77 million paintings is the title of the most recent Brian Eno’s video-installation. It can be described as a conception machine which produces an ever-evolving visual metamorphosis based on the random combination of a set of hand-made graphical work painted by Brian Eno himself. The resulting images are formed by the use of superposition and fading among the original graphic work, and are proyected over a variety of sites and surfaces. Each “light-painting” lasts only for a brief lap of time until it evolves into a different one.
photo by dailymail.co.uk
Even when the artist has a certain control over the input images and the time they last, the resulting image is unpredictable and thus the name Autogenerative Art. With 77 million possible combinations, the probability of seeing the same painting (or sequence) twice is the same as the probability of one person to win the lottery and get struck by a lightning, in the same day.
The background music is also a random combination of a set of samples and electronic ambient sounds, very characteristic of Brian Eno. Although the music blends really well, in my opinion, the sonic diversity is not as vast as the graphic work.
A plus is that this installation can be – to a certain point – experimented by anyone with a minimum of electronic gear. This is because the software with the original artwork used during this installation was released by Brian Eno in a DVD… ed2k link.
photo by Scott Beale
Here’s a video of Brian Eno’s presentation during an instalation of 77 million paintings
Lessons of Darkness – Werner Herzog 1992
This is a magnificent work by Werner Herzog about the aftermaths of the most stupid thing ever invented by men: the war. This film is a mixture of documentary and sci-fi with footage of real post-war scenarios on the kuwait desert, although the film never mentions any relevant political or geographical information.
The music included in this film is a excellent selection on classical pieces from big symphonies and operas and it plays a fundamental role in the film. It transforms a real life post apocalyptic scenario into a powerful and strangely cautivating visual symphony with in-location sound recordings as interludes along with werner’s own voice narrations and interviews.
This is a fragment of the film, the music is Wagner’s Sigefried’s funeral march:
Sountrack
- Edvard Grieg – Peer Gynt Suite No. 1, Op. 46 (Death of Aase)
- Gustav Mahler – Symphony No. 2
- Arvo Pärt – Stabat Mater
- Sergei Prokofiev – Sonata No. 2 Op.56
- Franz Schubert – Notturno op. 148
- Giuseppe Verdi – Messa da Requiem – Recordare (begins at minute 37:24)
- Richard Wagner – Das Rheingold
- Richard Wagner – Parsifal
- Richard Wagner – Götterdämmerung
Art Nouveau [aʁ nuvo] is an artistic movement proliferated during the last decade of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Flourishing in France, but with a strong presence in Belgium, Germany (Jugendstil), Italy (Stile Liberty or Stile Floreale), Spain (Modernismo), Holland (Nieuwe Kunst), and other European countries, as well as further afield as in the United States of America, the term itself pointed emphatically to a rejection of historicism and tradition in favour of a new aesthetic appropriate for a new century.
The movement was born in January of 1995, when a Czech artist working in Paris, Alphonse Mucha, produced a lithographed poster which appeared in the streets of Paris as an advertisement for the play Gismonda by Victorien Sardou, starring Sarah Bernhardt. It was an overnight sensation, and announced the new artistic style to the citizens of Paris.
There are very interesting stories behing many posters of this period, here are a few examples:
Le Chat Noir
Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (1896)
This lithograph was actually an advertisement poster for “Le Chat Noir”, a 19th-century cabaret in the bohemian Montmartre district of Paris, opened by the artist Rodolphe Salis.
It this cabaret, Salis most often played, with exaggerated, ironic politeness, the role of conférencier. It was this attitude from the cabaret scene that originated the “les arts incohérents” movement (later associated to the “avant-garde”) and the comic monologues.
This is how Salis describet his cavaret:
“The Chat Noir is the most extraordinary cabaret in the world. You rub shoulders with the most famous men of Paris, meeting there with foreigners from every corner of the world.”
Ambassadeurs
Toulouse-Lautrec (1892)
This lithograph publicized the singer Aristide Bruant’s debut at the Ambassadeurs on the Champs-Elysées, an altogether up-market venue for this popular entertainer who usually performed at his own café in Montmartre, the Mirliton (Reed Pipe). Source
Moulin Rouge – La Goulue
Toulouse-Lautrec (1891)
The poster advertises the Moulin Rouge dance hall and its featured performer La Goulue (the Greedy One or the Glutton), so named for her voracious appetite for all things sensual. By advertising a specific celebrity rather than anonymous beauties, Lautrec infused his poster with star power. The poster created a sensation, and fueled the popularity of both La Goulue and Lautrec. Source
Jane Avril
Toulouse-Lautrec (1899)
Toulouse-Lautrec’s penultimate poster, implicates one of the artist’s closest friends and favorite models in the sexual goings-on of Montmartre, the famous dancer Jane Avril (1868-1943). Jane was the daughter of a demi-mondaine known as La Belle Elise and the Marchese Luigi de Font, an Italian aristocrat from whom Jane’s mother extracted minimal support after he left her. Beaten by her mother, she ran away from home at the age of sixteen and was confined in a lunatic asylum… There she was a favorite of the nuns who cared for her. It was at a party they gave in her honor that Jane first displayed her joy in music and dancing. The performance convinced her caretakers that the girl might not be as mad as her mother insisted. Upon her release, she refused to return to her mother’s home, finding her way instead into the dance halls of Paris. Source
Sol Seppy is a cellist, pianist, singer-songwriter and producer from the United Kingdom with Greek and Australian influence. Her real name is Sophie Michalitsianos.
When she was twenty-three she moved to the US and after beeing a contributor on two sparklehorse albums, she was eventually able to afford moving to upstate New York, where she set up a studio of her own.
“Having the luxury of my own studio was great, but without an engineer to stop me, I destroyed most of what I wrote. To my dismay, my beloved music was turning into a gargantuan mirror and I couldn’t stand it. Barely any songs made it out alive; the studio was like a war zone.”
One night, while Sophie was out, there was an explosion in her studio, which promptly melted every piece of gear she owned, taking the whole house with it. She relocated, and began rebuilding another studio from scratch, and it was here that Sol Seppy began to manifest itself.
Sol Seppy’s music is a mixture of very intimate vocals oven an ethereal athmosphere… or as she describes it herself, “is a mixture of earth and space and dirt and glitter”. This album is beautiful and really worth listening to.
As the sole voice and creator behind Sol Seppy, Sophie landed not only the role of writer and performer of her first album (The Bells of 1 2), but also that of engineer and producer, with some additional mixing duties by Paul Antonell; all in all, a very substantial task for one person to surmount.
Slo fuzz video:
A lovely interview from toazted.com where she explains the origin of the name Sol Seppy… pretty cool story.
Beak> fue creada oficialmente en enero de 2009, y está integrada por Geoff Barrow (creador y productor de Portishead) , Matt Williams (Team Brick) y Billy Fuller (que ha tocado con bandas como Massive Attack, Robert Plant y Malakai). Su primer album fue grabado integramente en vivo en una habitacion, sin regrabaciones posteriores ni reparaciones de ningun tipo y solo usando la edición para crear los arreglos finales. Todas las canciones fueron escritas en una sesion de 12 dias en SOA Studio, Bristol.
Hay que checar este video de una sesión de grabacion para apreciar este material.. mas que un disco de estudio es un excelente performance de trip hop.
Acompañado de este video, Sigur Ros también publicó el audio de Hafssol (después llamada Hafsol), que es una canción que ha tenido interminables transformaciones año con año desde “Von” hasta su aparición en 2007 en “Hvarf/Heim”. Aquí esta el enlace de la página de Sigur Ros:
Til hamingju med afmaelisdaginn Agæetis Byrjun!
Feliz cumpleaños Agætis Byrjun!
Elisabeth Charlotte Rist, mejor conocida como Pipilotti Rist, nació en 1962 en Grabs, en el valle suizo del Rin, estudió “Arte comercial, ilustración y fotografía” en el Instituto de Artes Aplicadas en Viena (Universitat Für Angewandte Kunst) y posteriormente “comunicaciones audiovisuales” en la Escuela de Diseño de Basel (Schule für Gestaltung). Su apodo Pipilotti viene de la novela Pipi Calzaslargas de Astrid Lindgren.Desde 1986 ha hecho instalaciones de video/audio en varios museos al rededor del mundo, además ha trabajado en varios estudios industriales de video, fué integrante de la banda “Les Reines Prochaines” y también profesor invitado en UCLA. Actualmente vive en Zurich y “en las montañas de Suiza”, junto con Balz Roth, con quien tiene un hijo llamado Himalaya. Como dice en su propio sitio de internet, su numero favorito es el 54, “Against taboos and stereotypes with emotion and humour…”
Las videoinstalaciones de Pipilotti son impresionantes, para muestra, este video de una de sus instalaciones en el Museo Nacional de Arte Extranjero – vaya nombre – en Sofía, se titula “Ever Is Over All” son 2 proyecciones cuyas imágenes se sobreponen sobre el arista interior de una pared. La combinación de escenas y la temática del video son absolutamente maravillosas:
Algunas imágenes de sus videoinstalaciones:
Sitio oficial de Pipilotti:
Otros Clips:
I’m not the girl who misses much
Aujourd’Hui
Behind the Scences with Pipilotti Rist
Después del horror ocasionado por el cataclismo de la segunda guerra mundial, en Europa y otras partes del mundo, había un espíritu de idealismo generalizado originado por la idea de reconstrucción, principalmente en países que no quedaron cubiertos por la cortina de hierro. Se intentaba hacer las cosas mas abiertas, mas claras, que funcionaran mejor. En el área de diseño esta ideología no fue una excepcion. En Suiza, la necesidad de exponer las ideas de forma clara y racional llevo al desarrollo de la tipografía Helvetica, creada por Max Miedinger en 1957, era ante todo una fuente limpia, legible y neutral, que no pretendía tener significado por si misma si no que el significado fuera dado enteramente por el contenido del texto. Esta tipografía fue rápidamente adoptada y popularizada por un gran número de compañías e instituciones al rededor de todo el mundo, su auge se elevo por los aires con el surgimiento de las computadoras 
personales al ser adoptada como un default por Apple Macintosh. Microsoft por su parte liberó el set de tipografias “True type” cerca de 1990, el cual contiene Arial que se considera un clon de Helvetica, aunque en realidad tiene diferencias que, si bien son sutiles, producen una percepcion distinta de la tipografia. En Linux (ubuntu y varias otras distribuciones) se incluye un paquete de tipografias llamado Nimbus que contiene la tipografía “Nimbus Sans L” y es paracticamente igual a Helvetica. fue publicada bajo licencia GNU General Public Licence. También se puede instalar Helvetica. Para esto hay que descargar este archivo y descomprimir su contenido en la carpeta /usr/local/share/fonts. Una vez que las fuentes estén en esta carpeta van a aparecer a nivel sistema (para todos los programas).
Gary Hustwit realizo un documental sobre este tema que vale la pena ver, este es el trailer:
Por último aquí esta el link para bajar esta pelicula completa (link para emule y subtítulos), nuevamente gracias a clan-sudamerica.net
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