Wednesday, 20 October 2010

The Icebook at Illuminate Bath and Illuminating York

The Icebook - A Miniature Theatre Show



The Icebook is a pop-up book that comes to life in front of an audience's eyes as if by magic. It could possibly be the smallest show in the world - a 3D cinema made from sheets of paper and light. Each page unfolds an animated miniature world, telling the story of a princess who lures a boy into the forest in order to warm her heart of ice. The Icebook is an intimate and immersive experience of film, theatre, dance, mime and animation designed for an audience of 8 people lasting 20 min.
www.illuminatebath.org







Location Bath: St. James Square, Bath, BA1 2TW (map)






Date/Time:Sat 6 November, Sun 7 November and Sat 13 November. Shows every 30 min from 12:00 – 17:00






www.illuminatingyork.org.uk






Location York: Deans Park, York, North Yorkshire YO1 (map)






Date/Time:Wed 27 October – Sat 30 October. Shows every 30 min from 19:00 – 22:00


 
 
 
 
The Icebook is a production by Davy & Kristin McGuire.

Friday, 1 October 2010

Gertrude Stein and Picasso: The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas

"All of a. sudden down the street came some big cannon, the first any of us had seen painted, that is camouflaged. Pablo stopped, he was spell-bound. C'est nous qui avons fait a, he said, it is we that have created that, he said. And he was right, he had" (Stein 1962, 84-85).

Wednesday, 29 September 2010

Visual Cultures 1

A classic TV series and a canonical text, John Berger’s Ways of Seeing is an excellent introduction to the complexities of visual cultural. Part one of this series draws heavily on the ideas of the German critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940). His essay is called ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) and is available in a collection called Illuminations (and on the website below). Benjamin questioned ideas about originality and authenticity. Berger’s use of Benjamin’s arguments is not only relevant to discussions of painting, photography, animation, film and television, but other areas of mass culture: the internet, computer games, magazines, newspapers, CD-ROMs amongst other visual cultural artefacts. When transmitted the images meanings are multiplied and fragment into other meanings and often jostle for attention alongside other images and pieces of information under gaze of a mass audience. Berger encourages us to view images as a language that can be manipulated to communicate all kinds of ideas.



Before this ‘technological age’, the invention of the camera and even before the invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg, images adorned the walls and stained glass windows of churches, their meaning singular. This was as Berger suggests the age of pilgrimage: we went to the images; they did not yet travel to us. Information came from one source and it resided in one place at one time, the camera, digital technologies and television changed all of that.
 
Berger, John Ways of Seeing London: British Broadcasting Corporation Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972






Texts of interest and linked to Berger and his book:
 
Clark, Kenneth Civilisation: a personal view London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1969
 
Web sources:

John Berger Homepage: http://www.johnberger.org/

Daniel Chandler Semiotics for Beginners, Denotation, Connotation and Myth
www.aber.ac.uk/media/documents/54b/sem06.html


The Marxist Internet Archive: Benjamin, Walter The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, 1936 www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ge/benjamin.htm





Digital Imaging and Photography Production II

The working title for project two is Dialogues in the Cities. Project 2:
  • Aims to build upon previous approaches to digital imagin
  • An attempt move away from imagery that is inward looking. 
  • An attempt to create work that has a social context. 


Pablo Picasso Glass and Bottle of Suze November 1912. A recent reproduction.


Picasso's collage seems to represent the public sphere in some way: the cafe and the newspaper. It also presents us with an image of modernist consciousness. I like Patricia Leighton's use of Charles Baudelaire to describe this image as a "true painting of modern life".


Rodchenko Photomontage For "About This" by Vladimir Mayakovsky 1923


The Rodchenko photo-montage is fascinating because of the way in which communications technologies are represented. It is as if the communication, the phone call, takes place through the medium of the city.




Dialogues in the Cities (2010)



Dialogues in the Cities (The Ecstasy of Communication: After Baudrillard) (2010)


The above pieces are attempts at combining and re-combining text and image and theory and practice. The top image is an unsuccessful combination of photographic imagery and a film still from Hans Richter's Dreams that Money can Buy.  

The bottom image presents a series of photographs combined with text from Jean Baudrillard's "The Ecstasy of Communication" from Hal Foster's Postmodern Culture  1987 p.132. 

This image is attempt to compress a variety viewpoints and representations into one moment.



Tuesday, 10 August 2010

Copyright approved

ADAGP has given me  its permission for the use of the Marcel Duchamp's soundpiece "La mariée mise a nu par ses celibataires...même" as a soundtrack only during the presentation of your MA project.




Adagp: www.adagp.fr - Banque d’images : http://bi.adagp.fr


Many thanks.

Wednesday, 4 August 2010

Total recall: Gordon Bell's Digital Life



One man has made an online record of every document, every location and even every conversation that he has had over the past decade. Channel 4 News science correspondent Tom Clarke meets Gordon Bell - one of the pioneers of the World Wide Web - to find out why such total recall is necessary.
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/total+recall+gordon+bellaposs+digital+life/3731782