Side by Side

After watching this trailer , I'm extremely excited to watch this film, produced and narrated by non other than Keanu Reeves(?!). What looks like an encompassing debate between old and new film makers alike, Side by Side looks to offer a comparative arguement of the digital medium and how cinema is evolving.
Has anyone else heard of this film? I'd love to find a UK release date.

Nathan

Get on this you fine people you

http://www.tramway.org/events/Pages/Tramway-Festival-of-Artists-Moving-Image.aspx

A Night At The Museum

A couple of weeks ago I was helping this guy Omar out with a bit of demolition and it turns out he's also working as an architect on a huge museum conversion (in a former tobacco factory) in La Reole and was planning a big night market/party in part of the building. As part of the event he offered us a corner to put on an exhibition and promote the gallery we're opening here in October. Great, apart from the fact that this was with about a weeks notice and by the Friday I had a studio full of half finished work! After two days of manic work & installation this what we ended up with...

Bread & Circuses pt1, Concrete, Plywood, Melamine, 2012

I'd Rather Live On My Feet Than Die On My Knees, Welded Steel, Spraypaint, Plywood, Worklight, 2012

You're Either Fucked Or You're Not, Steel, Spraypaint, Lorry Tyre Debris, Lightbulb, 2012

Detail from You're Either Fucked Or You're Not

Detail from You're Either Fucked Or You're Not

The show was only open for one night (about 7pm to midnight) but we had a generally positive reaction with quite a few people coming over for a look and a chat.

Sam

Terry Riley - You're Nogood (1967)

Recently finished [skim] reading Keith Potter's Four Musical Minimalists and thought I'd share this rather amazing 1967 electronic work/proto-remix by Terry Riley that's mentioned in it:

You're Nogood is what its composer calls 'a set of variations' on a tune of this name by a New York rhythm-and-blues group called the Harvey Arverne Dozen. Riley was attracted to this source partly because by this time he had started calling himself 'Poppy Nogood'. You're Nogood exposes its borrowed material much more directly, and at greater length while remaining untransformed, than do the other tape pieces. By this time, its composer had acquired a sine-wave generator from [La Monte] Young and also, on loan from him, a small Moog synthesizer, Riley had never had access to a synthesizer before. The result was what he calls 'a combination of a synthesizer piece and a cut-up tape-loop piece', adding synthesizer sounds and their transformations to the basic techniques of tape-splicing, etc. Additionally, he now had two decent Revox tape recorders, giving him much better sound reproduction than before; Riley wanted to give his new piece, intended for replay in a discotheque, a cleaner sound.

'My idea was to make an arrangement', he says. 'So you'd have the tune, a set of improvisations, different loops of the tune: an abstract arrangement of the tune, almost like a jazz chorus. And then at some point, this tune generator which has sweeping and pulsing sounds'. A pulsing figure, taking the rhythm of the tune as its basis, starts with a very low pitch, then sweeps right upwards, at which point the tune itself enters. At the end of the piece, there are sonic very fast, double-speed loops, also supported by the pulses. Commissioned by a Philadelphia discotheque, You're Nogood apparently made a curious impact on the dance floor. Initially, the unusual effects seemed to mesh with the strobe lights and the general atmosphere. When the loops started to get out of phase with each other, however, the dancers were forced to stop and attempt to adjust to the constantly shifting metre, with apparently entertaining results.

John

Untitled (Indigestion Relief Club for Esoteric Discussion and Emancipated Learning) 2012

Following some discussion on the point and purpose of the BS collective, such as it is, I would like to propose the formation of a regular-as-far-as-possible study group for discussing papers, theses, books, pamphlets, ideas or whatever, in order to help our individual research as well as encouraging some slightly more formalised critical debate within the group and/or interpersonal chillaxing with tea and cake. This is basically, what happened in uni bar the tea and cake, with Ciara’s lectures and the seminar groups, the only difference being we choose the papers ourselves and there is no formal direction. 

The group would run as follows; one person chooses a text which is important/inspirational/difficult/controversial to them - whether that is a post-it note, a magazine article, an essay, a chapter of a book, in short anything that you would like to share or get feedback on. They then email it to everyone before meeting up to discuss, eat cake and whatnot. Then someone else chooses a thing to gather round and discuss, ad inifitum, until everyone is full of cake and knowledge. Yum.

As we have something of a tradition for naming things I hereby christen this vastly original concept as, Untitled (Indigestion Relief Club for Esoteric Discussion and Emancipated Learning) 2012, to be henceforth referred to only as, Book Club. Those in favour say “aaayye!” and I’ll put together an email group.

michael

Superb!

http://gawker.com/5936665/heres-what-happened-when-an-elderly-man-took-it-upon-himself-to-restore-a-painting-in-a-nearby-church

Nathan

Post Cards from the Future

Here's a really fascinating slide show that runs through the 75 Mega-cities of  the urban revolution across the globe.

It's quite incredible just how many of the top 20 cities are from China alone and how many of them break 20 million in population size.

View of China Central Television tower in Beijing 2012