend.

Enjoy!

Beautiful series of landscape photography from around the world:
http://www.theguardian.com/culture/gallery/2013/oct/21/awards-and-prizes-photography?CMP=twt_gu
From sublimely still:

To overpoweringly dynamic:

Best bit, the above link also offers links to 2010, 2011 and 2012 competitions.


From modern photography where every detail is given its prominence in light, motion and depth, to the first photograph ever that depicted people:
http://www.businessinsider.com/first-picture-of-people-2013-10
Irony is - the traces of people were all erased by the length of exposure… all but two...


I recently wrote about 3D and 4D printing (see here: http://trueeconomics.blogspot.ie/2013/10/4102013-wlasze-part-1-weekend-links-on.html). I even spoke about these two technologies as the signifies of the incoming change in global economic relations between core inputs of capital, labour and financial investment at a recent event… and now, art raced us all ahead of the reality:
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/10/20/mycelium-chair-by-eric-klarenbeek-is-3d-printed-with-living-fungus/

Living material interacting with 3D printed structure to reinforce it… the boundless capacity for tech innovation meets the boundless capacity for creative narration. And loses to it…

While on the topic: see this article about the emerging future of architecture in the age of 3D printing… http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/25/3d-printed-buildings-to-become-reality-in-the-not-too-distant-future/ Will we print our homes of the future? Sure we will. Will they look like a spiders-infested cave of post-apocalyptic plastic universe that reverses Lego into a fly-like dimensionality of human existence?.. I hope not…

Spare me this 3-bed penthouse…

It might look cool in dramatic light (no - it does not) but semantically and aesthetically it is equivalent to Zaha Hadid's obsession with curvature sprawled over any space to bury any dimensional proportionality to the living space around it... sort of like the image below, only taken through the filters of design:

And think about the cleaning bills… or the cost of watches and jewellery lost in all these twigs and twists of the surfaces of the 3D-printed cob-web-building… Then there are family dinners, with kids… Yeeks!


Let's get back to the clean(er) world of science and thought… JPL imagery of Saturn: the colorized mosaic from NASA's Cassini mission shows an infrared view of the Saturn system, backlit by the sun, from July 19, 2013. http://www.redorbit.com/news/space/1112979062/new-backlit-infrared-saturn-images-101813/

And for less dynamic imagery that is dead-cool: Saturn's satellite, the 'Death Star'(Moon) Mimas

Awe-inspiring...

27/7/2013: WLASze Part 1: Weekend Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics

This is the first part of my regular WLASze: Weekly Links on Arts, Sciences and zero economics posts for this weekend. Enjoy...


Let's start with some music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEB6bX35aHk
H/T to t.j greene @greentak : Gipsy Kings - Duende

And while on music front, memory brings me back to one of my most favourite composers of all times: Arvo Part's his Fratres was recently heard by myself and MrsG in Dublin's NCH. Different performance, but equally sublime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KddCQz_Ru_w


Of Fratres in us all… and science-linked, too: Nothing - emotively or nostalgically - comes close to seeing the Earth from outer space… and this photograph from July 19, 2013, the wide-angle camera on NASA's Cassini spacecraft, showing Saturn's rings and our planet Earth and its moon in the same frame does the job superbly:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/multimedia/pia17171.html#.Ue7tE2SglF_

Art merged with (sort of) science, or may be with just raw (accident-driven) curiosity?
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/07/who-knew-golf-balls-could-be-so-arty/?viewall=true
Images are stunning. My favourite?
http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2013/07/who-knew-golf-balls-could-be-so-arty/#slideid-27451
and

Reminds me of Kenneth Noland and Josef Albers. Kandinsky described circular form as one of the most natural and challenging simultaneously. Geometrically-speaking, circle is also conceptually one of the unique basic 'natural' shapes (Platonism)… go figure it is all inside a golf ball…


"The robots are even more baffled by Bernanke than the humans" - yes, I know - this is 'zero economics' post… but this is very, very good...
http://qz.com/108089/the-robots-are-even-more-baffled-by-bernanke-than-the-humans/
Need I to say that at a higher level - more 'Earth from Saturn' of a vantage point - Bernanke is baffling to humans too. But that has more to do with my Impossible Monetary Dilemma (you can search my blog for that to read my musings, or one of the summaries is here).


Prix Pictet photographer, Simon Norfolk, captures harsh reality of life in Afghanistan

Simon Norfolk, "The Disaster Season", 2013. Photo: Simon Norfolk for Prix Pictet

"After winning the coveted Prix Pictet commission, the British photographer Simon Norfolk travelled to Bamyan Province in Afghanistan's Central Highlands in February to shoot the landscape as it changed through the seasons. There the climate can wreak havoc on the local farming communities—May is known as the “disaster season”, when the sun melts the deep winter snow, sending it crashing down the valleys and often ripping through villages in its path. "Every year the beautiful, pristine blanket of white holds within it the possibilities of destruction and death," Norfolk writes in the Financial Times newspaper. Norfolk's series, also called “The Disaster Season”, depicts scenes photographed from the same vantage point roughly six weeks apart. The body of work is due to go on show at Somerset House in London from 10 to 27 October."

You can see more of his work here: http://www.simonnorfolk.com/burkenorfolk/photos.html

His other work - equally stunning:

Oak trees at Blenheim Palace, copyright Simon Norfolk. Read more: http://www.bjp-online.com/british-journal-of-photography/project/1650104/simon-norfolk-trees-blenheim-palace#ixzz2a5qMQuuV


Science and art: take a fixed spot in the sky. Take a shot every 10 seconds. Form a day-long movie of these shots. One movie per day over 360 days. Combine. Get: http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap130724.html Creative, imaginative, structured, replicable, not confirmable. Science and art. I loved this.


And then, take the most sacred in science (speed of light) and freeze it:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23925-light-completely-stopped-for-a-recordbreaking-minute#.UfITIWSglF9
"While light normally travels at just under 300 million metres per second in a vacuum, physicists managed to slow it down to just 17 metres per second in 1999 and then halt it completely two years later, though only for a fraction of a second. Earlier this year, researchers kept it still for 16 seconds using cold atoms."


But just taking fixed-point photographs does not guarantee attainment of value.
"A new exhibition by Magnum photographer Peter Marlow - opening today at London's The Wapping Project Bankside" - July 24th is an exemplification of the above statement.

Frankly, I'd run away from this parade of banality. As an architectural cataloguing project, this might fly. And the architecture is rather impressive, beyond any doubt. But as art this photography is static, boring, compositionally unchallenging and exploratively flat. Textures, tonalities, light remain unexplored, space is drained of its meanings.

Quote: "These days, Anglican cathedrals attract more tourists than churchgoers - though in some respects, both are arguably worshipping something greater than themselves. And while we wait with bated breath for the next 'starchitect' masterwork to be erected, it is worthwhile to remember that these religious shrines have withstood a test of fortitude (think two World Wars) far greater than any modern pinnacle might face - for centuries in fact."  Yes. But none of this has anything to do with Peter Marlow's effort, which, in the end, is itself a quintessentially a replica of the shallow tourist view… sans John Baldessari's capacity for sarcasm:

In contrast - a superb, absolutely superb work at the Irish pavilion at Venice Biennale 2013 offers an excellent viewing:

Panoramic landscapes from the range of geographies - rich, luscious, dynamic, juxtaposing war and peace, calm and tension, colour and depth - by Irish artist Richard Mosse's. Mosse uses infrared film to re-narrate space:

Ireland put one of the top 5 pavilions in Venice Biennale 2013, if not the best. Well done!


Stay tuned for WLASze Part 2 later… Enjoy… and think… and marvel… and question…