personal space

 Urban Armor #2: The Personal Space Dress

A dress with two proximity sensors and a plastic armature that allows the dress to expand when a person comes too close to the wearer. The dress is the second in a series of wearable electronics for women, playful pieces that help women assert control over their personal/public space.

"Urban Armor is a series of playful electronic wearables for women. The series arose partly out of my concern over the persistence of ideologies asserted at women in public space through advertising, architecture and socially normative behavior. I began to look for ways women could take more ownership over their personal space in public.At the same time, I noticed trends in wearable technology seeming to target mostly wealthy, young, professionals, and focusing on functions such as data collection and social networking. I wanted to explore how wearable technology could impact a person's physical world, and help the wearers augment their personal expression and agency in public space." 

Kathleen McDermott, designer of Urban armor'The personal space dress'

Kathleen McDermott received her BFA in Sculpture from Cornell University in 2009. When not pursuing personal projects, Kathleen has worked as a freelance fabricator for various artists, galleries, and film productions. She recently relocated to Hong Kong where she is pursuing a Masters in Fine Art in Creative Media, at City University of Hong Kong.

source: http://www.kthartic.com/index.php?/class/urban-armor-2/

for video, visit:  http://vimeo.com/94218378

 

judgement day

 It is believed in most religions that immediately upon death each soul undergoes a particular judgment. Depending upon the person’s actions in this life the person's soul goes to heaven or hell. A soul of a good person doing good deeds will always reach heaven, but the soul of a bad immoral person will remain in hell till eternity. Hans Memling (ca. 1433 - 11 August 1494, Bruges) was a Flemish painter. His painting Day of Judgement clearly depicts god in the centre taking decisions and the people on the left of the onlooker being led to heaven and souls on the right being led to hell.

credits:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Judgment#mediaviewer/File:Das_J%C3%BCngste_Gericht_(Memling).jpg

light at the end of the tunnel

Luis Barragan, the Mexican architect, is known for the sheer poetry he creates in his buildings through the very imaginative use of volumes, walls, light and colour. Modern in design and very Mexican at heart, his architecture demonstrates how a sensitive architect can combine the best of traditional vernacular architecture with the most modern building concepts to create a masterpiece.

"Beauty, Inspiration, Magic, Spellbound, Enchantment, as well as concepts of Serenity, Silence, Intimacy and amazement ..... They have never ceased to be my guiding lights " Fom his acceptance speech at the Pritzker Architecture Prize, 1980. Source: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Luis_Barrag%C3%A1n

Credits: http://sketch42blog.com/2013/07/luis-barragan-and-the-good-wall/

http://www.barragan-foundation.org/flash_english/1menu.html

better and better

Write as an instinct. Read as a habit. The video talks about how the whole process of writing is an extremely personal journey filled with trying times. It addresses what exactly we achieve at the end of that journey.

Here’s listing some iconic authors and authors that influenced them:

P.G. Wodehouse:  Shakespeare, Tennyson , Rudyard Kipling, Omar Khayyam and Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie: Wilkie Collins and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Dan Brown: Sidney Sheldon, Douglas Hofstadter, Fred Wrixon, John Steinbeck, John Langdon, Shakespeare, James Bamford and Robert Ludlum.

credits:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1h4rm57UIg
http://en.wikipedia.org/

harmonics

Notes from the history of orchestra

• During Renaissance around the 1500’s the word "consort" was used to mean a group of instrumentalists and occasionally singers making music together or "in concert".
• In the 1600’s the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi systematically choose the instruments he wanted to accompany his opera Orfeo (1607),
• First set comprised of fifteen viols of different sizes, two violins, four flutes, two large and two medium. Along with two oboes, two cornetts (small wooden trumpets), four trumpets, five trombones, a harp, two harpsichords, and three small organs.
• In the next century around J.S Bach the orchestra developed still further.
• The violin family, violin, viola, cello, and bass, replaced the viols and the new kind of string section became more prominent to the Baroque orchestra than the viols had been in the Renaissance.
• Musical leadership in the Baroque orchestra came from the musician playing the keyboards, harp or organ acting as leader.
• J.S. Bach worked with an orchestra usually giving cues from his bench as he sat at the organ or harpsichord.
• In the Baroque era a musical director occasionally stood and conducted the orchestra.
• It further underwent several developments till 1800 up to Haydn's and Beethoven's time.
• The string instruments came into the forefront and keyboard instruments took a back seat.
• Composers began to write for the specific instrument keeping in mind how the piece would sound and how could it be played easily.
• Combining instruments produced different sounds and added vibrancy in the orchestra.
• Initially a rolled up piece of white paper was used to conduct the orchestra so that all musicians could see it.
• This led to the design of a baton that conductors use today.
• In the 1800s, conductor-composers such as Carl Maria von Weber and Felix Mendelssohn stood up on a podium and conducted from front and centre.
• Later in the 1800s, the orchestra reached the size and proportions we know today and even went beyond that size.
• New instruments such as the piccolo and the tuba were now available for orchestras.
• Many composers like Berlioz, Verdi, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, turned conductors as well.  
• Orchestra mainly comprises of: a big string section, with smaller sections for brasses, woodwinds, percussion, harps and keyboard instruments.

CREDITS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeP_AS0DqaU

http://www.nyphilkids.org/lockerroom/history_f-r.html 

hear, or listen?

It is incredible how much more one can hear, if one decides to 'listen'. Musician Bernie Krause discovered the sounds of trees, animals and birds, while on a commission to make an album incorporating long segments of wild sounds.

'The way he describes what he hears through his recording equipment will make you want to put on a pair of headphones and sit in the forest for a day, tethered to a microphone. That’s what Krause first did in the fall of 1968, when he switched on his portable recorder in Muir Woods, a grove of coastal redwoods north of San Francisco:

The ambience was transformed into minute detail that I would have never caught with my ears alone—the sounds of my breathing; the slight movement of a foot adjusted into a more comfortable position; a sniffle; a bird landing nearby on the ground, stirring up leaves and then pushing air with its wing beats in short, quick puffs as it took off, alarmed.

I realized, even then, that wild sound might contain huge stores of valuable information just waiting to be unraveled. But to that point in my life, I’d had no way of understanding that the natural world was filled with so much wondrous chatter.' 

Source:A review of The Great Animal Orchestra By Dawn Stover 

http://conservationmagazine.org/2012/05/the-lost-art-of-listening/

Bernard L. "Bernie" Krause (born December 8, 1938 in Detroit, Michigan), founder of Wild Sanctuary, an organization dedicated to the recording and archiving of natural soundscapes, is an American musician, author, soundscape recordist and bio-acoustician, who coined the term biophony and helped define the structure of soundscape ecology.Since 1979, Krause has concentrated almost exclusively on the recording and archiving pristine sound environments from around the world. These recordings are commissioned as works of art and science by museums for their dioramas and sound installations in many countries, and as ambient tracks for numerous feature films, and as over 50 downloadable field recording albums from the world's rare habitats.

credits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernie_Krause

for more, visit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feexRcCHh3k

moving on

No write up for today’s pick. Pixar marvels as usual. There could not be a more apt piece of art to go with today’s quote. Moving on before you actually got there ! The video really talks about "moving" in more ways than one. Watch and enjoy. Geri’s Game is an animated short film made by Pixar in 1997. It was written and directed by Jan Pinkava and was the first Pixar short created after the 1989 Knick Knack. The film won an Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film in 1998.

credits:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IYRC7g2ICg