NeMe ReBlog

Margins of Time presents works by mainly Cypriot creators who have used Yiannis Ritsosʼ life and poetry as a starting point for their personal homage to the great poet.

Originally from NeMe by NeMe reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Oct 10, 2009, 6:43PM

The artwork A Dream Came Through started as an idea in 2006 and was developed in 2008 before the current capitalistic crisis and temporary rebirth of a social conscience in the Western World. 2006 was a time when a critique of the capitalist models of production of riches and their lack of distribution was neither fashionable nor intellectually sensible.

The focus of the artwork is on the interpretations and re-interpretations of the roles of the migrant and the politics of labor. The performative element of the project also challenges and questions the structural frameworks of labor by highlighting a condition of commodification and exploitation that is globally enforced.

Originally from NeMe by NeMe reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Sep 28, 2009, 7:00AM

Serpentine Gallery 17 - 18 October 2009 There is a long and vivid history of exchange between artists and poets. Guillaume Apollinaire made a literary connection to Cubism with his great work of 'visual poetry' Calligrammes: Poems of War and Peace 1913-1916. In the same period, Hugo Ball wrote the Dada Manifesto (1916), a movement in which the poet, essayist and performance artist Tristan Tzara was also closely involved. A decade later, in 1924, André Breton, the proponent of 'automatic writing', published La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution).

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Originally from e-flux shows :: rss reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Oct 9, 2009, 4:00AM

Reports of a flying sleigh and reindeers have been circulating throughout Melbourne from around 12:35am this morning. NORAD has been tracking the flight path of this UFO and can be found on the link below for further updates. The photograph above shows what looks like the navigation lights of the sleigh and an enlarged section reveals what clearly resembles a Santa-like vehicle.

Originally from shaun wilson research blog by Shaun Wilson reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

At a talk at the Pervasive Media Studio, University of the West of England, I mentioned a statement attributed to Thomas Huxley, doyen of Victorian science, that the oceans were effectively inexhaustible, and that we might throw into them and take from them as much as we please, and they would still feed us endlessly. I made the comparison with contemporary beliefs that the internet and digital communications can grow without limit. But of course, both the oceans – as we know to our cost – and the internet – as we will have to learn – are finite resources. But when I checked, the Huxley quote wasn't quite so mad: the more measured actual statement can be found in his Inaugural Address to the Fisheries Exhibition, London (1883) courtesy of The Huxley File.

Even without the "ta-da" moment that my misquotation provided, the point is still valid, I think: we act as if computing and network resources were unbounded. But materials, manufacture, use and recycling put boundaries round the materiality of internet and convergent media. The squalor and penury associated with extracting metals, building computers and recycling mobiles, TVs and digital devices are one half of a story which includes toxic waste, toxic working conditions, human waste from the maquilladoras, atnospheric and water pollution in the recycling villages of Africa and China, species and habitat loss . . .

Like any other form of organisation, maintaining the negentropy of the internet requires vast amounts of energy, physical and human. It also requires materials that are becoming more strategic and costly by the minute.

here are a few links that got me started:

Basel Action Network (2002), Exporting Harm: The High-Tech Trashing of Asia, http://www.ban.org/E-waste/technotrashfinalcomp.pdf
Basel Action Network, The Digital Dump: Exporting High-Tech Re-use and Abuse to Africa, http://www.ban.org/BANreports/10-24-05/index.htm, 2005
Boccaletti, Giulio, Markus Löffler, and Jeremy M. Oppenheim (2008), 'How IT can cut carbon emissions', Mckinsey Quarterly, October, http://www.mckinseyquarterly.com/How_IT_can_cut_carbon_emissions_2221
Cap Gemini (2008), 'Green IT Report 2008 The Computer Equipment Lifecycle Survey', http://www.capgemini.com/resources/thought_leadership/executive_summary_green_it_report_2008/
The Climate Group (2008), SMART 2020: Enabling the low carbon economy in the information age, http://www.theclimategroup.org/assets/resources/publications/ mart2020Report.pdf
Climate Savers Computing http://www.climatesaverscomputing.org
Duffy, Rosaleen (2005), 'Criminalisation and the politics of governance: illicit gem sapphire mining in Madagascar', Paper originally prepared for: ‘Redesigning the state? Political corruption in development policy and practice’ conference at IDPM, Manchester University, 25 November.
Gantz John (project director) (2008), The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe, IDC White Paper, IDC, Framingham MA, March. http://www.emc.com/collateral/analyst-reports/diverse-exploding-digital-universe.pdf
ITU (2007), ITU-T Technology Watch Report #3: ICTs and Climate Change, International Telecommunications Union, Geneva, December, http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-t/oth/23/.../T23010000030002PDFE.pdf
Koomey, Jonathan G. (2007), ‘Estimating Power Consumption by Servers in the US and the World', Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Stanford University, Stanford, February. http://enterprise.amd.com/Downloads/svrpwrusecompletefinal.pdf
Lyman, Peter and Hal R Varian (2003), How Much Information?, University of California, Berkeley. http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/research/projects/how-much-info-2003/index.htm
Stewart, Emma and John Kennedy (2009), 'The Sustainability Potential of Cloud Computing: Smarter Design', in Environmental Leader, Juy 20, http://www.environmentalleader.com/2009/07/20/the-sustainability-potential-of-cloud-computing-smarter-design/
Weber, Christopher L., Jonathan G. Koomey, and H. Scott Matthews (2009), 'The Energy and Climate Change Impacts of Different Music Delivery Methods' Final report to Microsoft Corporation and Intel Corporation, August 17, http://download.intel.com/pressroom/pdf/CDsvsdownloadsrelease.pdf

Originally from sean cubitt's blog by Sean Cubitt reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

3rd Riwaq Biennale 2009 presents A Geography: 50 Villages :: October 12 - 16, 2009 :: Riwaq, Nablus Road, El Sharafeh, Al Bireh, Palestine :: Opening: October 12; 9:30 am — Birzeit University :: Reception: October 12; 6:00 pm — Birzeit Historic Centre.

Can a biennale be a biennale in a state that is not a state? In a place that is so overwhelmed with visual realities? What if this idea can be understood as an artwork itself, leaving room to speculate on its own conception, validity and continuity?

These are just a few of the questions posed by the 3rd Riwaq Biennale, which forms itself first and foremost around a conceptual art project introduced by the artist Khalil Rabah. It follows the trajectory of his earlier work, such as The Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind, in (re)producing institutions that lie between fact and fiction. With a touch of irony, Rabah simulates the processes of national institutionalization and the assembly of national narratives through the collective and communicative structures that drives them.

Rabahs’ imagined institutions transgress borders, smuggling themselves into places where they can create havoc because of their ambivalent relation to the models that inspire them. As part of this process, he has created a dual presentation of the 3rd Riwaq Biennale: the first is set in Venice as part the 53rd Venice Biennale and functions as a biennale in a biennale; the second will take place in a number of venues throughout Palestine from 12th – 16th October.

The name, starting point and aim of the 3rd Riwaq Biennale were taken from the Ramallah-based NGO Riwaq - an organization that works on the protection and rehabilitation of Palestinian cultural heritage. Advancing the aims of this organisation has been the starting point of all editions of the Biennale and the Palestinian section of the 3rd Riwaq Biennale adopts Riwaq’s goal of rehabilitating 50 villages, while not being present in each of them.

Instead, it chooses a number of venues and platforms in the historic center of Birzeit as well as in other villages and their surrounding landscapes. Here, temporary interventions, gatherings and constructions of possible scenarios for the future will be presented.

As a journey between locations, the 3rd Riwaq Biennale does not feature any large-scale, central exhibitions, but consists of a series of trails, curated conversations and interactions in fragmented and disparate locations, reflecting on and moving through the fractured territory of Palestine.

A deliberate confluence of geographies, contexts and authorities, the 3rd Riwaq Biennale has the possibility to metamorphose in Palestine into a kind of ‘living art’ - an art that does not necessarily add to the environment but calls upon it as it is, reflecting a geography that we can never take for granted.

Biennale Curators: Charles Esche, Reem Fadda
Biennale Coordinator: Carol Michael
Biennale Director: Khalil Rabah

Program 12 – 16 October, 2009
Day one: Birzeit
Day two: Jerusalem, Bethlehem
Day three: Al Mazra’a Al Qiblieh, Birzeit, Jifna, Al Jalazon Camp, E’in Sinia, Silwad, Al-Taybeh, Jamma’een, Sabstiyah, Arrabeh
Day four: Al Zahiryyeh, Hebron
Day five: Ras Karkar, Ramallah

Birzeit University, Birzeit Municipality, Al-Rozana Association, Al Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Van Abbemuseum, A.M. Qattan Foundation, Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre, Popular Art Centre, Al-Mahatta Gallery, Hebron Rehabilitation Committee, Centre for Cultural Heritage Preservation, Palestinian Art Court – Al Hoash, Taybeh Municipality, Centre for Jerusalem Studies, International Academy of Art Palestine, Al Kasaba Theatre and Cinematheque, Ethnographic and Art Museum in Birzeit, British Council, Franco-German Cultural Centre Ramallah, ArtSchool Palestine, Al Kamandjati Association, Palestine c/o Venice, Nova Icona, Peoples Museum, Town House Gallery, EuroMED Heritage, Delfina Foundation, NG (Naser Golzari) Architect, Adam Mickiewicz Institute.

Originally from Networked_Performance by jo reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Oct 9, 2009, 9:49PM

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

One of the pleasures of participating in Urban Islands this past summer was meeting Johan Hybschmann, a recent graduate of the Bartlett School of Architecture and co-instructor, with Mark Smout, of one of the design studios hosted down there in Sydney. Johan is contagiously good-humored; even our pre-coffee, breakfast-less 7am ferry rides through cold winds across the Sydney Harbor in a surging boat were spent laughing. In fact, when I told him that my wife and I were about to celebrate our 7-year wedding anniversary... he started laughing.

Johan's projects at the Bartlett were a fascinating mixture of ornate technical detailing and abstract ideas: simulation, reproduction, and the nature of spatial perception. "The idea of visually connecting spaces has been my architectural obsession for a long time," he wrote to me in an email after we had all returned from Sydney, "and I find that perceptual/referential recognition [of specific spatial details] often plays a key role."

One of Johan's student projects, in particular, continues to astound me. What you're looking at in the images reproduced here (alongside Johan's answers to a series of questions I had posed over email) are painstakingly precise laser-cuts made into the pages of a blank sketchbook. As the book is opened and its pages begin to turn, these cuts work together to form a spatial representation of the single, highly choreographed 90-minute shot that is Alexander Sokurov's film Russian Ark.

The book's "content" is thus a three-dimensional, perspectivally accurate space.

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

From Johan:

The inspiration came directly from the single shot film sequence in Sokurov’s Russian Ark, where the camera is taken through the timeless spaces of the Winter Palace, jumping decades from one room to another. The distortion of time is, of course, interesting in terms of the timelessness of the spaces – but I was interested in the way that the camera never looks back. Even though the viewer never sees the full dimensions of these spaces, we are still left with a sense of coherence and wholeness. But what if the back of the room was mindblowingly different? It’s as if we constantly use the previous space to create an understanding of what should be behind us.

The book is an attempt to spatially prolong that perceptual idea. Two different spaces from the film sequence have been cut into each half of the book, as constructed perspectives. When the pages spread, the silhouettes of the elements visually collide, and the space within the book changes in character as the user travels through it by flicking through the pages.

You pick up a book, and you open the covers... and a series of rooms begins to pass by, like the frames of a film or sequences in a flipbook, and it's all due to laser-cut gaps and remainders. How amazing to think that we could slice entire works of architecture into all the books around us, so that "reading" a book would actually be a forward-moving optical journey through page-sized rooms and hallways.

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

The physical realization of this was actually quite difficult to work out. As Johan explained over email:

The book is made from layered silhouettes with inbuilt distorted perspectives that are laser-cut into the individual pages of a standard sketchbook. There is a drawing for each page, and these are all cut separately: turning the page, loading up a new drawing and cutting, page by page.

Aside from the seemingly overwhelming task of working out exactly how much or how little needed to change with each page, Johan also achieved a kind of spatial layering effect: the turning pages add (or subtract) from the structure of each "scene" you see.

[Image: The diagram of architectural outlines that was laser-cut into the book's pages, recreating the illusory volume of a cinematic space].

Rooms and perspectives shift; spaces blur one into the other, edited by laser; and the book re-enacts, on a bibliographic level, the act of watching Sokurov's film.

[Image: A project by Johan Hybschmann].

This project has a lot in common with another of Johan's student works.

In the following project, called "Replicating a Replica," he proposed "a redesign of the Federal Hall on Wall Street in New York City." Johan basically created two buildings that would occupy the same place at the same time, visually interlocking but spatially separate.

As you walk through the building, Johan explained, you would pass through a series of "choreographed viewpoints," or visual positions at which the spaces around you would shift. Here you would feel as if you are inside one particular building (a Museum of the Constitution, Johan suggests); there, even if only steps away, you would feel as if you were inside another building altogether (a Court of Law, for instance).

Each building would exist as if tucked inside the optically complicated spaces of the other. After all, Johan added, he is "interested in the spatial potential of being in-between."

The resulting model of the project was thus more like a small machine, moving between two states of being. In one state, it was simply a pile of loose wire frames and disconnected vaults; in the other, a battery-powered act of reanimation has brought these apparently discarded parts whirling back to life, forming a functional building space.

[Images: Another project by Johan Hybschmann].

The final images are fantastic: a building comes to life from whirring motors stored below.

[Images: By Johan Hybschmann].

Tying all of this together, and bringing us back to the laser-cut book project, Johan writes:

There is a scene in the film Blade Runner where Rick Deckard uses a machine to visually move around corners within a regular photograph. The machine traces all reflective surfaces in the “still-life” setting, and it collects information from objects represented from different spatial positions – but only from one viewpoint. This allows the machine to travel around the corner of the threshold within the photograph, but also to give an assumed image of what otherwise cannot be seen. Even though Rick Deckard gets a picture of a woman laying in a bed, we still have to consider that the image is constructed from distorted surfaces of mirrors and glass objects.

In some ways, the above description of Blade Runner could also be a description of the convex mirrors deployed throughout the Sir John Soane Museum, which distort and re-reflect the sarcophagi and Egyptian statuary scattered all around the place, making even the definition of a single room somewhat hard to settle on.

But it also ties in very nicely with the optical themes from Johan's and Mark's studio this summer in Sydney (which I hope to write about before too much longer): how we see architecture, how we visually comprehend built space, and what we might try to design in order to make this everyday experience both more complicated and more interesting.

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

Police in Los Angeles say a multi-million dollar Andy Warhol art collection has been stolen from the house of Richard Weisman. l.a. times

Originally from Archinect.com Feed reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Sep 12, 2009, 1:03AM

Originally from we make money not art by Regine reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

Natasha Tsakos presents and performs her one-woman, multimedia show, "Upwake." As the character Zero, she blends dream and reality with an inventive virtual world projected around her in 3D animation and electric sound. (Recorded at TED2009, in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 14:39)

Watch Natasha Tsakos' talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 500 TEDTalks.

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Originally from TED Blog by reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

Eric Giler wants to untangle our wired lives with cable-free electric power. Here, he covers what this sci-fi tech offers, and demos MIT's breakthrough version, WiTricity -- a near-to-market invention that may soon recharge your cell phone, car, pacemaker.(Recorded at TEDGlobal 2009, July 2009 in Oxford, UK. Duration: 10:10)

Twitter URL: http://on.ted.com/2V

Watch Eric Giler's talk on TED.com, where you can download this TEDTalk, rate it, comment on it and find other talks and performances from our archive of 475+ TEDTalks.

Get TED delivered:
Subscribe to the TEDTalks video podcast via RSS >>
Subscribe to the iTunes video podcast
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Subscribe to the TED Blog >>

Originally from TED Blog by reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

FILE Labo 2009 hosted Lev Manovich 's Cultural Analytics workshop on July 30th.
Take a look at the videos.
O FILE Labo recebeu no dia 30 de julho de 2009 o workshop do Professor e Pesquisador Lev Manovich, da Universidade da Califórnia em San Diego (UCSD), considerado um dos mais importantes pensadores da cultura e das mídias digitais na atualidade. Sua obra "The Language of New Media" (MIT Press, 2001), foi considerada a mais importante análise da história da mídia depois de Marshall McLuhan. Manovich apresentou o seu novo conceito de análise da cultura contemporânea denominado de Analítica Cultural (Cultural Analytics). Assista ao vídeo completo do workshop:

Originally from Software Studies by Cicero Silva reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

We completed two posters for SIGGRAPH 2009 Info-Aesthetics exhibition. The posters show some of the analytical and visualization techniques we have been developing in Software Studies lab as part of our work on Cultural Analytics. Each poster was printed at 100x60 inches.


GAMES POSTER ("HOW WE PLAY"):
design: Sergie Magdalin (UCSD undergraduate student)
data collection, analysis, visualization:
Colin Wheelock (UCSD undergraduate student; Calit2 summer 2009 undergraduate researcher)
Jeremy Douglass (Post-doctoral researcher, Software Studies Initiative, Calit2 + UCSD)


VIDEO POSTER ("MEDIA SPECIES"):
design: Sergie Magdalin (UCSD undergraduate student)
data collection, analysis, visualization:
Tara Zepel (UCSD Visual Arts PhD student)
Kedar Reddy (UCSD undergraduate student; Calit2 summer 2009 undergraduate researcher)
Lev Manovich (Director, Software Studies Initiative, Calit2 + UCSD)

Originally from Software Studies by Lev Manovich reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

The Bridge Homeless Assistance Center with public art by Gordon Huether receives an American Institute Of Architects (AIA) 2009 Housing Award.

The Bridge Homeless Assistance Center in Dallas, Texas was developed from a reclaimed industrial warehouse opened in May 2008.

It is a multi-purpose facility dedicated to serving homeless men, women and children, with a primary focus on the chronically homeless. The artist worked with the homeless to create seven art glass windows incorporating brightly colored mouth-blown glass, etched and silk-screened with text from writings of the shelter’s clients. The text is superimposed over the glass panels.

Originally from Northern Lights.mn by Peter V reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Sep 2, 2009, 3:03PM

[All this week, artist Bruce Charlesworth will be reporting from Ars Electronica.-SD]

3 Sept 2009

For me, events at Ars Electronica 2009 began last night with a presentation at the Lentos Kunstmuseum by multi-disciplinary American artist Tony Conrad.  Best known for his 1966 film The Flicker (which I saw in it’s mind-bending 16mm entirety, back in grad school), Conrad appeared in conversation with Chris Salter and talked about his interest in the margins between picture and sound.

Conrad performed his Bowed Film, an instrument made from a length of film spliced into a kind of lasso.  This he looped over his head, the long end tethered to the floor, and played with a violin bow.  Normally this would be a private experience executed by one person and heard on headphones.  Last night Conrad attached pickups to the instrument so that we could hear, too.

Later in the evening I went to the Grand Café zum Rothen Krebsen in Linz to see Ronnieism, performed by Ronnie Deelen. The small crowd was treated to a funhouse fusion of live-controlled music and video, composed on Gameboys and played on an instrument made of fifteen small stuffed toy animals.

Openings today in Linz include the new Ars Electronica Center, the CyberArts Exhibition at OK Offenes Kulturhaus and Human Nature at Brucknerhaus.  More about these events tomorrow.

[updated 09.06.09]

Originally from Northern Lights.mn by bcharlesworth reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Sep 3, 2009, 2:17PM

The famous Ars Electronica Festival turns 30 this year. The topic of the festival is Human Nature and my expectation is to see several discussions and talks focusing on desires and achievements of Humankind in relation to technology, art and society.

On the festival website it is stated: "We are entering a new age here on Earth: the Anthropocene. An age definitively characterized by humankind's massive and irreversible influences on our home planet. Population explosion, climate change, the poisoning of the environment and our venturing into outer space have been the most striking symbols of this development so far."

The schedule of the 30th Ars Electronica looks pretty intense and covers different fields of electronic arts and apparently there will be many interesting projects focusing on visualizations as well. This post mainly focuses on the projects related to the fields of infographics and data visualization.

In the Cyberarts Exhibition; Reconstitution from SosoLimited is one of the highlights for me. It is one of the nicest projects done based on the election debates last year. default the public, (Award of Distinction winner in Interactive Art category) brings a documentation about their public twitter display project. On the other hand, the new piece from Julius von Bismark (Golden Nica winner of 2008): Perpetual Storytelling Apparatus will take a place in the show as well. It consists of a device illustrating an endless story of the patents. Sounds very intriguing.

Mapping the Archive: Prix Ars Electronica from Ludwig Boltzmann Institute in collaboration with Moritz Stefaner is certainly one of the most interesting piece of the exhibition. I am very eager to see the massive data visualization of the Prix Ars Electronica archive they designed. Another event from the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute will be one of the side exhibitions during the festival: See This Sound (homepage). An exhibition which has 8 different sections to study the visualization and image of sound.

As many of you may know, the Ars Electronica Center completed an extension to its original building at the beginning of this year. The new building has an impressive façade consisting of 40,000 programmable LED lights. Façade Festival is a special event about this new 'toy' of the center and in the scope of this mini-festival there will be many façade visualization projects/performances. The Behind the Façade forum also looks interesting to learn more about how to produce projects for media facades in a city context.

MIT Media Lab is the guest school of the festival. In the campus exhibition, projects such as Proximeter - Ambient Social Navigation Instrument, Cartagen - Dynamic mapping framework, g-stalt: Gestural Interaction, Telekinesis, the Hand, and Cartoons and Sourcemap - Map of Open Supply Chains look very promising to see. For a full list of projects, you may check here. The second part of the Campus exhibition will consist of student projects from the Interface Culture department of the Art University in Linz. I will write another post about the Information Visualizations projects from The Royal Interface Culture Masquerade Ball.

As a bonus, I'd highly recommend not to miss the performance: datamatics [ver.2.0] meets unitxt Ryoji Ikeda & Alva Noto in concert. I am not really sure whether they performed at the same stage before, but it is obvious that the audience has really high expectations from this event. I hope that it will be one of the greatest data-noise-music performance!

Among the conferences an talks, I highlighted History Talks and Cloud Intelligence Symposium. New Media Pioneers (7th of September 15:30) has a really rich speaker list and Cloud Intelligence Symposium (5th of September 10:30) has a visionary topic about the role and effects of the digital artists in the future world.

Of course this is not all! There are many more projects from Human Nature, History Lounge and the Ars Electronica Center. During the festival week, Information Aesthetics will try to cover projects related to infovis and infographics from Linz. It is also recommended to follow the Ars Electronica Stream and #ars09 on Twitter.

This guest blog post was written by Mahir M. Yavuz, an instructor at Interface Cultures in Kunstuniversität Linz and researcher at Ars Electronica Futurelab.

Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe on Sep 1, 2009, 10:22AM

After reading around 300 entries for this year’s frieze Writer’s Prize, we – myself, James Elkins and Ali Smith – decided to award Jessica Lott the first prize. We liked her review because it was clear, smart, jargon-free and illuminating (it can be read here). She has been commissioned to write her first review for frieze and will receive a prize of £2,000. We also highly commended eight entrants: Christine Brueckner McVay, Ian Cowmeadow, Frederico Duarte, Annette Leddy, Taro Nettleton, Tessa Rapaport, Gabriel Sánchez Sorondo, and Emily Warner. Judging prizes is, in turn, a fraught, frustrating, illuminating process. It’s easy to let your concentration flag or let something or someone distract you mid-paragraph and it’s inevitable that, by the time you reach the end of a big pile of reviews of uneven quality, the speed of your judgement can be compromised by your levels of tiredness (which only serves to reinforce that the first sentence of any piece of writing is often the most important. It’s there to reel the reader in, however weary – a lesson that a lot of new writers could do with learning). However, nothing distracted us from the happy knowledge that this prize – now in its third year – has encouraged literally hundreds of emerging writers from around the globe to get in contact with us; we had entrants from the USA, Canada, UK, Australasia, Latin America, Europe and Africa. We are grateful to have been contacted by so many hopeful writers and fascinated to gain such insights into what ideas, artists and galleries are being discussed in various parts of the globe. The high level of response to the prize has vindicated our initial reasons for establishing the prize in 2006 – namely, to promote the discipline of art criticism at an international level. More people than ever are interested in, looking at and thinking about contemporary art – which means that more than ever intelligent criticism and interpretation are needed in order to help people navigate their way through this complex field. Compared to the amount of prizes and residencies offered to emerging artists, there are hardly any international prizes that encourage new writing about art. Hopefully, the frieze writer’s prize will help redress that balance. I’d like to make one thing clear though – frieze has always encouraged writers to contact us with ideas or feedback. If you’re interested in writing for us, we’re interested in hearing from you. Best thing to do is to email the appropriate editor a brief cover note and include some recent examples of your writing – and if your writing is clear, smart, jargon-free, entertaining, illuminating and original, then it’s more than likely you’ll be hearing back from us with good news.

Originally from Frieze Magazine reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

Sufficiently caffeinated from the morning’s bus coffee, Mark and I hopped on bikes and rode downhill to the seaside hotel in Leith. Fed, showered and shaved I ride back into town, noting the interesting shop fronts along the way.

[Link to slideshow]

The streets are packed with visitors to the Edinburgh Festival.

Later I meet up with Hungarian-American conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth and his family at the Talbot Rice Gallery, where he has an installation. Right now the family is living in Roma, which must be interesting — a lovely city, but I imagine it’s a bit hard getting things done and running an efficient organization out of a southern Italian town.

His show consists of quotes from Nietzsche and doodles by Darwin, interspersed and rendered in white neon. One has to “read” the exhibition. It’s presented in a room that was one of the studies where Darwin worked; this one originally contained thousands of stuffed birds. The frilly Victorian details add a nice touch; the columns along the walls serve to break up the texts at irregular intervals, making reading a bit difficult. Cleverly, Joseph arranged that the text fits perfectly, making a circle around the entire room and its little balcony. The Nietzsche quotes form an argument that art and creativity are the highest forms of philosophy… the Darwin doodles look like proto-genealogical trees, as if his hand was unconsciously figuring out how evolution worked.

Next door is a show by Jane and Louise Wilson based around some stuff they found in Stanley Kubrick’s archives. Here is an image from the Kubrick archive site:

Apparently he’d planned to make a film about a Polish-Jewish woman who passed herself off as a Catholic in order to save her family. The film was never shot, but a lot of screen tests with a young actress, and much location scouting, were done.

The Wilsons’ video shows the now slightly older actress re-enacting some of the earlier screen tests and poses, with her voice-over added. In another room were some of Kubrick’s location shots, which, to me, were truly bizarre. Like anthropologists or archaeologists he photographed banal details (windows, doorways, corners of rooms and stairways), always with a striped yardstick in the picture, sometimes held by an assistant. (The inches were alternately painted black or white, so they could be easily counted in these 8 x 10 prints — much easier than trying to see the little gradations on a regular yardstick.) As with archaeological and dinosaur dig photos, these give an accurate sense of scale — critical when one is looking at a photo of a fossilized bone fragment or a piece of partly buried pottery, but a normal Polish room interior? It seems a bit obsessive — a clue to Kubrick’s working method — and maybe that’s the point of the Wilsons’ inclusion and interest in these.

I wonder how many unfinished projects Kubrick had on the go? Another one was A.I., the film about a robot boy looking for love, which was eventually directed by Spielberg. Apparently the original story and script was a Kubrick project, and completing it was Spielberg’s way of making homage.

I meet the Kosuths at the Café Royal, where Joseph claims Princess Anne used to meet her lovers. It’s a baroque pub and café tucked away in an alley behind busy Princes Street, so it does seem plausible — though the place is too crowded for secret assignations these days. I have local food: black pudding (blood sausage) followed by local oysters. The food is gastropub fare nowadays — the black pudding isn’t wallowing in grease as it might be in a more typical Scottish café. Here there are dainty little greens sprinkled around it.

Originally from David Byrne Journal by David Byrne reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

I got an Amazon Kindle DX (the large-size one) before leaving on this last 6-week European tour leg. I thought that I could afford to be a guinea pig (it’s almost $500!) and try this way of reading. I loaded up a bunch of books ($10 for most, many just out) and some New Yorker magazines before I left, and as a result saved some space in my luggage, which usually gets filled with books I brought or purchased on the road. My luggage, as you can imagine, still got pretty full — mainly CDs and DVDs I was given — but a pile of books and magazines would have put it over the top. You can therefore “carry” more books than you might read, and if one is boring you can easily just dip into another.

Here’s my report.

The screen contrast approximates reading a newspaper — the background is off-white, rather than the ivory or white of most books. So it’s not super contrasty, but for me it’s OK — I didn’t feel eye strain. The device is heavier than a small paperback, but lighter than a hardback, so that part was no problem — and it’s MUCH thinner than any physical book, so it slips in a bag easily. The B&W screen isn’t so good with photos, though they’re often no worse than a B&W newspaper image. But, since most of what I was reading wasn’t photo- or chart-heavy, that was OK too. Reading The New Yorker, for example, was pretty great — no ads, you can skip around to various sections of the magazine, and the new issues download via a cellular network automatically.

There are a few websites that offer thousands of public domain books — Jane Austen, Dickens, Melville, Joyce and lots of wacky, forgotten, orphaned volumes as well. I got one by PT Barnum. So, if you wanted, you could have hundreds of books in this thing and not pay for any of them.

One of Amazon’s selling points is instant gratification. You want a book (at least in the US — there’s no coverage in Europe or elsewhere) and you can have it in about a minute — if there’s a Kindle version — and… you can shop only at Amazon (or through certain other Kindle content providers).

Here’s where the rub is. This machine only reads Kindle files and PDFs. And nothing else out there reads Kindle files. It can read other types of files — Word DOCs, MOBI, TXT etc. — but you have to go through Amazon via email, where they’re converted for a small charge, then sent directly to your Kindle. And, you can’t share a book with your friends, even if they too have a Kindle. No doubt, as with MP3 and iTunes, book publishers would only agree to this system if people couldn’t share their purchases. As we know, Apple has relented on this, and has taken DRM off many of their music files. But which ones? How do you know? Years from now, having gone through a few computers, your music collection is unplayable except for the files without DRM. Well, same with these books — if you migrate to a different tablet (the forthcoming Apple one we hear so much about, for example), you are fucked. All the unread books in your Kindle library are stuck on what will eventually become antiquated technology.

There are other e-book formats out there (EPub is being touted as a cross-platform format, but still, ugh, with DRM). I saw a guy at a bar reading a Kindle book on his iPhone, as the files are available for those and for the iPod Touch through an Amazon app, but it looked kinda tiny, and the backlit screen will drain a battery in a couple of hours of constant use. The slightly strange electronic ink system in the Kindle (and in the Sony Reader) has no backlight — so, like a book, you can’t read it in bed at night without a nightlight. This was an understandable tradeoff, as the battery life is unbelievable. With the wi-fi switched off (you only need it running to retrieve orders or magazine subscriptions), the thing stays charged for weeks.

Do I miss the “physical experience”? I will certainly miss being able to read books from my personal library, but if the title I want to read is all text it doesn’t make much difference to me. The smell will be a bit of nostalgia, as will fading and water damage. The Kindle only uses about two fonts at present, so some may miss type layout and design. But I suspect additional fonts will be added soon. On the e-book file I can still highlight sections to refer to later, and there’s a built-in dictionary! I forgot that! You put the cursor next to a word, and a little definition appears at the bottom of the page! Students will love that. I do.

[Source: left / right]

I hear that the Apple tablet will use a format that is more cross-platform, but will that mean I can share a book with my friend? It’s surely a way we make friends sometimes: “I just finished this GREAT book, do you want to read it? I’ll pass you my copy.” As with music, sharing things is a way of getting to know one another and a form of reciprocal debt — if I “lend” you my book, you sort of owe me… a book, or something. We’re linked now, which is how we use these things that represent our inner selves — as social connectors. Take that ability away, the ability to exchange stuff that represents us, and I’ll bet some of the “value” of these kinds of e-books goes too… the social interconnectedness value, not the dollar value.

The Apple tablet looks to have illumination, which will drain battery life really quickly in book-reading time (many, many hours on a train, plane, bus, back porch, bed) — but sometimes the color, photo quality and ability to read in low light that Apple promises (and the touch screen!) might win out. We’ll see. I do think, based on my limited experience, that if some of these bugs and proprietary issues can be worked out in any of these reader things, then yes, the future of reading (and of selling books) will be very different, whether it’s this device or another one.

The bookselling and publishing worlds will be shaken with repercussions. Imagine the hundreds of pounds of textbooks a lot of college students are expected to lug around every year — and pay hundreds of dollars for as well. And the resulting medical bills. If those textbooks can be sold as weightless $10 downloads the students and their parents will cheer, and the chiropractors will cry. A LOT of publishers count textbook sales as their bread and butter, because the poor students HAVE to buy them — which is why they are so damn overpriced. If the income from those textbooks shrinks by 90%, they’ll be hurtin’.

Likewise, if, as Amazon hopes, all books will be priced around $10, then publishers who regularly charge $25 for a new hardback (cheaper than a textbook) will also be crying. Or going out of business unless they jump on the wagon.

The upside for publishers is that with digital files there is a much lower distribution cost. There is still the expense of setting up and maintaining the e-commerce situation — which is not nothing, but it is mainly front-loaded. The ever-recurring printing costs, trucks, warehouses or even, ulp, percentages to bookstores go away. (“Hello, Tower Records, meet Barnes and Noble.”) So the printing and distribution costs will be significantly less — though there are still the costs and skills involved in marketing. As things move in that direction, it seems obvious that writers will begin to realize that the percentages and royalties they normally give up for those services — well, why should they pay them? Kinda like the music biz.

Another parallel to the music biz is that writers will be able to self-publish and distribute. Who knows what they’ll live on, but there won’t be any printing costs or distribution percentages to subtract from book sales. Just like the musicians (like me) who sell downloads from their own websites, writers will sometimes bypass publishers. Would Tom Clancy or Steven King need their publishers to print and distribute their latest? Hardly. Their fans, like Radiohead’s or those of NIN, will just buy directly from the author’s website. Amazon has already launched a test platform called Digital Text, which enables anyone to upload their work, suggest a retail price, and pocket 35% of sales.

Lastly, and scariest for publishers I guess, is that inevitably someone will hack the Kindle (or other formats) — and the books will become shareable… and copiable and infinitely reproducible, just like MP3s. People laughed at the record companies, with their reputations as money squanderers and for their waste and extravagance — but music hasn’t suffered, and writing and magazines might not either, especially if both writers and publishers can learn from the record companies and not pretend that publishing is any different.

Originally from David Byrne Journal by David Byrne reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe

[Image: Photo by Milos Bicanski/Getty Images, for The New York Times].

The massive system of wildfires burning right now in Greece, passing well into their third day and even threatening the perimeter of Athens itself – indeed, "racing" through the capital's outer suburbs and now visible from the Parthenon – presents international fire crews with a disaster burning "so hot that it [has] generated its own weather," the New York Times reports. There are "fire tornadoes swirling within the blaze, columns of smoke shooting up hundreds of feet and heat-created wind scattering flames in all directions."

Aside from genuine alarm at the scale and intensity of the blaze, I'm reminded of another book by W.G. Sebald, On The Natural History of Destruction. Paraphrasing from memory, Sebald offers incredible descriptions of bomb-induced fire storms whirling through the streets of Hamburg and Dresden, often forming tornadoes of fire, melting glass, and fueled by superhot vacuums. Huge voids are burning in the air of the city, racing through the streets faster than automobiles. The flames reached such horrifying temperatures that the cities Sebald describes became literal crematoria, incinerating everything – before collapsing in and on themselves as the fires burned out, leaving ash-covered piles of stone and brick behind.

Of course, this is an overly morbid image to conjure up right now – but the idea that these wildfires are generating their own weather systems as they move across the summer-dry hills toward the city, is both terrible and astonishing.

(Note: Oddly, between starting this blog post and finishing it, the New York Times seems to have removed the description of the fire-made weather, uploading a different article at the same link).

Originally from BLDGBLOG by Geoff Manaugh reBlogged by Natalie Demetriou for NeMe