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Showing posts from December, 2009

This is not finished

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It's too late for her wedding. It's too early for her funeral. I don't know what to do. Graphic artist Tanya Marie Williams has some decisions to make. SEE more of her 'Unfinished Ladies' here .

A steelpan cover of Joy Division's 'Transmission'?

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One does appear to exist. Was it a good idea I wonder? FIND out here .

# Computationnal neo-baroque / Projects by Tobias Klein and Jordan Hodgson

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" Ornament is a crime " wrote Adolph Loos in 1908. This sentence was opening one century of disdain for architecture's aesthetic developed by modernism. A hundred years later, a School claims for an embrace of ornament via computation. This approach of architecture is highly debatable since it seems to fully accept the role of the architect as only a embroiderer who would be able to express his creativity in non-essential elements (just like the French law which plans that 1% of every public building's budget should be dedicated to a piece of art). However, some people succeeds to design ornaments as fully part of the narration expressed by a project. Computation allows them then to populate a structure with an expressive ornamentation that register the resulting architecture in what we could call neo-baroque. Architecture becomes thus a materialized surrounding narration and computer seems essential to have a global and local control of the project (capitalism not a

# Street Packaging

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Each product around us got its own use and it is destinated to this one purpose, but sometimes the simplest things create the more interesting results being corrupted by a new employment. The exemple of the cellpohane is pretty relevant, I would like to present the work of two talented graffity artist, and one street artist, two very interesting approach of the cellophane misuse : a graphic one and a three-dimensional one, both in an urban context . Astro and Kanos , two members of the graffity crew ODV, are the creators of the Cellograff . This new style of street art/graffity, is a new way to paint in the street, painting with spray and being in an urban area, but getting out of the basic transgression cliché of illegal tagging.The Cellograff is more about to sharing an original piece of art and creating an ephemeral performance in an unexpected location than just writing a name. Following you can see few examples of their performances in the streets of Paris. CELLOGRAFF l'int

# Complex shaped art by Florian Claar

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Here is few exemples of the astonishing work of the tokyo based german artist Florian Claar . Between Art, Architecture and Science-Fiction, the art of Florian Claar is noteworthy for the approach of geometrical patterns and continuous surfaces, but moreover for the production's quality of the pieces. We can notice in each of his works the precision and the highly detailed finition that bring those scultpures to reality from the nano scale to the human scale . On his website you can see, for some project, a well documented part on the building process.

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// One flew over the cuckoo's nest by Milos Forman

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One flew over the cuckoo's nest is a movie directed by Milos Forman in 1975 interpreting Ken Kesey's novel from the same name. The heterotopia here is a mental hospital which tackles the question about one's madness and about devices of discipline within this kind of institution. The set of new rules here is frankly tyrannic and is justify by the supposed status of the patients. There is a lot from Foucault to read about history of madness and how a society is extracting from itself people who are not obeying to the same system of rationality in order either to put them apart, or even worst to re-educate them. When I observe that geniuses like Antonin Artaud or Camille Claudel have spent some time in those institutions (and institutional they are !), I have the intuition that the people we are calling crazy might just be people who had a glance at real freedom.

These films rocked this year

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This was a good year for films, especially if you lived in Trinidad and Tobago where the Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival (TTFF) really hit new highs, screening strong international films, and good local stuff like: The Solitary Alchemist , Coolie Pink and Green and Bury Your Mother . I've picked my favorite films for the year and judging from how many of you  LOVED James Cameron's Avatar  (which does not make my list I'm quite afraid to say) I figure I'm in for some serious slack for these choices. First of all, how DARE I declare Tomas Alfredson's  Let the Right One In to be the best film of the year, when most people never even heard of it or missed its screening here in Trinidad at studiofilmclub earlier this year? And why is fellow vampire flick  Twilight: New Moon NOT on my list? Didn't I get the memo about the pale and undead being HOT this year? 1. Let the Right One In (Låt den rätte komma in) You're getting beaten up in school everyday. It&

# HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA /// Stalker by Andrei Tarkovsky

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- How far away is that Room ? - If you go straight, about two hundreds meters, but there is no going straight here It has nothing to do with chance that the picture used for this theme's introduction of HETEROTOPIAS IN CINEMA was extracted from Stalker (1979) of Tarkovksy since the Zone is, as far as I am concerned, one of the best achieved heterotopia in the world of cinema. I wrote a small essay last week about the resistance to an institutionalization of power based on a study of heterotopia. Here is the little chapter I wrote about Stalker : Stalker is an interpretation of the Strugatsky brothers' novel called Roadside picnic . This example of heterotopia illustrates perfectly the adoption of behaviors set in a different system of rationality than the ones belonging to the normative world. It quite matches with the type of heterotopia that Michel Foucault calls: "crisis". In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would cal