Selected Courses on Digital Art-UOWM

10 Απριλίου 2013

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 16:48

Χάρβαρντ, Μασαχουσέτη
Μια πειραματική διάταξη που σχεδίασαν νευροεπιστήμονες του Χάρβαρντ επέτρεψε σε έναν εθελοντή να κουνάει από μακριά την ουρά ενός αρουραίου χρησιμοποιώντας μόνο τη δύναμη της σκέψης. Είναι η πρώτη μη επεμβατική σύνδεση ανάμεσα στους εγκεφάλους δύο διαφορετικών ειδών, λένε οι ερευνητές.

Το τελευταίο πείραμα, του οποίου τα αποτελέσματα δημοσιεύονται στην ηλεκτρονική επιθεώρηση PLoS ONE, έρχεται λιγότερο από δύο μήνες μετά την ανακοίνωση διαφορετικής ερευνητικής ομάδας ότι συνέδεσε με καλώδια τους εγκεφάλους δύο αρουραίων, επιτρέποντας στον ένα να αντιλαμβάνεται τα ερεθίσματα που δεχόταν ο άλλος.

Στο πείραμα αυτό είχαν χρησιμοποιηθεί ηλεκτρόδια εμφυτευμένα στους εγκεφάλους των δύο πειραματόζωων. Αυτή τη φορά, όμως, οι ερευνητές βασίστηκαν σε μη επεμβατικές μεθόδους: ο εθελοντής φορούσε ένα καπέλο με τα ηλεκτρόδια ενός εγκεφαλογράφου, ενώ ο αρουραίος βρισκόταν κάτω από ένα μηχάνημα που επηρεάζει την εγκεφαλική λειτουργία με παλμούς εστιασμένων υπερήχων.

Ο εθελοντής κοιτούσε μια οθόνη στην οποία ένα σχέδιο αναβόσβηνε με συγκεκριμένη συχνότητα. Όταν κοιτούσε την οθόνη προσεκτικά για λίγη ώρα, τα κύματα της εγκεφαλικής δραστηριότητας συγχρονίζονταν με το στροβοσκοπικό φως.

Ο υπολογιστής που ανάλυε τα σήματα από τον εγκεφαλογράφο αναγνώριζε αυτό το συγχρονισμό, οπότε έδινε εντολή στη συσκευή υπερήχων να ενεργοποιήσει μια συγκεκριμένη περιοχή του εγκεφάλου του αρουραίου, ο οποίος είχε αναισθητοποιηθεί ώστε να μένει ακίνητος την ώρα του πειράματος.

Πράγματι, ο εθελοντής μπορούσε στο 94% των περιπτώσεων να προκαλέσει μια μικρή κίνηση της ουράς του ζώου απλά κοιτάζοντας προσεκτικά στην οθόνη που αναβόσβηνε.

Η ερευνητική ομάδα, με επικεφαλής τον Σέουνγκ-Σικ Γιου της Ιατρικής Σχολής του Χάρβαρντ, παραδέχονται ότι το σύστημα λειτουργεί προς το παρόν μόνο ως διακόπτης «on/off». Εκτιμά όμως ότι η τεχνολογία θα βελτιωθεί στο μέλλον με τη χρήση είτε πιο σύνθετων ηλεκτροεγκεφαλογραφημάτων, είτε λειτουργικής μαγνητικής τομογραφίας.

Οι ερευνητές αναγνωρίζουν επίσης ότι η τεχνολογία διεπαφής μεταξύ εγκεφάλων μπορεί να βρεθεί σε γκρίζες περιοχές της βιοηθικής: «Είναι λογικό να υποθέσει κανείς ότι οι περαιτέρω βελτιώσεις στις διεπαφές εγκεφάλου-εγκεφάλου ανάμεσα σε ανθρώπους, καθώς και μεταξύ διαφορετικών ειδών, ενδέχεται να πυροδοτήσουν φλέγοντα ηθικά ερωτήματα που δεν καλύπτονται από τις σημερινές ηθικές έννοιες» γράφουν.

Ωστόσο, πριν αποκτήσουν οι κυβερνήσεις τη δυνατότητα να ελέγχουν τους εγκεφάλους των πολιτών, οι τεχνολογίες διεπαφής αναμένεται να χρησιμοποιηθούν σε τεχνητά άκρα τα οποία θα μπορούν να ελέγχουν οι ασθενείς με τη δύναμη της σκέψης.

video -vd insta-(re)-lations-inter-active vi-intrctive envrments

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 16:27

PS1
start creating history timelines
we nedd one main media history media

installation artists- video installations- experimental video

-ps1/ 99

από κάποιο site
« Pipilotti Rist »
Το αληθινό όνομα της καλλιτέχνιδας είναι Elisabeth Charlotte Rist. Γεννήθηκε το 1962 στην Ελβετία. Στην παιδική της ηλικία την φώναζαν με το ψευδώνυμο Pipilotti, παρμένο από το βιβλίο «Πίπη Φακιδομύτη» . Μέχρι το 1986 η Rist σπούδαζε εφαρμοσμένες τέχνες στην Βιέννη, και λίγο αργότερα σπούδασε Video art στο τμήμα εφαρμοσμένων τεχνών της Ελβετίας. Το 1997 με δουλειά της στην Biennale της Βενετίας, της απονεμήθηκε το πρώτο βραβείο. Από το 1988 και μετά, για έξι ολόκληρα χρόνια ήταν μέλος στους Les Reines Prochaines, μίας μπάντας-περφόρμανς. Το 2002 το πανεπιστήμιο της Καλιφόρνια στο Los Angeles κάλεσε την Pipilotti Rist να διδάξει. Ίσως γνωστή για τον φεμινισμό της κάποτε… τώρα όμως ζει με τον σύντροφό της Balz Roth και τον γιό τους Himalaya στο Los Angeles. Πολλοί νέοι καλλιτέχνες έχουν επηρεαστεί από την δουλειά της, και τα έργα της βρίσκονται σε πολλές σημαντικές συλλογές σε όλο τον κόσμο. 
Διάλεξα αυτήν την καλλιτέχνιδα επειδή από την αρχή μου τράβηξαν την περιέργεια τα μηνύματα που δίνουν τα ολιγόλεπτα βιντεάκια της. Όταν τα βλέπεις σου προκαλούν ένα χαρούμενο συναίσθημα λόγο των φωτεινών χρωμάτων, των ωραίων ήχων και του παιχνιδιού της ταχύτητας. Η Pipilotti Rist πειραματίζεται με όλα τα πρωτοπόρα για την εποχή της εφέ, και σχεδόν πάντα προσθέτει πάνω στην κύρια εικόνα μια άλλη εικόνα, ορατή καθαρά ή μη. Τα θέματα τα οποία θίγει είναι κοινωνικοπολιτικά με σεξουαλικά ή κωμικά στοιχεία. Κατά την προσωπική μου άποψη τα παλιά της βίντεο είναι καλύτερα από τα πρόσφατα, γιατί τα τελευταία της μου θυμίζουν βίντεοκλίπ.

chaos-maria-xaosx7-kinitikes ekfoniseis

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 12:51

Deterministic chaos and fractal complexity in the dynamics of cardiovascular behavior: perspectives on a new frontier.

Source

Division of Pharmacology and Toxicology, Faculty of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The University of British Columbia, 2146 East Mall, Vancouver, Canada. vijaysha@interchange.ubc.ca

Abstract

Physiological systems such as the cardiovascular system are capable of five kinds of behavior: equilibrium, periodicity, quasi-periodicity, deterministic chaos and random behavior. Systems adopt one or more these behaviors depending on the function they have evolved to perform. The emerging mathematical concepts of fractal mathematics and chaos theory are extending our ability to study physiological behavior. Fractal geometry is observed in the physical structure of pathways, networks and macroscopic structures such the vasculature and the His-Purkinje network of the heart. Fractal structure is also observed in processes in time, such as heart rate variability. Chaos theory describes the underlying dynamics of the system, and chaotic behavior is also observed at many levels, from effector molecules in the cell to heart function and blood pressure. This review discusses the role of fractal structure and chaos in the cardiovascular system at the level of the heart and blood vessels, and at the cellular level. Key functional consequences of these phenomena are highlighted, and a perspective provided on the possible evolutionary origins of chaotic behavior and fractal structure. The discussion is non-mathematical with an emphasis on the key underlying concepts.

diller-scofidio-ethics

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:29
http://www.dsrny.com/

Workshop on ethics and norms in recent European philosophy
Monday, May 6, 2-5p.m.
Research Unit in European Philosophy
Caulfield Campus: Room A 1.34 (the Clayfield Room).
Faculty of Arts – Monash University
PO BOX 197, Melbourne, VIC 3145 Australia
Dr Sean Bowden (Deakin U):
“Normativity and Expressive Agency in Hegel, Nietzsche and Deleuze”
Associate Professor Daniel W Smith (Purdue U, U.S.A):
“Deleuze, Normativity, and Judgment”
Professor Paul Patton (UNSW):
“After Critique: Genealogy and Normativity in the work of Michel Foucault”

steve reich-ballet-blach and white nederland theater

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:25

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/VFcJ0a3aBJs?version=3&hl=en_US

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 02:46
 Spoken Music
The poets portrayed in the Odyssey – Demodokos and Phemios – are singers. Ghandl’s poems were spoken, not chanted or sung, but they are musical in other important ways –
so much so that I think his work deserves to be compared to European music as much as to European sculpture and painting.
Musicologists like to distinguish between intrinsically musical abstract structures – fugues, sonatas, and so on – and program music, in which the composer has an extramusical plot to represent or an image to convey. The two kinds of structure very often coexist in the same piece – and the abstract structures of music have their counterparts, of course, in painting and in literature too. A painting or a poem can tell a story or represent an image and be rigorously abstract, or in some sense absolutely musical, both at the same time. Ghandl’s poem about the man who married a goose is an example. Consider, for instance, some of the symmetries in the poem.
It begins at a lake – a patch of water surrounded by land – where a young man falls in love with a soft-spoken, beautiful goose. It ends with the same man marooned on a reef – a patch of land
surrounded by water – where the man himself is squawking like a loudmouthed gull. At the center of the story is a pole that links the earth and sky. Either side of the pole is a series of tests and
exchanges, and framing these sequences are the two domestic scenes. The first is in the groom’s father’s house, where a vegetarian bride, who cannot speak directly to her mother-in-law, is
50offered food she cannot eat. The second is in the bride’s father’s house. There the omnivorous groom, who cannot speak directly to his father-in-law, tries to eat the same restricted diet as the
birds. In the groom’s village, the people insult the bride, whose connections with the skyworld have saved them from starvation, and the bride flies off. In the bride’s village, the groom insults the
people, who nevertheless respond with perfect courtesy, offering to fly him back to earth since he cannot fly himself.
There are more of these symmetrical inversions in the story,
but they are linked, like all good symmetries, to structures of
other, more dynamic kinds.
The old man gives the younger man a gift: a tool called skiiskil
tlxhahlgaaw, which is a marlinspike or bradawl used for working
with cedar-limb line. Then he instructs him to get eight things
for himself. The total is nine. At this point, every listener familiar with Haida narrative will know that there is one more gift to
come. In Haida, five and ten – tliihl and tlaahl – are perfect, or
consonant, numbers. Two, four and eight – sting, stansing and
stansingxha – are perfect numbers too, though in a different
mode or key. But nine is not. Nine in Haida is tlaahl sghwaansing
guu, “ten one minus,” or tlaahlinggiisghwaansingghu, “ten-lessone-many.” Nine is a dissonance. It is waiting to be completed. In
this poem, what completes the series is the mouse skin.
These ten items are like musical themes or motifs. They are
undissipated energies. All ten must be resolved in the unfolding
of the story. But Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas is an artist, who
likes to make a plot stand up and dance, so there is something
like a fugal structure to this aspect of the poem. The second subject – putting the ten medicine objects to use – begins before the
first, their acquisition, has come to an end.
The ten things are put to use in pairs, so five occasions are required. One of these occasions is the sky pillar itself. The other
four – symmetrically arranged around the pillar – involve extraordinary beings. Between their acquisition and their use, the
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ten charged objects, from marlinspike to mouse skin, are melodically and rhythmically recombined.
1
The rhythm and the melody involved have less to do with sound than with the order and the
tempo at which images are called before the mind – but they are called up in the context of a set of expectations and conventions, much like a system of musical modes or keys, which can work by
a mixture of statement and suggestion. Ghandl has to tell us that the salmon roe is used in combination with the mouse skin, but the other gift, the marlinspike, is never directly mentioned a second time. A reference to cedar-limb line and spruce-root cord is enough. That allusion brings the spike to mind.
The first pair of objects – oil and comb – goes to the holy fool:
a talented clairvoyant who cannot find his own lice.
(Elsewhere in the world, the same joke has been told of many wise men, including Herakleitos.) When a louse bites the back of his head, he turns around and looks for it behind him. This seer who is busy accomplishing nothing is followed by a woman who tries to do everything exactly as she is told. She is holding up the country:
Xhaaydla Gwaayaay tldaghawaay, the mountains of the Islands on the Boundary between Worlds. Beyond the pillar to the sky are two more figures – or two and a half. The first is half a man;
the second is a pair of fat old guys who act as one. The pair create the coho out of salmon-colored woodchips, while the halfman downstream spears them and puts them in his creel.
The structure created by these characters alone is a kind of complex narrative crystal, or a piece of conceptual music.
Butother structures are linked to it. On the terrestrial side there are the benefactors: the old man who lives at the edge of the village, and the Mouse Woman, whose large house is hidden in a clump
of ferns. On the celestial side there is a conclave of three carnivorous birds and a bear. Later comes another foursome consisting of three omnivorous birds – loon, grebe and raven – linked to a
man who is evidently also a bird, since his daughters are geese as well as women. In each of these two groups, one bird acts while the other two stand by. And there is one more bird in the last
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chapter two: Spoken Music
scene: the gull, who counterbalances the brace of geese with
which the plot began.
Very early in the story, the man takes one of the two goose
skins – his wife’s – and gives her one of his two marten skins in
exchange. After losing his wife, he gets two other skins: a coho
skin and a mouse skin, which is the only skin in the story that
comes with claws. This skin-swapping is linked to that innocent,
even irrelevant-looking transaction between the eagle and the
bear. The story of the bear getting claws from the eagle is a stock
piece of North American folklore, slipped into the poem like an
innocent bit of folksong inserted into a string quartet or sonata.2
But it fulfills here an essential musical function.
The human husband is in heaven, where he cannot stay. He
got there by means of a salmon egg and a mouse skin. Before he
can return to earth, the energy residing in these images has to be
resolved, the way an errant theme in music must be modulated
back to its home key. But this is narrative music; it is not performed on a keyboard; it is played by calling images into the
mind with spoken words. For the story to seem complete, tensions that are built up by that means must be discharged in the
same way. The energy of the mouse skin is resolved, or answered, by the transfer of claws from eagle to bear, and the energy of the salmon egg is answered by the woodchips that transform themselves to salmon.
Between these events comes another resolution or response.
The story began with two geese who came out of the sky and undressed, becoming recognizable as women. Both were caught,
and one was released, by a single man. In the sky, that scene is
answered by another in which the roles are reversed and the
numbers cut in half. The man comes up from earth, dresses as a
salmon, and evades being caught by half a man. These scenes balance one another much as episodes balance one another in sonata
form, and as figures balance one another in pictorial composition. The “unnatural” figure of the clawless bear also mirrors the
“unnaturally” meatless diet of the famine-stricken humans, and
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the bear’s unmistakeable politeness in dealing with the eagle balances the rudeness of the unnamed human whose words drove
the Goose Woman back to the sky.
The transfer of the claws is nicely symmetrical with another
event: the transfer of the spearhead from the hunter to the being
with one leg. It is, as we shall see, an old requirement that talons,
claws or fingers should change hands in this story. It seems that
they must also fall to earth – which they do when they are passed
from eagle to bear. The webbed feet and wings that belong to the
geese must also go back to the sky, and a man who masquerades
as a mouse and a coho must return to earth and water.
This structure was built by an artist enraptured by a story
that unfolds behind his eyes. And the story is more than just a
dance of the animal transvestites, a display of imagistic acrobatics, structural pattern or surreal cartoon ballet. It is grounded, let
us remember, in a poignant story of love and loss. It is grounded
in a world where perfection is perceived but imperfection rules,
and where humans and nonhumans sometimes both want more
than they can have.
Superficially, the story turns on the distinction between
xhaayda gataagha, human food, and hlgitghun gataagha, goose
food. The Goose Woman’s arrival in her human husband’s village, and the terms of her remaining there, are stated in a simple
sentence: Xhaayda gataagha waadluxhan gam lla taaghangas:
“She ate no human food at all.” Her departure is provoked by the
inversion of this sentence: Hlgitghun gataagha lla quyaada
ttlxhawgwa aa: “She thinks very highly of goose food.” Both a
famine and a feast intervene between these sentences. The Goose
Woman’s father sends the feast – but does he also send the
famine? Is the famine caused by the Goose Woman remaining
among the humans and in human form? If so, is the famine a test
for the human community to pass, or is it simply an inevitable
symptom of disorder in the world?
When her father sends food to the hungry humans, the Goose
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Woman tells them what is happening. Hakw dii xhaatgha dii gi
dangghattlxhattahlga, she says: “Now my father is sending
[something] down to me.” She speaks this sentence twice, to herald the arrival of two shipments of food. The complex verb she
uses, ghattlxhattahl, means “to move quickly downward.” This
verb will reappear, once only, later in the story – when the raven
delivers the Goose Woman’s husband back to the surface of the
earth. There the verb is differently inflected to form the second
half of a double subordinate clause (a convenient construction in
Haida which I cannot gracefully replicate in English). The prefix
changes too, from dang-(which points to the object of the verb)
to giit-(which points to the subject). The root form, nonetheless,
is unmistakeable:
Ll ghaaxhaghihljihliigaay dluu
lla dangat giitghattlxhattahldalaay dluu
nang qwaagadaaganga qqaayghudyas gha lla lla qqaa’adas.
When he grew very tired
and let himself fall with him,
he dropped him onto a shoal exposed by the tide.
The verbal echoes or thematic repetitions that are clear in the
Haida have been submerged in these line-by-line translations. In
the full translation with which we began, I added a phrase, “down
through the clouds,” to each of the three sentences in which the
verb ghattlxhattahl appears. “Down” and “through” have counterparts within that verb itself, but clouds are nowhere mentioned in the Haida. I put them in, to achieve in English a nouncentered echo equivalent in weight to the verb-centered echo in
the original. This is far from a perfect solution, yet I think something like it is required. The poem’s thematic echoes are not mere
accidents of language or ornamental rhymes.
•••
page 44:
lines
295–297
pages
35–36:
lines
79 & 89It is a tale of transformation, or transposition, as musicians say:
bird transposed to woman; man to bird. In the interim, a mouse
becomes a woman and her burrow a big house; a man becomes a
mouse and then a salmon; joy becomes despair. Dead redcedar
springs to life as fish with cedar-colored flesh, and passion and
devotion die. Even as the headman’s loveliest and youngest
daughter’s husband in a fine house overhead, a hunter’s life becomes routine.
But there are other transformations here, and other continuities, that summaries know nothing whatever about. In the beginning of the poem, when the hunter sees the women in the
water and the goose skins on the shore, Ghandl says, in two superbly simple lines,
Lla qindi qawdihaw
lla dawghattlxhasi.
After watching for a while,
he swooped in.
The verb in the first line is qing, to watch or to see. It can apply to anything with eyes (and that includes, in Haida biology,
the earth, the sea, the forest and the sky, and nearly everything that lives in all these realms.) The verb in the next line is dawghattlxha. It means to swoop in order to catch prey. It calls
to mind one class of creatures only: the small hawks and falcons
that in English are called kestrels, merlins and sharp-shins. In
Haida, these three species have one name: dawghattlxhaayang.
The hunter of the birds, transformed into a gull at the end of the
poem, was himself a bird of prey in the beginning.
After Swanton put this poem in writing, he asked Ghandl if it
had a name. Ghandl called it Ghungghang llanaagha gha nang
xhitiit ttsinhlgwaangxidaghan. This means “In his own father’s
village, someone was just about to go out hunting birds.” The
56
a story as sharp as a knife
pages
32 & 33:
lines 13–14verb used here includes a component,-xidi-, that makes it a verb
of anticipation or inception. The young man is getting ready to
go, or thinking of going, out to hunt birds, but he hasn’t yet gone.
In the opening lines of the story itself, Ghandl uses a different
form of the verb: not ttsinhlghwaangxidaghan but rather ttsinhlghwaanggwang, which implies that the hunting has begun. I
wonder if this subtle shift in the verb has something to tell us.
Should we take this story at face value as a tale of what happened,
maybe, once upon a time? Or does Ghandl’s title set it into a different context, as something that hasn’t happened yet but that
could occur tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow: something
like a dream, or a young hunter’s preparatory vision?
•••
It is easy to imagine – and not very difficult, at present, to go to
a few galleries and see – how the elements in Velázquez’s Supper
at Emmaus could be differently combined by other painters.
Rembrandt, for example, painted the same subject ten or twelve
years later, while he was still in his early twenties and living in
Leiden. There is very little chance that he had seen Velázquez’s
painting – a work by another young artist like himself, with as
yet only a local reputation, living 1600 sea miles to the south –
but Rembrandt also knew the story. He assembled the same figures on his canvas, while turning the arrangement inside out.
The result (never trimmed or overpainted) now hangs in the
Musée Jacquemart-André in Paris.
Rembrandt’s serving maid occupies the spot Velázquez gave
to the disciples. She is far off in the background to the left, perhaps suspecting nothing. Both she and Christ, who looms up
large and ghostlike on the right, are potent silhouettes. In the
foreground, also faceless, is a nearly invisible figure: a pilgrim
crouching down in sudden recognition. But at the center of it all,
as in a mirror, there is a face. It is drawing back, twisted with astonishment. It belongs to the other pilgrim – and to us.
57
chapter two: Spoken MusicGhandl’s poem, like Rembrandt’s painting, or Velázquez’s,
takes the form it does because that is the form its author gave it.
It has the human poignancy it does because that poignancy is
something its author had learned to perceive and communicate.
The images and themes of which it is made are largely materials
he inherited – and along with these components, he inherited a
narrative and visionary grammar for putting them together. He
could however have built them into a vastly different structure –
a more sentimental structure, for example, or a colder one, with
a lower emotional charge – just as any fluent speaker of a language can assemble a cluster of words into sentences with very
different values.
Pokhodsk is farther from Hlghagilda than Leiden from Seville. It is an overgrown mission station, trading post and neolithic
village near the mouth of the Kolyma, which empties into the
East Siberian Sea, 3000 rough and windy miles north and west of
Haida Gwaii. There in the summer of 1896 a Yukaghir woman
told several stories to a listener willing, like Swanton, to take dictation. I do not know her Yukaghir name, but a royalist Russian
missionary had given her another: Ekaterina Rumyantsev. Her
listener was a Russian political activist, anthropologist and novelist named Vladimir Germanovich Bogoraz.3
Ekaterina Rumyantsev had not only a Russian name; she had
considerable exposure to Russian colonial culture. She therefore
told her stories to Bogoraz in the Russian language. And some of
Bogoraz’s research in Siberia was funded, like Swanton’s work in
Haida Gwaii, through the American Museum of Natural History
in New York, at the instance of Franz Boas. The stories Rumyantsev had learned in Yukaghir and told to Bogoraz in Russian
were, for this reason, ultimately published not in Leningrad or
Moscow but in New York, in Bogoraz’s English translation.
In the absence of an actual transcription, there is no hope of
appraising Rumyantsev’s skill or stature as a mythteller, and no
hope of studying her work and Ghandl’s together on equitable
58
a story as sharp as a knifeterms. But one of her stories has something important to tell us,
even when reduced to English prose. Side by side with Ghandl’s
poem, it shows how the same events and characters can be assembled very differently by different human beings, just as the
same figures can be grouped very differently in different painters’ paintings and in different people’s dreams. This is Rumyantsev’s story as rendered by Bogoraz:4
T
here was a family of Tungus. They lived in a tent. They had
three daughters. The girls, when going to pick berries, would
turn into female geese. In this form they visited the sea islands.
One time they flew farther than usual. On a lonely island they saw
a one-sided man. When he breathed, his heart and lungs would
jump out of his side. The Geese were afraid and flew home.
After some time, they had nothing to eat, so they went again to
the sea islands for berries. Wherever they chose a spot on which to
alight, One-Side appeared and frightened them away. At last they
found a place full of berries. They descended and laid aside their
wings. They picked so many berries that they could hardly carry
them all. They went back to the place where they had left their
wings. The wings of the youngest daughter were gone. They looked
for them a long time. At last, evening came and the sun went down.
It grew very dark. The two elder sisters reproached the youngest
one: “Probably you have taken a liking to One-Side, and you have
asked him to hide your wings. Now remain here alone and let him
take you!”
She almost cried while assuring them that their suspicions were
unjust.“I have never seen him and never thought of him.”They left
her and flew away. She remained alone.
As soon as they were out of sight, One-Side appeared carrying
her wings. “Well, now,” he said. “Fair maiden, will you not consent
to marry me?” She refused for a long time. Then she gave in and
said, “I will!”
“If you are willing,” said One-Side,“I will lead the way.” He took
59
chapter two: Spoken Musicher to his house. It was the usual house, made of wood, with a
wooden Šreplace. He proved to be a good hunter, able to catch any
kind of game. Still he had only one side, and with every breath his
heart would jump out. They lived together for a while, and the
woman brought forth a son. The young woman nursed the infant.
But One-Side did not want to stay at home. He would wander about
all the time and bring back reindeer and elk.They had so much meat
that the storehouses would no longer hold it. He was a great hunter.
He hunted on foot on snowshoes, for he had neither reindeer nor
horses for traveling.
One time he set off to hunt as usual. Then his wife’s sisters suddenly came and carried the youngest sister and her little son off to
their own country. The small boy, while carried on high, shouted,
“O father! O my father! We are being carried by aunties to their
home, to their home.”
One-Side ran home as fast as he could, but he came too late.
They were out of sight. Only the boy’s voice was heard far away.
Then he shot an arrow with a forked head in the direction whence
the voices seemed to come, and the arrow cut off one of the boy’s
little Šngers. One-Side found the arrow and the Šnger and put them
into his pouch.
Then he started in search of his boy. He walked and walked. A
whole year passed. Then he arrived at a village. A number of children were playing sticks. He looked from one to another, thinking
of his boy. There was one poor boy who was dressed in the poorest
of clothing. His body was mangy, and his head was bruised and covered with scars. First, One-Side paid no attention to him, but when
he Šnally looked at this boy, he saw that the little Šnger on his left
hand was missing. He snatched the Šnger out of his pouch and
placed it beside the hand, and indeed it Št! The poor boy was his
son! “Whose boy are you?” asked One-Side.
“I am mamma’s boy.”
“And where is your father?”
“I have no father. I used to have one, but now I have none.”
60
a story as sharp as a knife“I am your father.”
The boy refused to believe it and only cried bitterly. “If my father were alive, we should not be so wretched, mother and I.”
The elder sisters had married and made their youngest sister a
drudge in the house.
“Why is your head so bruised and scarred?” asked One-Side.
“It is because my aunts order me to enter the house only by the
back entrance, and every time I try to go in by the front entrance,
they strike my head with their heavy staffs.”
“Let us go to your house.”
They arrived at the house. The boy went ahead and One-Side
followed him. They came to the front entrance. As soon as the boy
tried to go in, his eldest aunt jumped up and struck him with her
iron staff. Then the woman saw the boy’s father and felt so much
ashamed that she fell down before him.
He entered the house. They hustled about, brought food of
every kind, and prepared tea. They ate so long that it grew very late
and it was time to go to bed. On the following morning after breakfast, he said to his brothers-in-law, “Let us go and try which of us
can shoot the best with the bow! You are two and I am only one.”
They made ready their bows and arrows and began to shoot at
each other. The elder brother-in-law shot Šrst, but One-Side
jumped upward, and the arrow missed him. The second brother-inlaw also shot. One-Side jumped aside and dodged the arrow.
“Now I shall shoot,” said One-Side, “and you try to dodge my
arrows.” He shot once and hit his elder brother-in-law straight
through the heart. With the second shot he killed his other brotherin-law. Then he went back to the house, killed his wife’s sisters and
took home his wife and son.
One time he set off as usual to look for game. When he was out
of sight of his wife, he took off the skin that disguised his true form
and hung it up in the top of a high larch tree. He became a young
man, quite fair and handsome, just like the sunrise. He went home
and sat down on his wife’s bed. While he was sitting there, he was
61
chapter two: Spoken Musicabout to take off his boots. The woman began to argue. “Go away
from here! My husband will be here soon, and he will be angry with
me. He will say,‘Why have you let a strange man sit on your bed?’”
“I am your husband,” said he. “Why do you try to drive me
away?”
“No,” said the woman. “My husband is one-sided, and you are
like other men.”
They argued for a long time.At last he said,“Go and look at that
tree yonder. I hung up my one-sided skin on it.” She found the tree
and the one-sided skin, and now she believed him. Then she caught
him in her arms and covered him with kisses. After that they lived
happier than ever.
•••
Ghandl’s poem about the hunter who married his prey has been
spared the indignities visited on many works of indigenous oral
literature. It was transcribed in the language in which it was spoken, and it has quietly been travelling the world since 1905 in
Swanton’s admirably faithful prose translation. In that form it is
also the subject of a sensitive, close study by the poet Gary
Snyder.5
It is nonetheless a literary work that we have only just
begun to understand.
I have been calling it a poem and a piece of spoken music. That
is because I hear in it resonant textures and densities, and vividness and shapeliness and clarity that, for me, define the terms I
want to use. I cannot tell what terms to use for Rumyantsev’s
story, because Bogoraz’s translated paraphrase is all that now
remains.
Some things, nonetheless, can be known about the story on
the basis of the paraphrase alone, just as some things can be
known about a painting on the basis of a poorer painter’s copy or
a second-hand account.
The paraphrase can tell us, first of all, that the list of narrative
ingredients is very much the same – almost uncannily the same
62
a story as sharp as a knife– in Rumyantsev’s story and in Ghandl’s. The ingredients are
very much the same, but they are differently assembled by two
very different cooks, one of whom has learned the European
fairytale custom of serving happy endings for dessert. “The same
story” has become two wholly different meals for the mind. That
much is clear, though in the one case we can still attend the feast
– because we have the actual text – and in the other we can only
read the menu and collect the empty plates. There is no supper at
Pokhodsk because no one took dictation – just as, in the legacy of
Velázquez, there was once no supper at Emmaus because vandals, in whose hands the treasure rested, chose to have the
painter’s vision blotted out.
Digesting the sense of the world – of which we are made, and
to which we return – is just as essential to life as digesting its
physical substance. The mythteller’s art is as old, universal and
vital as that of the cook. The congruences between these tales told
by Ghandl and Rumyantsev are reminders of that fact. Drawing
on this old, shared recipe – as dormant in its way as Luke’s abbreviated version of the supper at Emmaus – and adding some
signiŠcant resources of his own, Ghandl could construct a work
of art that can stand beside the paintings of Rembrandt and
Velázquez or, I think, beside the sonatas of Haydn and Mozart. It
is a work of music built from silent images, sounding down the
years. It is a vision painted indelibly in the air with words that
disappear the moment they are spoken.
63
chapter two: Spoken Music

ethnopoetics-ubu-shaker-drawings

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 02:15

Spirit Message, 1843. Anonymous.

“The [Shaker] drawings … are documents of ‘visions’ taking a physical form that is, in most instances, highly contained and organized. Nonetheless, within this ordering are chaotic details and decorations, flourishes of line and color, as well as indecipherable texts and, alternately, those that read with heart-stopping clarity. A vision seen or heard by one Shaker member as a divine manifestation is then transcribed by another, assaulting on several fronts the modern notion of authorship. Whether intentionally or not, the Shakers contradicted many traditional notions of art-making, just as the relative freedom afforded them in their chosen home, the United States, allowed them to pursue a rigorous life of communal devotion very unlike the ‘cult of the individual’ that the new country promulgated.” (Ann Philbin and Catherine de Zegher, inShaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs, The Drawing Center, New York, and UCLA Hammer Museum, 2001.)

Shaker Visual Poetry (Gift Drawings & Gift Songs)

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing — called “Shakers” — originated in England in the mid-eighteenth century and soon centered around the person of Ann Lee (Mother Ann, or Mother Wisdom, or simply Mother), who became “the reincarnation of the Christ Spirit … Ann the Word … Bride of the Lamb.” The group practiced communal living and equality of the sexes, along with a reputedly complete abstention from sexual intercourse. After persecutions and jailings in England, Ann brought them to America in 1774, where for many years they thrived on conversions, reaching a maximum size of 6,000 before their demise in the twentieth century.
Between 1837 and 1850 (“known as the Era of Manifestations”) the Shakers composed (or were the recipients of) “hundreds of … visionary drawings … really [spiritual] messages in pictorial form,” writes Edward Deming Andrews (The Gift To Be Simple, 1940). “The designers of these symbolic documents felt their work was controlled by supernatural agencies … — gifts bestowed on some individual in the order (usually not the one who made the drawing.” The same is true of the “gift songs” and other verbal works, and the invention of forms in both the songs and drawings is extraordinary, as is their resemblance to the practice of later poets and artists.
N.B. “To be sure, the term drawing is a misnomer, because the Shakers did not use it themselves when they were referring to these works. In the few Shaker documents in which the gift drawings are mentioned, they are typically referred to as sheets, rolls, signs, notices, tokens of love, presents, rewards, hearts — sometimes prefaced by the adjective sacred. This definition focuses on the function of the works as gifts from heavenly spirits, rather than on the form in which the gifts were materialized. In fact, the gift drawings often include titles, captions, inscriptions, and extended texts, in English as well as in scripts written in indecipherable tongues, that place them on an uninterrupted continuum with other manifestations of belief, such as inspired writing, ecstatic movement, and spontaneous speech, especially in the form of song.” (Thus: France Morin, in Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs, The Drawing Center, New York, and UCLA Hammer Museum, 2001 — a book packed with generous examples, from which those shown here have been extracted.)

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 02:08
definition for ethnopoetics bu ubu.com


While the initial focus of ethnopoetics was on orality and performance, the discourse turned as well to the visible aspects of language — writing & inscription — both as a persistent contemporary concern & as an often unacknowledged kingpin of a revitalized & expanded ethnopoetics. In an age of cybernetic breakthroughs, the experimental tradition of modernist poetry & art has expanded our sense of language in all its forms, the written along with the oral. In doing this, it should also have sensitized us to the existence of a range of visual/verbal traditions and practices, not only in literate cultures but in those also that we have named “non”- or “pre”-literate — extending the meaning of literacy beyond a system of (phonetic) letters to the fact of writing itself. But to grasp the actual possibilities of writing (as with any other form of language or of culture), it is necessary to know it in all its manifestations — new & old. It is our growing belief (more apparent now than at the start of the ethnopoetics project) that the cultural dichotomies between writing and speech — the “written” & the “oral” — disappear the closer we get to the source. To say again what seems so hard to get across: there is a primal book as there is a primal voice, & it is the task of our poetry & art to recover it — in our minds & in the world at large. [J.R., adapted from The Book, Spiritual Instrument, Granary Books, 1996]
Shaker Visual Poetry (Gift Drawings & Gift Songs)

The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing — called “Shakers” — originated in England in the mid-eighteenth century and soon centered around the person of Ann Lee (Mother Ann, or Mother Wisdom, or simply Mother), who became “the reincarnation of the Christ Spirit … Ann the Word … Bride of the Lamb.” The group practiced communal living and equality of the sexes, along with a reputedly complete abstention from sexual intercourse. After persecutions and jailings in England, Ann brought them to America in 1774, where for many years they thrived on conversions, reaching a maximum size of 6,000 before their demise in the twentieth century.
Between 1837 and 1850 (“known as the Era of Manifestations”) the Shakers composed (or were the recipients of) “hundreds of … visionary drawings … really [spiritual] messages in pictorial form,” writes Edward Deming Andrews (The Gift To Be Simple, 1940). “The designers of these symbolic documents felt their work was controlled by supernatural agencies … — gifts bestowed on some individual in the order (usually not the one who made the drawing.” The same is true of the “gift songs” and other verbal works, and the invention of forms in both the songs and drawings is extraordinary, as is their resemblance to the practice of later poets and artists.
N.B. “To be sure, the term drawing is a misnomer, because the Shakers did not use it themselves when they were referring to these works. In the few Shaker documents in which the gift drawings are mentioned, they are typically referred to as sheets, rolls, signs, notices, tokens of love, presents, rewards, hearts — sometimes prefaced by the adjective sacred. This definition focuses on the function of the works as gifts from heavenly spirits, rather than on the form in which the gifts were materialized. In fact, the gift drawings often include titles, captions, inscriptions, and extended texts, in English as well as in scripts written in indecipherable tongues, that place them on an uninterrupted continuum with other manifestations of belief, such as inspired writing, ecstatic movement, and spontaneous speech, especially in the form of song.” (Thus: France Morin, in Shaker Gift Drawings and Gift Songs, The Drawing Center, New York, and UCLA Hammer Museum, 2001 — a book packed with generous examples, from which those shown here have been extracted.)

9 Απριλίου 2013

sound image relations

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 18:02

sound image 01.
 sound corresponds to another reading of the image http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Wi8sYY0pCdE?version=3&hl=en_US

02. http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/lJYLHoRqIsI?list=PLB8B45273ED41ADAD

state propaganda

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 17:58

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/O0D0E42AA4I?hl=en_US&version=3

Chantal Akerman

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 12:51
ΡΙΖΑΡΕΙΟ ΙΔΡΥΜΑ – ΕΚΘΕΣΗ ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΙΑΣ

Το Ριζάρειο Ίδρυμα για να τιμήσει την επέτειο των 100 ετών από την Απελευθέρωση της πόλης των Ιωαννίνων οργανώνει ένα κύκλο εκθέσεων φωτογραφίας με τίτλο:

ΙΩΑΝΝΙΝΑ 1913 – 2013
Ένας ιστορικός περίπατος στην πόλη

και θα περιλαμβάνει έργα σημαντικών δημιουργών που περιπλανήθηκαν στους δρόμους και τα σοκάκια των Ιωαννίνων, εμπνεύστηκαν και μας χάρισαν πλούσιο φωτογραφικό υλικό γύρω από την φύση και το αστικό περιβάλλον, τα ήθη και τα έθιμα, τα πρόσωπα
και τις ενδυμασίες, σκιαγραφώντας το προφίλ της πόλης την τελευταία εκατονταετία.

Απόστολος Βερτόδουλος / Κώστας Ζήσης / Λίλα Ζώτου
Άγγελος Καλογερίδης / Γιάννης Κόντος / Βασίλης Κουτσαβέλης
Γιώργος Μάκκας / Σπύρος Μελετζής / Κώστας Μπαλάφας
Ελένη Μουζακίτη / Βούλα Παπαϊωάννου / Άννα Παπούλια
Δηµήτρης Χαρισιάδης / Fred Boissonnas / Robert McCabe / Nelly’s

1η παρουσίαση : Δημοτική Πινακοθήκη Ιωαννίνων
Εγκαίνια :Σάββατο, 20 Απριλίου 2013, ώρα 19.00
Διάρκεια έκθεσης : 20 Απριλίου – 31 Μαίου 2013

ΟΓΑΝΩΣΗ – ΠΑΡΑΓΩΓΗ : ΡΙΖΑΡΕΙΟ ΙΔΡΥΜΑ
ΕΠΙΜΕΛΕΙΑ – ΣΥΝΤΟΝΙΣΜΟΣ : ΤΑΚΗΣ ΑΝΑΓΝΩΣΤΟΠΟΥΛΟΣ

ΔΗΜΟΤΙΚΗ ΠΙΝΑΚΟΘΗΚΗ ΙΩΑΝΝΙΝΩΝ

ΔΙΕΥΘΥΝΣΗ Κοραή 1 , 45444 Ιωάννινα
ΤΗΛ. 26510 75131
Fax 26510 75121
mail pinac1@otenet.gr
Ώρες Λειτουργίας Δευτέρα ως Παρασκευή 9:00 – 13:00 &
18:00 – 21:00.
Σαββατοκύριακα 10:00 – 13:00 &
18:00 – 21:00.
Εισιτήριο: Είσοδος Ελεύθερη







Chantal Akerman

On absence and imagination in documentary film: An open discussion with Chantal Akerman

Akerman: Film is a heroic work, compared to installations, where you can see the result right away, sometimes after making a single gesture. When you make movies you only see the results of your work much later. Most of the time, even for experimental films, you have to write something in order to get money. I know what kind of person is going to give me money for a documentary, and in fact I write for that person, so I have to go into his mind and guess what kind of writing this person wants. There is only one person in France who can give me money for something like an experimental documentary, so I write for his head – later maybe I do something else, and even if I do he says ‘It’s exactly like your writing!’. A Couch in New York was another kind of work entirely, a commercial work. I loved writing it, it was easy for me, but I was writing for different people. Sometimes I’m wrong. I wrote a beautiful text about the Middle East, not immediately political, I didn’t want to talk about the Jews and Arabs, but something like my film From the East. I wrote an enormous text, they didn’t understand it. In a documentary I never know what I will do. I go there with no plan. In a way it’s terrifying.

Audience: But isn’t there a story somewhere, like with James Bird in South

Akerman: I just wanted to make something about south. The James Bird story happened months after my decision to make something about the south. In From the East there is no story. So it’s frightening because you don’t know what is going to happen. You have to be so attentive to yourself. You are in a little bus with three other people. You have to try to totally ignore them, nothing should interfere between you and what you see. You have to be totally open like a sponge. You start to shoot something, why that? What’s going to happen with it? How it is going to take place in the movie, you have no idea. So many times, I have just been lucky, I was there. You have to be very confident, it asks much more confidence to go with no sheets of paper. In another sense it’s very exciting, too. Until the very end of the shoot you don’t know how those shots are going to fit into a movie, and whether there will be a movie. After we didSouth I thought when we came back from the shoot that we probably had something but that I would have to go back and shoot for three more months. I said to my editor, ‘Let’s try to put it together to see what kind of things I would need to build something’. When we edited it, however, it was a movie and I didn’t have to do anymore. Everyday when we were shooting I was saying ‘there is nothing’.

Audience: People talking about your work often draw associations with Warhol, Bresson, Dreyer and Snow. Do you think any of these references help to understand your work?

Akerman: I’m closer stylistically to Dreyer than any of the others. For example, when you see some shots of Jeanne Dielman sitting and you just see her face, I would love to never have the truth of her. It’s a lost cause. The dream side of someone, which is also a lost cause, you want to reach that in a way. If it’s a wall face, then as another you can reflect or project things which are also very rich. In a way it’s really a tension between these things that I love to work with, a face like a wall where you can project, or a face that you think you can see inside.

Audience: This tension would seem to be something like that between writing and film, in writing there’s a sense of entering into an interior, and with film you are moving across the surface.

Akerman: When I was young my dream was to be a great writer. I did write a lot, but I was still so impressed by the great writers. I always say well at some point I will finish, I will not make any more films and start to write. It’s totally silly and subjective, but writing is the most impressive medium for me.

Audience: I remember thinking that South has a really writerly quality to it, because, very much like a sentence, each image only made sense in its being adjacent to the next image. It was like this accumulation of images that ended up gathering meaning, and history became ingrained in the images so that when you saw a static image later in the film it was deeply embedded within the context of the situation.

Akerman: Imagine if I had to write South. It would never be finished. It would be a book with no end, if you have to put everything in the book. As a filmmaker, you impose a time that you cannot be imposed when you produce a book to read. I think that reading is a freer act than viewing a movie, because you put your own rhythm into it. When you give someone a movie to look at, you take away ninety minutes of his life. It’s an enormous difference, and that’s what something I’m very preoccupied with in my movies. I think that my movies have a kind of violence in the way I use the time, a very subtle violence, and instead of being a violence of explosion, it’s a violence of implosion. It’s a violent act when I push a shot as far as I can until it is just unbearable, and then I give another shot and you breathe again. It’s a violence done to the body of the viewer, because it’s becoming a physical experience. When I saw Bresson for the first time, I couldn’t stand it, I was crazy about him immediately. Something violent happened to me. As much I as adore him, he violated me. This is not my goal, it’s what happens.

Audience: In class you said as an example that it’s much more powerful to show a tree than to talk about it…

Akerman: I wouldn’t say it’s more powerful, exactly. When you say in a book ‘there was a beautiful green tree.’ You don’t see it exactly, you can make it up. If you see a tree on the screen, and then you have a woman speaking about lynching, then it’s opening your imagination. It’s usually by the addition of another image which is an opening. You can’t make images about the camps, for example, because that would be it. A book of that won’t close your imagination. You can write a book about the camps, it won’t ever be finished, unlike if you made a film. Images in succession can open your imagination, but an image by itself tends to close it off.

Schirmacher: The ‘closing’ argument is a typical argument in criticism of visual culture, it’s true for people raised in a literary culture, but it may not be true of people raised in a visual culture. For example, one of my favorite movies,Natural Born Killers had more images and faster shots than ever had been used before. People said ‘it’s impossible to get’ but it’s not true. There is a generation which can handle the so-called ‘closure’, for them it’s not a closure, there’s no image anymore on its own, every image only calls over another image.

Akerman: That’s what I was saying.

Schirmacher: You were saying the image has the power, and I agree to some extent, to close your imagination.

Akerman: But by itself! It’s not the same as with two images in tension together.

Schirmacher: There is no other definition of imagination than that it calls for another image. When I read, it’s also a stream of images going through my head. In a film it’s the same, it doesn’t limit my power to change images. It only makes it harder, I understand that, it makes it harder in a certain way because the images seem to be more impressive. But this is for people who are not used to a visual culture.

Akerman: I don’t think that people have changed so much, first of all, and I take my mother as the best example. She can take everything, maybe not images about the camps. That’s the real point about images. What are you allowed to show about the camps? That’s the biggest thing a filmmaker should ask himself. It’s the same problem whether you’re talking about documentary or fiction.

Audience: I’ve heard this argument a lot, that the image inspires much less in the way of imagination, but I don’t think that’s true, especially in some of the things we’ve seen this week, particularly the scene in ‘South’ with the rope. Part of the reason that’s so moving is because the way you film your movies gives the audience a lot of time to think about other things. As you’re traveling down that road, all of us are thinking about images we’ve seen before, the event itself…

Akerman: That can’t be done in writing. You can feel the same thing but it’s totally different strategy.

Audience: I think in a way it’s sort of the same nebulous, it’s just a different way of coming in at it. Instead of providing a couple of words that inspire you to go beyond, you supply a couple of images. I think there’s a sense sometimes in criticism that the image is somehow explicated, that you can’t imagine a different kind of tree because the tree you see is the tree you get.

Akerman: If I would have shot the scene of the three kids killing the black guy, I think it would have been much less powerful.

Audience: We’re talking about visual images, but precisely in film duration is an aspect. So the singularity of the tree shot opposed to the tree described is one component of visual culture. The singularity of the tree or that road with that duration in which your mind plays over it, rejects it, wanders away, comes back, then that road becomes more and less symbolic through that duration. I don’t think the text versus image argument can be properly delineated unless we know if we are talking about visual static or visual duration.

Audience: I’d like to hear you speak a little more about the physical violence that you feel you do to the viewer. I feel you’re very coercive in your filmmaking. As you’re planning your shots are you in a way choreographing the more visceral response of the viewers?

Akerman: I do it for me. For example, when I edited The Captive I tried to make it as tense as possible, so that you are swallowed by it, you can breathe less and less and less.

Audience: Right when they’re on the road, driving to the sea, that tempo is so intense that I felt like she had to die at that point, it felt like it had to explode.

Akerman: That’s narrative, but there’s also something physical. I think what is more coercive is not so much what you can think about the narrative, but what the film does to you physically. Forgetting about the narrative. I know it’s part of it but in a way there is something also abstract that works on you, you’re feeling like you can’t breathe. I want to return to discussing images of the camps, because the Americans took some images of the camps when they arrived there. When you see those images, they are totally frightening and horrifying, of people totally destroyed. With the image alone it is not possible to be totally aware of what it was for the people to be in that situation. In a way images are foreclosing, and it’s totally right for an extreme case, because images will never say what the people have gone through. In a way that’s why you should have other strategies to speak about it.

Audience: You actually have geography stand in for this thing that’s heavily tinted with this history. The weight of history is so present that the tree is the lynching tree of the South, there’s many referential meanings, histories, personal relations.

Audience: Your experience of going to the concentration camp and seeing the whole thing in images and not being able to film it because of the experiences of the people who went through the Holocaust is actually the contrast of what you said you were doing before in your film. There, you could focus on certain images and try to talk about the whole, try to reflect what you wanted to reflect. But you actually didn’t prefer that there, regarding the camps, because it was so intense?

Akerman: When you see history since the war from 1938 to 1944, what happened in Cambodia, Korea and Vietnam, it’s probably one of the most awful centuries. I think that as an artist it’s hard to work on that, even when you don’t think you’re working on it, it comes through. There are other strategies than filming the facts, in order to make people feel something and not just see something. Of course when they see they also feel but for me it’s the wrong strategy to film the Holocaust. I haven’t seen Schindler’s List. I think Lanzmann’s film was the best, I know some people say ‘Enough, stop that ‘Shoah’ business’, but I don’t think it will ever be enough. Especially since time is passing and there are new generations. We should do more. As a filmmaker it remains one of the main questions.

Audience: I think there’s another issue when it comes to filming something that is so devastating and also so encapsulated in time. With the American films of Jews in camps, there’s always a question of what was edited it out. I went to a performance and when we walked in the door everything was pitch black, then they showed on an enormous high wall projections of the outtakes from American concentration camp films, so pictures of piles of eyeglasses, hair, shoes, it was horrifying. To me I’d only ever seen the images of people suffering. When I saw the abstract images it was somehow more compelling as an artistic choice. Maybe you only have ten minutes as a news clip to put something out there.

Audience: I think there’s something else here that doesn’t have to do specifically with images. What you’re saying is that by showing something so specific you’re closing it off. This is the Holocaust. By suggesting something, a situation or a problem, because there have been many genocides since the Holocaust and there are many people who don’t want to acknowledge that. What’s important about watching South is the feeling that this can happen again, and that the situation is continuing.

Audience: Because it’s a feeling, not a concrete record in time and place. It’s not specific to one death, one event. That’s what becomes powerful about it. The end shot could be any road, not even just in the United States. There’s no fixed face in terms of the incident or the victimizers. You have reference points but the continuity between your films is this allowance, this range, this singular pointing to something which is a kind of violence to the viewer because you don’t let the viewer relax or go elsewhere. You remain with a respectfulness that is not normative in documentaries, you don’t claim that a story can be arrived upon, that the truth can be revealed, that the end will come.

Audience: So it’s strategy of not showing the event, but the spaces around it, the shadows that it casts.

Akerman: This is the case for both Resnais’ Night and Fog and for Lanzmann. Whatever doesn’t say, ‘That was it.’ Because that’s never it, it’s always more. If we want to confront what we’ve been through in the twentieth century then we have to speak about strategies of showing things.

stan brackage

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 12:50

Stan Brakhage
 

Dear Stan

Stan Brakhage was a friend and fringe filmer. Shortly after retirement, he became ill with cancer. Izabella Pruska Oldenhof organized a package to be sent to him from a number of Toronto filmers, thank-you valentines for a half century of inspiration. Too late as it turned out. He died on March 9, 2003.

Dear Stan,
I remember when my friend Alex dropped by to visit. I had recently come down with shingles, a ‘memory plague’ which followed the lines of my body as it once created itself, radiating from the center outwards. Ever faithful to these early meridians, severe and debilitating, it threatens to join the end of life with its beginning. I never imagined that much pain could squeeze itself up into one body until the lesions started to spread, but I had no idea how bad I looked until Alex got to the door. He tried to be discreet of course, and careful and kind but he just couldn’t keep the open-mouthed horror off his lips. He’d always been a voluble speaker, able to hold forth on the secret life of plants (“Plants are much more important than people, Michael. Not because they create the atmosphere, but because they’re reliable”), movies of course, and a topic which he invariably steered every conversation towards: his mother. But when he arrived he couldn’t find any of his words, which left us both looking across the years at the face I used to have, and the one I have now. We waited in a silence occasionally punctuated by magnificent efforts of speech from which each of us slumped back, until he stammered his apologies and left. I think he’ll never stop apologizing for that afternoon no matter how much I apologize right back to him. He was speechless because he didn’t know how to behave. It was all new to him.

What do you say to someone who looks like they’re dying?

I remember the first time I saw you at the Funnel, Toronto‘s once fringe film theatre. I had heard of you of course, you remain one of those (blessed or cursed) with reputation, even read a couple of your books, or tried to, seen some of the so-many movies, once hitchhiking fifty miles to Hamilton where Zone Cinema promised an evening of Brakhagia. I arrived at an unheated office space where seven of us huddled around a projector and one of those screens dad used to pull down when it was time for home movies, trying to make some sense of pictures that moved faster than we did. The organizer announced, just before turning on a machine borrowed from the local library, that he preferred the structural cinema of Snow and Benning, and that all the films were silent. Lacking even the most basic tools to unpack this work, your pictures stood beside me, waiting for even a glimmer of understanding which I’m afraid never arrived. I was thrilled nonetheless, wanting to see the program again as soon as it was finished. I put a lot less stock in making sense then than I do now. My interiors, the root cause of feelings which seemed new every day, all this was a mystery to me. I had hardly left my teen years behind, though emotionally I was a good deal younger than that, and the notion that movies should be organized in a coherent, linear fashion seemed quaint and old-fashioned. The movies I loved were riots of colour and sound, and if I couldn’t tell good from bad, well that was alright too, for a while, though I remember watching Mike Snow’s Wavelength and wondering, why are we still in this room? But at the same time, how lovely it was to be able to think my own thoughts, have my own feelings, and be able to come back to his film, still reliably zooming down that same loft. But your films were never like that, my eye forced to jump splice dams, searching the frame, following that moving motion picture camera, absorbed from the very beginning in the adventure of vision. I didn’t know where I was going, and that made me a lot happier than it should have.

You had just finished the first of what would be a quartet of films about Faust. I don’t recall much of that evening, though there are moments of this first Faust which have stuck, a blue light mostly which didn’t seem to be projected onscreen but to emerge from it. Out of this light a figure was being born, a friend and familiar but also something larger than that, some idea of what a person could be, if only we dared, if we could ever admit to ourselves that we could want that much. If we would take that risk, which was also the risk of seeing. The promise the film held, at least for those with heads large enough to hold it, was that the act of viewing was a kind of dare. Your neural processing had turned into grain and emulsion, and following these lightning synaptical joists would surely re-wire the electricity we used to make decisions of our own, and so we emerged from the theatre, ripped out from the roots and reseeded, no longer certain of anything but the cost of understanding.

I don’t remember much of that evening. But you spoke for a long time, all those beautiful words arriving one after another, as if they belonged there in the air between us. And at the end of the night, too confused and shy and moved to venture a question, I walked out at last to find you slumped in a chair, nearly midnight now, outside the main door. My friend Gary asked you something which you answered graciously, though you were clearly exhausted, it had been a long night, and you signed off by urging blessings on us both.

Moments later, puffing up cigarettes and walking we didn’t know where, excited to be back on streets that looked no longer familiar (which was just the way we wanted them), Gary turned to me and said, “I think we were just blessed by Stan Brakhage!” I made a quick inventory of my insides wondering if I could feel the shift that might allow me too, perhaps, one day, to make good movies, or at least understand when I was in the presence of one, but I couldn’t tell. It might have been too early or too late, all that mattered now was getting to the next drink. Confusing movies and drinking until I couldn‘t anymore. Life really was simpler then.

You were supposed to be difficult and angry, partner to legendary feuds that survived as avant after burns, whispers and rumours, but when you appeared it was as genial host and guide, freely mixing moments of your own life with the poetry of Olson, riffs on Gertrude Stein, tangents into plein air painters who struggled to find with their brushes a stroke that could mime the natural world. You said your camera moved in just the same way, carving out spaces and cavities in order to show more faithfully the intersection of viewer and viewed.

You said that before it rains you could see soft white streaks in the air. It was just a question of noticing what was already around us.

You always had a slightly off-look in your eyes, like you were taking in two things at once, dashing quickly between two moments in the visual field, even if you were just speaking with a friend. Seeing was a practice which didn’t start with the camera. It never made you seem less attentive or anything, it wasn’t like those schmoozers who are always looking over your shoulder at a party waiting for someone higher in the food chain to stroll by. Not at all. But neither did you evidence the fascinated stare that Fitzgerald describes as Gatsby’s most winning trait, that made one feel one was the only and most important person in the universe. I think you regarded this fixed stare as something like perceptual fascism. You seemed, on the contrary, always on the lookout for the moment between things, before ‘in the beginning was the word,’ nodding with the great splicer of the world as seemingly unrelated events ran together to produce new kinds of happiness.

Your movies were never silent. All the books said they were silent, even the inscriptions on the can carried the word: silent. But each screening was furnished with prelude and benediction, and as the years went on you intervened further, allowing us a taste, a small movie, before taking up the stump again, and talking. When you sat back down again and the lights dimmed there was no sound from the projector, but that was unnecessary now, your words, beautiful words, were still echoing through the room, deepened somehow by the silence which accompanied them, and the pictures which occasioned them. Night after night you would raise the attention of the room, work us up so we would have enough energy to find the thread, though most of us wouldn’t carry it for long. You seduced us with that voluble memory, quoted poetry, occasionally complained or blew up, told jokes. Not getting us in the mood exactly, but firing us up to speed so we could climb back inside the spotlight of your face.

You had come to bear witness, but without your speaking, many of us wouldn’t have been able to see a thing. I know you thought of your speaking as a kind of curse, and announced yourself on many evenings as a failed poet, that pictures held the place you had hoped for words. I remember that famous Spanish mathematician, who one day ascended the podium to accept his Nobel for a lifetime of numbers, only to express bewilderment and rage at an unsuspecting public. He too was a poet, had written many volumes of verse, even published a few, though all were ignored or treated at best as curiosities. He was a poet trapped in a mathematician’s brain, condemned to calculation.

In the late 1980s you moved to Toronto and we were pretty jumped up about that. It was a hard time for fringe movies here, the city divided into camps, churches of sub-belief and obscure doctrines. You could lose your best friend by enjoying the wrong kind of movie. I was working at Canadian Filmmakers then, a distribution outfit which had offered a job with the preposterous title of “experimental film officer.” As if desires this personal and arcane could ever be policed. You arrived with about a hundred titles under your arm, films I’d read about in books and interviews, and I was thrilled. Somehow it made everything more real, as if the building’s foundation was finally being settled.

You remember that moment at Innis College when you screened a brand new print of Dante’s Quartet? That movie was a real marker for you, the first of what would turn out to be a decade and a half of hand-painted works. This one had been printed onto 35mm, a rarity owing to expense, and when it ran the colour was so thick I wanted to dig into it with a spoon. When its few minutes had run out you spoke again, taking us into each of its four sections, telling us the why and how of it without nailing it all down. Then you asked if we might see the film again. But when it appeared the second time, in place of the pristine beauty of a print fresh from the lab, a large, ugly scar cut through the heart of the screen. Clearly, it had been ruined in its very first projection, and there was something like a funeral hush in the room. When the lights came on again everyone held their breath, wondering what you were going to do. Leave? Throw a fit? But no, you stood calmly and talked about the marks of aging, the cost of going on, how the bodies of film and maker were growing old together. There was no way to guard against accident and illness, you remarked, not unless you shut your life up in a room.

Like Leonard Cohen, you were always standing on the front line of your life.

I watched all the hundred movies you brought in that year, and a bunch more besides, and came to the conclusion, reached by many before me, that the only person who should be making films is you. It was crushing, I can admit that now, though trying to keep me from your next can, the next moment of emulsion, was impossible. I devoured the literature, argued with my friends, became a fan. My own work was also changing, again, unlike many I’d never settled into a style, a signature I could call my own. This has something to do with those of us born with Scorpio rising. I began an ersatz-Brakhage period, making bad imitations, shaking the Bolex, trying to get up to catch the moment as it slipped on by. It kept right on slipping past me while you just soldiered on, making that incredible City Streaming movie which seems both a portrait of Toronto and a love letter to Marilyn, the woman who was not yet your wife. But soon, very soon.

Looking back I feel that I’d stepped a little too close to the sun, which was radiant and warm and the source of all light okay, but get too near… This I know, it’s so obvious to me now, was never your intention. Your insistence on amateur status, on making it personal, means just the opposite. No recipes in this kitchen. Everybody makes their own way, and if there’s an occasional nod to tradition it means only there’s a signpost or two on a map we’re each drawing as we live it, like the map Borges describes which is as large as the country it depicts.

I was still looking for a father, in art at least, and there you were.

My immersion in the microverse of your work coincided with an unforeseen discovery of my own. One day I received a call from the Red Cross who informed me I was HIV positive, and that I should go see my doctor right away, though it turned out he didn’t know much more about it than I did. Unlike many others who handled themselves with grace and calm I just threw myself into work a little harder, imagining every weekend might be the last. I was living at Canadian Filmmakers, and at the little studio Phil and Carl and I shared, where I could be found most evenings, drinking and editing, cutting together little bits of my former life, before the word had come down, taking revenge somehow on this body which had never felt its own end pounding inside. I was struggling to find some way that would allow my body to talk, to say what I couldn’t say, because during the daytime amongst ‘the others’ (as I began to think of all those who didn’t have the sickness) I never said a word, repressed all mention of the illness. I was still young enough to imagine that my real life could be saved up and dished out in my art, like interest from a bank account.

In these late night journeys I was guided by your example, sometimes goaded by the galling proliferation of your seeing (“Stan would have already finished this by now”), or wondering at the precise montage that lent shape to even your most abstract work (hours were spent agonizing over whether to splice in two frames of red or green, only one seemed correct). A new body of work was produced, most of which was lousy, my T counts crashed, and I packed up for Vancouver hoping to stave off the end there. I think you had already left the city, gone back to Boulder, and I’m a bit ashamed to say I was relieved, feeling I had to maintain distance, and try to find my own way, instead of getting swallowed by your too august example.

I wrote Phil Solomon about this, some years later, after he’d presented a show of his lovely movies, each of which seemed to exist in that moment of light before the end comes. I believe that despite appearances, each of us is one age the whole of our lives. I am just six or seven. But Phil is old, hovering at the very end of life, and this last sight is what he shares in his movies. Your words and thoughts were never far that evening, evoked time and again in Phil’s wonderfully self-deprecating and incisively intelligent manner. He seemed, curiously, both best friend and surrogate, a fellow traveler, but a student at the same time, resident expert in Brakhagology. And I know it’s not fair of me to say this, but I was reminded when I saw him of that line from Hamlet when the new king asks, “Ham, what’s up? You look so damn pale, aren’t you getting out or what?” And Hamlet answers him, “Oh no my lord, I am too much in the sun.”

Too much in the son.

I wondered if you could write plays living next door to Shakespeare. Somehow Phil managed. I needed a lot more space, and after twenty years of mostly catastrophes am beginning to find my stroke in video, a medium I know you’ve never had much time for, and which used to be regarded as something like the leviathan, ruining everything in its path. Today the labs are closing, my precious 16mm equipment lent to friends as I embrace its digital doppelganger, and begin my third act in a life made possible by science, an opportunity I’ve only recently stopped being ashamed of.

Over the years I’ve seen dozens of your screenings and the one thing that discouraged me more than any other was the explanations directed at folks who had never seen an avant movie before. I just didn’t know how you could keep doing it with the same patience and guiding intelligence. Imagine Bach having to explain that what he’s going to play isn’t like Eminem, it’s based on a series of themes and variations, and then having to explain what themes and variations are. This is no sweat when you’re twenty or thirty, but you’d been showing movies for fourty years by then, and were answering the same kinds of questions you must have been getting back before much of the new audience was born. You never seemed to mind, even though questions like that meant the 1000 hours in the edit room were mostly going unnoticed, people were getting ‘impressions,’ ‘feelings,’ like the kind of feelings I had when I saw the work in Hamilton. Those can be good feelings, yes okay, but after you’ve worked that hard don’t you want to be able to look into someone’s eyes and find them looking straight back? Don’t you need to feel someone out there is really picking up the groove, following every last bit of splicing tape and jump cut and humming right along? You shrugged all that off. You were a tautology. You’d show the film, talk the film, work the film, then pack it all up and go into the next town and do it all over again.

You were the one that taught me that movies had to be lived before they could be seen. That lesson cost me more than any other. I have the scars to show for learning it.

Sometimes when I’m out on the street taping, someone will walk on over, trying to slip a peak into my camera’s handy, pull-out view screen. If they’re particularly bold they might venture a question, but mostly they’re content to stand and stare wherever the camera happens to be pointing. Of course, most of these people live in the neighborhoods I’m filming, they know them with an intimacy I will never be able to manage. So when they ask me, “What are you shooting?” what they really want to know is, “How do I look?” Or: how do I see what I’m looking at?

Each of your many beautiful films carries an answer to this question: how do I look? They are demonstrations, models of behavior, part of what Barthes liked to call a science of the particular. This is a science which would not hold true for now and always, but a science whose laws could be guaranteed for a single use only. Like a match. There is no answer to the questions of these onlookers, or at least, none that I could ever give them. Each of us is our own answer. You taught me that too.

Of course I’m reminded of the story you told about shooting Commingled Containers, that brief spark of light across the water, heavenly, these two containers of body and water singing across the sun’s shine. You had recently been diagnosed with stomach cancer I think, and fresh from the doc’s office had found your way to a stream, where urged to make an impression of your feelings, your last feelings perhaps, you hauled out some extension tubes and crouched down into the moving light. In the midst of this meditation, this elegy and rapture, a policeman came by and asked what you were doing, and what you wanted to tell him, you told us later, was that you were busy dying.

Dying with a camera in your hand.

It was David Gatten who told me you were ill. I spotted him across the room in Rotterdam with a beard so long it seemed to be tugging him around the floor. He said he’d been speaking with Phil who was coming up to Canada to see you, and that things didn’t look good. We spoke about our own health, and then traded stories of mystifying, potentially fatal illnesses of other fringe filmers we knew. Once, about a thousand years ago, speaking about the endless rounds of in-person appearances filmers were required to make, you quipped that the entire American avant-garde was on an airplane. Today, the avant-garde is not in the air, but in the hospital.

David said that they weren’t treating the cancer anymore, they were giving you morphine for the pain, nothing would really help now. David said that you were scratching on black leader with your thumbnail. After all these years it seems you were still determined to write your epitaph. To leave us one last gift.

I think you have been somewhere near this place before. I say that because of the film you made which I won’t name here. It is a movie many will deem ‘abstract’ though I was chilled to see it, recognizing in it some of the many ice fields I crossed when I began my own trip to the other side, seized up with pneumonia. After months in bed, I had long ago left what I knew of this world, and had begun to live in a place I never found words for. But somehow, scratching away at bits of leader, you managed to inscribe it into emulsion, and then shoot it all up on a screen where we could see it. I think of this movie as forbidden, because you’re not supposed to be able to get that far over, to rub so close to the end, and then come back to tell of it, not with that kind of clear-eyed lucidity and grace. Soon enough, I gather, you’ll be crossing that field again, and as you go, generous to the last, you will leave a record of this journey, as you’ve left records all these years, of all the trips your eyes have taken, so that they might be shared, a testament to living, and of course, to love. You have given me so much it seems pitiful to leave you with these thanks, though thanks are all I have. Perhaps after all these years it’s time to give you my blessing, my hope that you might continue, until the very last, to scratch and paint and photograph from the frontiers of seeing one last and lonely and most perfect song. We will be there to join you soon.

All my love
mike

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How They Were Loving: Stan Brakhage at Millennium Film Theatre, NYC. February 19, 1972

Films shown:
Deux Ex
The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (world premiere)

Stan Brakhage: First tell me where you want me to sit, so when I finish you can sit down.

Howard: Over there next to the last row.

SB: Oh, OK. (laughter) I asked him where your toilet is and he said well unfortunately it’s down here so when I finish speaking I’ll go in the toilet. (laughter) I’m sorry, not that it’s anybody’s fault, that there is so crowded a condition. It’s opposite of my sense of what would be appropriate to looking at anything and so I apologize for it. In such circumstances people should feel free to step back out of the crowd and take a breath of air to have a sense of freedom. Because otherwise there is too much constriction. Art requires discipline both in the making and in the seeing or the experience of it. I feel to give a balance to that you need the most freedom in seeing it.

We’ve got to get films into the homes. I’m so very aware of that because so many years were spent to make it possible to have the Anthology Film Archive. I put in my little finger’s worth and Jonas put in his whole leg, arm, head, and heart and various other pieces of him, whatever was needed, and many other people did also. So that exists as a kind of a comfort, where people can sit and the films roll on, and the films come back in a month. But that’s all we have as a solid anchor. But this is the other alternative, and the only other one that people ever had, to see new work once a week, under this desperate circumstance. I’m very aware of that because these three new works from Pittsburgh, of which you will see two tonight, have a drive toward simplicity as never before. Every time you have one thing you have its opposite. They hark back to what I take to be the very beginnings of any possible art of film, the Lumiére brothers. Though I did not at all have the Lumiére brothers in mind when I made the first two, Eyes, the police film, and Deux Ex the first one we’ll see tonight. What I had in mind was the years of photographing constantly and continually in the house where I live—photographing the play of the children, and Jane cooking, sewing, walking around, sitting, reading, talking, everything anybody could possibly do inside the house and outside the entrance. This activity was becoming so unbearable, it was interfering with the daily life of just living in this house and I had to stop. Not that anyone else complained, but I felt it that way. In fact Jane complained in the opposite direction, she said, “My God it’s been a year and a half since you photographed me (laughter)… who are you photographing these days?”

I went to Pittsburgh at about this time where Sally Dixon is head of the Film Department at the Carnegie Museum, and Mike Chakiris is a very great photographer and a newspaper man who made it possible for me to ride in a patrol car. And ride there freely, that is, I did not have to come encumbered by a company or represent anything, I did not have to be a spy from some liberal company set to do the police in, nor did I have to be hired by the city fathers to show what nice guys police were. I just had to ride in that car, and I had no idea if I could make a work of art as my sense of it is, but I would hope for that or even pray for it. And it came about that I could. Next came an attempt to do it in a hospital, and that is the first film we will see tonight. The police car experience was three days, the hospital was more like ten days. Every morning I went to the hospital and let the public relations man take us around, showing us this and that and when I was moved I began photographing and in all respects tried to be myself… which is always a problem for anyone almost anywhere except in their home. It was an excruciating experience. I nearly died several times in hospitals and additionally I’ve been very sick in hospitals a number of other times. And so with all this experience in hospitals it loomed in great terror for me. And here was the need to confront that terror, and then to try to understand in some overall sense what the hospital is in its own activities, separate from whatever use I might have of it. And so out comes a film called Deus Ex. The reference is to Deux Ex Machina, the machine of the gods. When Greek heroes got in such trouble that only the gods could save them they created machines that permitted actors to fly through the air or come down to the stage from above, and save them. I leave the third word off this term quite deliberately because I’m not after the machine. Most literally Deux Ex cannot mean ‘of god,’ it must be ‘the god of’ and then there is always the implied source of what that would be. And, it also has the pun of the god X as Nietzsche might read it or hear it in his ears, or in fact as most of the world hears it primarily when we don’t see it spelled out.

Towards the end of the film we see the most extraordinary attempt to save human life at all costs, an open heart surgery which is the central metaphor of the film. I guess there is nothing much more to say right now. It’s intentionally silent. Let me say particularly when we have a close room here with a lot of smoke and everyone packed together if anyone has any squeamishness about what you might be calling subject matter in the film close your eyes. (laughter) We have this wonderful advantage with the eyes that we don’t have with the ears, and people don’t use it as much as they might. You can close eyes, you know, you do not have to look. I have worked very hard that there shall be a balance so that there is no extricable object matter. And I like to use the term here instead of subject matter, I say object matter. My drive has been to create of what normally would be called subject matter something that can be much more objectively seen, so that in fact if you closed your eyes and the light was strong enough the rhythm of those changing lights, and tones, and colors would have a musical form which evolves and develops and which I pay the primary attention to when I’m selecting what will go into the final film.

(The film Deus Ex)

Audience: When you got the footage back were you able to work with it right away or was it so intense that you had to wait? How did you do it since you didn’t have a workprint, were you shooting your original or putting it on a reel or working by eye? How long did it take you to put this together?

SB: I began working with both Deux Ex and Eye almost immediately when I got back from Pittsburgh. I don’t work with the workprint because first of all it costs money, but even could I spend that, and there were times when I could have the money to spend it on workprints; I have this problem that when I work I put everything that I’ve got into it and if I were doing that with the work print my nature is such that when I got to the original I would not be able to just match edge numbers, I would make another whole film. If I were able to make one at all. And so I don’t work with workprint.

Now the next thing is very interesting because it reflects something of the changes in my working process lately. In the case of this film and its predecessor I did very little cutting, there was no editing in the sense of Eisensteinian montage. You see shots in the order in which they were made. The cuts were mostly camera cuts, there are very few splices. I consciously knew when I was shooting that I wanted to get the energy of whatever I was going to take and the order in which I was going to take it all of a piece. I wanted to rely, in other words, on the present moment in which I was photographing, and not to depend that I should come back to my work table, and become the great editor with the green nightshade who rearranges the news for all of us; that I should be more wise at my table, and know more about what these instances were about on reflection than I did when I was experiencing them, the light pouring into my eyes the same as it was into the camera. And so I searched as I went through that footage for the longest possible strips of sustained response. Strips with however many shots in them that sustained the whole rhythmic recognition. By rhythmic recognition I mean that I was hand holding the camera and all the movements at the edge of the frame where my camera jiggles with my breathing and my heart and my steps and my movements are all of one set of rhythms, that’s dividing with three sets of rhythms. The second set of rhythms is the movement of the people within the picture. The third set of rhythms are the moments where I change shots. So here are three rhythm sources and they must work together so that I can look at all three of them at once, they make an articulation that seems right for the objects that the light was bouncing off of when I’m photographing.

I’m very excited and I’m working and I’m right with it and then I get a little tired but I keep on going a little further. All filmmakers do this, some do almost this, alas, only. But I get a little tired then keep shooting, trying to get it up so to speak. And I’m failing and I don’t know until I’ve wasted maybe fifty feet. But I do trust that back at the table this will be recognizable so I throw this out. Then in throwing this out I do at times have to make slight rearrangements so that there is some editing here of course, though I’m not relying on it, but rather making it rely on the moment of shooting as much as I’m able.

I use a moviescope and two Hollywood rewinds, and I have clothes pins hanging with strips of film in them. But I very seldom use that, only for the long shots that I’m throwing out. I have all of the film in chronological order on one or two reels, however many it takes, in this case two huge 16mm reels. And when I ‘m going through it, and when the impulse is not there as near as I can see it I’m throwing out sometimes two hundred feet at once, and sometimes twenty feet at once, and that gets hung up. The other process is to go through your footage and pick certain shots and hang them up and then pick this one and that one and see how they go together—a quite different use of those clothespins. But those do hang there, so if I do need a transition then I try to remember where there was a pretty good impulse going to make a bridge between these two occurrences. Or simple things occur in my shooting that are more musical themes than anything that might possibly be called object matter. Like at the beginning here I used black quite conventionally and you have black shadows and a little war between white and black and this immediately evokes for me fear and something of the presence of death. I don’t mean that audiences should interpret that shadow as the fear of death, but it’s suggestive. I have little vestiges of that throughout the ten days of shooting and I put some of those together so they reinforce each other. But the film runs very much in the order in which it was shot.

Audience: How long did you work on it?

SB: About a month, which is elusive since I can’t tell you how many days I worked or how many hours in that month. But let’s say four days a week about eight hours a day.

Audience: Were any releases necessary?

SB: Yes they certainly were. In the first place it was very difficult to arrange to get into the hospital. Hospitals are very uptight, much more so than the police about taking any kind of record because you might shoot something where some patient for some reason or other is able to sue the hospital. If the guy fixing that hand at the beginning, you know, jabs the finger and the man at the table realized there is a movie of it and he wants to sue the hospital for fifty thousand dollars then he has moving pictures. And they’re overworked as it is, and in comes a movie man. (laughter) Most doctors I know detest medical films and dramas the way artists are disgusted by Charlton Heston’s vision of Michelangelo or Kirk Douglas’s of Van Gogh. They are just horrified that people have these images of the hospital or of doctoring still premised on God the doctor because doctors really know how ungodlike they are.

It took the powers of several monied institutes that were reached through the Carnegie that put pressure on hospitals and finally I was permitted in. Once admitted they were very gracious to me. A man was assigned to go everywhere with me and it was his job to get releases from patients as to whether they wanted to be in the movie or not. Much to my surprise most said yes it’s alright and signed a release for me to photograph them. I would find a place where I had a strong feeling and I would sit and wait or else while waiting I would start working on walls or pieces of furniture or whatever. Then he would come to me and say I have signatures for all but this one, that one, this one here, and him. I would carefully memorize these and then make my own taboos around these areas. So I didn’t permit my eyes even to focus or unfocus meaningfully on these four areas. (laughter) I was free to do with everything else whatever I could and that wasn’t unreasonable. Actually it was hard on me but it was not unreasonable because that’s often the case in photographing, although most often it’s the case that the filmmaker has his own internal taboos. So here is the spirit of wanting to be creative with everything but the filmmaker cannot face mother yet, he cannot work it into the landscape, or the shot, even though it’s there.

Audience: Why did you make the film intentionally silent?

SB: Mostly I work with silence. I have made a number of sound films and I am not against the sound film. I know first of all my limitations around sound as a composer and that doesn’t bother most filmmakers but it does bother me very much. Most of them go ahead anyway and slap on the mood music and let the noise pour in. I’ve done some of that too, but I tired of it quickly and it bores me and I don’t want to presume. Then not being a composer, not having the energy or the ability in the area of sound, every time I take in a sound I tend to weaken the vision. All sound weakens vision in my opinion. If the sound comes (clap) then the eyes dim. Not the eyes themselves, but the brain switches over to the ears right away, and the light pouring into the eyes is not primary in the experience. If we can now have paintings that make sound and sculptures that are noisemakers there is no reason why we can’t have silent films. (laughter)

I think anything is possible depending on the maker and his needs, his desperations. Yet
I don’t have much need for sound. On the other hand I applied for a grant which I probably won’t get, but it would permit me to have access to Ricky Leacock’s sound system so that I could have sync sound.

Audience: What kind of relation does this film have to your first film?

SB: It’s good you saw that. I made Eyes and half of this one before I realized there was a previous tradition for this direction in my life’s work. I’ve gotten very complicated with many fast cuts, and superimpositions and literary allusions and God knows what. And when it gets to God knows what it means that you don’t know anymore. And then it seemed to me suddenly in my life I was working with single rolls, and with long shots and without splices. This was terrifying to me because I thought, well, I’m now getting old and tired and weak. It’s much harder to edit a film like this than to make a thousand splices because I’m very happy when I make many splices. It means I can go upstairs right after breakfast just like a normal man is supposed to. If I thought through half a second of film the day before it means I have three hours of work just splicing. I’d have the record player going listening to Beethoven, or something on the radio, and I’m splicing and feeling important. I’m accomplishing something whereas with this I don’t know when I can go upstairs. I was working harder, and sweating more but on the other hand so suspicious of any change in this direction that I was thinking I’m getting old, maybe I’ll give up films altogether. So you chew yourself out and worry and fret over these things, but in the meantime the impulse to make the film as it has to be made fortunately dominates, and wrings you out and comes through something newly. Did that entertain your question or did I miss something?

Audience: That was very good. But it’s…

SB: What was your question?

Audience: I asked about the relationship between those two films.

SB: Oh, yeah, well wonderful… because the great moment came where suddenly someone came over who wanted to see the CHILDBIRTH film and I said this is my new work! And that’s of course thirteen years old now or fourteen. I said this is in the tradition of Window Water Baby Moving, so a man begins to feel very comfortable when he is working in a tradition particularly his own. (laughter) Love Making is of course the most obvious precedent in more recent years. The first section of it is very arty and the weakest because the couple is fucking and the light is overexposing and underexposing obviously and dazzles are coming through the window and there’s quick cuts and it has a rhythm like the last act of Rites of Spring. Whereas the second one is much more straight because I could be more objective about the dogs than this young couple fucking. I mean I got a hard on while working and I wanted him out of the way and for me to have her. It messed up the film in a way that my following around dogs in heat with my telephoto lens panting out (laughter) did not. The next one is even better because it is the homosexuals and here I had an objectivity even better than with dogs, I mean by my inclination, this film was great for me because I really came to see how they were loving, that they were loving. I was so prejudiced in the way this society, in fact any society would do it to you, that I was unsure that you could really call that loving. Think of that. I can’t imagine that in so short a stupid time that I had become so incredibly prejudiced. This film solved that for me. Then the last one is the best because it’s the children and in fact they are not going to come at all, that’s the really crucial thing about that. They are going to be the most sensual and this made a great work of art in my mind. And so that was the precedent and then there are others and I’m almost terrified to start giving names because Americans throw words like stones and it’s one of our greatnesses but you do have to look out. Someone threw the word structuralism and it’s caused more damned trouble in the last several years than any other term I know. So I’m terrified that I’ll throw mine out.

I throw out: that I like the sense of object matter. I like that kind of idea because it makes us rethink what we mean by subject matter. I trust that word because it informs me that there was a wisdom to the term objectionable, you see. And so I’ll just leave you with that and not stamp it too strongly and hope that it doesn’t form a whole new movement that disturbs us all. Movements are great but the problem we’ve always had is having terms no one ever liked… avant garde came from the French and we all hated that. We did not like experimental, that was an insult implying that we didn’t know what we were doing but were just puttering. In fact, if we were called puttering we could have made better use of that. If we were puttering filmmakers it would have been more fun than experimental which was a little too pompous to be simply dismissed. I always hated underground, velvet or otherwise. I don’t identify with Jean Valjean moving through the sewers of Paris with my camera. So terms are difficult and they always will be, or at least in our forseeable lifetime in relationship to film, because it has taken language centuries to even be halfway sensible about poetry. The criticism of poetry should properly be poetry. But usually it is written by critics who are people who have failed to make an art and therefore they are critics. That’s a very good thing to do with their life, I think if they love art that much and have honestly failed at it they are certainly more honorable than those who have failed and don’t know it and go on making films. There is a built-in problem with the critic of poetry that he has a language and with painting it’s even worse. What do words have to do with paint! Well that’s a hell of a problem, opening any art book will convince you instantly. Film is running twenty four frames per second and there are a thousand words per picture panting after this? If all the people wrote all the words it might conceivably bring it up to date, though we’d be buried in words so there’d be no time to look at films… which might be the danger of the twenty first century. Any other questions? Yes?

Audience: If you don’t mind can you talk a little about why you choose the film stocks that you use and how do you come to the lab with the complicated business of getting the color you want.

SB: Oh very complicated. This film particularly cost me a lot of money in the lab. Which is really painful money because you think you’re all done and actually you are and you’ve just barely made it and you’ve just had enough money to cover it and then suddenly you realize that you have to go through a tremendous creative and extremely expensive process in the lab. I use many different film stocks. In Deus Ex I used EF tungsten, EF daylight, MS, and Kodachrome tungsten and I think that’s it. Four films and two conventional filters. I had a filter that would filter neon to what they call normalcy. I used it a few times but not much. The other one converted tungsten to daylight. The hospital has many different kinds of neons and at first I went in there with the intention to defeat the neon with this filter. But of course it doesn’t. And so then I got excited because I know what those neons will do with this film which I know better than the back of my hand. I see that there’s a kind of pink neon, a blue neon, and the steely blue neon, and the yellow neon, and then there’s another pretending to be white but which is really a sneaky green neon, and on and on. And then the game becomes—and I mean game in the most serious sense of the word—the game becomes to force these conclusions. When I thought that sneaky white might come across too weakly I slipped in the blue filter to bring it out.

Then it depends on how you photograph. The white sheet will bounce enough rose that will relate to the actual covers of the bed when the daylight’s hitting it and so in the shooting right away there is a following along the lines of color. A justification for this in my own sense is that people are affected by these changes in color very seriously. I permit the camera with what ordinarily would be called faults to bring out these tones that are really the main drama … that are the subconscious affects on these people and on the people who work in the hospital as well. That moves faster than thought when I’m working. So then the question is when I’m back at the table was I really with it or was I not, and it’s full of surprises and it’s full of some errors or weaknesses which you keep anyway. You may lose the melody you thought you were developing from rose, blue, green, rose, green, blue, and versions of that as basic tones, you may lose a note for rhythmic reasons because the rhythm at that point becomes more crucial. The rhythm is dominated, of course, by the hand held camera, even the handheld telephoto lens. In Eyes I discovered I could hand hold a fifteen inch lens which is forbidden by the manufacturer, and rightfully so but with enough training and awareness you can move it, and provide a reflection of your heartbeat, you can dance with it.

But the great, thing in Deux Ex was in the operating room, where there are seventeen nurses and surgeons and this anestheticized man laid out, and we had to put on these big puffy white paper boots that have a rubber strip running along the bottom that you’re supposed to tuck into your shoe so that you don’t make any static electricity, because if you do you could set off the oxygen and blow the room up. But I had this problem that this rubber thing would not tuck into my boot. I would start working and it would slip out. So I was continually down in there at that boot using every means I could, they told me afterwards it wouldn’t have mattered, but of course I was in terror that I would harm someone. And so we did not stay in that room very long for that reason, and went back into the observation room.

Once in there I kept backing up and finally I was in the far corner of that room on a ladder hunched against the ceiling photographing this open heart surgery. We weren’t interfering because I was shooting through glass and we were totally removed sound wise from the operation. And I kept unscrewing this 15 inch lens and holding it in hand. I tried it later at home and could not get good images this way, so you have here the strength of a madman, I could only hope to do it if I was that desperate again. That footage is basically the whole second half of the heart surgery.

The second film we are going to see tonight The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes came out of a set of strange circumstances. Actually, Sally Dixon and Mike came to Colorado and they were sitting in the kitchen and said, “Oh you know Hollis Frampton is going to come to Pittsburgh to shoot an autopsy.” What flashed through my mind is that smart son of a bitch, now there’s a subject that really involves me. (laughter) But instead I said something like, “Oh is he?” (laughter) And I said kind of shyly, “Gee, I would like to do that too.” And Sally said, “Oh well he wants to do a surgical movie where they do anatomy for students.” I hadn’t by the way met Hollis, or seen any of his films at this point, I think I’d seen Lemon, but had no clear sense of who he is. She said she could talk to the coroner’s office and so she did. I still had it well in mind that we weren’t really going to do this, I was going there to do football film because I had suffered enough over football in high school as a little fat boy. I was very intrigued by the possibilities of football, and I still am. But the way to do that would be to go with Mike at the newspaper down to the football game, as an addition to the photographer, and shoot it that way. We were trying to set that up and it fell out because the newspaper was still on strike and I was suddenly faced with having to go into the morgue. In the meantime Hollis had other problems and decided not to do any autopsy. So for several days I was telling this story, much to my shame, that I have to go down to the morgue to shoot this because Sally made arrangements for Hollis Frampton and he can’t do it at this time. A filmmaker has to go down and I have to at least pretend to be making a film. (laughter) I really came to believe this, that’s how desperate the situation was. Then Sally asked, “Why are you saying that, you know that’s untrue.” Immediately I said, “You’re right, it’s not.” Before I started shooting it was so desperate I did not want to admit it.

In Deux Ex I have an honest but terrific symbol or metaphor in this flower because it sits in a pot in a window in the hospital, and yet I really use it for much more power that is in the symbolic area. It really isn’t a symbol of anything specific, it just carries that kind of power. Whereas, making the film in the morgue that kind of occurrence doesn’t happen. I didn’t cut away to any pots of flowers or to anything of that sort. That kind of power symbol occurs, but it occurs very subtly right within the images as they are moving, as you’re seeing all other levels of them. In The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes you see everything exactly in the order in which it was shot. There is very little cutting.

Now let me say this in all seriousness, this one is very difficult for many people, please close your eyes if it is bothering you. Of course some people have that problem if they close their eyes then they are imagining something much more dreadful than what’s on stage. One of the great things that an art can do is that there is always a very direct constant level where this is light, shadow play, tones and colors very carefully considered by the maker just as a poet makes rhythms appropriate to the literal meaning of the words he’s using. The rhythm reflects directly my feelings, my movements, my heartbeat, my aversions at times. In this case, I use seven kinds of film, EF daylight,, EF tungsten, MS, Kodachrome tungsten, Kodachrome daylight, commercial Ektachrome, that’s it in terms of film stocks, and that’s about it as you know in this country in terms of film stocks, plus two filters, plus three light sources. I was fortunate in as much as they were changing the ceiling lights and putting in a whole new neon system which undoubtedly turns all the corpses green appropriately enough, but when I started they wanted me to wait because in a few days we’ll have terrific lighting here. And I thought oh what’s that?

So there are two kinds of neon, one tungsten lamp, and daylight. For two hours a day there was daylight coming into these subterranean rooms. I have enough experience now to have a pretty clear idea when I’m shooting what qualities of color these will produce. And all of the rearranging that occurs in this film, and there is in fact quite a lot of it, is purely to use this full palette. I will shift footage around so that I can shift from one color tone to another, so you can have the skin changing, the organs of the bodies as they are being removed and as the bodies are being cut open, there is a very strong symphony of color. Everything is seen that I saw, and I saw basically everything that is done in autopsy. I feel about this film as I did years ago about Window Water Baby Moving, I think it’s very important for people who possibly can to really see something of death, to see something of this stupidly despised process of autopsy and to experience that in whatever form they can. And my hope is that art can permit you to see each with his real or her own eyes. That’s always been what I’ve thought was the greatness of art—if I’m an artist I make it for my own desperate reasons but answering all the forms of history that I know of that will be useful to me so that each person in here can be as free as possible. And so I hope it’s that kind of opportunity for you. Then I’ll be happy to entertain questions for you after you’ve seen it.

(FILM)

SB: I want to thank you… I was so worried that there would be a confusion
of response but it feels very good here in the room and I hope it does for all of you. Are there any questions?

Audience: How do your notions of vision, once formulated in Metaphors in Vision, play into the new subjects and styles of Window Water Baby Moving and this film?

SB: I haven’t read the book Metaphors in Vision in seven years which means except for my central nervous system there isn’t an atom left in my body that wrote it. But there’s precedence for some of these stylistic directions in Window Water Baby Moving and even in Metaphors of Vision, it begins with that opening introduction trying to define what vision really means to me. You know to cut away from all that pomposity around the word vision, that it only belongs to saints or drunkards in high moments of intoxication and say that vision really is to see. There’s many things to see and many ways of seeing it. There are as many as there are people born on earth. And you can subtitle that in terms of different cultures that have been. In that book I was pointing out that some cultures—as near as we can tell by the way they have structured their language—had no way to refer to the sky as blue. They refer to it as yellow in the ways that we refer to it as blue. And so we know that in a culture we can share a quality of seeing that another culture doesn’t have. The difference between Renaissance painting and Chinese painting of any period shows this and so on. And these are very specifically dictated in most cases by natural surroundings.

The big drive in Metaphors in Vision was to do away with the notion that a god or a phenomenological world is how it always has been and always shall be. Each person makes his or her own seeing and we also share a seeing that the whole culture makes up. All seeing is a made up job. Those were my considerations then, so when I painted on film it was for the specific purpose of creating an approximation of closed eye vision that I had seen, but that as I could not get a camera back in here to photograph it and there is no way to plug in to record what I feel when I close my eyes, I have to paint it. And with many superimpositions I was very much into memory processes, which is mostly closed eye vision. I mean closing the eyes and trying to remember grandmother. Grandmother comes with certain colour possibilities that she has evoked with certain forms, there are certain formalities to the recapturing of the image of grandmother. Scenes From Under Childhood is the culmination so far of dealing with remembering things and sights which you do certainly make up, and yet which you have some source that poured in once that you used to make it up with.

These films don’t deal with closed eye vision or memory, they deal with sights we normally take for granted. Finally having dealt so much with all those other forms of sight I was also freed to deal just with the seeing that everyone takes too much for granted. And that is where you have the most surprises because what you take for granted is what you’re really having trouble understanding. I open my eyes and I’m not struggling and seeing, I’m just walking through the world or I’m buying groceries and I’m living also in that cultural milieu where I’m communicating my sight with the grocer. That began to be overlooked because if it were true that Hollywood was dealing with that, as maybe one time I thought they might be, that would be OK. But they are not. They are not basing their visions on normal daily sight. So that began to seem to me the most neglected area and prompted this newer direction.

Audience: What emotion did you feel when you were photographing?

SB: Oh, it’s so many it’s so hard to tell you. I almost fainted often. And I told you before I felt great guilt, a great shame as thought I were the worst peeping Tom to want to photograph this thing. So I was trying to blame it on Hollis Frampton. (laughter)

Audience: I wasn’t at all sure I was going to be able to take this story but I felt your vision of the morgue was the same kind of vision that you apply to the branches of a beautiful tree I remember in one of the films they showed at the Elgin last night where there is delirious joy in color and form. This became strictly a fabulous abstract pattern of color and movement and ceased to be what supposedly is a ghastly thing. Did you feel anything conscious in that way?

SB: Sure, I mean I was desperate to see it in a balance, or I would never have gone into the morgue under any excuse whatsoever. I was afraid of dying before and Sirius Remembered came out of that or The Dead or the Dog Star Man’s death, and so on. There is always the fear of dying. I’ve dealt with it metaphorically, symbolically, monumentally. I will die, that is one thing I can be sure of, and everyone I know will die. And if I die on a public street in Pittsburgh I will end up at the morgue. In fact I had terrible nightmares every night, and one of them is revealing because in this nightmare the surgeons danced around the table and one of them kept joking that he always wanted to be Fred Astaire and would I photograph him tap dancing? (laughter) He holds a bloody organ in one hand and a scalpel in the other and he’s tap dancing. (laughter). They did not do that often. (laughter) But that was their release which they needed so much. In my dream they are dancing and cutting up like this and I am photographing and then they say to me, “Come on you, try this.” I don’t know what they mean at first. “Come on, it doesn’t hurt.” They shove the bodies on the table aside and start making a place for me to lie down. And I say, “No, no I’m photographing.” (laughter) It’s such a direct work of genius that dream. (laughter) They say, “Get up on the table now and stand on one leg and piss into a jug and say ‘Hail Dartmouth’ in front of everybody.” They are joking, of course, but if you don’t do what they say, they will force you or worse. So in the dream I’m moving a body aside and I know they’re going to make me lie down and I woke up screaming. But think of the beautiful line in the dream: “It won’t hurt.” And of course when one sees skin being cut open you want to say, “No stop,” because all your associations are painful, but these people are dead and this does not hurt them. That being the case, why would it not be something to look at and see? I think everything should be seen. For instance, this film was shown to my children the same as Window Water Baby Moving was and they had no trouble with it at all. They just looked at it and were curious, but they were totally puzzled as to why I was nervous as to how they would receive it.

You do not have the sounds here, when they pull the skull up over the face it makes a terrific roaring sound. Sometimes the skull is so thick, you’ve heard of thick skulled people? (laughter) They take a mallet and beat on the skull and break it open. And then there are the smells. The interest in opera is the dream that you can have smells, sounds, poetry, music, acrobatics and everything going on at once and have a supreme art and everyone fails because in art that’s asking for too much. Some operas are great, but they always have that problem that one thing is taking away from the other. You just don’t get a genius great enough that he can make sounds and visions easily appropriate. I mean, some men can much more than I can. Kubelka, for instance, is a great sound filmmaker. But also it’s clear to me that he sacrifices much of image. The image activity is often very weak compositionally or rather more ordinary so that it can marry with the sound in a proportion that makes the two work together. He structures so that he can afford the drain of attention sounds create, he is a genius of that form.

Audience: I think your film had different kinds of vision and I’m wondering
if you distinguish between different kinds of binocular vision as opposed to ordinary formal vision?

SB: It just doesn’t involve me deeply at this time. Ken Jacobs has really dug deeply into it, not just as a gimmick but using both eyes in three dimensions. I think he is the great genius of this form at the moment. I’m very excited with what I’ve seen of his—he has nothing quite finished yet. Of course Ken never worries about finishing things. All the rest of us sit around and say, “Please finish it” (his laugh) so we can see the final version. But his greatness is that he just keeps on working and finally something flies off him in a solid and complete form.

Audience: In the Film Worker I read about dyes for black and white film. Could you tell me a little about the technical aspect of the dyes you used and which ones worked better?

SB: There were no dyes.

Audience: You didn’t use dyes?

SB: No, I used three kinds of light, two kinds of neon…

Audience: No, I mean in your previous films.

SB: Martin dyes have the greatest variety of subtlety of colors and Higgins India ink was an interesting form for me to use. Then there were chemicals which changed the dyes on the film itself, simple ones like Clorox but also complicated ones that I don’t remember or which would take a very long time to say. Does that help? Yes?

Audience: Were you committed to film the faces?

SB: That’s the one taboo in this film. I may not film faces so that they will be recognizable to a relative later, or a friend and I would not want to anyway. They did not have to tell me this, because you could drive someone crazy with that. It was amusing in a way because for years I had this taboo that I couldn’t photograph sexual organs and now I can photograph all I want no problem but I cannot photograph the face. (laughter) There’s always limitations, a lot of them are imposed from the outside and if they don’t interfere you go ahead; if they do, of course, it’s blasphemy to go ahead. There were things I wanted to show that were amazing. For instance, when they pull the scalp clear up over the face the bend is above here, you bend the face right over itself almost in half. After when they’re through they slip the cap of the head on there and the brain is removed. They grasp it and pull it back and the face snaps back into exactly the same expression as before. All these people have expressions that reflected the way they died, in some cases they died by violence, but their faces were extraordinarily peaceful. I could not show any of that. I showed pieces but not something one could recognize. I really came to feel the first mask must have been made after a conquered enemy stripped the face off and wore it. Because the face holds this rigidity like a rubber mask, and will hold that expression until it begins to decay.

Audience: There was one shot of an open torso and an almost electric feeling moving across the frame. I didn’t know if it was reflected light or water?

SB: This is what I call a miracle shot. Because in the first place it’s magic, It just bolts out and you have it, and it sums up so many things that have been moved toward. But the technical thing that caused that was a reflection of light on water, the way a lake shows the blue of a sky. On one side you have neon turning the hand green and on the other side you have tungsten. So three lights are falling into place to make a metaphor that one could not possibly imagine of what. We begin to escape from the dominance of language. It’s incumbent on everyone to know that in describing and talking about films I’m trying very hard to be clear, but my language even here is shoddy in comparison to the necessities of speaking about film, because really when film becomes great is when it escapes everything else and does only that which it can do better than anything else on earth. And the wonderful thing is that the Lumiéres discovered that right off. But then, a film like a person has to test everything: how am I like theatre; how am I like poetry; and gradually how am I like music? What strengths can I get from music, from painting and so on? I have a feeling that a possibility of art will always be drawn back in relationship to where its greatest strengths lie.

It’s Lao Tzu, isn’t it, who suggested the process of a life’s transformation. At first you see the mountain the way children see it; then you wonder what it is, possibly you study this mountain, you struggle with it and finally exhausted you see the mountain again except your feet are a little off the ground. Maybe that’s the progress of any developing personal form, or, as many personalize to make a kind of history which is the personal story of all these peoples or all those that were concerned. I’m not trying to suggest that now’s the time for ever, that we’ve really solved utterly what music has to give us or theatre, or anything, and that now has come the great moment in the history of film for everyone to run out and just make movies. I don’t think so at all. But for me I’ve reached a point where I’ve exhausted myself in these other struggles for the moment, so suddenly I see what assumptions I run on and the subtle informing of musical studies. Amazingly I didn’t have to work at it in this film as I did previously, and I’m sure I will again. What I had to work on here was singularity of vision, which is very, very hard. Any other questions? Yes?

Audience: You felt there were potentially alarming aspects to the screening of this movie, is that correct?

SB: I wondered if something would disturb, you know. Some people who are very subtle about their disturbances are most troubled about the fly on the foot. Within the film you have a track of some of my disturbances. A wonderful joke occurs before showing the skull broken open, I had shown some distance to that, some people are split open, you haven’t seen it happen but you know it’s been done. Then the skull’s completely dealt with and there’s one thing left that hasn’t been shown and that is the cutting open of the body and at this moment I couldn’t take it anymore so I turned suddenly and started shooting something else. I started looking around desperately for something else to photograph without even thinking about it and what is the first thing I photograph? Someone unzipping a package in which a body lies. I have a powerful metaphor there which I know the subconscious will get. This wise arrangement of perceptions announce that splitting open is coming next, and then we get the release in a zipper. So that later when one does come to the splitting open it’s impacted with metaphor, it is given more sense.

Another example is that at some point you’ve had so much blood and then you see a full field of what looks like blood and suddenly you see it’s a red cover and someone’s being wheeled away. This puts blood in perspective. This is colored light here and these are the greatnesses of the possibilities of art for me. Again, with the red gloves, you see a wrist open with much blood and then you see a moving red and they are the red gloved hands of the man washing off. Here is this bloody mass and they’re coming carefully clean as if it were a Saturday night and we were getting ready to go to town. There are many kinds of wit running throughout in desperation because wit is one of the great strengths people have.

Audience: After this film it’s hard for me to imagine that there is anything else that you have to confront.

SB: Oh, yeah? (laughter)

Audience: Can you talk about the difference between the camera movement and your own movement?

SB: Well The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes is the literal translation of the word autopsy. Think on that. The camera movements are for the most part very much more subtle. Rhythmically there is quite a different thing happening here too, because you have a play constantly between the movements of the people or objects within the frame and the movements of myself holding the camera. Deux Ex has more dreamy and dramatic movements; and only towards the end of The Act of Seeing do I permit myself a crescendo of dramatic changes of focus and light and so forth.

Audience: By singularity of vision you mean the type of vision a child might have when he first sees the mountain. Is that the kind of thing you’re striving for?

SB: No, I’m striving for the third place naturally. I want the feet a little bit off the ground, maybe one foot. (laughter) I am much disciplined in the possibilities of music for film, of poetry, painting, still photography, drama. Now I want these things to be subservient to the thing that film can do that none of these things can do. To be subservient rather than prominent. Because at times it got to the point where drives of mine pushed the film to be music. This happens in all arts, when nineteen century Russian music tired to evoke images, pictures of an exhibition and so on. The French version of this is Debussy’s La Mer and this is great, but music can’t stay there. It would push it so far as to how it might be a picture and then it must fall back upon what it principally is that nothing else is. And historically this happens again and again and it is rather exciting that in my life time, in the little way that I partake in this history, I have not had my first really recognizable falling back on what film can do that nothing else can.

I’m very excited and involved with this whole concept of what’s called structuralism. There’s a group of people listed under that title some of them I am intensively involved in. For instance, the man who wrote the program notes on The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, Hollis Frampton. Conversation between us is literate and very intensive. For my side what has tended to happen is that people get very dry, there’s always the tendency to try to get something narrowed down and this is fine except in a social way it begins to crimp everybody because the more you narrow the more people begin to be utterly outside of these considerations. For instance, lyricism is now very suspect in relation to structuralism. By lyricism I mean principally Ernie Gehr. And I think wit is very suspect and I think Hollis Frampton suffers from that. I don’t even know how to attach any word to the qualities of Ken Jacob’s lyricism that I feel are neglected. I also think that Andrew Noren is not as appreciated as he should be, because Wind Variations is one of the most startling clear documents we have had. It is minimal and meditative and fulfills most of the qualifying demands as a structuralist film, but there’s just one thing wrong with it. It is too lyrical, or romantic one would tend to say. I wouldn’t, but that would be a direction of talk that would exclude that great possibility. So that the things that would be easily considered would be anything that had a series of easily recognizable intellectual threads like someone was creating a language which is a specifically intellectual activity, unless you are taking it from the grunts up. If you have the desperation to say something, that can be emotional. But if you’re sitting here and point to a line, and then another, and decide to make a language, that becomes more calculating, closer to mathematics. Now that is somehow acceptable because it is narrow enough to many people these days, whereas anything that might disrupt this concentrate is having a little trouble getting rented or seen or written about or recognized.

Many people considered that I betrayed something in making Eyes, Deus Ex and wait till they see the one you just saw. What could one have betrayed? Only the narrowing considerations of a particular clique at this time in New York City. But then of course that’s deadly, because New York City is still the needle’s eye through which most culture in some effective way of this nation must pass in order to reach Kansas, or Wyoming, or even New Jersey. Then next year it will all be gung ho for romanticism which always happens as a natural reaction and at that point Michael Snow will have very few defenders. At that point I would like to be the defender of Michael Snow. I mean he is such a genius, let me be clear about that, that I am having to struggle harder with his work at this time than anyone I can remember. I struggle with Hollis Frampton too, in many ways, but there’s some emotional part of me and traditions of thinking that permit me to begin working with his movies much quicker, whereas I can’t even quite get in the door yet with Michael. Maybe I’ll never be able to. But you see there is so much power here. Most people don’t realize the power they exercise. I’m sure all of you who are making films and suffer under the powers of these people who have a little position in the art world know exactly what I am talking about. Without anyone meaning to, everything that you are trying to give to the world is refused.

In my view, there should be not one Anthology Film Archives but dozens. The word Anthology implies that and that is certainly the wish of all the people who made it—that there would be many. But we may not live to see it happen. It’s just desperate enough to keep one of them going. It becomes terribly important this not become Mecca. If Anthology Film Archives becomes Mecca, or operates as a political machine, which at the moment it cannot help but do, being there’s no other place but this one where we are to regularly see new work. That makes it a machine despite itself through none of the intentions of the people who made it or run it. That being the case, let’s do something with that—not let it sit like that. Then the thing to do is make your own. I have made my own in Colorado. It is small but I send away to Black Hawk and get whatever they have and to other eight millimeter people who sell eight millimeter film. I save up my money and when I think I have enough I can for thirty-five dollars get The Battleship Potemkin by Eisenstein. Any other questions?

Audience: What about structuralism—have you gone into the work of structural anthropologist Levi-Straus?

SB: I don’t think that anyone could really defend that as a useful term for film. Last night we were trying to get at it in a simple sense, because it’s so hard to describe. A word like structuralism will sit there like a bomb or a tomb because it’s hard to say what you mean. You sense there’s a direction and it’s coming newly out of many people who knew each other. There’s a drift and it has some historical precedence so one’s trying to say what is this. I was feeling very badly because someone had took it that I was putting down Michael Snow the other night, which I certainly do not want to do. I have great respect for the man and his work, and I’m intending, for instance, to teach him in Chicago the year after next when I deal with document throughout the year. I was brooding about it, and then it happened that we were with Peter Kubelka and it began to snow. Peter said, “Oh it’s snowing outside, let’s go to the window and look.” Now where I live it snows eight months out of the year. (laughter) I was upset because I am thinking, “Oh Christ, now getting a taxi cab back to the hotel is going to be hard or perhaps impossible.” And so I just relieved myself by saying, “I hate snow” and Peter said, “You mean Michael?” (laughter) So, with that start it suddenly fell into place, we were walking out on the street and I said, “Well, you know this is a minimal experience, or in fact this is structuralism. It’s white and getting whiter and it’s coming down and the streets are empty and there’s nothing happening and if you just stand here long enough and dig it, you know, it will all slowly vanish before your eyes and Nirvana will be achieved.” I was being cute of course but in joking you very often get at some aspect of the truth. And I throw these things out to you in hopes that… not that I have any solutions but that people begin to try to make more sense about what these many filmmakers that have been called this do share that might give them a more opening term. And it would help prevent so serious and sad a thing if they get involved with fighting each other, so that’s about all I have to say on that. That’s my little prayer for what’s now called structuralism. Thank you.

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vito acconci-lecture-mastrubation-performance

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 12:49

Vito Acconci notes from a lecture delivered at the University of Toronto on November 10, 2005

I began as a writer interested in the page as a field to travel over. I wasn’t interested in certain words, like “tree” for instance, or “fire hydrant” because these were words that referred to a space that was outside the page. I was interested in words like “there” or “here” or “at that time,” phrases that would refer to reading the page. I liked words that would cover or track a space. 

From this interest in movement across a page, I became interested in movement. How do I get off the page? And then: how do I move? My ground was a piece of paper. What happens without the paper? What happens when I’m not negotiating a piece of paper, what makes me move? How do I move? In October 1969 I did a performance called “Following Piece.” Each day I picked a person who was walking on the streets of New York and followed them, sometimes for a few minutes until they disappeared into a cab or their apartment, sometimes for several hours, through shops or cinemas. I am almost not an I anymore. I put myself in the service of this scheme. 

Movement that covers space instead of uncovering meaning. 

So now I’m in real space, once the scheme is chosen I am tied into it, dragged along by another person. Then I began a shift from ground (medium) to instrument (myself). These new pieces were focused on making the self, this was the 1960s remember, and there was a lot of talk about the self. How do I prove I to others? How do I find my body, by finding myself? How do I find the space I’m in, how to occupy a self? How do I find every inch of my body? The body as space as instrument, how does my body survey space around it? There was a stress in this work on the body, how the body adapts, takes shape or resists or reacts according to these stresses. “Trademarks” was a performance in which I “found myself” I would bite each part of myself, apply printer’s ink and make prints of these marks. 

Video offered simultaneous feedback, you can see what you’re doing while you’re doing it. Video as mirror, to see what you can’t see. Movies were landscape but video was close-up. When he was asked why he never used close-ups Charlie Chaplin answered that there was nothing funny about a face fifteen feet high. But TV delivered new faces, made looking at new faces possible. Jack Nicholson and Robert DeNiro wouldn’t have been possible without television. The monitor is the size of a person’s face, it offers a face to face encounter between artist and viewer. Then there’s this question: where am I in relation to the viewer? Am I below the viewer, beside them, opposite the viewer? I take a position vis a vis the viewer in each videotape. In front of the camera. 

These performances also featured self reliance, a self enclosed system. Now how do I bring viewers into it? What is the relation between you and me? “Claim” was made for a two level space, there was the street level gallery and a basement, connected via a monitor and cable which showed me in the basement, blindfolded and talking and wielding a crowbar. “I’ll stop anyone from coming down here.” If anyone tried to come down I would swing the crowbar. It was about art as an exchange system, the way artist meets viewer. I am a still point, viewers had to go down, to get through something, to get to me, but I was continuing to confirm an art world hierarchy. The problem was focus, I was the focal point, the target. What if I wasn’t a point, but part of the room, part of the architecture? In “Seedbed” I had the floor ramped, I entered the ramp and lived underneath it during gallery hours. It was important that I get under the ramp before anyone arrived and was there after everyone left. I became the floor. People would come in and I would talk to them, I would conjure sexual fantasies from their footsteps and constantly masturbate, it was about the inside coming outside. At first I thought of spitting constantly, or inserting a small video camera which would record my eating some kind of food which would grow a little tapeworm inside, but this was too baroque, too complicated. So I settled on masturbation. Scattering seed, that was also important. 

Whenever I got a gallery show I would think of what to do in that space, I would go and look around and try to think of how to proceed. I didn’t have something already done, I responded to what was there. Today this is called site specific, this was always important. 

In the 1960s gallery space was undergoing changes, in the mid sixties the walls were typically pastel, it looked like a rich person’s apartment, and this was finally replaced by white walls, a neutral space to show art which reflected the dominant art world mode of minimalism. I thought, along with my friend Dennis Oppenheim and others making non-object art that we would bring down the whole system. We had nothing to sell, so we would finish this whole capitalistic system, but that’s not what happened of course. We became window dressing for these new Soho galleries, we would get bring some attention and then they would sell some Rauchenbergs in the backroom. 

After “Seedbed” I asked: if I’m not seen, do I have to be there? I was having second thoughts about live experience which was related to a 60s discourse about finding myself. By 1972-73 the self didn’t seem quite so autonomous, maybe there was no self to find, maybe the self existed as a system of feelers, an intersection of social, political, moral imperatives. 

Another question: Can art be used to gather community? I began to make installations to answer this question. I made a piece which had a long table with chairs at it, and the table stretched out the window hanging over the street. There was a speaker with a clock ticking and my voice says, “Now that we’re all here. Now that we’ve gone as far as we can go…” I wanted to treat the gallery as if it was a town square, but the gallery will only, ever, be a private space. If I wanted a public space I would need to move into architecture and product design. I wanted to redo architecture, connect the body to architecture (which contains the body). Could the body cause architecture? Could architecture last as long as the viewer was engaged, carried along and set up and disposed of? Temporary and nomadic, like clothing? Could architecture be a vehicle used by the viewer? 

I wasn’t interested in art anymore because the art viewer is separated from the world, they are only looking at art. I’m more interested in casual passersby. At the end of 1980s my way of working changed, I had to have architects around, and I thought of this slogan: “The person who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” If something begins privately it ends privately. If you want to have something that ends up public, it was necessary to begin publically. One person is solo. Two people are a couple or a mirror. Three people is a public, the third person starts an argument. So the Acconci studio was formed, an ongoing thinking, discussing, arguing project. 

Question: when you design a space are you also designing the activity possible within that space? Is architecture totalitarian? Or can our spaces liberate people? 

Question: can we have a surface that is its own structure? 

Music and architecture are the same, both make an ambience. 

I’m interested in transparent, immersive, continuous spaces. Mobile spaces for a mobile body, offering freedom of movement (equals freedom of thought). If this space can be turned upside down then I can turn something else (a problem, my relationships, my ideas) upside down too. 

The computer offers us an unprecedented freedom, and the conservative backlash is the result. The election of George Bush shouldn’t be possible in the time of computers but. 

Vision is about control, and distance is necessary to exercise control and mastery. What upsets this view is proximity. The control of viewing is subverted at close range. Therefore close-up equals change. Change happens up close, in close-up, when the objectifying gaze is left behind. 

The chair keeps its back up. 

Once a room falls then people can rise. 

Time is fast, space is slow. 

A laugh is a second thought, a parenthesis. It means the beginning of thinking for yourself.

http://www.mikehoolboom.com/r2/section_listing.php?section=8

Script

The Invisible Man script

Image: door close, blinds close

Title: The Invisible Man

Suitcase, screen door, door opens, night sky (super boy fade in/out, boy looks back fade in/out)

Man v/o: “It sounds funny to say but I was born an old man. Everyone said so, who is that old man they asked, even while I was in my diapers. Each year I got a little younger, every time my birthday came around I’d take another candle off my cake, the lines on my face and hands started to disappear, as if I hadn’t lived at all.”

Foggy drive, drive

Title: in a beginning

Track shot unmoving people winter exterior

Title: “you were the place”

Interior car pan dissolve to children at school desks dissolve to boy running

Man v/o: “You were the place my thoughts began, the place that words came from, my first school.”

Farmers pass car

Man v/o: “I came back to find you, and found I didn’t know where I was.”

Lumiére boat docks

Boy v/o: “I remember the day you left home, you didn’t stop to wave like the others, I guess you were afraid to look back and see me there, already plotting your destination, the person you would become. I am your writer.”

Boy with flashlight, light in clouds, clouds, boy with flashlight

Car pass on road, road super with violinist and 2 men dancing

Man v/o: “Everything here feels so familiar. Even though I’m not able to remember what lies beyond the next corner, the next turn in the road, as soon as I arrive, I know I’ve been here before.”

Man gets out of car

Car at night

Boy v/o: “When I was eight years old, you were my book. I wrote you, your story, knowing that you would never know me.”

Light shaft, boy in misty door, snowball fight

Man walks to house

Man v/o: “It’s still here.”

Man in house, house windows

Men v/o: “Lost your way again?” “I’m back. I’m stiff, frozen. The wind’s cut all the lines on the border zones. Some of us will have to work all night to fix them. Our home is your home. Our home. We’ve crossed the border and we’re still here. How many borders must we cross to reach home?” “It’s late. I’m expected somewhere. Good-night.”

Lumiére film: wall pushed down

boy run to school, freeze frame boy

teacher’s v/o: “You’re late.”

Diver, whale, diver and whale, diver supered with boy at window

2 men on bridge

boy v/o: “You believe, you imagine, that you are moving closer to me, but you’re not. You’re always moving away. Away from the one who has already written your story. Away from the understanding that I am your writer.”

Boy writes at desk

Title: There is no literature here

Boy writes at desk negative

Title: only writing

Silhouette figures up ramp, man through hole, man in fog, man in abandoned cinema

Man v/o: “I was searching the only way I knew how, through the small hole of my personality, which I used to look out into the world, though I knew that it wasn’t enough, that it would never be enough to find you.”

Man in bathtub rips pages from book, looks out window, night street, open door

Man rips shirts

Boy v/o: “The only thing I didn’t write, the only that that still belongs to you is your forgetting. That’s why you cling to it. And that makes you angry. Though you’ll never know why.

Man and blinds

Title: you are not yourself

Boy walks in cafeteria, boy in class super with diver

Boy v/o: “As I write I realize that I am becoming blind because there’s no one left to see me.”

Time lapse: ships rise and fall

Night boat in water super with fish, boy runs

Boy v/o: “I wrote this story, your story, because I knew as you grew older you would forget everything. So when you come back you would recognize nothing.”

Family gathers for photo

Boy walks to window

Tracking shot people with umbrellas, man takes off layers of clothing

Man v/o: “I’m beginning to forget myself here. It seems the closer I get to you the more I feel I’m floating in an ocean of personality, any one of whom could be me or none of them. I feel myself becoming different people over the course of a day, like you for instance, but also many others. I’m not losing my mind, this is different, I’m losing myself.”

Lock door montage

Snow ball, snow scene, man walks in snow, footprints, snowball breaks

Negative invisible man enters house and closes drapes

Invisible man takes off his clothes

Boy on stairs, invisible man washes face, boy in bed touches wall, rain shadow on ceiling, boy in bed hands approach him

Man hand switches on light, shoes, briefcase, car ignition, stick shift, garage door, foggy drive, traffic light, car crash

Tire spin loop

Boy v/o: “Who could have thought that forgetting would have come so easily to you?

Boy at window

Boy v/o: “That you would have extended this forgetting to everyone you met…”

Man holds boy walks into sunset

Boy v/o: “and finally mistake it for happiness. When you die you’ll have a smile on your face. I know. I know because I wrote it myself.”

  

prepare lesson

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 11:54
http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ch8cTL2tN4c?version=3&hl=en_US

Uploaded on Dec 18, 2010
The Blood of a Poet // Le sang d’un poète (1930)

The Blood of a Poet (French: Le Sang d’un Poete) (1930) is an avant-garde film directed by Jean Cocteau and financed by Charles, Vicomte de Noailles. Photographer Lee Miller made her only film appearance in this movie, and it also features an appearance by the famed aerialist Barbette.[1] It is the first part of the Orphic Trilogy, which is continued in Orphée (1950) and was concluded with Testament of Orpheus (1960).

Director: Jean Cocteau
Writer: Jean Cocteau
Stars: Enrique Rivero, Elizabeth Lee Miller and Pauline Carton

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021331/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BAqxEq4ylb4&feature=share&list=PL82744AC3D57F92BB

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/pYd7STccjN8?hl=en_US&version=3

 morals-bounderies


Architecture magazines are ruining architecture, Brooklyn-based artist and architect Vito Acconci told Dezeen at Vienna Design Week, stating that “architecture is the opposite of an image”.
Acconci believes the only difference between a piece of architecture and an image is that people can move through architecture, meaning the element of time is the crucial difference. “Architecture is not about space but about time,” he says.
Speaking to Dezeen editor-in-chief Marcus Fairs in Vienna earlier this month, the 72-year-old described how he started out as a poet in the 1960s, becoming fascinated with the way the reader uses words to navigate across the page. Later he worked as a performance artist and now runs Acconci Studio, which focuses on landscape design and architecture.
Acconci explains how he now regrets his notorious 1971 “Seedbed” performance – which saw him lie hidden beneath a ramp in the Sonnabend Gallery in New York, verbally fantasising about, and masturbating over, gallery visitors passing over him – explaining that it “ruined my career”.
Below is a transcript of the conversation, which took place in Vienna during Vienna Design Week, where Acconci chaired the jury of the inaugural NWW Design Award along with Fairs and Italian designer Fabio Novembre, who also took part in the discussion.


A Song of Love (FrenchUn chant d’amour [œ̃ ʃɑ̃ damuʁ]) is French writer Jean Genet‘s only film, which he directed in 1950. Because of its explicit (though artistically presented) homosexual content, the 26-minute movie was long banned and even disowned by Genet later in his life.
The plot is set in a French prison, where a prison guard takes voyeuristic pleasure in observing the prisoners perform masturbatory sexual acts. In two adjacent cells, there is an older Algerian-looking man and a handsome convict in his twenties. The older man is in love with the younger one, rubbing himself against the wall and sharing his cigarette smoke with his beloved through a straw.
The prison guard, apparently jealous of the prisoner’s relationship, enters the older convict’s cell, beats him, and makes him suck on his gun in an unmistakably sexual fashion. However, the inmate drifts off into a fantasy where he and his object of desire roam the countryside. In the final scene, it becomes clear that the guard’s power is no match for the intensity of attraction between the prisoners, even though their relationship is not consummated.
Genet does not use dialogue in his film, but focuses instead on close-ups of bodies, on faces, armpits, and penises. The film’s highly sexualized atmosphere has been recognized as a formative factor for works such as the films of Andy Warhol.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ch8cTL2tN4c?version=3&hl=en_US

SHIPS-PREPARATION

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 11:34

The first of these was “Mémoires sur la marine des anciens” (“Memoirs on the navies of the ancients”), Le Roy’s first lecture on naval architecture. Presented at the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres in February 1770, this lecture presented analyses and detailed explanations of the evolution of ships and sails to demonstrate that the historical and scientific approaches had to work in tandem. In Le Roy’s words, history and nature were similar: “History, as much as nature, frequently offers us a mass of sterile facts; she also sometimes presents us with some more precious, but more rare facts, from which can be drawn, as from a prolific spring, a great number of truths.”[4] History and nature both yielded the ever-important principles needed for scientific understanding. Without a historical underpinning, a technical understanding of ship building would be faulty. The same applied to history of naval architecture: it made little sense without understanding the kinds of technological changes that gave rise to the present problem. And like Les ruines, Le Roy’s first work on ships identified the development of an idée over time. The only difference here, of course, was that he looked to examples from Phoenician, Greek, and Roman shipbuilding to prove his point.

Catherine Haussard, engraving showing historical development of vessels. Figure 3 represents Odysseus’ raft. Figure 4 is a Phoenician vessel. Figures 5 and 6 are the side and front elevations of an Egyptian ship. From Le Roy, “Premier mémoire sur la marine des anciens,” 596.

THE PATH OF THE CYCLONE

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 11:20
http://www.aggregat456.com/search/label/media


Yet the general principle that underlies Le Roy’s thinking—the tracing of the development of an idée over time—resonates with another aspect of Cloué’s work. In an 1887 article, Cloué introduced two maps, each showing the path of the cyclone as it moved from the Laccadives to the Gulf of Aden at a specific time of the day. The first is a reinterpretation of the German map that appeared in German hydrographic journals in 1886. It shows the storm’s trajectory, as told from the point of view of different vessels. The paths of four of these are depicted as dashed arrows, each showing the general path of a ship as it moved with or against the oncoming storm. Labeled dots indicate the threshold at which barometric pressure reaches the 750 mm isobar at a certain time and location. The thickest, blackest line belongs to the Aden cyclone itself, here shown as moving in a shallow sine wave-like pattern as it entered the gulf. Small dots show that the storm was increasing in size as it approached land.

Maps showing trajectory, position, speed, and pressure of the Aden cyclone: (Top) Version based on one published in Annalen der Hydrographie; (Bottom) Cloué’s account (Source: Cloué, “L’Ouragan de juin 1885 dans le Golfe d’Aden (second mémoire)” Revue maritime et coloniale, Vol. 93 (Paris: Librarie Militaire de L. Badouin et cie, 1887)

This depiction of the storm is different from that in the second map, a summary of Cloué’s own research about the event. Here, the cyclone’s progression appears as series of circles that diminish in size—this, of course, verifying his observation that the storm behaved “irregularly.” As in the German map, the resulting diagram here represents information gathered from various vessels. Yet the most important difference is that in the French map, the cyclone appears to be taking a rectilinear path. This is because, according to Cloué, cyclones tend to follow the “line of least resistance” once they enter a confined space like the Gulf of Aden.[24] And after using additional accounts, Cloué concludes that the German report is erroneous. It is in this sense that much of the intellectual work behind Cloué’s 1887 article consisted of proving that, of all things, the cyclone behaved in a rational manner.

The two maps then exemplify different kinds of knowledge. The German map, which relied extensively on wind change data to show differences in isobars as well as the position of the storm, exemplified a quantitative approach to meteorology that was being recuperated slowly.[25] Cloué’s map, on the other hand, resonates with the kind of scientific thinking shown in the engravings from Le Roy’s Les navires. This map suggests that experience, in the form of the accounts from various vessels moored or traveling along the Gulf of Aden from May 31 to June 3, 1885, confirm the idea that cyclones travel in straight paths. The fact that the maps show the cyclone differently is also important. Whereas the German hydrographic map depicts the cyclone as a nebulous form that saunters along the Gulf of Aden, Cloué’s shows it as a circle—a convention that reflects the actual “position and extent” of the storm.[26]

Synoptic chart showing position of Aden cyclone relative to regional pressures. From W.L. Dallas, Storms of the Arabian Sea (Calcutta: Indian Meteorological Department, 1891) (Source: David Membery, “Monsoon Tropical Cyclones: Part 2,” Weather, Vol. 57, No. 7 (Jul., 2002), 247).






http://we-make-money-not-art.com/archives/2013/03/wpo-press.php#.UWP4MaKBqaY



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Zhang Kechun, Holding Mao’s picture swim across Yellow River in Henan, 2012. From the series: The Yellow River. Copyright: © Zhang Kechun, China, Shortlist, Landscape, Professional Competition, 2013 Sony World Photography Awards


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Louise Porter, Kara Woman, Omo Valley, Ethiopia. Copyright: © Louise Porter, USA, Shortlist, People, Open Competition 2013 Sony World Photography Awards
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Fausto Podavini. From the series: Mirella. Copyright: ©Fausto Podavini, Italy, Finalist, Lifestyle, Professional Competition, 2013 Sony World Photography Awards
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Jens Juul. From the series Six degrees of Copenhagen. Copyright: ©Jens Juul, Denmark, Finalist, Portraiture, Professional, 2013 Sony World Photography Awards
Taking its point of departure in the idea that every person on Earth is connected in the sixth degree, this series of photos depicts human connections through the city of Copenhagen. The set up is that Jens Juul portray random people that he engage with in the streets, and that these chance meetings end up with him taking highly personal photos of these people, who then each send Jens Juul on to another person in their network, who he can portray, who then gives me the name of another person…
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Danny Cohen, Polar Bear. Copyright: ©Danny Cohen, Australia, Shortlist, Enhanced, Open Competition 2013 Sony World Photography Awards
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Arjen Schmitz. From the series Hong Kong. Copyright: © Arjen Schmitz, Netherlands Finalist, Landscape, Professional Competition 2013 Sony World Photography Awards

for the HSPACE

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:50

Impure Opticality or: When Urban Screens Were Architecture

Shibuya at Night (Source) 

We normally think of urban screens as those larger (and brighter) than life media displays that illuminate cities and public spaces throughout the world.  In places like Shibuya or Times Square, for example, building façades have become the sites for what Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer call the “spectacular exhaustion of urban space.” [1]  The term serves a double purpose.  On the one hand, it does allude, albeit subtly, to the idea of how media screens become sources of light pollution.  The suggestion is that urban screens, with their barrage of lights,  exhaust and confuse the urban dweller to the point of sensorial exhaustion.  On the other hand, the term operates as a nod toGuy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) as well as to Paul Virilio’s idea of architecture as “media building”[2]—the latter being a term describing how architecture has transformed from a practice of creating structures of habitation to designing vehicles of information.  Such language immediately invokes buildings like Toyo Ito’s Sendai Mediatheque (2001).  Ito’s statement that his building—a Maison Dom-i-no for the information age integrating “the primitive body of natural flow and the virtual body of electronic flow”—really does invoke architecture as the literal building of media.

Historical analyses are useful in detecting the social, cultural, and technological milieus that led to the deployment of urban screens.  However, what kind of history are we (or should we be) talking about?  In his contribution to the Urban Screens Reader (2009), Erkki Huhtamo outlines an “archaeology of public media displays”—an ostensibly foucauldian approach that looks at past practices in order to understand the present. He links contemporary urban screen practice to the development of “trade signs, banners and broadsides to billboards and the earliest dynamic displays”[3] of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Huhtamo’s essay asserts that urban screen practice is first and formost urban—and from this we can infer that urban screens are therefore coextensive with the development of modern urbanism.  Such an assumption would normally cause us to deploy our favorite quotes and aphorisms by Walter BenjaminGeorg Simmel, or Siegfried Kracauer in support of Huhtamo’s observations at a moment’s notice.  And yet somehow the history of architecture remains a muted presence.

Urban screens are architectural in two senses of the word.  Urban screens generally stand perpendicular to the ground plane, a characteristic that places them in the same architectural categories as walls or facades.  Yet urban screens also operate as a kind of architectural effect.  They transform facades and curtain walls from blank or ornamented surfaces into actively charged envelopes.  And this transformation has been the object of recent criticism.  In an essay on the mediatic function of postwar American architecture, for example, Reinhold Martin makes a deceptively simple equation between curtain walls and television screens.  At the heart of this equivalency is a well-placed quote from Samuel Weber:

[T]he television screen can be said to live up to its name in at least three distinct, contradictory and yet interrelated senses.  First, it serves as a screen which allows distant vision [tele-vision] to be watched. Second, it screens, in the sense of selecting or filtering, the vision that is watched. And finally, it serves as a screen in the sense of standing between the viewer and the viewed, since what is rendered visible covers the separation that distinguished the other vision [the seeing someone or something seeing] from that of the sight of the spectator sitting in front of the set.[4]

The same could be said, for the most part, about urban screens.  Architectural effects, of course, have their own history, and Weber’s framework can provide a solid foundation from which to understand this development.  To modify this statement and apply it to urban screens as architecture requires some elaboration.  The first two definitions of screen—of screen as a mediator of distant vision and as a kind of selective filter—certainly do apply to urban screens.  Urban screens can depict scenes from faraway or physically distinct locales much in the same way as a television screen.  The third definition, however, is a variant of the first.  We can think of it as a way of distinguishing the sight of the viewer from the source of the image on the urban screen.  It is an impure opticality (to modify Clement Greenberg’s term)—an opticality that relies on the flatness of the urban screen (or just the condition of flatness) for its ability to project and transmit images.  The idea of an impure opticality recognizes the urban screen as a hybrid site that can include and display various kinds of media at different times.

Fritz Lang, Photograph of Broadway (1924) (Republished in Mendelsohn’s Amerika) (Source)

What, then, are architectural examples of screens that exemplify this notion of impure opticality?  An attempt at an exhaustive catalog of examples remains far beyond the purpose of this post.  Whole books have and remain to be written on the subject.  But for our purposes here, we can begin with a picture (and accompanying passage) from Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (1926).  The book includes photographs of buildings that Mendelsohn took while on a visit to the United States in 1924 at the behest of his publisher, Rudolf Mosse.  At one point, Mendelsohn reproduces a picture by Fritz Lang (who accompanied him on the trip) of a series of billboards along Broadway in Manhattan.  Here, lighted Coca-Cola and Dairylea billboards leave incandescent traces across the celluloid.  It as if Lang were momentarily disoriented, moving too rapidly, avoiding the onslaught of artificial light while keeping the camera aperture open. This light inscribes everything as a double-image, anticipating the scene in Metropolis when the technocrat Johann Fredersen stares outside his own office at the frenzied city lights flickering faster and faster: a vision of a city in disrepair.  And in his caption to the photograph, Mendelsohn writes:

Uncanny. The contours of the building are erased.

But in one’s consciousness they still rise, chase one another, trample one another.

This is the foil for the flaming scripts, the rocket fire of moving illuminating ads, emerging and submerging, disappearing and breaking out again over the thousands of autos and the maelstrom of pleasureseeking people.

Still disordered, because exaggerated, but all the same full of imaginative beauty, which will one day be complete.[5]

Lang’s photograph and Mendelsohn’s caption are a useful starting point for our investigation of urban screens for two reasons.  First, notice how the photograph elides any distinction between building and media.  This arresting image owes as much to its exposure as it does to the phantom traces captured on film.  But it is also important to note just how critical Mendelsohn is of the resulting image.  The casting of lights onto urban space is “beautiful” yet “disordered.”  Like the attendant image, his observations collapse any difference between building and billboard—we get the sense that he directs his ire as much to the billboard as to the underlying architecture, and yet it is difficult to maintain any difference between the two.

Erik Gunnar Asplund, Advertising Mast (1930) (Source)

We can think of Lang’s photograph as one of the first architectural conceptualizations of urban screens because of its equation of light effects with buildings.  Although this was precisely the point of Mendelsohn’s invective, other architects took advantage of this equivalency.   Only a couple of years later, Swedish architect Erik Gunnar Asplund (1885-1940) drew an elevation for an advertising mast for the Stockholm Exhibition of 1930.  The drawing reveals only the most minimal of architectural interventions—a neo-Constructivist fantasy of sorts.  A giant, metal frame, carried aloft above grade, acts a mast supporting a small observation platform between clew and tack.  Steel battens extend outward, each holding a thin cable suggesting the existence of a sail.  Between head and clew, and somewhere along the leech, nautical banners flutter in the wind.  Along the luff, illuminated signs bearing the names and logos of various companies are stacked upon each other.  Asplund’s mast acted like a beacon, casting its incandescent information into the air.  The Swedish novelist Ivar Lo-Johansson even remarked how “the high steel mast on the exhibition grounds projected like a signal, like a thrilling expression of joy, toward the bright blue sky.  The era of functionalism had blown in.”[6]

C.G. Rosenberg, Photograph of Asplund’s Advertising Mast (1930) (Signage by Sigurd Lewerentz)

One of the most compelling and dramatic images of Asplund’s advertising mast was taken from ground level by photographer C.G. Rosenberg.  The camera, trained upwards, reveals the aforementioned stacking of corporate logos (designed by fellow Swedish architect Sigurd Lewerentz).  Here, unlike in Lang’s photograph, the logos never dominate or overpower the image.  Lewerentz’s signs occupy only the top half of the image.  They almost totally obscure the mast.  The observation platform dominates the bottom half of the image.  This trick of angle does more than just compress the entirety of the advertisement mast into a single frame—it equates the relative flatness of the corporate logos with the flat, smooth, white surfaces of the observation deck.  And yet, the building in the picture, though white and supported in the air, nevertheless appears heavy and overbearing.  Here, through careful composition, architectural modernism literally and figuratively supports the projection of images into public space.  Architecture becomes the foundation for the broadcasting of media.

Venturi, Rauch, Scott Brown, National College Football Hall of Fame (1967)

Fast forward another 40 years or so, and we finally get to Robert Venturi’s and Denise Scott Brown’s famous dictum fromLearning From Las Vegas that “billboards are almost all right.”  Their tongue-in-cheek appraisal of architecture’s communicative potential is more than just a vindication of building as a form of visual art: it is an affirmation of “the validity of the commercial vernacular.”[7]  And just before their legendary Las Vegas studio, Venturi and Scott Brown had already explored the limits of commercial vernacular to the fullest extent possible.  Their unrealized National College Football Hall of Fame (1967) in New Brunswick, New Jersey is as close as one can get to the architecturalization of a billboard.  They called it a combination of sign and building, or “bill-ding-board”—a nod to the project’s dominating billboard facade.  Venturi’s description of the project in the April 1968 issue of Architectural Forum is especially resonant for those interested in urban screens:

The building fronts on large parking spaces and Rutgers Stadium and backs onto an exhibition field.  The billboard is 100′ x 200′.  Buttresses integrate it with the rest of the building.  Interior display niches fall within the buttress, static spaces along a long gallery.  This billboard, itself several feet thick, is backed by a maintenance catwalk, interlaced with the buttresses.  The screen, the approximate proportions of a football field, is lit by 200,000 electronically programmed lights which produce moving sequences of naturalistic images, or words and diagrams of football plays.  Immediately below the screen, where seats are bad in a movie, is a moat.[8]

What differentiates this project from Lang’s photograph or Asplund’s mast is an emphasis on entertainment.  Venturi’s description affirms the building’s role as a provider of images for public consumption.  More specifically, however, the National College Football Hall of Fame is an important predecessor for urban screens not only because of its architectural qualities, but also for its use of a literal screen as a means to display a combination of images and data—a first stab at an architecture for the sake of impure opticality.

Urban Apartment Block, from Playtime (dir. Jacques Tati, 1967)

More needs to be said about Weber’s quote, and especially about the relevance of television screens to an examination of urban screens.  If there is a building that truly exemplifies the relationship between television screen, curtain wall, and architecture, it would be the modernist apartment block from Jacques Tati’s Playtime (1967).  A medium shot captures the bottom two stories of a glazed building.  Four large picture windows, roughly the same proportion as television screens, reveal four families watching television sets inside their apartments.  Except for a few lamps, the television glow lights each unit from within.  The effect of course being that each unit now resembles a television set.  Here, spectator and spectacle, observer and observed are conflated onto the building’s window wall: “the generic window-wall becomes a metaphor for the movie screen itself, its extruded architectural technology multiplying it ad infinitum.”[9]


Top
: Louis Sullivan, Carson, Pirie Scott and Co. Department Store (1899-1904); Bottom: Le Corbusier, Maison Clarté (1930-32) (Source: Sigfried Giedion, 
Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Fifth Revised and Enlarged Edition [Cmabridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2008 (1966)]).

Jenney’s Leiter Building vs. Le Corbusier’s Maison Clarté, from Giedion, 
Raum, Zeit, Architektur: Die Entstehung einer neuen Tradition(Berlin: Springer, 2000 [1960]).

Tati’s careful framing recalls similar photographs of building facades from Sigfried Giedion’s Space, Time and Architecture (1941).  In that book, Giedion looks to photographs of windows and skeletal frames of buildings such asWilliam Le Baron Jenney’s Fair Building (1891) and Leiter Building (1889), as well as Louis Sullivan’s Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company department store (1899-1904) as buildings where “what is expressed in its construction and its architecture” are equal.[10]  The demarcator between the various structural/architectural elements are the horizontally-elongated “Chicago windows” that give these buildings their glazed appearance.  And in one famous instance, Giedion utilizes a Wölfflinian approach and pairs Jenney’s Leiter building on one page against Le Corbusier’s Maison Clarté (1930-32) on the other.  Although Giedion uses these images to show how these two architects used skeletal frames to achieve a kind of architectural purity, again it is the difference in glazing that deserves attention.  Whereas the windows are cut deeply into the Leiter building’s facade, in the Maison Claré, window and structural unit seem to become part of the same surface. This too is a compositional trick.  With careful cropping and the use of a telephoto lens, the terraces and walkways are flattened onto a single image.

In Playtime, the apartment building also reveals a decided Chicago Frame influence.  The dark, horizontal floor plates, when played against the lighted vertical framing, suggest that the windows are also cut deeply into the facade.  And yet the ambient television glow from within problematizes this distinction.  A second glance reveals that the glass planes are indeed flush with the surface facade.  And as in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building (1957), external wide-flange vertical beams are deployed as subtle ornament.

Eiffel Tower reflected onto Tativille glazing, from Playtime (1967)

This collapsing of window onto facade becomes yet another way to erase any distinction between building and image.  And this is even more so in Tati’s film, where glazed curtain walls reflect other parts of Paris.  Here, then, glass becomes architecture.  Architecture becomes a screen that reflects images onto public space.  In short, as demonstrated by the various buildings (and reflections of buildings) in Playtime, architecture has become a true urban screen.

Let us return back to Weber’s definition of “screen”.  Specifically, the second definition—that of a screen as a filtering device—becomes important because is alludes to how an urban screen may be deployed in front of a building.  The urban screen becomes a site of impure opticality, a surface where various kinds of images, colors, and information, illuminate city spaces.  And yet, once we move beyond Huhtamo’s archaeological investigations, we note that urban screens filter and obscure much more than the supporting architecture: they conceal histories of architectures that gave rise to this phenomenon in the first place.

______________________

Notes


[1] Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer, Introduction to Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), p. 10.

[2] Gianni Ranauldo, Light Architecture, New Edge City (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2001), p. 7.
[3] Erkki Huhtamo, “Messages on the Wall: An Archaeology of Public Media Displays” in Scott McQuire, Meredith Martin, and Sabine Niederer, Introduction to Urban Screens Reader (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2009), p. 15.
[4] Samuel Weber, “Television: Set and Screen,” in Alan Cholodenko, ed. Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), quoted in Reinhold Martin, “Atrocities.  Or, Curtain Wall as Mass Medium” Perspecta, Vol. 32, Resurfacing Modernism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2001), p. 70.
[5] Stanley Appelbaum, trans., Erich Mendelsohn’s “Amerika”: 82 Photographs (New York: Dover Publications, 1993), p. 52.  The original caption reads:

Unheimlich. Die Konturen der Häuser sind aus gewischt. Aber in Bewußtsein steigen sie noch, laufen einander nach, überennen sich.

Das ist die Folie für die Flammenschriften, das Raketenfeuer der beweglichen Lichtreklame, auf- und untertauchend, verschwindend und ausbrechend über den Tausenden von Autos und dem Lustwirbel der Menschen.

Noch ungeordnet, weil übersteigert, aber doch schon voll von phantastischer Schönheit, die einmal vollendet sein wird.

Erich Mendelsohn, Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Architekten (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse Verlag, 1928), p. 130.  For more information, see Enrique Ramirez, “Erich Mendelsohn at War” Perspecta, Vol. 41, Grand Tour (Cambridge, MIT Press, 2008).
[6] Ivar Lo-Johansson, The Author (1957), quoted in Dag Windman, Karin Winter, and Nina Stritzler-Levine, Bruno Mathsson: Architect and Designer (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), p. 14.
[7] Rober Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1977 [1972]), p. 6.
[8] Venturi, “A Bill-Ding Board Involving Movies, Relics and Space,” Architectural Forum (Apr., 1968) pp. 74-76.
[9] Joan Ockman, “Architecture in a Mode of Distraction: Eight Takes on Jacques Tati’s Playtime,” in Mark Lamster, ed. Architecture and Film (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2000), p. 189.
[10] Sigfried Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967 [1941]), p. 385.

HMNY.ORG CALL FOR PAPERS 2013

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Evangelina Guerra Luján ( a.k.a. The Nomad) is an urban architect, public space designer/strategist, spatial designer and lecturer/pedagogue.Trained in Urban Architecture at ITESM (Guadalajara, México) with a postgraduate degree in Design, Art and Society: Actions on Public Space at ELISAVA (Barcelona, Spain) and a Master Advanced Studies of Applied Sciences in Spatial Design (ehem. Scenography) at ZHdK (Zürich, Switzerland), Evangelina develops her professional practice beyond the traditional boundaries of Architecture.

Cartographer interested in the new territory of social network, she created in 2010 the platform “The Nomad / THNMD”: a tool for research, communicate and disseminate knowledge in the fields of Urbanism, Architecture, Design and Art, with an activist and political approach.

Evangelina is founder and Director of OTUN : Oficina de Transformación Urbana | Nómada: a young architectural practice/research platform combining Urbanism, Public Space Design and Spatial Intervention. OTUN develops and investigates strategies for urban renewal.

She is faculty member of ITESM University at both Architecture and Design Departments.
Her work has been published in various printed and on-line media such as Arquine MagazineSocks Studio and Quaderns.

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 10:07
https://sites.google.com/site/2013hmny/cfp

HMNYC 2013: Confronting Capital
April 26-28, 2013

New York University

Critical investigations into the present moment quickly reveal that the current crisis of capitalism shows no sign of abating. The failure of austerity to restore growth has sent ruling class politicians scrambling, as the assault of capital on all fronts of life—ecological, economic and social—grows exponentially. 
    
This is not without resistance however. From the ongoing Arab revolution, to Occupy and Greece, confrontations of capital and regimes of power continue to proliferate, push forth new political horizons and sustain influence on a global scale. 

HMNY 2013 is an intervention into the present to provide a theoretical space for debate and discussion, urgently needed on the left at this juncture. Moments like this are especially fertile for new looks at old debates, from the history of capitalism to new modes of resistance. HMNY 2013 will be a venue where figures representing the breadth of current leftist thought will convene to exchange ideas.

Historical Materialism (HM) is one the foremost journals of Marxian theory. HM’s London-based conferences have long drawn hundreds of scholars from around the world. Since 2006, North American HM conferences have been organized in Toronto and New York City (which will now alternate with bi-annual Spring conferences). HMNY 2013 will begin with a reception on the evening of Friday April 26th, and will take place on April 27th-28th at the New York University in downtown Manhattan. All participants are encouraged to stay for the whole duration of the conference.
The themes for this year’s conference will include:
  • politics of socialist planning and utopias
  • history and future of social democracy
  • political economy of capitalism
  • history of international communism
  • political philosophy of feminism
  • debt, austerity, and finance
  • critical geographies
  • ecology and climate change
  • law, punishment, and incarceration
  • queer studies and sexuality
  • theories of the state and politics
  • race and capital
  • empire and the third world
  • history of capital and labor
  • feminism and marxism
  • critical philosophy
  • socialist strategy today
  • education under capitalism
  • aesthetic ideologies
  • culture and the crisis
Submissions are closed. The deadline for the submission of abstracts was February 15, 2013.

phtgrphy-post

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post-photo lec- 7page

post-photo 

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[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/47762992 w=500&h=281]
Aquatic centre. Short film by Cristobal Palma from LCLAOFFICE on Vimeo.

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/ffDDry55CfQ?version=3&hl=en_US

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 05:49


We can even talk about new species in architecture wich are based in several biological formations. Marta Malé-Alemany and Luis Fraguada state on the book Antartica. Time of Change that natural structures attract architects because their physical characteristics are the result of a system that has been subjected to constantly variable conditions. In that sense, it’s easy to understand why so many architects and engineers have focused their attention on diatoms, a major group of algae that are encased within a unique cell wall made of silica [hydrated silicon dioxide] called a frustule. Thus, the diatom morphology is a great source of inspiration in developing structural strategies for the construction of complex forms.


not only the same happened at the art world…give examples


Antarctica: Time of Change 


Mireya Maso mostly works in video and photography, and in recent years she has essentially concerned herself with the study of human beings through their action on the landscape. In her project ANTARCTICA. TIME OF CHANGE, however, she engages with a natural landscape barely touched by man, and focuses her investigations on the mechanisms of perception of the human being in an environment in continual transformation. The conversations between the artist and scientists from different disciplines provide the basis for a discussion in the book which considers questions such as Perception in the Antarctic environment in terms of glaciology, biology, psychology, neurology and other disciplines, and The interpretation of Antarctic microorganisms from the perspective of bionanotechnology and architecture.








The Territory of the Virtually Unknown*


Svalbard. Photo by Reuben Wu
“Any environmental design task is characterized by an astounding amount of unavailable or indeterminate information.”
—Nicholas Negroponte, The Architecture Machine
The North and South Poles are somehow a terra incognita for architects. The harsh conditions of this environments are related more with the power of ideas than materiality, while we are still speculating about how to conquer this territory of the virtually unknown, as Peter Cook pointed on MAP 001 Antartica. These territories, the Artic and the Antartic, has been inspiration for artists, poets, musicians and architects, who have been working to discover the secrets hidden behind the masses of ice that shape these lands.
With all this facts in mind, it is interesting to revisit some history about built projects in this areas, such as theHalley VI Antartic Research Station or the Princess Elisabeth Station as examples to understand what have been done until now and to speculate on what can be done in the future. We have written before about the fascination of extreme environments and it seems that a good place to start researching about the environmental conditions of this kind of places is Svalbard, an archipelago in the Arctic, which constitutes the northernmost part of Norway. Svalbard is also known because of the Doomsday Vault, an emergency genebank located in the mountains above Longyearbyen or for the SOUSY Svalbard Radar, a so-called “mesosphere-stratosphere-troposphere”, a system to determine atmospheric parameters such as winds and turbulence from a few km altitude to over 100km and at a wide variety of spatial and temporal resolutions.
2
SOUSY Svalbard Radar in Svalbard. Photo by Reuben Wu
polar-11-of-30
Doomsday Vault in Svalbard. Photo by Reuben Wu
Paul D. Miller wrote on the Book of Ice:
“Looking back over the last several centuries, an intense amount of energy has been expended all over the world exploring and unraveling the meaning of humanity’s condition on the planet. Much of this energy has been spent in perverse and self-defeating ways. Our vision of modern life is tinged by events like the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, which makes former disasters like the 1989 Exxon Valdez incident or the 1986 release of radioactive steam in Chernobyl seem quaint and self-contained. More than ever, we are interconnected, and interdependent. In the future, regardless of any human action, the planet will be here—we, as a species, might not.”
This idea of life disappearing from the planet is part of the motivation of creating bank seeds. MAP Architectshas designed the South Pole Universal Seed Archive with the aim to place the archive at the geographic South Pole and to take advantage of the already existing conditions. Mostly all of the seed archives built until now are housed in concrete bunkers, to avoid any kind of damage, but the main fact of this project is that is a seed archive without “architecture”. The proposal is that the landscape itself becomes the archive with the seeds saved in aluminium canisters buried five metres in the ice [not to be ground but stored]. One of the most interesting facts emerges with the use of geolocation technologies: “With each canister marked by a flag and a radio beacon, the archive becomes a map, a GPS landscape, charting the collection of seeds distributed radially and following the genetic relationship between the archived species.” This way, topography becomes alive with information.
MAP_01
South Pole Universal Seed Archive by MAP Architects
Going further we can remark the importance of transdiciplinarity in this field. To speculate and propose projects for such a difficult environment, there is a real need for architects to work side by side with scientist, biologist, physicist and other disciplines to discover new approaches to this frozen terrain that has long been Earth’s most mysterious region, in words of Brian Greene.
We can even talk about new species in architecture wich are based in several biological formations. Marta Malé-Alemany and Luis Fraguada state on the book Antartica. Time of Change that natural structures attract architects because their physical characteristics are the result of a system that has been subjected to constantly variable conditions. In that sense, it’s easy to understand why so many architects and engineers have focused their attention on diatoms, a major group of algae that are encased within a unique cell wall made of silica [hydrated silicon dioxide] called a frustule. Thus, the diatom morphology is a great source of inspiration in developing structural strategies for the construction of complex forms.
With the emergence of digital manufacturing and 3D printing processes, research projects in the fields of architecture and design are now capable to produce models and prototypes to test in a very accurate way a wide frame of new materials and structures. Following these ideas, the Istitute of Advanced Architecture has produced for the exhibition “Antartica. Time of Change” an interesting set of spheres based on the geometric analysis of diatoms, creating surfaces that could adopt a continuous, unbroken skeleton.
University-of-Hong-Kong-02-photo-dpr-barcelona
Work by the University of Hong Kong. Exhibited at the Beyond Media Festival
diatoms-exhibition-1
24 Spheres. IAAC participation at Antartica. Time of Change.
If we agree with Mireya Masó when she states that “Time becomes matter in the uninterrupted flow of sun and fog.”, it is possible to even go further on the explorations of this extreme landscape and use the same inspiration in some other places and contexts, as Luis Callejas and Lukas Pauer did when they directed the workshop “What Olmsted did not know: On snow storms“, where natural phenomena are the raw materials used to generate a projected landscape. The project Moku-Moku by Jason Brain, Sang Cho, Takuya Iwamura and Phoebe White is based on the idea of organize in a scientific way the different kinds of clouds, as they point “There are no kingdoms, phylums, orders or classes in the cloud-world, but there are families, genera, species and even subspecies.” In addition to enumerating the endemic behaviors of the three observed cloud species, the team explored ideas of chemical cloud seeding. By adding as little as 0.1 micrograms per liter of water of various compounds [USPHS safe], the visual qualities of the clouds can be drastically affected.
On this project, White, Iwamura, White and Cho also used balloons, not only for their connotation with weather patterns in our modern age, but also for the timeless wistfulness that they convey to everyone. The project is also a representation of how clouds imply landforms of interest beneath them, and how environmental conditions [such as wind force] can be used as inherent part of the proposal, as the way that wind deformation transforms the installation constantly.
Snow_01
Moku-Moku by Jason Brain, Sang Cho, Takuya Iwamura and Phoebe White.
Snow_02
Moku-Moku by Jason Brain, Sang Cho, Takuya Iwamura and Phoebe White.
In times when the horizon of unknown territories is moving faster than ever, instead of the old human desire of conquer nature maybe we should decide to abandon this new colonialism and try to remember that “space, once conquered, loses interest in the eyes both of the explorer and of a public that is avid for new feats.”, as Josep Perelló wrote. Or on the opposite, we should simply be humble enough to remember that nature has its own rules that are impossible to replicate in a perfect way.
We want to end with Matteo Pasquinelli words:
“Schematically, the question is how to apply the forms of the bios to the techne? And conversely, how to apply the forms of the techne to the bios? […] Instead of forcing biomimesis, such an investigation should trackbiomorphism, that is, the stratification and transmission of energy surplus through frictions, asymmetries and condensations.”
—–
The Territory of the Virtually Unknown*. Name taken of Peter Cook’s introduction to MAP 01: Antartica
Recommended readings:
[1] Antartica. Time of Change. Josep Perelló, Vicenc Altaió, Alicia Chillida. Actar, 2011.
[2] The Book of Ice. Paul D. Miller. Subliminal Kid Inc, 2011.
[3] Four Regimes of Entropy: For an Ecology of Genetics and Biomorphic Media Theory. Matteo Pasquinelli. Fibreculture #17: Unnatural ecologies, special issues on media ecology. 2011.

situanists

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 05:47

hyper
hyper culture
share
distribute

alien

From
Us
to
our family
our neighborhood
our education
our job
our government
our city
our regions
our planet…
the planet and us within the planet.


What would be the main characteristics of the new culture and how would it compare with essential urbanity?
– Against the spectacle of individual progress, the realised situationist urbanity introduces the recognition of “the other” and its differences as essential step towards collaboration.
– Against preserved education, it is posed learning through direct experience with relational civic interactions, conflict management and “doing with others” strategies.
– Against particularised design, it will be a global practice with a bearing, each moment, on all the available elements. Naturally this would tend to collective production which would be without doubt anonymous (the claim of exclusive authorship would reveal suspicious and works will no longer be stocked as commodities but as means to reach collective goals). The minimum proposals of these experiences will be a revolution in behaviour and a dynamic unitary urbanism capable of extension to the entire planet, and may become the key to access to all parallel universes created by a new conscious observation of all micro-ordinary events of the city.
– Against unilateral art, situationist culture will be an art of dialogue, an art of interaction, an art of conflict as enabling force. The enclosed era of primitivism and isolated design solutions must be superseded by complete communication and open peer to peer tools to reach dynamic equilibrium between opposites in a given urban system.
At micro-ordinary level, everyone will become a coder generating the conditions for its playful existence to insert and work within the urban system of interactions. 
It will happen that when opening the door and going where the street begins, it won’t appear the already known houses aligned in the moulded sidewalk, but a living forest where every moment “can be thrown like a magnolia and where the faces will born when looking at them”.[2] This violent emotive possession of the streets will provide exciting treasures for those drifters taking the challenge to explore alien quarters and neighbors.[3]
“”περίπατος- περιπλάνηση η αναδημιουργία του χάρτη(*) της πόλης μέσα από τη συνειρμική(**) συλλογή υλικού με χρονική ταυτότητα(***) …στόχος η εξερεύνηση  των παράξενων ,ανοίκειων, περιθωριακών, ετεροτοπικών, ονειρικών στοιχείων της πόλης που δεν υπάρχουν σε πρώτο πλάνο 
We have just move inside what will historically be the evolutive urban dimension. The role of amateur-professional —of adhocrat— is again a specialisation up to the point of social and mental interaction, when everyone becomes a node in the sense that the new system will remain in the strength of its connections. This task will be slowly filtering into to the society without a permanent division of labour, thus generating activities for which we haven’t invented the names yet.
To those who don’t understand us properly, we say with an irreducible will: “We await the turning point which is the inevitable liquidation of the world of economic progress, in all its fictional forms. Such are our goals, and these will be the future goals of urbanity.”
“It is the business of the future to be dangerous” 
—A.N. Whitehead

http://sites.nationalacademies.org/CSTB/CompletedProjects/CSTB_042322

Doctor Atomic opera about the Manhattan Project
  • Breaking the Code, Broadway play about Alan Turing
  • A Beautiful Mind biography of John Nash
  • Laurie Anderson as NASA Artist in Residence
  • LOGICOMIX, graphical novel about the history of Logic
  • Bruce Nauman’s installations using infrared surveillance cameras
  • The Listening Post and Moveable Type collaborative projects of Mark Hansen (statistician) and Ben Rubin (artist)

Bridging the Two Cultures is a grand challenge.

 There is a fundamental asymmetry and complementarity between them: the word Science comes from the Greek “to cut.” The word Art comes from the Latin “to join.” 
what about the greek word +τεχνη- 
The results can be extremely productive by expanding public interest and engagement with both sectors, bringing new topics to new audiences, and educating and inspiring the next generation to transcend existing boundaries to discover and create the future of innovations. STEM fields have always valued creative minds, and the best artists excel at highly unconventional, unorthodox thinking. Artists also are excellent at capturing and representing the zeitgeist in elegant, compelling ways. That quality suggests that fruitful collaboration between scientists and artists can yield not only interesting ideas and “products,” they may also build in effective modes of communicating the value of that work to a wide audience.

8 Απριλίου 2013

b&h-pro-webd-tables-html-consuming-consumed-archive/ from simple html and js to dhtml , to html 5 and js sem 5-6

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 18:05
simple html
tags-elements
starting-ending
opening-closing concept
head section
body section
………..listen to the tutorial
texts-images-sounds

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/v4oN4DuR7YU?version=3&hl=en_US

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/v/Wz2klMXDqF4?hl=en_US&version=3
uowm ftp server //

In more length: The term “HTML5” is widely used as a buzzword to refer to modern Web technologies, many of which (though by no means all) are developed at the WHATWG, in some cases in conjunction with the W3C and IETF.
The WHATWG work is all published in one specification (the one you are reading right now), parts of which are republished in an edition optimized for Web developers
The W3C also publishes parts of this specification as separate documents. One of these parts is called “HTML5”; it is a forked subset of this specification (the HTML Living Standard). There are numerous differences between this specification (the HTML Living Standard) and the W3C version, some minor, some major. Unfortunately these are not currently accurately documented anywhere, so there is no way to know which are intentional and which are not.

1.8 HTML vs XHTML


This section

non-normative.

 is 
This specification defines an abstract language for describing documents and applications, and some APIs for interacting with in-memory representations of resources that use this language.
The in-memory representation is known as “DOM HTML”, or “the DOM” for short.
There are various concrete syntaxes that can be used to transmit resources that use this abstract language, two of which are defined in this specification.
The first such concrete syntax is the HTML syntax. This is the format suggested for most authors. It is compatible with most legacy Web browsers. If a document is transmitted with the text/html MIME type, then it will be processed as an HTML document by Web browsers. This specification defines the latest HTML syntax, known simply as “HTML”.
The second concrete syntax is the XHTML syntax, which is an application of XML. When a document is transmitted with an XML MIME type, such as application/xhtml+xml, then it is treated as an XML document by Web browsers, to be parsed by an XML processor. Authors are reminded that the processing for XML and HTML differs; in particular, even minor syntax errors will prevent a document labeled as XML from being rendered fully, whereas they would be ignored in the HTML syntax. This specification defines the latest XHTML syntax, known simply as “XHTML”.
The DOM, the HTML syntax, and the XHTML syntax cannot all represent the same content. For example, namespaces cannot be represented using the HTML syntax, but they are supported in the DOM and in the XHTML syntax. Similarly, documents that use the noscript feature can be represented using the HTML syntax, but cannot be represented with the DOM or in the XHTML syntax. Comments that contain the string “-->” can only be represented in the DOM, not in the HTML and XHTML syntaxes.

αρχικό παράδειγμα γραφής dom html




A document with a short head


...
Here is an example of a longer one:





An application with a long head


http://support.js



...

ex

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the spectacle and the image- the origins of spectacle


The theory of mass culture-or mass audience culture, commercial culture, “popular”
culture, the culture industry, as it is variously known-has always tended to define its object
against so-called high culture without reflecting on the objective status of this opposition.
As so often, positions in this field reduce themselves to two mirror-images, and are
essentially staged in terms of value. Thus the familiar motif of elitism argues for the priority
of mass culture on the grounds of the sheer numbers of people exposed to it; the pursuit of
high or hermetic culture is then stigmatized as a status hobby of small groups of
intellectuals. As its anti-intellectual thrust suggests, this essentially negative position has
little theoretical content but clearly responds to a deeply rooted conviction in American
radicalism and articulates a widely based sense that high culture is an establishment
phenomenon, irredeemably tainted by its association with institutions, in particular with
the university. The value invoked is therefore a social one: it would be preferable to deal
with tv programs, The Godfather, orJaws, rather than with Wallace Stevens or HenryJames,
because the former clearly speak a cultural language meaningful to far wider strata of the
population than what is socially represented by intellectuals. Radicals are however also
intellectuals, so that this position has suspicious overtones of the guilt trip; meanwhile it
overlooks the anti-social and critical, negative (although generally not revolutionary)
stance of much of the most important forms of modem art; finally, it offers no method for
reading even those cultural objects it valorizes and has had little of interest to say about
their content

**html

Presentation related attributes

  • background (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes for body (required element according to the W3C.) element.
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on divform, paragraph (p) and heading (h1h6) elements
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), noshade (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), size (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and width (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes on hr element
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), bordervspace and hspace attributes on img and object (caution: the object element is only supported in Internet Explorer (from the major browsers)) elements
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on legend and caption elements
  • align (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) on table element
  • nowrap (Obsolete), bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), widthheight on td and th elements
  • bgcolor (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attribute on tr element
  • clear (Obsolete) attribute on br element
  • compact attribute on dldir and menu elements
  • type (Deprecated. use CSS instead.), compact (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) and start (Deprecated. use CSS instead.) attributes on ol and ulelements
  • type and value attributes on li element
  • width attribute on pre element

HTML is written in the form of HTML elements consisting of tags enclosed in angle brackets (like ), within the web page content. HTML tags most commonly come in pairs like 

 and 

, although some tags, known as empty elements, are unpaired, for example . The first tag in a pair is the start tag, the second tag is the end tag (they are also called opening tags and closing tags). In between these tags web designers can add text, tags, comments and other types of text-based content.




Sample page


Sample page


This is a simple sample.




HTML documents 

Some features of HTML trade user convenience for a measure of user privacy.
In general, due to the Internet’s architecture, a user can be distinguished from another by the user’s IP address. IP addresses do not perfectly match to a user; as a user moves from device to device, or from network to network, their IP address will change; similarly, NAT routing, proxy servers, and shared computers enable packets that appear to all come from a single IP address to actually map to multiple users. Technologies such as onion routing can be used to further anonymize requests so that requests from a single user at one node on the Internet appear to come from many disparate parts of the network.
However, the IP address used for a user’s requests is not the only mechanism by which a user’s requests could be related to each other. Cookies, for example, are designed specifically to enable this, and are the basis of most of the Web’s session features that enable you to log into a site with which you have an account.
There are other mechanisms that are more subtle. Certain characteristics of a user’s system can be used to distinguish groups of users from each other; by collecting enough such information, an individual user’s browser’s “digital fingerprint” can be computed, which can be as good, if not better, as an IP address in ascertaining which requests are from the same user.
Grouping requests in this manner, especially across multiple sites, can be used for both benign (and even arguably positive) purposes, as well as for malevolent purposes. An example of a reasonably benign purpose would be determining whether a particular person seems to prefer sites with dog illustrations as opposed to sites with cat illustrations (based on how often they visit the sites in question) and then automatically using the preferred illustrations on subsequent visits to participating sites. Malevolent purposes, however, could include governments combining information such as the person’s home address (determined from the addresses they use when getting driving directions on one site) with their apparent political affiliations (determined by examining the forum sites that they participate in) to determine whether the person should be prevented from voting in an election.
Since the malevolent purposes can be remarkably evil, user agent implementors are encouraged to consider how to provide their users with tools to minimize leaking information that could be used to fingerprint a user.
Unfortunately, as the first paragraph in this section implies, sometimes there is great benefit to be derived from exposing the very information that can also be used for fingerprinting purposes, so it’s not as easy as simply blocking all possible leaks. For instance, the ability to log into a site to post under a specific identity requires that the user’s requests be identifiable as all being from the same user, more or less by definition. More subtly, though, information such as how wide text is, which is necessary for many effects that involve drawing text onto a canvas (e.g. any effect that involves drawing a border around the text) also leaks information that can be used to group a user’s requests. (In this case, by potentially exposing, via a brute force search, which fonts a user has installed, information which can vary considerably from user to user.)
Features in this specification which can be used to fingerprint the user are marked as this paragraph is.(This is a fingerprinting vector.)
Other features in the platform can be used for the same purpose, though, including, though not limited to:
  • The exact list of which features a user agents supports.
  • The maximum allowed stack depth for recursion in script.
  • Features that describe the user’s environment, like Media Queries and the Screen object. [MQ] [CSSOMVIEW]
  • The user’s time zone.

1.11 A quick introduction to HTML

Ready for first implementations
This section is non-normative.
A basic HTML document looks like this:



Sample page


Sample page


This is a simple sample.




HTML documents consist of a tree of elements and text. Each element is denoted in the source by a start tag, such as ““, and an end tag, such as ““. 
(Certain start tags and end tags can in certain cases be omitted and are implied by other tags.)
Tags have to be nested such that elements are all completely within each other, without overlapping:

This is very wrong!

This is correct.

This specification defines a set of elements that can be used in HTML, along with rules about the ways in which the elements can be nested.
Elements can have attributes, which control how the elements work. In the example below, there is a hyperlink, formed using the a element and itshref attribute:
simple
Attributes are placed inside the start tag, and consist of a name and a value, separated by an “=” character. The attribute value can remainunquoted if it doesn’t contain space characters or any of " ' ` = < or >. Otherwise, it has to be quoted using either single or double quotes. The value, along with the “=” character, can be omitted altogether if the value is the empty string.









HTML user agents (e.g. Web browsers) then parse this markup, turning it into a DOM (Document Object Model) tree. A DOM tree is an in-memory representation of a document.
DOM trees contain several kinds of nodes, in particular a DocumentType node, Element nodes, Text nodes, Comment nodes, and in some cases ProcessingInstruction nodes.
The markup snippet at the top of this section would be turned into the following DOM tree:
  • DOCTYPE: html
  • html
    • head
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • title
        • #textSample page
      • #text⏎␣
    • #text⏎␣
    • body
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • h1
        • #textSample page
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • p
        • #textThis is a
        • a href=”demo.html
          • #textsimple
        • #textsample.
      • #text⏎␣␣
      • #commentthis is a comment
      • #text⏎␣⏎
The root element of this tree is the html element, which is the element always found at the root of HTML documents. It contains two elements,head and body, as well as a Text node between them.
There are many more Text nodes in the DOM tree than one would initially expect, because the source contains a number of spaces (represented here by “␣”) and line breaks (“⏎”) that all end up as Text nodes in the DOM. However, for historical reasons not all of the spaces and line breaks in the original markup appear in the DOM. In particular, all the whitespace before head start tag ends up being dropped silently, and all the whitespace after the body end tag ends up placed at the end of the body.
The head element contains a title element, which itself contains a Text node with the text “Sample page”. Similarly, the body element contains an h1 element, a p element, and a comment.

This DOM tree can be manipulated from scripts in the page. Scripts (typically in JavaScript) are small programs that can be embedded using thescript element or using event handler content attributes. For example, here is a form with a script that sets the value of the form’s outputelement to say “Hello World”:
<form name="main">
Result: <output name="result">
<script>
document.forms.main.elements.result.value = 'Hello World';

Each element in the DOM tree is represented by an object, and these objects have APIs so that they can be manipulated. For instance, a link (e.g. the a element in the tree above) can have its “href” attribute changed in several ways:
var a = document.links[0]; // obtain the first link in the document
a.href = 'sample.html'; // change the destination URL of the link
a.protocol = 'https'; // change just the scheme part of the URL
a.setAttribute('href', 'http://example.com/'); // change the content attribute directly
Since DOM trees are used as the way to represent HTML documents when they are processed and presented by implementations (especially interactive implementations like Web browsers), this specification is mostly phrased in terms of DOM trees, instead of the markup described above.

HTML documents represent a media-independent description of interactive content. HTML documents might be rendered to a screen, or through a speech synthesizer, or on a braille display. To influence exactly how such rendering takes place, authors can use a styling language such as CSS.
In the following example, the page has been made yellow-on-blue using CSS.



Sample styled page

body { background: navy; color: yellow; }



Sample styled page


This page is just a demo.



For more details on how to use HTML, authors are encouraged to consult tutorials and guides. Some of the examples included in this specification might also be of use, but the novice author is cautioned that this specification, by necessity, defines the language with a level of detail that might be difficult to understand at first.

1.11.1 Writing secure applications with HTML

This section is non-normative.
When HTML is used to create interactive sites, care needs to be taken to avoid introducing vulnerabilities through which attackers can compromise the integrity of the site itself or of the site’s users.
A comprehensive study of this matter is beyond the scope of this document, and authors are strongly encouraged to study the matter in more detail. However, this section attempts to provide a quick introduction to some common pitfalls in HTML application development.
The security model of the Web is based on the concept of “origins”, and correspondingly many of the potential attacks on the Web involve cross-origin actions. [ORIGIN]
Not validating user input
Cross-site scripting (XSS)
SQL injection
When accepting untrusted input, e.g. user-generated content such as text comments, values in URL parameters, messages from third-party sites, etc, it is imperative that the data be validated before use, and properly escaped when displayed. Failing to do this can allow a hostile user to perform a variety of attacks, ranging from the potentially benign, such as providing bogus user information like a negative age, to the serious, such as running scripts every time a user looks at a page that includes the information, potentially propagating the attack in the process, to the catastrophic, such as deleting all data in the server.
When writing filters to validate user input, it is imperative that filters always be whitelist-based, allowing known-safe constructs and disallowing all other input. Blacklist-based filters that disallow known-bad inputs and allow everything else are not secure, as not everything that is bad is yet known (for example, because it might be invented in the future).
For example, suppose a page looked at its URL’s query string to determine what to display, and the site then redirected the user to that page to display a message, as in:
If the message was just displayed to the user without escaping, a hostile attacker could then craft a URL that contained a script element:
http://example.com/message.cgi?say=%3Cscript%3Ealert%28%27Oh%20no%21%27%29%3C/script%3E
If the attacker then convinced a victim user to visit this page, a script of the attacker’s choosing would run on the page. Such a script could do any number of hostile actions, limited only by what the site offers: if the site is an e-commerce shop, for instance, such a script could cause the user to unknowingly make arbitrarily many unwanted purchases.
This is called a cross-site scripting attack.
There are many constructs that can be used to try to trick a site into executing code. Here are some that authors are encouraged to consider when writing whitelist filters:
  • When allowing harmless-seeming elements like img, it is important to whitelist any provided attributes as well. If one allowed all attributes then an attacker could, for instance, use the onload attribute to run arbitrary script.
  • When allowing URLs to be provided (e.g. for links), the scheme of each URL also needs to be explicitly whitelisted, as there are many schemes that can be abused. The most prominent example is “javascript:“, but user agents can implement (and indeed, have historically implemented) others.
  • Allowing a base element to be inserted means any script elements in the page with relative links can be hijacked, and similarly that any form submissions can get redirected to a hostile site.
Cross-site request forgery (CSRF)
If a site allows a user to make form submissions with user-specific side-effects, for example posting messages on a forum under the user’s name, making purchases, or applying for a passport, it is important to verify that the request was made by the user intentionally, rather than by another site tricking the user into making the request unknowingly.
This problem exists because HTML forms can be submitted to other origins.
Sites can prevent such attacks by populating forms with user-specific hidden tokens, or by checking Origin headers on all requests.
Clickjacking
A page that provides users with an interface to perform actions that the user might not wish to perform needs to be designed so as to avoid the possibility that users can be tricked into activating the interface.
One way that a user could be so tricked is if a hostile site places the victim site in a small iframe and then convinces the user to click, for instance by having the user play a reaction game. Once the user is playing the game, the hostile site can quickly position the iframe under the mouse cursor just as the user is about to click, thus tricking the user into clicking the victim site’s interface.
To avoid this, sites that do not expect to be used in frames are encouraged to only enable their interface if they detect that they are not in a frame (e.g. by comparing the window object to the value of the top attribute).

1.11.2 Common pitfalls to avoid when using the scripting APIs

This section is non-normative.
Scripts in HTML have “run-to-completion” semantics, meaning that the browser will generally run the script uninterrupted before doing anything else, such as firing further events or continuing to parse the document.
On the other hand, parsing of HTML files happens asynchronously and incrementally, meaning that the parser can pause at any point to let scripts run. This is generally a good thing, but it does mean that authors need to be careful to avoid hooking event handlers after the events could have possibly fired.
There are two techniques for doing this reliably: use event handler content attributes, or create the element and add the event handlers in the same script. The latter is safe because, as mentioned earlier, scripts are run to completion before further events can fire.
One way this could manifest itself is with img elements and the load event. The event could fire as soon as the element has been parsed, especially if the image has already been cached (which is common).
Here, the author uses the onload handler on an img element to catch the load event:
Games
If the element is being added by script, then so long as the event handlers are added in the same script, the event will still not be missed:

var img = new Image();
img.src = 'games.png';
img.alt = 'Games';
img.onload = gamesLogoHasLoaded;
// img.addEventListener('load', gamesLogoHasLoaded, false); // would work also
However, if the author first created the img element and then in a separate script added the event listeners, there’s a chance that theload event would be fired in between, leading it to be missed:

Games
<!-- the 'load' event might fire here while the parser is taking a
break, in which case you will not see it! -->

var img = document.getElementById('games');
img.onload = gamesLogoHasLoaded; // might never fire!

1.12 Conformance requirements for authors

This section is non-normative.
Unlike previous versions of the HTML specification, this specification defines in some detail the required processing for invalid documents as well as valid documents.
However, even though the processing of invalid content is in most cases well-defined, conformance requirements for documents are still important: in practice, interoperability (the situation in which all implementations process particular content in a reliable and identical or equivalent way) is not the only goal of document conformance requirements. This section details some of the more common reasons for still distinguishing between a conforming document and one with errors.

1.12.1 Presentational markup

This section is non-normative.
The majority of presentational features from previous versions of HTML are no longer allowed. Presentational markup in general has been found to have a number of problems:
The use of presentational elements leads to poorer accessibility
While it is possible to use presentational markup in a way that provides users of assistive technologies (ATs) with an acceptable experience (e.g. using ARIA), doing so is significantly more difficult than doing so when using semantically-appropriate markup. Furthermore, even using such techniques doesn’t help make pages accessible for non-AT non-graphical users, such as users of text-mode browsers.
Using media-independent markup, on the other hand, provides an easy way for documents to be authored in such a way that they work for more users (e.g. text browsers).
Higher cost of maintenance
It is significantly easier to maintain a site written in such a way that the markup is style-independent. For example, changing the color of a site that uses  throughout requires changes across the entire site, whereas a similar change to a site based on CSS can be done by changing a single file.
Larger document sizes
Presentational markup tends to be much more redundant, and thus results in larger document sizes.
For those reasons, presentational markup has been removed from HTML in this version. This change should not come as a surprise; HTML4 deprecated presentational markup many years ago and provided a mode (HTML4 Transitional) to help authors move away from presentational markup; later, XHTML 1.1 went further and obsoleted those features altogether.
The only remaining presentational markup features in HTML are the style attribute and the style element. Use of the style attribute is somewhat discouraged in production environments, but it can be useful for rapid prototyping (where its rules can be directly moved into a separate style sheet later) and for providing specific styles in unusual cases where a separate style sheet would be inconvenient. Similarly, thestyle element can be useful in syndication or for page-specific styles, but in general an external style sheet is likely to be more convenient when the styles apply to multiple pages.
It is also worth noting that some elements that were previously presentational have been redefined in this specification to be media-independent:bihrssmall, and u.

1.12.2 Syntax errors

This section is non-normative.
The syntax of HTML is constrained to avoid a wide variety of problems.
Unintuitive error-handling behavior
Certain invalid syntax constructs, when parsed, result in DOM trees that are highly unintuitive.
For example, the following markup fragment results in a DOM with an hr element that is an earlier sibling of the correspondingtable element:

...
Errors with optional error recovery
To allow user agents to be used in controlled environments without having to implement the more bizarre and convoluted error handling rules, user agents are permitted to fail whenever encountering a parse error.
Errors where the error-handling behavior is not compatible with streaming user agents
Some error-handling behavior, such as the behavior for the 


... example mentioned above, are incompatible with streaming user agents (user agents that process HTML files in one pass, without storing state). To avoid interoperability problems with such user agents, any syntax resulting in such behavior is considered invalid.

Errors that can result in infoset coercion
When a user agent based on XML is connected to an HTML parser, it is possible that certain invariants that XML enforces, such as comments never containing two consecutive hyphens, will be violated by an HTML file. Handling this can require that the parser coerce the HTML DOM into an XML-compatible infoset. Most syntax constructs that require such handling are considered invalid.
Errors that result in disproportionally poor performance
Certain syntax constructs can result in disproportionally poor performance. To discourage the use of such constructs, they are typically made non-conforming.
For example, the following markup results in poor performance, since all the unclosed i elements have to be reconstructed in each paragraph, resulting in progressively more elements in each paragraph:

He dreamt.

He dreamt that he ate breakfast.

Then lunch.

And finally dinner.

The resulting DOM for this fragment would be:
  • p
    • i
      • #textHe dreamt.
  • p
    • i
      • i
        • #textHe dreamt that he ate breakfast.
  • p
    • i
      • i
        • i
          • #textThen lunch.
  • p
    • i
      • i
        • i
          • i
            • #textAnd finally dinner.
Errors involving fragile syntax constructs
There are syntax constructs that, for historical reasons, are relatively fragile. To help reduce the number of users who accidentally run into such problems, they are made non-conforming.
For example, the parsing of certain named character references in attributes happens even with the closing semicolon being omitted. It is safe to include an ampersand followed by letters that do not form a named character reference, but if the letters are changed to a string that does form a named character reference, they will be interpreted as that character instead.
In this fragment, the attribute’s value is “?bill&ted“:
Bill and Ted
In the following fragment, however, the attribute’s value is actually “?art©“, not the intended “?art&copy“, because even without the final semicolon, “&copy” is handled the same as “©” and thus gets interpreted as “©“:
Art and Copy
To avoid this problem, all named character references are required to end with a semicolon, and uses of named character references without a semicolon are flagged as errors.
Thus, the correct way to express the above cases is as follows:
Bill and Ted 
Art and Copy <!-- the & has to be escaped, since &copy is a named character reference -->
Errors involving known interoperability problems in legacy user agents
Certain syntax constructs are known to cause especially subtle or serious problems in legacy user agents, and are therefore marked as non-conforming to help authors avoid them.
For example, this is why the U+0060 GRAVE ACCENT character (`) is not allowed in unquoted attributes. In certain legacy user agents, it is sometimes treated as a quote character.
Another example of this is the DOCTYPE, which is required to trigger no-quirks mode, because the behavior of legacy user agents in quirks mode is often largely undocumented.
Errors that risk exposing authors to security attacks
Certain restrictions exist purely to avoid known security problems.
For example, the restriction on using UTF-7 exists purely to avoid authors falling prey to a known cross-site-scripting attack using UTF-7.
Cases where the author’s intent is unclear
Markup where the author’s intent is very unclear is often made non-conforming. Correcting these errors early makes later maintenance easier.
For example, it is unclear whether the author intended the following to be an h1 heading or an h2 heading:

Contact details

Cases that are likely to be typos
When a user makes a simple typo, it is helpful if the error can be caught early, as this can save the author a lot of debugging time. This specification therefore usually considers it an error to use element names, attribute names, and so forth, that do not match the names defined in this specification.
For example, if the author typed  instead of 

, this would be flagged as an error and the author could correct the typo immediately.
Errors that could interfere with new syntax in the future
In order to allow the language syntax to be extended in the future, certain otherwise harmless features are disallowed.
For example, “attributes” in end tags are ignored currently, but they are invalid, in case a future change to the language makes use of that syntax feature without conflicting with already-deployed (and valid!) content.
Some authors find it helpful to be in the practice of always quoting all attributes and always including all optional tags, preferring the consistency derived from such custom over the minor benefits of terseness afforded by making use of the flexibility of the HTML syntax. To aid such authors, conformance checkers can provide modes of operation wherein such conventions are enforced.

1.12.3 Restrictions on content models and on attribute values

This section is non-normative.
Beyond the syntax of the language, this specification also places restrictions on how elements and attributes can be specified. These restrictions are present for similar reasons:
Errors involving content with dubious semantics
To avoid misuse of elements with defined meanings, content models are defined that restrict how elements can be nested when such nestings would be of dubious value.
For example, this specification disallows nesting a section element inside a kbd element, since it is highly unlikely for an author to indicate that an entire section should be keyed in.
Errors that involve a conflict in expressed semantics
Similarly, to draw the author’s attention to mistakes in the use of elements, clear contradictions in the semantics expressed are also considered conformance errors.
In the fragments below, for example, the semantics are nonsensical: a separator cannot simultaneously be a cell, nor can a radio button be a progress bar.


Another example is the restrictions on the content models of the ul element, which only allows li element children. Lists by definition consist just of zero or more list items, so if a ul element contains something other than an li element, it’s not clear what was meant.
Cases where the default styles are likely to lead to confusion
Certain elements have default styles or behaviors that make certain combinations likely to lead to confusion. Where these have equivalent alternatives without this problem, the confusing combinations are disallowed.
For example, div elements are rendered as block boxes, and span elements as inline boxes. Putting a block box in an inline box is unnecessarily confusing; since either nesting just div elements, or nesting just span elements, or nesting span elements insidediv elements all serve the same purpose as nesting a div element in a span element, but only the latter involves a block box in an inline box, the latter combination is disallowed.
Another example would be the way interactive content cannot be nested. For example, a button element cannot contain atextarea element. This is because the default behavior of such nesting interactive elements would be highly confusing to users. Instead of nesting these elements, they can be placed side by side.
Errors that indicate a likely misunderstanding of the specification
Sometimes, something is disallowed because allowing it would likely cause author confusion.
For example, setting the disabled attribute to the value “false” is disallowed, because despite the appearance of meaning that the element is enabled, it in fact means that the element is disabled (what matters for implementations is the presence of the attribute, not its value).
Errors involving limits that have been imposed merely to simplify the language
Some conformance errors simplify the language that authors need to learn.
For example, the area element’s shape attribute, despite accepting both circ and circle values in practice as synonyms, disallows the use of the circ value, so as to simplify tutorials and other learning aids. There would be no benefit to allowing both, but it would cause extra confusion when teaching the language.
Errors that involve peculiarities of the parser
Certain elements are parsed in somewhat eccentric ways (typically for historical reasons), and their content model restrictions are intended to avoid exposing the author to these issues.
For example, a form element isn’t allowed inside phrasing content, because when parsed as HTML, a form element’s start tag will imply a p element’s end tag. Thus, the following markup results in two paragraphs, not one:

Welcome. Name:

It is parsed exactly like the following:

Welcome.

Name:
Errors that would likely result in scripts failing in hard-to-debug ways
Some errors are intended to help prevent script problems that would be hard to debug.
This is why, for instance, it is non-conforming to have two id attributes with the same value. Duplicate IDs lead to the wrong element being selected, with sometimes disastrous effects whose cause is hard to determine.
Errors that waste authoring time
Some constructs are disallowed because historically they have been the cause of a lot of wasted authoring time, and by encouraging authors to avoid making them, authors can save time in future efforts.
For example, a script element’s src attribute causes the element’s contents to be ignored. However, this isn’t obvious, especially if the element’s contents appear to be executable script — which can lead to authors spending a lot of time trying to debug the inline script without realizing that it is not executing. To reduce this problem, this specification makes it non-conforming to have executable script in a script element when the src attribute is present. This means that authors who are validating their documents are less likely to waste time with this kind of mistake.
Errors that involve areas that affect authors migrating to and from XHTML
Some authors like to write files that can be interpreted as both XML and HTML with similar results. Though this practice is discouraged in general due to the myriad of subtle complications involved (especially when involving scripting, styling, or any kind of automated serialization), this specification has a few restrictions intended to at least somewhat mitigate the difficulties. This makes it easier for authors to use this as a transitionary step when migrating between HTML and XHTML.
For example, there are somewhat complicated rules surrounding the lang and xml:lang attributes intended to keep the two synchronized.
Another example would be the restrictions on the values of xmlns attributes in the HTML serialization, which are intended to ensure that elements in conforming documents end up in the same namespaces whether processed as HTML or XML.
Errors that involve areas reserved for future expansion
As with the restrictions on the syntax intended to allow for new syntax in future revisions of the language, some restrictions on the content models of elements and values of attributes are intended to allow for future expansion of the HTML vocabulary.
For example, limiting the values of the target attribute that start with an U+005F LOW LINE character (_) to only specific predefined values allows new predefined values to be introduced at a future time without conflicting with author-defined values.
Errors that indicate a mis-use of other specifications
Certain restrictions are intended to support the restrictions made by other specifications.
For example, requiring that attributes that take media queries use only valid media queries reinforces the importance of following the conformance rules of that specification.

1.13 Suggested reading

This section is non-normative.
The following documents might be of interest to readers of this specification.
Character Model for the World Wide Web 1.0: Fundamentals [CHARMOD]
This Architectural Specification provides authors of specifications, software developers, and content developers with a common reference for interoperable text manipulation on the World Wide Web, building on the Universal Character Set, defined jointly by the Unicode Standard and ISO/IEC 10646. Topics addressed include use of the terms ‘character’, ‘encoding’ and ‘string’, a reference processing model, choice and identification of character encodings, character escaping, and string indexing.
Unicode Security Considerations [UTR36]
Because Unicode contains such a large number of characters and incorporates the varied writing systems of the world, incorrect usage can expose programs or systems to possible security attacks. This is especially important as more and more products are internationalized. This document describes some of the security considerations that programmers, system analysts, standards developers, and users should take into account, and provides specific recommendations to reduce the risk of problems.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 [WCAG]
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making Web content more accessible. Following these guidelines will make content accessible to a wider range of people with disabilities, including blindness and low vision, deafness and hearing loss, learning disabilities, cognitive limitations, limited movement, speech disabilities, photosensitivity and combinations of these. Following these guidelines will also often make your Web content more usable to users in general.
Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0 [ATAG]
This specification provides guidelines for designing Web content authoring tools that are more accessible for people with disabilities. An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible user interface to authors with disabilities as well as by enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible Web content by all authors.
User Agent Accessibility Guidelines (UAAG) 2.0 [UAAG]
This document provides guidelines for designing user agents that lower barriers to Web accessibility for people with disabilities. User agents include browsers and other types of software that retrieve and render Web content. A user agent that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility through its own user interface and through other internal facilities, including its ability to communicate with other technologies (especially assistive technologies). Furthermore, all users, not just users with disabilities, should find conforming user agents to be more usable.

4.2.3 The base element


The
 base element allows authors to specify the document base URL for the purposes of resolving relative URLs, and the name of the defaultbrowsing context for the purposes of following hyperlinks. The element does not represent any content beyond this information.Categories:
Metadata content.
Contexts in which this element can be used:
In a head element containing no other base elements.
Content model:
Empty.
Tag omission in text/html:
No end tag.
Content attributes:
Global attributes
href — Document base URL
target — Default browsing context for hyperlink navigation and form submission
DOM interface:
interface HTMLBaseElement : HTMLElement {
attribute DOMString href;
attribute DOMString target;
};
There must be no more than one base element per document.
base element must have either an href attribute, a target attribute, or both.
The href content attribute, if specified, must contain a valid URL potentially surrounded by spaces.
base element, if it has an href attribute, must come before any other elements in the tree that have attributes defined as taking URLs, except the html element (its manifest attribute isn’t affected by base elements).
If there are multiple base elements with href attributes, all but the first are ignored.
The target attribute, if specified, must contain a valid browsing context name or keyword, which specifies which browsing context is to be used as the default when hyperlinks and forms in the Document cause navigation.
base element, if it has a target attribute, must come before any elements in the tree that represent hyperlinks.
If there are multiple base elements with target attributes, all but the first are ignored.
The href IDL attribute, on getting, must return the result of running the following algorithm:
  1. If the base element has no href content attribute, then return the document base URL and abort these steps.
  2. Let fallback base url be the Document‘s fallback base URL.
  3. Let url be the value of the href attribute of the base element.
  4. Resolve url relative to fallback base url (thus, the base href attribute isn’t affected by xml:base attributes or base elements).
  5. If the previous step was successful, return the resulting absolute URL and abort these steps.
  6. Otherwise, return the empty string.
The href IDL attribute, on setting, must set the href content attribute to the given new value.
The target IDL attribute must reflect the content attribute of the same name.
In this example, a base element is used to set the document base URL:



This is an example for the <base> element



Visit the archives.



The link in the above example would be a link to “http://www.example.com/news/archives.html“.

js-html-domain-edu-

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 03:34


JavaScript is a Scripting Language

A scripting language is a lightweight programming language.
JavaScript is programming code that can be inserted into HTML pages.
JavaScript inserted into HTML pages, can be executed by all modern web browsers.
JavaScript is easy to learn.

Example

document.write(“

This is a heading

“);
document.write(“

This is a paragraph

“);

example listed below about the boolean object

Boolean Object

The Boolean object represents two values: “true” or “false”.
The following code creates a Boolean object called myBoolean:
var myBoolean=new Boolean();
If the Boolean object has no initial value, or if the passed value is one of the following:
  • 0
  • -0
  • null
  • “”
  • false
  • undefined
  • NaN
the object is set to false. For any other value it is set to true (even with the string “false”)!

http://backbone.codeschool.com/levels/1

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environmentsas well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB.
The JavaScript standard is ECMAScript. As of 2012, all modern browsers fully support ECMAScript 5.1. Older browsers support at least ECMAScript 3. A 6th major revision of the standard is in the works. The current progress of different new and improved features can be followed on the dedicated wiki.
This section of the site is dedicated to the JavaScript language itself, the parts that are not specific to Web pages, or other host environments. For information about APIs specific to Web pages, please see DOM. Read more about how DOM and JavaScript fit together in the DOM Reference.

from

v

JavaScript syntax

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The syntax of JavaScript is the set of rules that define a correctly structured JavaScript program.
The examples below make use of the alert function for standard text output. The JavaScript standard library lacks an official standard text output function. However, given that JavaScript is mainly used forclient-side scripting within modern web browsers, and that almost all web browsers provide the alertfunction, alert is used in the examples.

Contents

  [hide

[edit]Origins

Brendan Eich summarized the ancestry of the syntax in the first paragraph of the JavaScript 1.1 specification[1] as follows:
JavaScript borrows most of its syntax from Java, but also inherits from Awk and Perl, with some indirect influence from Self in its object prototype system.

[edit]Basics

[edit]Case sensitivity

JavaScript is case sensitive. It is common to start the name of a constructor with a capitalised letter, and the name of a function or variable with a lower-case letter.

[edit]Whitespace and semicolons

Spacestabs and newlines used outside of string constants are called whitespace. Unlike C, whitespace in JavaScript source can directly impact semantics. Because of a technique called “automatic semicolon insertion” (ASI), some statements that are well formed when a newline is parsed will be considered complete (as if a semicolon were inserted just prior to the newline). Programmers are advised to supply statement-terminating semicolons explicitly because it may lessen unintended effects of the automatic semicolon insertion.[2]
return
a + b;

// Returns undefined. Treated as:
// return;
// a + b;
But:
a = b + c
(d + e).foo()

// Treated as:
// a = b + c(d + e).foo();

[edit]Comments

Comment syntax is the same as in C++ and many other languages.
// a short, one-line comment

/* this is a long, multi-line comment
about my script. May it one day
be great. */


/* Comments /* may not be nested */ Syntax error */

[edit]Variables

Variables in standard JavaScript have no type attached, and any value can be stored in any variable. Variables are declared with a var statement, multiple variables can be declared at once. An identifier must start with a letter, underscore (_), or dollar sign ($); subsequent characters can also be digits (0-9). Because JavaScript is case sensitive, letters include the characters “A” through “Z” (uppercase) and the characters “a” through “z” (lowercase). Starting with JavaScript 1.5, ISO 8859-1 or Unicode letters (or \uXXXX Unicode escape sequences) can be used in identifiers.[3] In certain JavaScript implementations, the at sign (@) can be used in an identifier, this is contrary to the specifications and not supported in newer implementations. Variables are lexically scoped at function level (not block level as in C), and this does not depend on order (forward declaration is not necessary): if a variable is declared inside a function (at any point, in any block), then inside the function, the name will resolve to that variable. This is equivalent in block scoping to variables being forward declared at the top of the function, and is referred to as hoisting.[4] However, the variable value is undefined until it is initialized, and forward reference is not possible. Thus a var x = 1 statement in the middle of the function is equivalent to avar x declaration statement at the top of the function, and a x = 1 assignment statement at that point in the middle of the function – only the declaration is hoisted, not the assignment.
Functions statements, whose effect is to declare a variable of type Function and assign a value to it, are similar to variable statements, but in addition to hoisting the declaration, they also hoist the assignment – as if the entire statement appeared at the top of the containing function – and thus forward reference is also possible: the location of a function statement within an enclosing function is irrelevant.
Block scoping can be produced by wrapping the entire block in a function and then executing it; this is known as the immediately-invoked function expression pattern.
Variables declared outside any function are global. If a variable is declared in a higher scope, it can be accessed by child functions.
Here is an example of variable declarations and global values:
var x = 0; // A global variable, because it is not in any function

function f() {
var z = 'foxes', r = 'birds'; // 2 local variables
m = 'fish'; // global because it wasn't declared anywhere before
function child() {
var r = 'monkeys'; // This variable is local and does not affect the "birds" r of the parent function.
z = 'penguins'; // The child function is able to access the variables of the parent function, this is called closure.
}
twenty = 20; // This variable is declared on the next line, but usable anywhere in the function, even before, as here
var twenty;
child();
return x; // We can use x here because it is global
}
f();
alert(z); // This line will raise a ReferenceError exception because the value of z is no longer available
When JavaScript tries to resolve an identifier, it looks in the local function scope. If this identifier is not found, it looks in the outer function that declared the local one, and so on along the scope chain until it reaches the global scope where global variables reside. If it is still not found, JavaScript will raise a ReferenceError exception.
When assigning an identifier, JavaScript does exactly the same process to retrieve this identifier, except that if it is not found in the global scope, it will create the “variable” as a property of the global object.[5] As a consequence, a variable never declared will be global if assigned. Declaring a variable (with the keyword var) in the global code (i.e. outside of any function body), assigning a never declared identifier or adding a property to theglobal object (usually window) will also create a new global variable.
Note that JavaScript’s strict mode forbids the assignment of an undeclared variable, which avoids global namespace pollution.

[edit]Primitive data types

The JavaScript language provides a handful of primitive data types. Some of the primitive data types also provide a set of named values that represent the extents of the type boundaries. These named values are described within the appropriate sections below.

[edit]Undefined

The value of “undefined” is assigned to all uninitialized variables, and is also returned when checking for object properties that do not exist. In a Boolean context, the undefined value is considered a false value.
Note: undefined is considered a genuine primitive type. Unless explicitly converted, the undefined value may behave unexpectedly in comparison to other types that evaluate to false in a logical context.
var test;                  // variable declared but not defined, ...
// ... set to value of undefined
var testObj = {};
alert(test); // test variable exists but value not ...
// ... defined, displays undefined
alert(testObj.myProp); // testObj exists, property does not, ...
// ... displays undefined
alert(undefined == null); // unenforced type during check, displays true
alert(undefined === null); // enforce type during check, displays false
Note: There is no built-in language literal for undefined. Thus (x == undefined) is not a foolproof way to check whether a variable is undefined, because in versions before ECMAScript 5, it is legal for someone to write var undefined = "I'm defined now";. A more robust approach is to compare using (typeof x === 'undefined').
Functions like this won’t work as expected:
function isUndefined(x) { var u; return x === u; } // like this...
function isUndefined(x) { return x === void 0; } // ... or that one
Here, calling isUndefined(my_var) raises a ReferenceError if my_var is an unknown identifier, whereas typeof my_var === 'undefined'doesn’t.

[edit]Null

Unlike undefined, null is often set to indicate that something has been declared but has been defined to be empty. In a Boolean context, the value of null is considered a false value in JavaScript.
Note: Null is a true primitive-type within the JavaScript language, of which null (note case) is the single value. As such, when performing checks that enforced type checking, the null value will not equal other false types. Surprisingly, null is considered an object by typeof.
alert(null == undefined);         // unenforced type during check, displays true
alert(null === undefined); // enforce type during check, displays false
alert(typeof null === 'object'); // true

[edit]Number

Numbers are represented in binary as IEEE-754 Doubles, which provides an accuracy nearly 16 significant digits. Because they are floating pointnumbers, they do not always exactly represent real numbers, including fractions.
This becomes an issue when comparing or formatting numbers. For example:
alert(0.2 + 0.1 == 0.3); // displays false
alert(0.94 - 0.01); // displays 0.9299999999999999
As a result, a routine such as the toFixed() method should be used to round numbers whenever they are formatted for output.
Numbers may be specified in any of these notations:
345;    // an "integer", although there is only one numeric type in JavaScript
34.5; // a floating-point number
3.45e2; // another floating-point, equivalent to 345
0377; // an octal integer equal to 255
0xFF; // a hexadecimal integer equal to 255, digits represented by the ...
// ... letters A-F may be upper or lowercase
The extents +∞−∞ and NaN (Not a Number) of the number type may be obtained by two program expressions:
Infinity;  // Positive Infinity (negative obtained with -Infinity for instance)
NaN; // The Not-A-Number value, also returned as a failure in ...
// ... string-to-number conversions
These three special values correspond and behave as the IEEE-754 describes them.
The Number constructor, or a unary + or -, may be used to perform explicit numeric conversion:
var myString = "123.456";
var myNumber1 = Number(myString);
var myNumber2 = +myString;
When used as a constructor, a numeric wrapper object is created (though it is of little use):
myNumericWrapper = new Number(123.456);

[edit]String

string in JavaScript is a sequence of characters. In JavaScript, strings can be created directly by placing the series of characters between double or single quotes.
var greeting = "Hello, world!";
var anotherGreeting = 'Greetings, people of Earth.';
You can access individual characters within a string using the charAt method (provided by String.prototype). This is the preferred way when accessing individual characters within a string because it also works in non-modern browsers:
var h = greeting.charAt(0);
In modern browsers, individual characters within a string can be accessed (as strings with only a single character) through the same notation as arrays:
var h = greeting[0];
However, JavaScript strings are immutable:
greeting[0] = "H"; // Not working.
Applying the equality operator (“==”) to two strings returns true if the strings have the same contents, which means: of same length and same cases (for alphabets). Thus:
var x = "world";
var compare1 = ("Hello, " +x == "Hello, world"); // Now compare1 contains true.
var compare2 = ("Hello, " +x == "hello, world"); // Now compare2 contains ...
// ... false since the ...
// ... first characters ...
// ... of both operands ...
// ... are not of the same case.
You cannot use quotes of the same type inside the quotes unless they are escaped.
var x = '"Hello, world!" he said.' // Just fine.
var x = ""Hello, world!" he said." // Not good.
var x = "\"Hello, world!\" he said." // That works by replacing " with \"
It is possible to create a string using the String constructor:
var greeting = new String("Hello, world!");
These objects have a valueOf method returning the primitive string wrapped into them:
var s = new String("Hello !");
typeof s; // Is 'object'.
typeof s.valueOf(); // Is 'string'.
Equality between two String objects does not behave as with string primitives:
var s1 = new String("Hello !");
var s2 = new String("Hello !");
s1 == s2; // Is false, because they are two distinct objects.
s1.valueOf() == s2.valueOf(); // Is true.

[edit]Boolean

JavaScript provides a Boolean data type with true and false literals. The typeof operator returns the string "boolean" for these primitive types. When used in a logical context, 0-0nullNaNundefined, and the empty string ("") evaluate as false due to automatic type coercion. Thecomplement evaluates as true, including the strings "0""false" and any object (except null). Automatic type coercion by the equality comparison operators (== and !=) can be avoided by using the type checked comparison operators, (=== and !==).
When type conversion is required, JavaScript converts String, Number, Boolean, or Object operands as follows:[6]
Number and String
The string is converted to a number value. JavaScript attempts to convert the string numeric literal to a Number type value. First, a mathematical value is derived from the string numeric literal. Next, this value is rounded to nearest Number type value.
Boolean
If one of the operands is a Boolean, the Boolean operand is converted to 1 if it is true or to 0 if it is false.
Object
If an object is compared with a number or string, JavaScript attempts to return the default value for the object. An object is converted to a primitive String or Number value, using the .valueOf() or .toString() methods of the object. If this fails, a runtime error is generated.
Douglas Crockford advocates the terms “truthy” and “falsy” to describe how values of various types behave when evaluated in a logical context, especially in regard to edge cases.[7] The binary logical operators returned a Boolean value in early versions of JavaScript, but now they return one of the operands instead. The left–operand is returned if it can be evaluated as: false, in the case of conjunction (a && b), or true, in the case ofdisjunction (a || b); otherwise the right–operand is returned. Automatic type coercion by the comparison operators may differ for cases of mixed boolean and number-compatible operands (including strings that can be evaluated as a number, or objects that can be evaluated as such a string) because the boolean operand will be compared as a numeric value. This may be unexpected. An expression can be explicitly cast to a boolean primitive by doubling the logical negation operator (!!), using the Boolean() function, or using the conditional operator (c ? t : f).
//Automatic type coercion
alert(true == 2 ); // false... true → 1 !== 2 ← 2
alert(false == 2 ); // false... false → 0 !== 2 ← 2
alert(true == 1 ); // true.... true → 1 === 1 ← 1
alert(false == 0 ); // true.... false → 0 === 0 ← 0
alert(true == "2"); // false... true → 1 !== 2 ← "2"
alert(false == "2"); // false... false → 0 !== 2 ← "2"
alert(true == "1"); // true.... true → 1 === 1 ← "1"
alert(false == "0"); // true.... false → 0 === 0 ← "0"
alert(false == "" ); // true.... false → 0 === 0 ← ""
alert(false == NaN); // false... false → 0 !== NaN

//Type checked comparison (no conversion of types and values)
alert(true === 1); // false... data types do not match

//Explicit type coercion
alert(true === !!2); // true.... data types and values match
alert(true === !!0); // false... data types match but values differ
alert( 1 ? true : false); // true.... only ±0 and NaN are “falsy” numbers
alert("0" ? true : false); // true.... only the empty string is “falsy”
alert(Boolean({})); // true.... all objects are “truthy” except null
The new operator can be used to create an object wrapper for a Boolean primitive. However, the typeof operator does not return "boolean" for the object wrapper, it returns "object". Because all objects evaluate as true, a method such as .valueOf(), or .toString(), must be used to retrieve the wrapped value. For explicit coercion to the Boolean type, Mozilla recommends that the Boolean() function (without new) be used in preference to the Boolean object.
var b = new Boolean(false);   // Object  false {}
var t = Boolean(b); // Boolean true
var f = Boolean(b.valueOf()); // Boolean false
var n = new Boolean(b); // Not recommended
n = new Boolean(b.valueOf()); // Preferred

if (0 || -0 || "" || null || undefined || b.valueOf() || !new Boolean() || !t) {
alert("Never this");
} else if ([] && {} && b && typeof b === "object" && b.toString() === "false") {
alert("Always this");
}

[edit]Native objects

The JavaScript language provides a handful of native objects. JavaScript native objects are considered part of the JavaScript specification. JavaScript environment notwithstanding, this set of objects should always be available.

[edit]Array

An Array is a JavaScript object prototyped from the Array constructor specifically designed to store data values indexed by integer keys. Arrays, unlike the basic Object type, are prototyped with methods and properties to aid the programmer in routine tasks (for example, joinslice, and push).
As in the C family, arrays use a zero-based indexing scheme: A value that is inserted into an empty array by means of the push method occupies the 0th index of the array.
var myArray = [];            // Point the variable myArray to a newly ...
// ... created, empty Array
myArray.push("hello world"); // Fill the next empty index, in this case 0
alert(myArray[0]); // Equivalent to alert("hello world");
Arrays have a length property that is guaranteed to always be larger than the largest integer index used in the array. It is automatically updated if one creates a property with an even larger index. Writing a smaller number to the length property will remove larger indices.
Elements of Arrays may be accessed using normal object property access notation:
myArray[1];   // the 2nd item in myArray
myArray["1"];
The above two are equivalent. It’s not possible to use the “dot”-notation or strings with alternative representations of the number:
myArray.1;     // syntax error
myArray["01"]; // not the same as myArray[1]
Declaration of an array can use either an Array literal or the Array constructor:
myArray = [0, 1,, , 4, 5];            // array with length 6 and 6 elements, ...
// ... including 2 undefined elements
myArray = new Array(0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5); // array with length 6 and 6 elements
myArray = new Array(365); // an empty array with length 365
Arrays are implemented so that only the elements defined use memory; they are “sparse arrays“. Setting myArray[10] = 'someThing' andmyArray[57] = 'somethingOther' only uses space for these two elements, just like any other object. The length of the array will still be reported as 58.
One can use the object declaration literal to create objects that behave much like associative arrays in other languages:
dog = {color: "brown", size: "large"};
dog["color"]; // results in "brown"
dog.color; // also results in "brown"
One can use the object and array declaration literals to quickly create arrays that are associative, multidimensional, or both. (Technically, JavaScript does not support multidimensional arrays, but one can mimic them with arrays-of-arrays.)
cats = [{color: "brown", size: "large"},
{color: "black", size: "small"}];
cats[0]["size"]; // results in "large"

dogs = {rover: {color: "brown", size: "large"},
spot: {color: "black", size: "small"}};
dogs["spot"]["size"]; // results in "small"
dogs.rover.color; // results in "brown"

[edit]Date

A Date object stores a signed millisecond count with zero representing 1970-01-01 00:00:00 UT and a range of ±108 days. There are several ways of providing arguments to the Date constructor. Note that months are zero-based.
new Date()                       // create a new Date instance representing the current time/date.
new Date(2010, 2, 1) // create a new Date instance representing 2010-Mar-01 00:00:00
new Date(2010, 2, 1, 14, 25, 30) // create a new Date instance representing 2010-Mar-01 14:25:30
new Date("2010-3-1 14:25:30") // create a new Date instance from a String.
Methods to extract fields are provided, as well as a useful toString:
var d = new Date(2010, 2, 1, 14, 25, 30); // 2010-Mar-01 14:25:30

// Displays '2010-3-1 14:25:30':
alert(d.getFullYear() + '-' + (d.getMonth()+1) + '-' + d.getDate() + ' '
+ d.getHours() + ':' + d.getMinutes() + ':' + d.getSeconds());

// Built-in toString returns something like 'Mon Mar 01 2010 14:25:30 GMT-0500 (EST)':
alert(d);

[edit]Error

Custom error messages can be created using the Error class:
throw new Error("Something went wrong.");
Nested within conditional statements, such instantiations can substitute for try/catch blocks:
var emailAddress = prompt("Please enter your e-mail address:", "");
if (!emailAddress || emailAddress.length == 0) {
throw new Error("Excuse me: You must enter your e-mail address to continue.");
}

[edit]Math

The Math object contains various math-related constants (for example, π) and functions (for example, cosine). (Note the “Math” object has no constructor, unlike Array or Date. All its methods are “static”, AKA “class” methods.) All the trigonometric functions use angles expressed in radians, not degrees or grads.
Properties of the Math object
Property Returned value
rounded to 5 digits
Description
Math.E 2.7183 e: Natural logarithm base
Math.LN2 0.69315 Natural logarithm of 2
Math.LN10 2.3026 Natural logarithm of 10
Math.LOG2E 1.4427 Logarithm to the base 2 of e
Math.LOG10E 0.43429 Logarithm to the base 10 of e
Math.PI 3.14159 π: circumference/diameter of a circle
Math.SQRT1_2 0.70711 Square root of ½
Math.SQRT2 1.4142 Square root of 2
Methods of the Math object
Example Returned value
rounded to 5 digits
Description
Math.abs(-2.3) 2.3 Absolute value: (x < 0) ? -x : x
Math.acos(Math.SQRT1_2) 0.78540 rad. = 45° Arccosine
Math.asin(Math.SQRT1_2) 0.78540 rad. = 45° Arcsine
Math.atan(1) 0.78540 rad. = 45° Half circle arctangent (-π/2 to +π/2)
Math.atan2(-3.7, -3.7) -2.3562 rad. = -135° Whole circle arctangent (-π to +π)
Math.ceil(1.1) 2 Ceiling: round up to smallest integer ≥ argument
Math.cos(Math.PI/4) 0.70711 Cosine
Math.exp(1) 2.7183 Exponential functione raised to this power
Math.floor(1.9) 1 Floor: round down to largest integer ≤ argument
Math.log(Math.E) 1 Natural logarithm, base e
Math.max(1, -2) 1 Maximum: (x > y) ? x : y
Math.min(1, -2) -2 Minimum: (x < y) ? x : y
Math.pow(-3, 2) 9 Exponentiation (raised to the power of): Math.pow(x, y) gives xy
Math.random() 0.17068 Pseudorandom number between 0 (inclusive) and 1 (exclusive)
Math.round(1.5) 2 Round to the nearest integer; half fractions are rounded up (e.g. 1.5 rounds to 2)
Math.sin(Math.PI/4) 0.70711 Sine
Math.sqrt(49) 7 Square root
Math.tan(Math.PI/4) 1 Tangent

[edit]Regular expression

/expression/.test(string);
"string".search(/expression/);
"string".replace(/expression/,replacement);

// Here are some examples
if(/Tom/.test("My name is Tom")) alert("Hello Tom!");
alert("My name is Tom".search(/Tom/)); // == 11 (letters before Tom)
alert("My name is Tom".replace(/Tom/,"John")); // == "My name is John"

[edit]Character classes

// \d   - digit
// \D - non digit
// \s - space
// \S - non space
// \w - word char
// \W - non word
// [ ] - one of
// [^ ] - one not of
// - - range

if (/\d/.test('0')) alert('Digit');
if (/[0-9]/.test('6')) alert('Digit');
if (/[13579]/.test('1')) alert('Odd number');
if (/\S\S\s\S\S\S\S/.test('My name')) alert('Format OK');
if (/\w\w\w/.test('Tom')) if (/[a-zA-Z]/.test('B')) alert('Letter');

[edit]Character matching

// A...Z a...z 0...9  - alphanumeric
// \u0000...\uFFFF - Unicode hexadecimal
// \x00...\xFF - ASCII hexadecimal
// \t - tab
// \n - new line
// \r - CR
// . - any character
// | - OR

if (/T.m/.test('Tom')) alert ('Hi Tom, Tam or Tim');
if (/A|B/.test("A")) alert ('A or B');

[edit]Repeaters

// ?     - 0 or 1 match
// * - 0 or more
// + - 1 or more
// {n} - exactly n
// {n,} - n or more
// {0,n} - n or less
// {n,m} - range n to m

if (/ab?c/.test("ac")) alert("OK"); // match: "ac", "abc"
if (/ab*c/.test("ac")) alert("OK"); // match: "ac", "abc", "abbc", "abbbc" etc.
if (/ab+c/.test("abc")) alert("OK"); // match: "abc", "abbc", "abbbc" etc.
if (/ab{3}c/.test("abbbc")) alert("OK"); // match: "abbbc"
if (/ab{3,}c/.test("abbbc")) alert("OK"); // match: "abbbc", "abbbbc", "abbbbbc" etc.
if (/ab{1,3}c/.test("abc")) alert("OK"); // match: "abc","abbc", "abbbc"

[edit]Anchors

// ^   - string starts with
// $ - string ends with

if (/^My/.test("My name is Tom")) alert ("Hi!");
if (/Tom$/.test("My name is Tom")) alert ("Hi Tom!");

[edit]Subexpression

// ( )   - groups characters

if (/water(mark)?/.test("watermark")) alert("Here is water!"); // match: "water", "watermark",
if (/(Tom)|(John)/.test("John")) alert("Hi Tom or John!");

[edit]Flags

// /g   - global
// /i - ignore upper/lower case
// /m - allow matches to span multiple lines

alert("hi tom!".replace(/Tom/i,"John")); // == "hi John!"
alert("ratatam".replace(/ta/,"tu")); // == "ratutam"
alert("ratatam".replace(/ta/g,"tu")); // == "ratutum"

[edit]Advanced methods

my_array = my_string.split(my_delimiter);
// example
my_array = "dog,cat,cow".split(","); // my_array==("dog","cat","cow");

my_array = my_string.match(my_expression);
// example
my_array = "We start at 11:30, 12:15 and 16:45".match(/\d\d:\d\d/g); // my_array=("11:30","12:15","16:45");

[edit]Capturing groups

var myRe = /(\d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}) (\d{2}:\d{2}:\d{2})/;
var results = myRe.exec("The date and time are 2009-09-08 09:37:08.");
if (results) {
alert("Matched: " + results[0]); // Entire match
var my_date = results[1]; // First group == "2009-09-08"
var my_time = results[2]; // Second group == "09:37:08"
alert("It is " + my_time + " on " + my_date);
} else alert("Did not find a valid date!");

[edit]Function

Every function in JavaScript is an instance of the Function object:
//x,y is the argument. 'return x+y' is the function body, which is the last in the argument list.
var add = new Function('x', 'y', 'return x+y');
var t = add(1, 2);
alert(t); //3
The add function above may also be defined using the following pattern.
function add(x, y) {
return x + y;
}
var t = add(1, 2);
alert(t); //3
A function instance has properties and methods.
function subtract(x, y) {
return x - y;
}

alert(subtract.length);//2,expected amount of arguments.
alert(subtract.toString());

/*
function subtract(x, y) {
return x - y;
}
*/

[edit]Operators

The ‘+’ operator is overloaded: it is used for string concatenation and arithmetic addition. This may cause problems when inadvertently mixing strings and numbers. As a unary operator, it can convert a numeric string to a number.
// Concatenate 2 strings
alert('He' + 'llo'); // displays Hello

// Add two numbers
alert(2 + 6); // displays 8

// Adding a number and a string results in concatenation
alert(2 + '2'); // displays 22
alert('$' + 3 + 4); // displays $34, but $7 may have been expected
alert('$' + (3 + 4)); // displays $7

// Convert a string to a number
alert(+'2' === 2); // displays true
alert(+'Hello'); // displays NaN

[edit]Arithmetic

JavaScript supports the following binary arithmetic operators:
+     Addition
- Subtraction
* Multiplication
/ Division (returns a floating-point value)
% Modulus (returns the integer remainder)
JavaScript supports the following unary arithmetic operators:
+     Unary conversion of string to number
- Unary negation (reverses the sign)
++ Increment (can be prefix or postfix)
-- Decrement (can be prefix or postfix)
var x = 1;
alert(++x); // displays: 2
alert(x++); // displays: 2; x becomes 3 then
alert(x); // displays: 3
alert(x--); // displays: 3; x becomes 2 then
alert(x); // displays: 2
alert(--x); // displays: 1

[edit]Assignment

=     Assign
+= Add and assign
-= Subtract and assign
*= Multiply and assign
/= Divide and assign
%= Modulus and assign
Assignment of primitive types
var x = 9;
x += 1;
alert(x); // displays: 10
x *= 30;
alert(x); // displays: 300
x /= 6;
alert(x); // displays: 50
x -= 3;
alert(x); // displays: 47
x %= 7;
alert(x); // displays: 5
Assignment of object types
var obj_1 = {a: 1}; // assign reference of newly created object to variable obj_1
var obj_2 = {a: 0};
var obj_3 = obj_2; // obj_3 references the same object as obj_2 does

obj_2.a = 2;
alert(obj_1.a + " " + obj_2.a + " " + obj_3.a); // displays 1 2 2

obj_2 = obj_1; // obj_2 now references the same object as variable obj_1
// obj_3 now the only reference to what obj_2 referenced
alert(obj_1.a + " " + obj_2.a + " " + obj_3.a); // displays 1 1 2

obj_2.a = 7;// modifies obj_1
alert(obj_1.a + " " + obj_2.a + " " + obj_3.a); // displays 7 7 2

[edit]Destructuring assignment

In Mozilla’s JavaScript, since version 1.7, destructuring assignment allows the assignment of parts of data structures to several variables at once. The left hand side of an assignment is a pattern that resembles an arbitrarily nested object/array literal containing l-lvalues at its leafs which are to receive the substructures of the assigned value.
var a, b, c, d, e;
[a, b] = [3, 4];
alert(a + ',' + b); // displays: 3,4
e = {foo: 5, bar: 6, baz: ['Baz', 'Content']};
var arr = [];
({baz: [arr[0], arr[3]], foo: a, bar: b}) = e;
alert(a + ',' + b + ',' + arr); // displays: 5,6,Baz,,,Content
[a, b] = [b, a]; // swap contents of a and b
alert(a + ',' + b); // displays: 6,5

[edit]Comparison

==    Equal
!= Not equal
> Greater than
>= Greater than or equal to
< Less than
<= Less than or equal to
=== Identical (equal and of the same type)
!== Not identical
When comparing variables which are objects they are considered to be different if their objects are not the same object, even if the values of them are the same, so:
var obj1 = {a: 1};
var obj2 = {a: 1};
var obj3 = obj1;
alert(obj1 == obj2); //false
alert(obj3 == obj1); //true
See also String.

[edit]Logical

JavaScript provides four logical operators:
In the context of a logical operation, any expression evaluates to true except the following:
  • Strings: "", '',
  • Numbers: 0, -0, NaN,
  • Special: null, undefined,
  • Boolean: false.
The Boolean function can be used to explicitly convert to a primitive of type Boolean:
// Only empty strings return false
alert(Boolean("") === false);
alert(Boolean("false") === true);
alert(Boolean("0") === true);

// Only zero and NaN return false
alert(Boolean(NaN) === false);
alert(Boolean(0) === false);
alert(Boolean(-0) === false); // equivalent to -1*0
alert(Boolean(-2) === true );

// All objects return true
alert(Boolean(this) === true);
alert(Boolean({}) === true);
alert(Boolean([]) === true);

// These types return false
alert(Boolean(null) === false);
alert(Boolean(undefined) === false); // equivalent to Boolean()
The NOT operator evaluates its operand as a Boolean, and returns the negation. Using the operator twice in a row, as a double negative, explicitly converts an expression to a primitive of type Boolean:
alert( !0 === Boolean(!0));  alert(Boolean(!0) === !!1);    alert(!!1 === Boolean(1));
alert(!!0 === Boolean(0)); alert(Boolean(0) === !1); alert(!1 === Boolean(!1));
alert(!"" === Boolean(!"")); alert(Boolean(!"") === !!"s"); alert(!!"s" === Boolean("s"));
alert(!!"" === Boolean("")); alert(Boolean("") === !"s"); alert(!"s" === Boolean(!"s"));
The ternary operator can also be used for explicit conversion:
alert([] == false);  alert([] ? true : false); // “truthy”, but the comparison uses [].toString()
alert([0] == false); alert([0]? true : false); // [0].toString() == "0"
alert("0" == false); alert("0"? true : false); // "0" → 0 … (0==0) … 0 ← false
alert([1] == true); alert([1]? true : false); // [1].toString() == "1"
alert("1" == true); alert("1"? true : false); // "1" → 1 … (1==1) … 1 ← true
alert([2] != true); alert([2]? true : false); // [2].toString() == "2"
alert("2" != true); alert("2"? true : false); // "2" → 2 … (2!=1) … 1 ← true
Expressions that use features such as post–incrementation, (i++), have an anticipated side effect. JavaScript provides short-circuit evaluation of expressions; the right operand is only executed if the left operand does not suffice to determine the value of the expression.
alert(a || b);    // When a is true, there is no reason to evaluate b.
alert(a && b); // When a is false, there is no reason to evaluate b.
alert(c ? t : f); // When c is true, there is no reason to evaluate f.
In early versions of JavaScript and JScript, the binary logical operators returned a Boolean value (like most C–derived programming languages). However, all contemporary implementations return one of their operands instead:
alert(a || b); // if a is true, return a, otherwise return b
alert(a && b); // if a is false, return a, otherwise return b
Programmers who are more familiar with the behavior in C might find this feature surprising, but it allows for a more concise expression of patterns likenull coalescing:
var s = t || "(default)"; // assigns t, or the default value if t is null, empty, etc.

[edit]Bitwise

JavaScript supports the following binary bitwise operators:
&     And
| Or
^ Xor

<< Shift left (zero fill)
>> Shift right (sign-propagating); copies of the leftmost bit (sign bit) are shifted in from the
left.
>>> Shift right (zero fill)

For positive numbers, >> and >>> yield the same result.
JavaScript supports the following unary bitwise operators:
~     Not (inverts the bits)

[edit]String

=     Assignment
+ Concatenation
+= Concatenate and assign
Examples
str = "ab" + "cd";   // "abcd"
str += "e"; // "abcde"

str2 = "2"+2 // "22", not "4" or 4.

[edit]Control structures

[edit]Compound statements

A pair of curly brackets { } and an enclosed sequence of statements constitute a compound statement, which can be used wherever a statement can be used.

[edit]If … else

if (expr) {
//statements;
} else if (expr2) {
//statements;
} else {
//statements;
}
this is also possible
if (exprA exprB) {
//statements;
} else if (expr2) {
//statements;
} else {
//statements;
}

[edit]Conditional operator

The conditional operator creates an expression that evaluates as one of two expressions depending on a condition. This is similar to the if statement that selects one of two statements to execute depending on a condition. I.e., the conditional operator is to expressions what if is to statements.
 result = condition ? expression : alternative;
is the same as:
 if (condition) {
result = expression;
} else {
result = alternative;
}
Unlike the if statement, the conditional operator cannot omit its “else-branch”.

[edit]Switch statement

The syntax of the JavaScript Switch statement is as follows:
 switch (expr) {
case SOMEVALUE:
//statements;
break;
case ANOTHERVALUE:
//statements;
break;
default:
//statements;
break;
}
  • break; is optional; however, it is usually needed, since otherwise code execution will continue to the body of the next case block.
  • Add a break statement to the end of the last case as a precautionary measure, in case additional cases are added later.
  • Strings literal values can also be used for the case values.
  • Expressions can be used instead of values.
  • case default: is optional.
  • Braces are required.

[edit]For loop

The syntax of the JavaScript for loop is as follows:
 for (initial; condition; loop statement) {
/*
statements will be executed every time
the for{} loop cycles, while the
condition is satisfied
*/

}
or
 for (initial; condition; loop statement(iteration)) // one statement

[edit]For … in loop

The syntax of the JavaScript For … in loop is as follows:
 for (var property_name in some_object) {
//statements using some_object[property_name];
}
  • Iterates through all enumerable properties of an object.
  • Iterates through all used indices of array including all user-defined properties of array object if any. Thus it may be better to use a traditional for loop with a numeric index when iterating over arrays.
  • There are differences between the various web browsers with regard to which properties will be reflected with the for…in loop statement. In theory, this is controlled by an internal state property defined by the ECMAscript standard called “DontEnum”, but in practice each browser returns a slightly different set of properties during introspection. It is useful to test for a given property using if (some_object.hasOwnProperty(property_name)) { ... }. Thus, adding a method to the array prototype withArray.prototype.newMethod = function() {...} may cause for … in loops to loop over the method’s name.

[edit]While loop

The syntax of the JavaScript while loop is as follows:
 while (condition) {
statement1;
statement2;
statement3;
...
}

[edit]Do … while loop

The syntax of the JavaScript do … while loop is as follows:
 do {
statement1;
statement2;
statement3;
...
} while (condition);

[edit]With

The with statement sets the default object for the set of statements that follow.
 with (document) {
var a = getElementById('a');
var b = getElementById('b');
var c = getElementById('c');
};
  • Note the absence of document. before each getElementById() invocation.
The semantics are similar to the with statement of Pascal.

[edit]Labels

JavaScript supports nested labels in most implementations. loops or blocks can be labeled for the break statement, and loops for continue. Althoughgoto is a reserved word,[8] goto is not implemented in JavaScript.
loop1: for (var a = 0; a < 10; a++) {
if (a == 4) {
break loop1; // Stops after the 4th attempt
}
alert('a = ' + a);
loop2: for (var b = 0; b < 10; ++b) {
if (b == 3) {
continue loop2; // Number 3 is skipped
}
if (b == 6) {
continue loop1; // Continues the first loop, 'finished' is not shown
}
alert('b = ' + b);
}
alert('finished')
}
block1: {
alert('hello'); // Displays 'hello'
break block1;
alert('world'); // Will never get here
}
goto block1; // Parse error.

[edit]Functions

function is a block with a (possibly empty) parameter list that is normally given a name. A function may use local variables. If you exit the function without a return statement, the value undefined is returned.
function gcd(segmentA, segmentB) {
var diff = segmentA - segmentB;
if (diff == 0)
return segmentA;
return diff > 0 ? gcd(segmentB, diff) : gcd(segmentA, -diff);
}
alert(gcd(60, 40)); // 20

var mygcd=gcd; // mygcd is a reference to the same function as gcd. Note no argument ()s.
alert(mygcd(60, 40)); // 20
Functions are first class objects and may be assigned to other variables.
The number of arguments given when calling a function may not necessarily correspond to the number of arguments in the function definition; a named argument in the definition that does not have a matching argument in the call will have the value undefined (which can be implicitly cast to false). Within the function, the arguments may also be accessed through the arguments object; this provides access to all arguments using indices (e.g.arguments[0], arguments[1], ... arguments[n]), including those beyond the number of named arguments. (While the arguments list has a .length property, it is not an instance of Array; it does not have methods such as .slice(), .sort(), etc.)
function add7(x, y) {
if (!y) {
y = 7;
}
alert(x + y + arguments.length);
};
add7(3); // 11
add7(3, 4); // 9
All parameters are passed by value (for objects, it is the reference to the object that is passed).
var obj1 = {a : 1};
var obj2 = {b : 2};
function foo(p) {
p = obj2; // Ignores actual parameter
p.b = arguments[1];
}
foo(obj1, 3); // Does not affect obj1 at all. 3 is additional parameter
alert(obj1.a + " " + obj2.b); // writes 1 3
Functions can be declared inside other functions, and access the outer function’s local variables. Furthermore they implement full closures by remembering the outer function’s local variables even after the outer function has exited.
var v = "Top";
var bar, baz;
function foo() {
var v = "fud";
bar = function() { alert(v) };
baz = function(x) { v = x; };
}
foo();
baz("Fugly");
bar(); // Fugly (not fud) even though foo() has exited.
alert(v); // Top

[edit]Objects

For convenience, types are normally subdivided into primitives and objects. Objects are entities that have an identity (they are only equal to themselves) and that map property names to values (“slots” in prototype-based programming terminology). Objects may be thought of as associative arrays or hashes, and are often implemented using these data structures. However, objects have additional features, such as a prototype chain[clarification needed], which ordinary associative arrays do not have.
JavaScript has several kinds of built-in objects, namely Array, Boolean, Date, Function, Math, Number, Object, RegExp and String. Other objects are “host objects”, defined not by the language but by the runtime environment. For example, in a browser, typical host objects belong to the DOM (window, form, links, etc.).

[edit]Creating objects

Objects can be created using a constructor or an object literal. The constructor can use either a built-in Object function or a custom function. It is a convention that constructor functions are given a name that starts with a capital letter:
// Constructor
var anObject = new Object();

// Object literal
var objectA = {};
var objectA2 = {}; // A != A2, {}s create new objects as copies.
var objectB = {index1: 'value 1', index2: 'value 2'};

// Custom constructor (see below)
Object literals and array literals allow one to easily create flexible data structures:
var myStructure = {
name: {
first: "Mel",
last: "Smith"
},
age: 33,
hobbies: ["chess", "jogging"]
};
This is the basis for JSON, which is a simple notation that uses JavaScript-like syntax for data exchange.

[edit]Methods

method is simply a function that is assigned to the value of an object’s slot. Unlike many object-oriented languages, there is no distinction between a function definition and a method definition. Rather, the distinction occurs during function calling; a function can be called as a method.
When called as a method, the standard local variable this is just automatically set to the object instance to the left of the “.”. (There are also call andapply methods that can set this explicitly—some packages such as jQuery do unusual things with this.)
In the example below, Foo is being used as a constructor. There is nothing special about a constructor, it is just a method that is invoked after the object is created. this is set to the newly created object.
Note that in the example below, Foo is simply assigning values to slots, some of which are functions. Thus it can assign different functions to different instances. There is no prototyping in this example.
function px() {return this.prefix + "X";}

function Foo(yz) {
this.prefix = "a-";
if (yz > 0) {
this.pyz = function() {return this.prefix + "Y";};
} else {
this.pyz = function() {return this.prefix + "Z";};
}
this.m1 = px;
}

var foo1 = new Foo(1);
var foo2 = new Foo(0);
foo2.prefix = "b-";

alert("foo1/2 " + foo1.pyz() + foo2.pyz());
// foo1/2 a-Y b-Z

foo1.m3 = px; // Assigns the function itself, not its evaluated result, i.e. not px()
var baz = {"prefix": "c-"};
baz.m4 = px; // No need for a constructor to make an object.

alert("m1/m3/m4 " + foo1.m1() + foo1.m3() + baz.m4());
// m1/m3/m4 a-X a-X c-X

foo1.m2(); // Throws an exception, because foo1.m2 doesn't exist.

[edit]Constructors

Constructor functions simply assign values to slots of a newly created object. The values may be data or other functions.
Example: Manipulating an object
function MyObject(attributeA, attributeB) {
this.attributeA = attributeA;
this.attributeB = attributeB;
}

MyObject.staticC = "blue"; // On MyObject Function, not obj
alert(MyObject.staticC); // blue

obj = new MyObject('red', 1000);

alert(obj.attributeA); // red
alert(obj["attributeB"]); // 1000

alert(obj.staticC); // undefined
obj.attributeC = new Date(); // add a new property

delete obj.attributeB; // remove a property of obj
alert(obj.attributeB); // undefined

delete obj; // remove the whole Object (rarely used)
alert(obj.attributeA); // throws an exception
The constructor itself is stored in the special slot constructor. So
function Foo(){}
// Use of 'new' sets prototype and constructor slots (for example,
// Foo.prototype = {}; // would set constructor to Object).
x = new Foo();
// The above is almost equivalent to
y = {};
y.constructor = Foo;
y.constructor();
// Except
x.constructor == y.constructor // true
x instanceof Foo // true
y instanceof Foo // false
z = new {constructor: Foo}.constructor();
z instanceof Foo // true.
// Changing Foo.prototype after 'new' has been called can change the
// instanceof results, until it is changed back with the identical value.
Functions are objects themselves, which can be used to produce an effect similar to “static properties” (using C++/Java terminology) as shown below. (The function object also has a special prototype property, as discussed in the Inheritance section below.)
Object deletion is rarely used as the scripting engine will garbage collect objects that are no longer being referenced.

[edit]Inheritance

JavaScript supports inheritance hierarchies through prototyping in the manner of Self.
In the following example, the Derived class inherits from the Base class. When d is created as a Derived, the reference to the base instance of Base is copied to d.base.
Derive does not contain a value for aBaseFunction, so it is retrieved from Base when aBaseFunction is accessed. This is made clear by changing the value of base.aBaseFunction, which is reflected in the value of d.aBaseFunction.
Some implementations allow the prototype to be accessed or set explicitly using the __proto__ slot as shown below.
function Base() {
this.anOverride = function() {alert("Base::anOverride()");};

this.aBaseFunction = function() {alert("Base::aBaseFunction()");};
}

function Derived() {
this.anOverride = function() {alert("Derived::anOverride()");};
}

base = new Base();
Derived.prototype = base; // Must be before new Derived()

d = new Derived(); // Copies Derived.prototype to d instance's hidden prototype slot.

base.aBaseFunction = function() {alert("Base::aNEWBaseFunction()")}

d.anOverride(); // Derived::anOverride()
d.aBaseFunction(); // Base::aNEWBaseFunction()
alert(d.aBaseFunction == Derived.prototype.aBaseFunction); // true

alert(d.__proto__ == base); // true in Mozilla-based implementations but false in many other implementations.
The following shows clearly how references to prototypes are copied on instance creation, but that changes to a prototype can affect all instances that refer to it.
function m1() {return "One";}
function m2() {return "Two";}
function m3() {return "Three";}

function Base() {}

Base.prototype.m = m2;
bar = new Base();
alert("bar.m " + bar.m()); // bar.m Two

function Top() {this.m = m3;}
t = new Top();

foo = new Base();
Base.prototype = t;
// No effect on foo, the *reference* to t is copied.
alert("foo.m " + foo.m()); // foo.m Two

baz = new Base();
alert("baz.m " + baz.m()); // baz.m Three

t.m = m1; // Does affect baz, and any other derived classes.
alert("baz.m1 " + baz.m()); // baz.m1 One
In practice many variations of these themes are used, and it can be both powerful and confusing.

[edit]Exception handling

JavaScript includes a try ... catch ... finally exception handling statement to handle run-time errors.
The try ... catch ... finally statement catches exceptions resulting from an error or a throw statement. Its syntax is as follows:
try {
// Statements in which exceptions might be thrown
} catch(errorValue) {
// Statements that execute in the event of an exception
} finally {
// Statements that execute afterward either way
}
Initially, the statements within the try block execute. If an exception is thrown, the script’s control flow immediately transfers to the statements in the catch block, with the exception available as the error argument. Otherwise the catch block is skipped. The Catch block can throw(errorValue) if it does not want to handle a specific error.
In any case the statements in the finally block are always executed. This can be used to free resources, although memory is automatically garbage collected.
Either the catch or the finally clause may be omitted. The catch argument is required.
The Mozilla implementation allows for multiple catch statements, as an extension to the ECMAScript standard. They follow a syntax similar to that used in Java:
try { statement; }
catch (e if e == "InvalidNameException") { statement; }
catch (e if e == "InvalidIdException") { statement; }
catch (e if e == "InvalidEmailException") { statement; }
catch (e) { statement; }
In a browser, the onerror event is more commonly used to trap exceptions.
onerror = function (errorValue, url, lineNr) {...; return true;};

[edit]Native functions and methods

(Not related to web browsers.)

[edit]eval (expression)

Evaluates expression string parameter, which can include assignment statements. Variables local to functions can be referenced by the expression.
(function foo() {
var x=7;
alert("val " + eval("x+2"));
})(); // shows val 9.

7 Απριλίου 2013

types-strbrd-wed-anim-schls

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 19:19

01. the walt diseny strbrd




A storyboard is a sequence of images and words drawn together on a page to form a plausible narrative.
Storyboards are routinely used in the movie making business to ‘preview’ a movie before a single shot is taken. Not only does a storyboard allow for a dress rehearsal of the final product but by the very fact of being posted on the wall,it elicits early feedback and encourages quick, painless editing, leading to significant savings in time and resources.
Disney was a storyboarding freak!
A storyboard is an apt metaphor for how we make sense of our own life history. Storyboarding can be used to sense emergent patterns in our own life story and to envision the life experiences that we wish to welcome into our future.
Try storyboarding the past and future events in your Life!

Disney
Storyboard Inventor: Walter Elias Disney

http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/kgmhoQnQZNY


02. strbrd and 3d space


—- mechanical flipbook

0i8mechanical4f01131_z.jpg

Mark Rosen and Wendy Marvel, Mechanical Flipbook. Photo by Luke Neve for Kinetica

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/48901714 w=500&h=281]
01 HORSEINMOTION from Wendy Marvel on Vimeo.

03.strboarding interactivity

**
the origins of storyboard are in the film history , where a series of panels roughly depicts snapshots from an intented film sequence in porder to get the idea across about the eventual scene. Similarly, for inreractive system design, the storyboards provide snapshots of interface at particular points in the interaction.
Evaluating customers or user imprassions of the storyboards can determine relatively quickly if the design is heading in the right direction.

students examples-

tvscreen
-movie svreen- theatre-tv
the perception of the scale- the tv-human scale-phycological implications-being with another.
-how the action happens in z axis.
–                                                              

//// story board 1////////////P2080240

story board 1

maeda-rec-links-prog-dsgn

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 18:55

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 15:37

Architectures without Place [diaporama]


Construccions al bosc d’Olot by Josep Pujiula [1974]
As in the rest of Spain, Catalonian history is marked for the General Franco’s dictatorship from 1939 to 1975. The Franco era was characterised by repression of pro-democracy and left-wing organisations. In the middle of the repression, the post-war years led Catalonia to an economical growth which started in 1959 and, according to the Museo d’Història de Catalunya, “led [Catalonia] to major economic and social changes: foreign capital came into the country; industry diversified; tourism developed; waves of immigration from within Spain occurred; and the consumer society became established.
Within this context, it is interesting to discover some of the projects presented on the exhibition and publication Architectures without Place, which analyzes a particular vision of architectural production in Catalonia since 1968. As if we were talking about other phantom city, the aim of the exhibition was to limit the study to architectures that do not physically exist but nonetheless help us to understand the present-day reality in all its complexity. As we can read on the exhibition web-site:
The great majority are ideal projects that never got off the architect’s drawing board. Others are projects that have changed as a result of being altered or demolished, or are ephemeral architecture projects conceived for a brief existence: among these, set designs form a group apart by virtue of their specific logic and clearly differentiated conditioning factors.
There are many facts to think about, as how any dictatorship affects architecture and culture in general terms or how the economical limitations have been the seed for creativity and multidisciplinarity on those years, when architectures were proposed or imagined by creative talents from other disciplines such as film, the visual arts and especially the comic.

Modern Iconography. América Sánchez [1980]
Housing was not the exemption. While architects and artist were dreaming on a better and free world, the economic growth that started in those years has affected the architectural production, with the use of new materials and communication tools that allowed architects to know what was happening abroad in the architectural arena. Some historical facts such as the promulgation of the Stabilisation Plan [a plan to cut inflation and reduce the balance of payments] in July 1959, when the régime abandoned the despotic interventionist approach that it had maintained since 1939, had influenced the ideals of architects and creative minds that lived in Catalonia. Again from the Museo d’Història de Catalunya
This [economical] expansion took place without any type of urban planning nor the slightest degree of democratic control over the economy. Urban chaos and the lack of a basic infrastructure were common in the large cities and the tourist areas on the coast.
On those years, homes underwent major changes: New materials, such as chipboard and Formica, revolutionised furniture making. The flood of new domestic appliances continued unabated, and residents’ comfort was dramatically improved by electric fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, radios and televisions, as we can see in the following project:

Reforma apartament Stéphanie. Lluís Clotet and Òscar Tusquets [Studio PER, 1974-79]

Reforma apartament Stéphanie. Lluís Clotet and Òscar Tusquets [Studio PER, 1974-79]
After this brief historical reflection, here is a [diaporama] with some architectures proposed or imagined in which the discussion about the city is carried out from a perspective that, remote from the particular servitudes of the architecture profession, often gives it a greater lucidity.

Naus industrials Josep Ignasi Llorens and Alfons Soldevila [1980]

Infatables. Josep Ponsatí [1971]

Club de golf a Sant Cugat del Vallès. MBM Arquitectes [1970]

Carretera de les aigües. Emili Donato [1981]

City in Space. Ricardo Bofill, Taller de Arquitectura [1968]
The exhibition was designed with a non-chronological narrative of events which aimed to offer a more reflective and multifaceted reading of the content, providing us with the elements for a debate on the role of architecture and its interaction with the socio-political context. General Franco died on 20 November 1975 and the opening up of the regime led to democracy by another route, political reform. In June 1977, the first free elections since 1936 were held. This socio-political changes drives us to reflect on the paradigm of the relationship between the architect and society.
We want to finish with the thought that architecture and architectural communication has often been related with activism in the political context, using image and media as political manifestos. As Beatriz Colominatold us in an interview, “you have to think that in the decade of the 1970s, the political agenda was almost part of our architectural curriculum.” And she adds:
I think that we are facing a very interesting era, because architecture always develops in a deeper way in moments of crisis. In the decade of the 60s and 70s, we had the oil crisis, the war, and other conflicts and we had the time to think about ecology, emergency housing, new materials, the space program, etc. And now that we are living in a similar state of the world, we can discover again some similar responses and recover the principles that we have lost.
Utopias as activism and polemical reaction, keep on going. In the current years, when Barcelona is facing a “star-architect-fever” on its architectural development, Beth Galí reflects this political and economical situation in Catalonia with her project La Sagrera Família [also included in the exhibition], a paper-architecture project aimed to condemn the mediatization of a monument like Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia:

La Sagrera Família, Barcelona. Beth Galí [2000]

But is it Architecture?* | Beniamino Servino


14_08_2012

I’m an ephemeral and not too discontented citizen of a metropolis thought to be modern because all known taste has been avoided in the furnishing and exterior of houses as well as the city plan. Here you cannot point out a trace of a single monument to superstition. Morals and language are reduced to their simplest expression, in short! These millions not needing to know each other pursue their education, work, and old age so identically that the course of their lives must be several times shorter than absurd statistics allow this continent’s people. So, from my window, I see fresh spectres roaming through thick eternal fumes – our woodland shade, our summer night! – New Furies, before my cottage which is my homeland, my whole heart, since all here resembles this – Death without tears, our active daughter and servant, desperate Love and pretty Crime whimpering in the mud of the street.

Filed under: Notes — admin @ 15:30

Stop Obeying! | Resistant Checklist by Lebbeus Woods

Resist whatever seems inevitable.
.
Resist people who seem invincible.
.
Resist any idea that contains the word algorithm.
.
Resist the idea that architecture is a building.
.
Resist the idea that architecture can save the world.
.
Resist the hope that you’ll get that big job.
.
Resist buying an automobile of any kind.
.
lwblog-the-system-dwg1
.
Resist people who are satisfied.
.
Resist getting big jobs.
.
Resist taking the path of least resistance.
.
Resist the growing conviction that They are right.
.
Resist the idea that you need a client to make architecture.
.
Resist people who tell you to resist.
.
Resist writing what They wish you would write.
.
Resist assuming that the locus of power is elsewhere.
.
Resist any idea that equates architecture and ownership.
.
Resist the thought that life is simple, after all.
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