The British Councils Design, Fashion and Architecture blog, Back of the Envelope, carries a good link to an archive of British Films produced in the 30′s and 40′s promoting British Industry. More on ‘Industrial Entertainment’ later.
Archive for the 'Film' Category
Sadly Hillman Curtis, designer and film maker died on Wednesday of last week from colon cancer.
http://www.hillmancurtis.com
Creative Review announce the winners of this recent BFI competition, based around the film Don’t Look Now. Receiving a judges commendation is vis-com-des person Julie Sheridan for the piece above.
Glasgow 1980, as viewed by Oscar Marzaroli, from 1971. In reference to Nostalgia Now brief.
“The point is that fashion is the armour to deal with the reality of everyday life.”
To those of you studying at (or former students of) GSA, it’ll be self-evident that degree show opens this week, and runs for the next week, till Sat. Opening times here. For any external audience, please feel free to come and have a look round this final degree show in the Foulis building.
Looking forward to Friday’s opening, the forecast looks bleak, but viewers may be relieved to know that the relative humidity is down to 61%, from today’s 92%, and visibility will be very good.
The vis com degree show site is here.
Image top: Newbery building.
One from the archive here: It’s rare for old blog posts here to attract many comments*, but Foreign Report: Pixacao – a report on Street Art from Argentina by Gordon Carmichael – has attracted a few of late, one which is in Portugese (I think, give it a go in google translate), and another of which offers a link to the video above, a really interesting segment from Style Wars. Thanks to Gordon for writing what has turned out to be the sleeper ‘hit’ of the Vis Com blog.
* please complete the “or new posts” or “only when you and lizzie comment on your own posts” jokes at your leisure.
Seeing as the Rapture didn’t occur on Saturday, you might want to tune in to Adam Curtis’s new series, ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Love and Grace‘ – What I hope will be an entertaining, insightful, and probably eclectic look at the politics, culture, society and technology we’re currently immersed in. All this on the back of a weekend where Twitter has been at the centre of a legal storm over privacy, and the geographical impotence of national laws has been tested, firstly by the aforementioned micro-blogging site (or rather the users of) and secondly by a shrewd Scottish Newspaper.
Conflating the issues of ‘freedom of speech’ here with the widely reported use of Twitter and other social media sites in the Arab-Spring would devalue the latter and elevate the former, but they possibly feature somewhere on the same spectrum.
Meanwhile, closer to home, super-injunctions at GSA prevent me from telling you that the Head of ———– was recently seen ——— a ——— with a learning outcome.
Can you not not communicate? via Critical Graphic Design. Try playing them all at once for a graphic design meltdown.
Video Vortex is a really interesting conference run by the Institute of Network Cultures, and which focusses on the messy but interesting world of online video, the most recent one looking at Online Video Aesthetics, Platforms, Standards and the Trouble with Translation, Civil Rights, Online Video Art and Online Video as a Political Tool. It has much to say about how images are created and transmitted, and what’s really great is that the Readers which accompany each conference are free to download from their website.
A selection of short films about poverty and alternative approaches to welfare reform such as a Citizens Basic Income.
Guest Speaker:
Ailsa McKay, Professor of Economics, Glasgow Caledonian University
1.30pm – 3.30pm
Sat 19th March 2011
Free Admission
Screening & Discussing:
Sylvain Froidevaux
“Onesimus Paradox and the Basic Income as A New Economy Alternative”
Slavoj Zizek at the RSA
“First As Tragedy, Then as Farce: The economic crisis and the end of global capitalism”
Making a Difference –
“Tae Sail On Them Is No Their Fate – Stories from the Fight Against Poverty in Scotland”
Part of the 2011 Glasgow Reshuffle…
The Pearce Institute
840 860 Govan Road
Govan
Glasgow
G51 3UU
0141 445 6007
0141 440 1937
http://www.citystrolls.com/
http://www.documentfilmfestival.org/
http://www.commonperspectives.org/
BIL Conferences are unconferences set up in riposte to (and in some ways in the image of) TED conferences. They are more ‘open’, funded on donations, and try to circumnavigate some of the exclusivity of their older counterpart. As a consequence, the production is far less slick, but as a model it could produce some interesting results.
(This blog post should be read aloud whilst listening to this).
This weekend I was looking through the highly impressive Ubuweb and stumbled upon this film, Production of Meaning, by Adbusters. I’m interested in this because while I broadly agree with the sentiment, I was really struck by how outdated and simplistic the analysis seemed to be. I used to buy and read Adbusters and have been away from it for a while, but wonder whether post Naomi Klein and No Logo, the arguments need to be more subversive and more sophisticated in equal measure.
The second benefit of roaming Ubuweb was that I came across a link to this download of the entire Ken Nordine album ‘Colors’, which wholeheartedly satisfied my jazz/colour analysis needs.
Ways of Seeing by John Berger is now available in full on UbuWeb. Thanks to GSA library for the tip-off.
Making Future Magic: iPad light painting from Dentsu London on Vimeo.
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You could easily ask the ‘why?’ question about this project, but knowing the work of BERG, there’s something quite pleasing in the playful visual experimentation that works as a sketch of future ideas to come. More here.
“The Wilderness Downtown” is not a phrase that you’d readily use to describe Kenton Lane in Newcastle, the street where I grew up – the most exciting thing that happened there being an occasional crash at the traffic lights. However it is given a different slant in this video for the latest Arcade Fire release which brings to the mainstream a lot of experiments using interactive media, geo-locative data and re-interpretations of the pop-video format. As an aside, we are told that this is the year of ‘geo-location‘ and the death of the ‘web‘ (as distinct from the internet). Beware false prophets*? Endism anyone**?
*or possibly opportunists using the well trodden “x is dead” tactic.
** “At the center of their argument is the observation that popular thinking about technology today is ruled by a kind of relentless “endism,” which forecasts the death of everything from mass media to the nation-state, government to politics, universities to regions, even distance itself.”
The film above by Chris Marker, could be taken as an interesting design research proposition, and way of visualising scenarios. ‘Future Artifacts’ (to which this film could possibly tenuously be said to belong) are a useful way of trying to ‘evidence’ the impact of design decisions, particularly across larger and more complex projects that involve networks, services and interactions.
Marker himself is a very interesting filmmaker and visualiser, a leading exponent of the ‘compilation’ or ‘essay’ film. ‘Notes from the era of imperfect memory‘ is a blog dedicated to him and his work.
Thanks to Gordon Hush for the link.
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