Via
William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops I-IV
(Thanx Suzy!)
Wednesday, 14 September 2011
All Hail jail to star tale
Courtin-Wilson, a young Melbourne filmmaker, who has won accolades with the documentaries Chasing Buddha and Bastardy, met Jones while working with Plan B, a Melbourne theatre group founded to help rehabilitate former prisoners through performance.
Hail tells the story of a prisoner who is released from a Melbourne jail and tries to return to a normal domestic and working life. It is based on the experiences of former prisoners like Jones, who allowed a film crew into the flat he shares with his girlfriend Leanne to film his family and former criminal associates.
Jones explained in Venice that he had already been in Cannes with Courtin-Wilson's short film, Cicada. Strangely enough he had dreamt he was coming to Venice this year - just like with Cannes in 2009.
Jones said he planned to marry his girlfriend soon "so the festival is like a honeymoon in advance".
Jones explained his first crime was being born. "After my mother and father separated, my mother became seriously ill and I was raised in a boys' home," he said. "So at the age of 12, I was exposed to all the things that happen in the criminal world."
Empire magazine film critic Damon Wise described Jones' performance as "brilliant in the moments when you really got inside his mind and he was articulating his rage. When his eyes glazed over and he was in the zone it was really frightening".
Helen Barlow @'The West Australian'
Venice Press Conference
The Responsive Eye | USA, MoMA, 1965
The Responsive Eye, MoMA Catalogue (1965) [PDF, 80mb]
In 1965, an exhibition called The Responsive Eye, created by William C. Seitz was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The works shown were wide ranging, encompassing the minimalism of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, the smooth plasticity of Alexander Liberman, the collaborative efforts of the Anonima group, alongside the well-known Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Bridget Riley. The exhibition focused on the perceptual aspects of art, which result both from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color relationships. The exhibition was enormously popular with the general public, though less so with the critics. Critics dismissed op art as portraying nothing more than trompe l'oeil, or tricks that fool the eye. Regardless, op art's popularity with the public increased, and op art images were used in a number of commercial contexts. Bridget Riley tried to sue an American company, without success, for using one of her paintings as the basis of a fabric design.
The Op Art movement got a new lease of life in the first decade of the twenty-first century as new forms started once again emerging. In 2005, Indian artist, Devajyoti Ray started a new genre of art called Pseudorealism. Though the concept and the name of the movement was brought from the film-world, much of Pseudorealism depends on the intuitive use of colours and understanding the relationships between them. -- Wiki
Via
Thursday September 15 is R U OK? Day.
Every day, 8 Australians take their own lives; that’s more than 2,100 a year.
According to Lifeline, for each person that dies in this way, another 30 attempt to end their life. R U OK? Day aims to inspire all Australians to help reduce our suicide rate by reaching out and making contact with others. Connect with someone you care about, and help stop little problems turning into big ones.
Staying connected with others is crucial to our general health and wellbeing. Feeling isolated or hopeless can contribute to depression and other mental illnesses, which can ultimately result in suicide. Regular, meaningful conversations can protect those we know and love.
Tomorrow, R U OK? want everyone across the country, from all backgrounds and walks of life, to ask family, friends and colleagues: “Are you OK?”.
It’s so simple. In the time it takes to have a coffee, you can start a conversation that could change a life. Visit the R U OK? Day website | Twitter | Facebook and join in tomorrow.
If you read no further than this and know you’ll join in tomorrow, that’s wonderful. Thank you! But if you have a few more minutes we’d like to tell you a little more about R U OK?Day and why it’s so important...
(BIG thanx Stan for the heads up!)
Collateral Damage: Robin Rimbaud
Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner hails the new community spirit of social networking sites that encourage direct communications between artists and listeners.
When British pop singer John Miles trilled, “Music was my first love and it will be my last/Music of the future and music of the past”, he could well have been celebrating the role music still plays in many of our lives today, despite the transformative impact digital technologies have had upon the means of both listening and production.The conversation regarding the digital economy of music tends to bypass many of the more constructive aspects that have been born from this radical reworking of the traditional models. The fiery debates continue to burn, so let’s sidestep those for a moment, look forwards not backwards, and explore the possibilities of engaging with these systems – colluding rather than quarrelling.
I have been professionally engaged in producing and performing music for the last 20 years, though my enthusiasm for all types of music stems from a much earlier age, having been exposed to both John Cage and Suzi Quatro at the very same time: one at school, one at home – no prizes for guessing which one had more influence upon me. (I don’t live on Devil Gate Drive.) Very early on, I was conscious that music has always centred on a social engagement, commonly in performance, and quite unlike the solitary pursuits of writers or visual artists, working independently in their studios to create unique objects.
However, there has always remained a distance between listeners and the musicians themselves, often maintained via bombastic management companies and unresponsive record labels. But nowadays artists can mediate the experience themselves using networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Ping and (in dwindling cases) MySpace. Social networking has erased some of these boundaries controlled by the music industry, enabling fans, consumers and the artists themselves to develop an emotional relationship.
It’s impossible to underestimate the value and impact of this direct line of communication, and personally I’ve felt more of a connection than ever with people who follow my work, or those with whom I’ve collaborated or respected. Indeed, countless times I’ve written ‘fan’ emails to musicians I’ve heard on The Wire Tapper CDs, for example, and receiving a personal response still gives me a thrill. Which is why I still try to respond to every email I receive, whether it’s from commissioners of new work or a curious student asking a technical question, or a request for yet another signed photo (but that’s inevitably my mum asking for those)...
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E-petitions: MPs to debate riots and Hillsborough
MPs are to debate two e-petitions which have gathered the support of more than 100,000 people.
The first debate, on 13 October, will consider calls to remove benefits from people found guilty of taking part in this summer's riots.The second debate, four days later, is on a petition demanding the full release of documents relating to the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.
The government introduced the e-petitions website this summer.
Any petitions gaining the support of more than 100,000 people can be considered for a full debate, if an MP suggests it to the backbench business committee, which controls about 35 days a year of parliamentary time.
At Tuesday's committee meeting, Conservative MP Gavin Barwell proposed a wider debate on the government's response to the riots, after a petition calling for those involved to lose entitlement to benefits gathered more than 244,000 signatures.
'Maximum disclosure' Liverpool Walton MP Steve Rotheram suggested the petition calling for the release of government papers on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died.
In 2009, the then Labour government set up the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose task was to "oversee the maximum possible public disclosure of governmental and other agency documentation relating to the Hillsborough tragedy and its aftermath".
The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham ruled in July this year that some files should be released, ahead of the usual 30-year rule, following a BBC freedom of information request, which was made before the panel was established.
'Process is working' However, the government is appealing against that ruling, and has said it wants the documents to be released to the panel first rather than all at once to the public.
It is understood the panel may put forward its recommendations on which papers should be released as early as the spring of next year.
The petitioners, however, are demanding that the information given out is not pre-filtered.
A third topic considered for debate - that of a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union - was not selected by the backbench committee, which had set aside two time slots in October.
The EU referendum call had gathered 80,000 signatures on a paper petition, and more than 20,000 on an e-petition.
A spokesman for the House of Commons leader, Sir George Young, said: "We welcome the decision of the backbench business committee to propose debates in the House on the subjects of the first two eligible e-petitions through the new government website.
"This shows that the new e-petition process is working, and demonstrates that it can achieve the aim of better connecting the public with Parliament."
The government announced last week that MPs could get more time to debate issues raised on the e-petitions website.
@'BBC'
It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing.'
It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.
Perloff's notion of unoriginal genius should not be seen merely as a theoretical conceit but rather as a realized writing practice, one that dates back to the early part of the 20th century, embodying an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text is as important as what the text says or does. Think, for example, of the collated, note-taking practice of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project or the mathematically driven constraint-based works by Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians.
Today technology has exacerbated these mechanistic tendencies in writing (there are, for instance, several Web-based versions of Raymond Queneau's 1961 laboriously hand-constructed Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), inciting younger writers to take their cues from the workings of technology and the Web as ways of constructing literature. As a result, writers are exploring ways of writing that have been thought, traditionally, to be outside the scope of literary practice: word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few...
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Kenneth Goldsmith @'The Chronicle'
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