Thoughts on dreams. A book with physical hyperlinks

“The book “’Traumgedanken’ (“Thoughts on dreams”) contains a collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts which provide an insight into different dream theories.
To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.”

More info here.

Se non ti piace, non lo guardare

Don’t watch if you dislike” è il titolo del canale Youtube di wendyvainity. Ma è anche un monito per il suo pubblico, per tutti gli utenti casuali che atterrano sulla sua pagina e riversano insulti e cattiverie nei commenti (Youtube è il regno di troll e haters, d’altronde). Ma a Wendy non importa granché del giudizio degli altri, e i suoi video lo dimostrano. Wendy non è una professionista del 3D, ma si diverte un mondo ad usarlo; lo fa senza seguire le regole, senza ricalcare nessuna estetica riconoscibile, senza aspirare al virtuosismo. Di lei sappiamo che vive in Australia, in una casa con giardino nei sobborghi di Adelaide, in compagnia dei suoi gatti, che è appassionata di giardinaggio e di “roba gratis” (“ma mi capita di comprare le cose quando veramente mi piacciono”).
Preparatevi: i video di Wendy sono assurdi e inquietanti, surreali e senza senso. Per non parlare della colonna sonora, un mix di effetti audio al limite del sopportabile per un normale orecchio umano. Quando li guardate, però, non badate alla tecnica, non cercate una narrazione, non affannatevi a trovare un termine di paragone, perché non lo troverete. La potenza di questi video sta nella loro sfrenata, irrazionale, libertà espressiva. Per dirlo con una sola parola, sono coraggiosi.

Leggete cosa scrive Wendy nel suo profilo. In poche righe, dice di più lei sulla creatività amatoriale nell’era di Internet di almeno una decina di saggi che ho letto ultimamente.

“try hard noob hobby animator, anyone can make movies with animation software, I am pretty crap at it as people like to let me know, but instead of having no uploads on their channels when I check them out after nasty comments, get Daz studio from Daz3d.com the basic program is free and a lot of fun. or try iClone by reallusion, the free demo is fully functional, you can do better than me so please do!”

Potete fare meglio di Wendy? Fatelo.

Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds

The italian artist group IOCOSE has thrown some real sunflower seeds on Ai Weiwei‘s porcelain ‘Sunflower Seeds’:

“The porcelain seeds, previously exhibited at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, are now part of a new artwork. The new artwork looks exactly the same as the previous one, as the natural seeds and those made of porcelain are indistinguishable from each other. IOCOSE reclaims the authorship of the new installation and reminds viewers of Ai Weiwei’s previous statement: ‘what you see is not what you see, and what you see is not what it means’.”

But who said art has to cost money?

Challenging thoughts in this Francis Ford Coppola interview:

“We have to be very clever about those things. You have to remember that it’s only a few hundred years, if that much, that artists are working with money. Artists never got money. Artists had a patron, either the leader of the state or the duke of Weimar or somewhere, or the church, the pope. Or they had another job. I have another job. I make films. No one tells me what to do. But I make the money in the wine industry. You work another job and get up at five in the morning and write your script.

This idea of Metallica or some rock n’ roll singer being rich, that’s not necessarily going to happen anymore. Because, as we enter into a new age, maybe art will be free. Maybe the students are right. They should be able to download music and movies. I’m going to be shot for saying this. But who said art has to cost money? And therefore, who says artists have to make money?

In the old days, 200 years ago, if you were a composer, the only way you could make money was to travel with the orchestra and be the conductor, because then you’d be paid as a musician. There was no recording. There were no record royalties. So I would say, “Try to disconnect the idea of cinema with the idea of making a living and money.” Because there are ways around it.”

[via kottke]

The Time Machine in alphabetical order

The Time Machine in alphabetical order, by Thomson & Craighead:

“The Time Machine in alphabetical order is a complete rendition of the 1960’s film version of HG Wells Novella re-edited by us into alphabetical order from beginning to end. In doing so, we attempt to perform a kind of time travel on the movie’s original time line through the use of a system of classification.”

[via vvork]

Photo report: Order and Progress

“Order and Progress is the first Italian solo show by the Dutch artist Rosa Menkman (Arnhem, The Netherlands 1983), curated by Domenico Quaranta at Fabio Paris Art Gallery (Brescia).
The title of the show, inspired by the Brazilian flag (Menkman developed one of the works on show in Brazil, during a residency at the São Paulo Museum of Image and Sound), is an ironic and cynical reference to the ideology behind all technological developments: an ideology that the artist combats with her obsessive exploration of the aesthetic, poetic and cultural consequences of the error.
Menkman’s work focuses on visual artifacts created by accidents in digital media. The visuals she makes are the results of glitches, compressions, feedback and other forms of noise.”

I took some pictures :-)

Demolish the eerie ▼oid from Rosa Menkman on Vimeo.

Every website is a monument

Every website is a monument is the first solo Italian exhibition of Greek artist Angelo Plessas at Gloriamaria Gallery (Milan). In his work Plessas combines animated drawings with domain names to create websites. He treats websites as places where we can imagine and experience objects, the same way we can admire a sculpture in a public space.

More infos here.