Sunday, 24 October 2010
You know it makes (no) sense...
JPBarlow California spends about 1.8 billion a year to prohibit marijuana use, roughly what it could gain in taxes were it legal.
David Hockney's iPad art
One day last summer I got a text message from David Hockney. It read: “I’ll send you today’s dawn this afternoon, an absurd sentence I know, but you know what I mean.” Later on it duly arrived: pale pink, mauve and apricot clouds drifting over the Yorkshire coast in the first light of a summer’s day. It was as delicate as a Turner, luminous as stained glass and as hi-tech as any art being made in the world today. Hockney had drawn it on his iPhone.
He first started using that Apple gadget in late 2008. Since then he has produced hundreds of drawings on his iPhone and – beginning last spring – on his iPad, too. Some of these will go on show next week in an exhibition David Hockney: Fleurs Fraîches at the Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, Paris (Oct 21 to Jan 30).
The title comes from one of Hockney’s favourite sayings from the first half of last year. “I draw flowers every day on my iPhone,” he told me then, “and send them to my friends, so they get fresh flowers every morning. And my flowers last. Not only can I draw them as if in a little sketchbook, I can also then send them to 15 or 20 people who then get them that morning when they wake up.”
The novelty of what he has been doing is two-fold. Firstly, this is a new medium with fresh possibilities, requiring unorthodox techniques. Hockney executed the drawings mainly with the edge of his thumb; you can’t use the thumbnail, he says, because the device is sensitive to heat, not just touch. The second innovation is in the method of distribution. He sends these techno-sketches out to friends, who may then pass them on, collect them or do whatever they want.
Each image as it appears on another iPhone or laptop is virtually identical to the original, although Hockney points out that even with a manufactured item such as this, there will probably be minute differences. Even so, the drawing on my phone not only looks like the one on his, digitally and in almost every respect it is the same. This is profoundly subversive of the art market as we know it, with its focus on the signed original work.
Hockney first discovered the iPhone during the winter of 2008. “I was fascinated by it, because I think it’s a stunning visual tool,” he says. “It took a while to master how to get thicker and thinner lines, transparency and soft edges. But then I realised that it had marvellous advantages.” He uses an app called Brushes. “People keep sending me new drawings apps to try out, but once you get used to one it’s sufficient.”
Flowers were a frequent subject, especially of Hockney’s iPhone drawings from 2009. His partner, John Fitzherbert, would buy a different bouquet every day – roses, lilies, lilacs – and often Hockney would sketch them. The real subject, however, was light. The other persistent motif was the sun – breaking through the shutters, sparkling on the glass of a vase, rising over the beach.
“The fact that the screen is illuminated makes you choose luminous subjects, or at least I did,” he says. “Dawn is about luminosity and so is the iPhone. People send me iPhone drawings which look OK, but you realise that they are not picking particularly luminous subjects – which this medium is rather good at [in ways that] another medium isn’t.”
A lot of these little works were done in the early hours of the morning, as Hockney explained. “I’ve got this lovely bedroom window, and the flowers are there and the light’s changing.” The location is the north-east coast of Britain. For much of the past seven years, Hockney has been living in the seaside town of Bridlington, after having spent the previous quarter of a century based in Los Angeles.
The big difference between the two places, as Hockney sees it, is climatic. In southern California, there is only a small degree of seasonal variation; in Northern Europe it’s massive. During the dark winter the day is short, in high summer it begins to get light in the early hours of the morning.
“If you’re in my kind of business you’d be a fool to sleep through that, especially if you live right on the east coast, where there are no mountains or buildings to block the sun. Artists can’t work office hours, can they?”
In high summer Hockney wakes sometimes at 3.30 or 4 in the morning. “I go to bed when the sun goes down and wake when it starts getting light, because I leave the curtains open,” he told me in June last year. “The little drawings of the dawn are done while I’m still in bed. That’s the window I see and the shutters. If there are some clouds about, you get drama – the red clouds, the light underneath.
This is not the first time that Hockney has turned new technology to the age-old purposes of art. “Anyone who likes drawing and mark-making,” he thinks, “will like to explore new media.”
In the mid-1980s he bought one of the first colour photocopying machines and used it to create a series of works entitled Hand-Made Prints. A few years later, he did the same with the fax. He sent whole exhibitions down the line to be printed out and assembled on arrival. The fax, he joked at the time, was a telephone for the deaf (he is himself increasingly handicapped by deafness).
In both these cases, and now with iPhone and iPad, Hockney worked with the strengths and limitations of the device. Approaching the fax, he recalls: “People said it was just a bad printing machine. But I think there is no such thing as a bad printing machine. It either prints or it doesn’t. Most people were asking it to reproduce things it has difficulty with.”
In the case of the iPhone, he thinks: “There are gains and losses with everything. You miss the resistance of paper a little, but you can get a marvellous flow. So much variety is possible. You can’t overwork this, because it’s not a real surface. In watercolour, for instance, about three layers are the maximum. Beyond that it starts to get muddy. Here you can put anything on anything. You can put a bright, bright blue on top of an intense yellow.”
A little after Easter this year, another text arrived. Hockney had got his first iPad and was immediately converted to using that instead. “I thought the iPhone was great, but this takes it to a new level – simply because it’s eight times the size of the iPhone, as big as a reasonably sized sketchbook.” On this, Hockney draws with all his fingers, rather than just his thumb. Hockney began carrying his iPad around in the internal pocket he always has inserted by his tailor in all his suits. Previously it would contain a book of drawing paper.
One discovery that came with the iPad was that the process of drawing could be re-run at the tap of a finger. The screen goes blank again, then lines and washes reappear one after another, apparently of their own accord. The result is, in effect, a performing drawing (some of these will be on show in Paris).
Hockney is tickled by the experience of watching himself at work. “Until I saw my drawings replayed on the iPad, I’d never seen myself draw. Someone watching me would be concentrating on the exact moment, but I’d always be thinking a little bit ahead. That’s especially so in a drawing where you are limiting yourself, a line drawing for example. When you are doing them you are very tense, because you have to reduce everything to such simple terms.”
Like many people, Hockney thinks that this technology will change the world of news media and television quickly and irreversibly. But drawings, like songs, Hockney believes will always be with us: it is only the means of making and delivering them that will change. This autumn, Hockney remains in love with his iPad, and almost every day new drawings he’s done on it arrive in my inbox. “Picasso would have gone mad with this,” he says. “So would Van Gogh. I don’t know an artist who wouldn’t, actually.”
Martin Gayford @'The Telegraph'
Post Human
In 2007, the Japanese central government pledged $26 billion over ten years to develop a robot dependent society and lifestyle that is safe, comfortable and convenient. One person who is helping to make this vision a reality is Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro of Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute in Kyoto. He calls himself an Android Scientist and along with his multi disciplinary team of scientists he is creating very human-like robots or androids called Geminoids.
Why is the Japanese government pursuing such a vision? Why is it that the Japanese are able to welcome such machines into their society? Post Human explores these questions as well as providing a unique opportunity to hear scientists at the cutting edge of robotics express their hopes and fears about a future in which the lives of humans and robots are inextricably entwined.
Why is the Japanese government pursuing such a vision? Why is it that the Japanese are able to welcome such machines into their society? Post Human explores these questions as well as providing a unique opportunity to hear scientists at the cutting edge of robotics express their hopes and fears about a future in which the lives of humans and robots are inextricably entwined.
@'RN'
Saturday, 23 October 2010
The Tory Cuts
While the Tory Coalition Govt rip the shreds out of the UK with cuts in public spending of £81 billion an interesting fact might be remembered.
VInce Cable the Business Secretary has admitted that the amount lost through tax evasion by the richest members of the UK is over £100 billion.
VInce Cable the Business Secretary has admitted that the amount lost through tax evasion by the richest members of the UK is over £100 billion.
So why aren't this government pursuing that then?
I knew you well at The Chelsea Hotel (From Dylan to Dylan)
Although it’s been embattled and its legacy tarnished in the past few years, Manhattan’s Hotel Chelsea remains a spiritual landmark for those who remember (or simply romanticize) the old, weird New York. So it’s jarring news to learn that the Chelsea is now up for sale. Its owners claim that the place’s legacy will be preserved, and we sure hope they mean it.
To understand exactly what’s at stake here, we’ve put together a timeline of cultural events that took place at or were inspired by the Hotel Chelsea in the past 60 years. Of course, since its relationship to the art, music, and literary world is too enormous to measure, we’ve had to leave a lot out. Add your favorite Hotel Chelsea moments in the comments.
The death of Dylan Thomas (1953)
The Hotel Chelsea has been home to many poets, but perhaps its most famous was Dylan Thomas, who also died there. Notorious for consuming heroic quantities of liquor, he succumbed to an alcohol-related affliction on November 9, 1953, at the age of 39. Since then, rumors have swirled over whether it was pure quantity of drink or something to do with diabetes or a bad drug interaction that killed Thomas...
Continue reading
Land Desecration - Palestine's Olive Harvest Horror
“Lit from a blessed tree, an olive, neither of the east nor of the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous, though fire scarce touched it … ”
Quran 24:35Judges 15:5
Olives and olives oil. Nothing symbolizes Palestinian land, identity and culture as they do. They are the hallmarks of national pride and the veritable heart of Palestine’s agricultural economy.
Although the subjugation and daily humiliation of occupation takes various forms in East Jerusalem and the West Bank—demeaning checkpoint searches; arrest and interrogation of minors; preventing ambulances from expeditiously transporting the sick to hospitals; the eviction of families and demolition of homes—few situations evoke more outrage and deep sadness as do the torching of olive orchards by vigilante settlers.
Last Friday was the official start of the olive harvest season in the Israeli-occupied West Bank as gunfire and real fire once again heralded its opening. Hundreds of trees were burned by settlers as Israeli soldiers looked on. Fire trucks were prevented from helping put out the blaze in what has become an annual ritual of despoiling land by those who have illegally settled on it.
To coincide with the beginning of the harvest, the international relief agency Oxfam released its report, “The Road to Olive Farming: Challenges to Developing the Economy of Olive Oil in the West Bank” in Jerusalem.
Oxfam indicates that Palestinian olive oil production contributes $100 million annually to some of the poorest, most disadvantaged families and communities in the West Bank. It is a primary source of revenue for the economy and nearly half of all agricultural land use is devoted to it. As one of the territory’s major exports, the extent to which olives and olive oil contributes to employment opportunities and income for 100,000 Palestinian farming families cannot be overstated.
Yet, the Israeli government deliberately prevents access to land where olive farms are located.
“Physical barriers such as checkpoints and road blocks have restricted the free movement of people and goods within the West Bank and obstructed access for Palestinian agricultural produce, including olives and olive oil, to internal, Israeli and international markets,” the report said.
It also concluded the Israeli government sanctions settler violence against the groves, which include stealing its fruits, torching or uprooting tens of thousands of trees and attacking farmers to intimidate them from harvesting their crops.
“Settler attacks and harassment against Palestinian olive farmers are common.”
And Friday was no exception. As the AFP reported, settlers swooped down on the groves with automatic weapons, setting olive trees alight and chanting “Out, Out.”
Although this year’s violence has been characterized as one of the worst in recent history, yet nearly all assailants will likely go unprosecuted.
In a five-year study tracking 97 cases of Palestinian land vandalism, the Israeli human rights organization Yesh Din (Volunteers for Human Rights) found that police investigations did not yield a single indictment. “The law enforcement authorities are not responding to the ongoing harm done to the livelihood of Palestinian families,” said lead researcher Yior Lavne.
Savaging the cultural heritage and economic viability of a people is an odious practice. Under any other circumstance, the deliberate, purposeful desecration of land and sabotage of livelihoods would be considered a war crime. It is time the international community call what happened in the West Bank last week just that.
Support Palestinian farmers through fair-trade purchase of their olive oil.
Rannie Amiri @'Counterpunch'
Friday, 22 October 2010
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