10,950 (931-1860) – Part 2
Jack London says “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” 10,950 follows the paradigm that to have success in any field you must practice a specific task for around 10,000 hours. For the next year I will be drawing 30 – 3″ x 2″ pictures a day, clubbing the basics of motion into something that is hopefully both beautiful and inspirational. 10,950 (1-930) is the first part of a journey as destination, the rest remains a mystery for now.

Film By: Kiri Hargie
Music By: Jake Anderson
Production Assistant: Rebecca Schraffenberger

02 Apr 12 | 10950 (931-1860) – Animation Part Two Release | No comments

TYPOGRAPHY

Mixel Typography is a hand made typeface by Senongo Akpem. The typeface was made with the new college app for the iPad, Mixel. Senongo is a Nigerian American designer in New York who works with digital interactions and websites. He loves to experiment with typography and letter-forms.

787

A 787 Dreamliner Drew the Boeing Logo Across the United States

INTERACTIVE

ZED
ZED is an immersive narrative experience that simulates an end of the world scenario and encourages its participants to engage with the story through various mediums. These include original online content, pervasive-style interactions and performance events linked to major arts festivals across Toronto throughout 2012. By charting the rise and fall of ByoLogyc, a fictional biotech corporation, ZED is an investigation into the hubris of mankind in its hurry to innovate and improve itself – regardless of the price.

MOTION

Crops (Gerco de Ruijter) from Michel Banabila on Vimeo.

Photographer Gerco de Ruijter who shoots aerial photographs of tree farms and pigeon’s-eye-view cinema of the city—has edited together a short stop-motion animation from satellite views of circular crop irrigation systems in the U.S. southwest.

Lillian Schwartz Youtube Channel

THINKING

A Crash Course in World History

Related Link: Crash Course

Arcades, Mall Rats, and Tumblr Thugs Web 1.0 vs. Web Future
Related Link: The Death of the Cyberflaneur

Any Sufficiently Advanced Civilization is Indistinguishable from Nature (and its garbage).

The Internet is a Major Driver of the Growth of Cognitive Inequality – “Moral of the story: the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter. If you don’t know how to use it, or don’t have the background to ask the right questions, you’ll end up with a head full of nonsense. But if you do know how to use it, it’s an endless wealth of information. Just as globalization and de-unionization have been major drivers of the growth of income inequality over the past few decades, the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality. Caveat emptor.”

Call Yourself a Critic? Art Writer? Art Commmentator? Art Critic? Hack?

A Chemist Uses Google’s Algorithm to Determine the Structure of Molecules

FILM-MAKING

A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock Part I

A Talk with Alfred Hitchcock Part II

PAINTING

Dear Painter … the role of abstraction in painting today

SOUND

Cube with Magic Ribbons by Simon Katan

3-D

Speaking in Blobjects – senusal evaluation instruments (objects)

21 Feb 12 | An Ode to Calling (Manic Monday – Linkage) | No comments

10,950 (1-930)
Jack London says “You can’t wait for inspiration, you have to go after it with a club.” 10,950 follows the paradigm that to have success in any field you must practice a specific task for around 10,000 hours. For the next year I will be drawing 30 – 3″ x 2″ pictures a day, clubbing the basics of motion into something that is hopefully both beautiful and inspirational. 10,950 (1-930) is the first part of a journey as destination, the rest remains a mystery for now.

Film By: Kiri Hargie
Music By: Jake Anderson
Production Assistant: Rebecca Schraffenberger

SCREENINGS:

25 MAY 2012 – Portland Experimental Film Festival
THE NEAR SIDE – @Studio Two – 810 SE Belmont St., Portland OR

15 Feb 12 | 10950 (1-930) – Animation Part One Release | No comments

TALKING / THINKING

Artists Respond to W.A.G.E. Open Forum with Hans Abbing.
Dutch artist/economist Hans Abbing, author of Why Are Artists Poor: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, lectured at Artists Space, the first of a series of open forums organized by W.A.G.E. Artists John Powers and William Powhida attended the event, here’s what they had to say.

Michel Foucault: Free Lectures on Truth, Discourse & The Self. Recordings of UC Berkeley lectures.

PHOTOGRAPHY

Afronauts, by Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel, creates an imagined futuristic landscape of Afronauts and science fiction. The works are an ongoing project exploring new landscapes of Afrofuturism.

ANIMATION

Block Alley from Andrew Sanderson on Vimeo.

Block Alley: Short animation playing with vovel animation, volselect method turned out faster than pflow + krakatoa, Rendered with single plate and HDR environment, 3dsmax + mental ray + after effects

CULTURE REMIXED


The Epic, Crowd-Sourced Star Wars

The Emmy Award-winning Star Wars Uncut project, in which hundreds of Internet users recreated scenes from the Hollywood classic, is now available online in all its feature-length glory. The undertaking began in 2009, when Casey Pugh, a developer at Vimeo at the time, created a platform through which users could select 15 second increments of A New Hope to reproduce. Using DIY production methods and delightfully inventive props and costumes, users delivered 473 clips (watch here). Now select scenes have been assembled into a director’s cut, with editing by Aaron Valdez and sound design by Bryan Pugh.

MOTION WORK

Colorful Colorado (1976) from Phil Morton on Vimeo.


Phil Morton’s Colorful Colorado

NEW / TRANS / MULTI MEDIA

On Scott Snibbe and shadow play.

Occupying the Internet: When New Media Artists Protest, by Hannah Collman

FLORA, Adafruit’s wearable open source electronics platform and accessories


Created by Bartholomäus Traubeck, Years is a record player that translates wood’s year rings into sound. Using a ps eye camera, the grain on the slices of wood is read and converted into music. Includes modified turntable, computer, camera, acrylic glass, veneer, approx. 90x50x50 cm.

It’s You’ and ‘All the Universe is Full of the Lives of Perfect Creatures’ are two most recent projects by Karolina Sobecka,

AWARD FOR THE MOST PRETENTIOUS SOUNDING PROJECT



Andrea Galvani: Work from Higgs Ocean

“Each photograph in the series records a singular moment in this transfer of energy; they are only simulacra of a process that continues—segments of an infinite vector.”

ARTISTS TO WATCH

Drew Moody NYC, USA. – Illustration/Sequential

Cynthia Daignault NY, USA. – Painting

24 Jan 12 | The Yearly Wail | No comments

Overheard returning to the theatre after Intermission:
Old Gentleman: there’s trouble brewing…
Old Lady: yep, they’re all gonna die!

Our instincts know how these things go, right? Mix revenge, aristocracy, religion, a hefty dose of Italian swaggoo and what do you get? Sex, lustful insanity, and dead people. Lots of dead people.(1)

If you’ve ever seen Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 adaptation of Romeo and Juliet you can instantly identify with the vibe of (I am Still) The Duchess of Malfi. There’s a certain “thing” about adapting really old plays into modern times… a certain smarmy something. Greasy, perverted, slightly off-key. You know what I mean? *wink wink* *nudge nudge*. It’s probably due to the fact that humanity should have learned something in the intervening 400+ years. Which of course it hasn’t. That’s okay, because we can still laugh at ourselves. You got the text, right?

And that’s where the Duchess of Malfi arrives, dragging her tired Prada shopping bags, and widowed and undersexed gams into the confessional cum dungeon, with one incestuous and one hyper-greedy-unfeeling zealot Cardinal, her brothers, dogging her. Of course her future lover-husband is a studly “mongrel” and her best friend a bougie hobaguette from the wrong side of the tracks with an intellectual streak. Last but not least, and lest we forget, our gay tour guide narrator, and the cyanide pill as revenge-filled assassin man, as the ultimate instruments of “they’re all gonna die” to round out the Duchesses’ entourage.

Because in the end it is all about The Duchess.

The staging is slick but spare resembling something between a bordello, a mob restaurant, and a castle dungeon. Which is par for the course as the narrator leaves us no doubt to the character of Malfi when he says that there is nothing “holy in the word religion”. But there is plenty of unholy in its residents.

Our tour guide narrates us through the machinations of Malfi during the first act, which felt more like a preface, a setup for the juicy bits which come round in the second. Liberal one liners set up Malfi as an echo-chamber of modern issues of corporate greed, fascist control, protest/revolt, familial obligations, and hypocritical Christianity. Praise be to God. Amen! Unfortunately some of the jokes seem forced (2), invoking snickers instead of guffaws. But then these issues can be uncomfortable in their familiarity. I wanted them to take the acting a lot further – I wanted them to make me feel a little bit dirty and sleazy and smarmy about these characters. I wanted to feel some emotional investment in them. Instead I felt a bit flat after the first act.

The second act opens with our heroine tied to a gurney in an antiseptic room with Mr. revenge-filled assassin man (Bosola), the lighting is shocking. She’s been kidnapped to a torture chamber and the streets are revolting. It’s “Duchess Spring” in Malfi. The extended battle of wits between the Duchess and Bosola is the first truly gripping scene in the play. The second a little later in the torture scene with her lover/husband Antonio. BANG BANG. They’re all dead. That’s it? Despite the 2nd act finally settling in a stronger brew, I found myself emotionally wanting more from the characters right up to the all good gays go to heaven end.

I’ll give the play a C+/B- in the ultimately enjoyable, but wanting more category. The heroine should have been more heroic, Antonio more naive, Bosola more angry, the Cardinal more sleazy, Ferdinand more crazy… I don’t know if its the weird unengaged combo of comedy and tragedy that doesn’t quite gel in the writing, or the acting of this particular combo. I do give props to the actors for keeping us engaged and never bored for the entire 2 hours despite the fact that I never cared a lick for any of the characters.

(1) My ears are still ringing from the gunshots.
(2) I think I was only one in the theatre that got the Shepard Fairey joke.

(I Am Still) The Duchess of Malfi
January 10, 2012 – February 12, 2012
Artists Repertory Theatre, 1515 SW Morrison, Portland, OR.
By Joseph Fisher, an adaptation of John Webster’s play
Directed By Jon Kretzu

This play runs with one intermission.

19 Jan 12 | (I am Still) The Duchess of Malfi (Review) Fertile Ground Festival – Day 1 | 3 comments

The black blank wraps. Tightly bound, but not forgotten. Brutal truth triggers set around every corner. Watch your step. Plead surrender. Portents seal the deal with strangers. A take down waiting in the wings. Waiting to pounce. Erase by retaliate. Censure by dollar for dollar. Censored out right. Wrong seeps, slithers, slimes Main St dollar by collar. Wound to wounding. Under control now. The future bleak from black respiration.


NO SOPA, NO PIPA

17 Jan 12 | The Black Out | No comments

Ok, so officially a week behind in going full bore ahead on Hargie. I have two big projects in production with deadlines and have been jam packed busy. Will this be the turning point?

IN PDX THIS WEEK

Fertile Ground Festival starts on Thursday 19 Jan. A festival pass is only $50. What a deal to see all the new shows!

(Our) eagerly awaited new documentary !WOMEN ART REVOLUTION by Lynn Hershman-Leeson is showing on 22 Jan at 4pm at the Whitsell Auditorium – Portland Art Museum – 1219 SW Park Avenue.

NEW/TRANS/INTERACTIVE/MULTI MEDIA

Alexei Shulgin and Aristarkh Chernyshev – Electroboutique


I would rather my street opened itself with all the stories it contains by Gui Machiavelli.

I have placed some of my memories created in Stockholm in the same places they were formed. Deposited in QR Codes as a memory layer on top of the world. Small narratives, from commonplace to slightly extravagant, from confessions to puzzling moments, hints of the countless brief experiences that populate our world.


450 Free Movies Online
from Openculture.

ANIMATION

The Monk and The Fish by Dutch-born animator Michael Dudok de Wit.

SCULPTURE

Where Math and Art intersect – MIT Mathematics PhD student Zachary Abel delights in discovering hidden patterns even in the most mundane of objects.

Grayson Perry at the British Museum

MOTION WORKS

Portrait of the ghost drummer from odaibe on Vimeo.

This animated drawing is a recorded motion path of drum sticks in process of performing rhythmic composition. Motion trajectory was captured by Vicon MX system, raw CSV files were translated into visual language in C4D.

A piece from the “Times Topics” section of the January, 28, 1898 edition of the New York Times enumerating the many names for the newfangled medium of cinema.

The Noise of Cairo (Trailer) from scenesfrom on Vimeo.

The Noise of Cairo

Twelve influencers from Cairo’s cultural scene lead us on a journey to understand the unique role artists played during the revolution in Cairo. This documentary bears witness to Cairo’s vibrant artistic underbelly, as it raises its voice once again. The artists of Cairo, who refused to quiet down, come together to be heard. These individuals create “The Noise of Cairo”.

THINKING & SPEWING

Bruce Sterling and Jon Lebkowsky’s: State of the World 2012

Cory Doctorow: A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future

ARTISTS TO WATCH

Jason Eppink – NY, USA. – Interactive Experiences & Etc.
A dude who is just trying to make things a little better.

Ben Woodeson – London, UK. – Sculpture.
Taking prolonged anticipation with a hint of danger to the max.

Anri Sala – Berlin, Germany – Film
Why the Lion Roars

17 Jan 12 | A Fish on Fertile Ground | No comments