Soft Cinema project mines the creative possibilities at the intersection of software culture, cinema, and architecture. Its manifestations include films, dynamic visualizations, computer-driven installations, architectural designs, print catalogs, and DVDs. In parallel, the project investigates how the new representational techniques of soft(ware) cinema can be deployed to address the new dimensions of our time, such as the rise of mega-cities, the "new" Europe, and the effects of information technologies on subjectivity.
At the heart of the project is custom software and media databases. The software edits movies in real time by choosing the elements from the database using the systems of rules defined by the authors.
It seems clear to a lot of us that there is a problem ...
What kind of art does the future deserve? How should we advance?
Much of the [current] work is repetitive and derivative in a way that starts to resemble planned cultural obsolescence.
A strange cycle has set in, whereby the most valuable attribute an artist can have is "promise." With a lot of big bets being placed, the artist has to be both young and verifiable. In other words, marketable. But almost none of our superstar artists have delivered on their promise.
This might be of interest to those who read these recent threads:
Lives Lived at a Monk’s Pace, Allowing Time for the Spirit to Flourish
Topic: Arts
7:10 pm EST, Mar 2, 2007
I hesitate, given the early date and the project’s modesty, to call “Into Great Silence” one of the best films of the year. I prefer to think of it as the antidote to all of the others.
No matter how much films may improve, their prospects are not likely to — which suggests that something has fundamentally changed in our relationship to the movies. The long, long romance may finally be losing its bloom, and that is why Hollywood should be concerned.
Movies were the barometers of the American psyche. More than any other form, they defined us, and to this day, the rest of the world knows us as much for our films as for any other export.
Today, movies just don't seem to matter in the same way — not to the general public and not to the high culture either, where a Pauline Kael review in the New Yorker could once ignite an intellectual firestorm. There aren't any firestorms now.
To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content.
The Internet ... plays to [a] powerful force in modern America and one that undermines the movies: narcissism.
Gary Bredow's documentary High Tech Soul: The Creation of Techno Music, a labor of love that chronicles techno's genesis via nuanced interviews and smart cultural context.
The film features: Juan Atkins, Derrick May, Kevin Saunderson, Eddie (Flashin) Fowlkes, Richie Hawtin, Jeff Mills, John Acquaviva, Carl Cox, Carl Craig, Blake Baxter, Stacey Pullen, Thomas Barnett, Matthew Dear, Anthony "Shake" Shakir, Keith Tucker, Delano Smith, Mike Archer, Derrick Thompson, Mike Clark, Alan Oldham, Laura Gavoor, Himawari, Scan 7, Kenny Larkin, Stacey "Hotwax" Hale, Claus Bachor, Electrifying Mojo, Niko Marks, Barbara Deyo, Dan Sordyl, Sam Valenti, Ron Murphy, George Baker, and Kwame Kilpatrick.
Why a physicist dropped everything for paper folding | The New Yorker
Topic: Arts
8:53 am EST, Feb 25, 2007
Not all career changes involve huge debts, but they are no less of a challenge (*) to those undertaking them.
Robert Lang kept folding while earning a master’s in electrical engineering at Stanford and a Ph.D. in applied physics at Caltech. As he worked on his dissertation —— "Semiconductor Lasers: New Geometries and Spectral Properties" —— he designed an origami hermit crab, a mouse in a mousetrap, an ant, a skunk, and more than fifty other pieces. They were dense and crisp and precise but also full of character: his mouse conveys something fundamentally mouse-ish, his ant has an essential ant-ness. His insects were especially beautiful. While in Germany for postdoctoral work, he and Diane were taken with Black Forest cuckoo clocks; the carved casings, pinecone-shaped weights, pendulums, and pop-out birds wouldn’t seem to be a natural for origami, but Lang thought otherwise. He started a job at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, in 1988, shortly after he had finished folding a life-sized cuckoo clock. It had taken him three months to design, and six hours to fold, and it made Lang a sensation in the origami world.
iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city. It is available for both Windows and Mac OS X and supports worldwide searches.
pick any artist, we'll build you a custom playlist featuring music by your artist and related artists. you can also click on one of the playlists featured below.
the mix tape evolved. you pick the songs. put your playlist on your blog with our player widget, it's the soundtrack for your life and anyone can tune in.
our community members are building new playlists everyday. the best way to discover new music is to have it recommended by a friend.
