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Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
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My kitty drawing is posted over on Tino's photo blog, Bike Lane Diary. The cat's in good company with lots of photos of intrepid winter cyclists.
quote from "Video's Body, Analog and Digital" by Laura U. Marks:
Among digital videomakers, one of the manifestations of the desire for indexicality is what I call analog nostalgia, a restrospective fondness for the "problems" of decay and generational loss that analog video posed. In the high-fidelity medium of digital video, artists are importing images of electronic dropout and decay, "TV snow" and the random colors of unrecorded tape, in a sort of longing for analog physicality. Analog nostalgia seems especially prevalent among works by students who started learning video production when it was fully digital.
[...]
While analog video suffers from bodily decay as the tape demagnetizes, digital video decays through "bit-rot", William Gibson’s evocative term for information loss that renders images in increasingly large and "forgetful" pixels. Crime TV shows us digital forgetting to blur faces into pixels. Artworks use it to metaphorize memory and information loss. In Déconstruction by Rémi Lacoste (1997), a shot of a building being demolished is rendered virtual by digital editing: the building reassembles, deconstructs again, and then deconstructs more terribly due to image compression, a kind of digital Alzheimer’s where the image is saved as just a few bytes of memory. Anthony Discenza’s The Vision Engine (1999), Phosphorescence (1999), and other works exploit the ability of pixelization to render the familiar strange. Phosphorescence begins with Rothkoesque images, gorgeous scumbled forms in deep red, lemon yellow, and blue-gray. Stripped of the digital algorithm that transformed them, the source images turn out to be just evening news broadcasts. Plundered images are manipulated so as to give us the immediacy of pre-symbolic perception that an Eric Siegel 1968 electronically synthesized video did [7].
Image above and text below are from Don Doyle's page at the US Atomic Veterans History Project website. Great photos and testimonials.
Our battalion, The 95th Combat Engineers were on site for the Turk shot. When it went off we were told that it was necessary for us to immediately leave the area and we left when the busses got there. There were teams of people with geiger counters to check us. We were brushed off with brooms as we entered the busses. I suppose that there was some radiation on our uniforms as the fallout cloud appeared to be drifting directly over us. We had no special equipment other than it was very cold and we had on all the cold weather clothing that we had.
We went back the next day and walked toward ground zero until we were told to go back. We passed various types of armored equipment that had been tossed around by the blast and also there were some pieces of the tower mixed in with it. I could identify something that looked like a huge turnbuckle that would have stretched the supporting cables. Also, there were some rabbits that were running around and appeared to be blind and had their fur singed.
The site also has an interesting section on declassified government documents.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves (1904-06) [source]Excerpt from a longer essay I am working on: In 1905, the painter Paul Cézanne was pushing himself relentlessly at the edges of perception, tossing torn paintings out the window in frustration (according to legend) and casting new depictions of space onto canvas with an unprecedented and hard-won level of abstraction. That year Einstein published three papers: one on Brownian Motion (providing a mathematical explanation for the apparently random, zig-zagging motion of particles suspended in liquid), one on special relativity (introducing the mind-bending physical law that the time and space are inextricably connected, such that the faster an object moves in space, the slower it moves in time), and a paper stating that light, previously considered exclusively as a wave, sometimes behaves like stream of discrete particles, tiny bundles or "quanta" of energy. The wave/particle theory laid the groundwork for quantum physics.
Goya, Executions on the Third of May, 1808 (1819). [source]
Techniques of interpretive illustration as used in art, according to James O. Young (see previous post), p. 82-84:
Selection: "A work of art can, by judicious use of selection, bring an audience to focus on objects which have been overlooked, or thought unworthy of careful attention."
Amplification: "Amplification is a technique common in all forms of satire. It is found in the paintings and engravings of Hogarth and in the plays of Sheridan. In general, amplification highlights certain properties and thereby draws attention to them."
Simplification: "Every object possesses a great many properties. When simplification is used in the representation of an object, some of these properties are down-played or eliminated. [...] One sub-species of simplification may be called idealisation. Idealisation is simplification that removes all of an object's imperfections."
Juxtaposition: "When juxtaposition is employed, two or more objects are simultaneously represented. [...] Classic instances of juxtaposition are found in Jane Austen's novels. She frequently juxtaposes a superficially engaging but morally flawed character with a type who, though lacking certain social graces, has true worth."
Correlation: "Correlation involves the representation of an object in such a way that audiences will see it in relation to a second object. The difference between juxtaposition and correlation is that juxtaposition involves the representation of both objects, while in correlation the second object is not represented. A good example of correlation is provided by Goya's The Third of May 1808 in Madrid: Executions on Principe Pio Hill. Here a Spanish patriot is represented in such a way that he resembles and recalls the crucified Christ."