Kristin Scott Thomas for Je Reviens
The award-winning British actor swirls in front of a fountain to the tune of West Side Story’s “I Feel Pretty” for The British Cryonics Institute. The campaign encourages the public to plan their afterlife as they bid you to wake up in 3015.
"Katerina Jebb Concocts Seven Products You Cannot Live Without This Fall
For years artist Katerina Jebb has been collaborating with good friend Tilda Swinton in making satirical shorts. When gallery owner Gloria Maria Cappelletti happened upon one of these parody advertisments last year, she encouraged Jebb to expand on the series, and the result is Simulacrum and Hyperbole. Opening on Thursday at the Gloria Maria Gallery in Milan, the show features an installation that includes a television set playing Jebb's imaginary channel Lucid TV and seven cheeky films about consumerism and the beauty industry, with a little help from the artist’s famous friends. Here’s a rundown of the imaginary products they're selling."
Civilization is a video installation we created with artist/director Marco Brambilla for the elevators Standard Hotel in NYC. It's comprised of over 400 video clips and it takes elevator passengers on a trip from hell to heaven as they go up or from heaven to hell as they go down. Pictures of the installation and Q&A with Brambilla and Crush is posted here glossyinc.com/civilization.html
GHOST is a study of model Natasha Poly. An investigation into the obsessive behavior of the public eye and it's lingering effects on those chased and caught by it. The piece utilizes multiple shots, all presented head-on, giving the audience an opportunity to experience the deconstruction of an icon as it strips the beauty out of fashion.
The film opens with a robed, profusely bleeding "God" disemboweling himself, with the act ultimately ending in his death. A woman, Mother Earth, emerges from his remains, arouses the body, and impregnates herself with his semen. Becoming pregnant, she wanders off into a vast and barren landscape. The pregnancy manifests in a fully grown convulsing man whom she leaves to his own devices.
The "Son of Earth" meets a group of faceless nomads who seize him with what is either a very long umbilical cord or a rope. The Son of Earth vomits organic pieces, and the nomads excitedly accept these as gifts. The nomads finally bring the man to a fire and burn him.
"Mother Earth" encounters the resurrected man and comforts him. She seizes the man with a similar umbilical cord. The nomads appear and proceed to rape her. Son of Earth is left to mourn over the lifeless body. A group of characters appears, carry her off and dismember her, later returning for Son of Earth. After he, too, is dismembered, the group buries the remains, planting the parts into the crust of the earth. The burial site becomes lush with flowers. In a final coda, "Mother Earth" and "Son of Earth" are shown again, this time wandering away through a forest.
While the movie is not easily approached—lacking both dialogue and discernible cultural symbols—it does contain references to various religious and pagan myths. Christian elements are present in the impregnation of Mother Earth by God, akin to the impregnation of Mary by the Holy Spirit. The same myth is partly present in ancient Egyptian mythology, where Isis impregnates herself with the penis of the killed god Osiris and gives birth to Horus.
 Critical Reception
The critical reception of Begotten was very positive. It holds a rating of 67% at Rotten Tomatoes . Phil Hall of Wired.Com says: "Few motion pictures have the power to jolt an audience with the fury, imagination, and artistic violence of Begotten Susan Sontag called it "one of the 10 most important films of modern times"
— Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler tells Grazia magazine what he thinks of their customers.
"Nomenus Quarterly, a limited-edition folio of original or previously unpublished images, typically costs more than your average It bag. (Each issue differs in price, but the rate, until now, was around $2,500.) So, given the current economic climate, it’s a little cheeky that Erik Madigan Heck, the publication’s founder and editor in chief, has slashed the print run to 10 copies from 50 and raised the price to $6,500. For the cost of an entry-level Birkin, the new, seventh issue includes work by the artists Anselm Kiefer and Lucian Freud, the photographers Adam Fuss and Roger Bollan, and a tribute to Ann Demeulemeester men’s wear (above) — shot, by Heck, in the style of the Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli’s studies of young priests. Bless.
To view the issue — and its impressively plentiful Web extras — free, go to nomenusquarterly.com."
1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez' central location for the subsequent novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. He has since used Macondo as a setting for several other stories.
Given the town's association with magical realism, many Latin Americans would portray the everyday illogical or absurd news and situations they or their respective countries face as more aptly belonging to Macondo. As a result, some Latin Americans occasionally refer to their home towns or countries as Macondos.
2. Macondo Prospect is the name of an offshore drilling site in the Gulf of Mexico where a disastrous blowout occurred on 20 April 2010. See Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion.
Peter Singer is a utilitarian, not a rights theorist.
Singer is an act utilitarian, or more specifically a preference utilitarian, meaning that he judges the rightness of an act by its consequences, and specifically by the extent to which it satisfies the preferences of those affected, maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain. (There are other forms of utilitarianism, such as rule utilitarianism, which judges the rightness of an act according to the usual consequences of whichever moral rule the act is an instance of.)
Singer's position is that there are no moral grounds for failing to give equal consideration to the interests of human and non-humans. His principle of equality does not require equal or identical treatment, but equal consideration of interests. A mouse and a man both have an interest in not being kicked down the street, because both would suffer if so kicked, and there are no moral or logical grounds, Singer argues, for failing to accord their interests in not being kicked equal weight. Singer quotes the English philosopher Henry Sidgwick: "The good of any one individual is of no more importance, from the point of view ... of the Universe, than the good of any other." This reflects Jeremy Bentham's position: "[E]ach to count for one, and none for more than one." Unlike the position of a man or a mouse, a stone would not suffer if kicked down the street, and therefore has no interest in avoiding it. Interests, Singer argues, are predicated on the ability to suffer, and nothing more, and once it is established that a being has interests, those interests must be given equal consideration. The issue of the extent to which animals can suffer is therefore key.
 Animal suffering
Singer writes that commentators on all sides of the debate now accept that animals suffer and feel pain, although it was not always so. Bernard Rollin, a philosopher and professor of animal sciences, writes that Descartes' influence continued to be felt until the 1980s. Veterinarians trained in the U.S. before 1989 were taught to ignore pain, he writes, and at least one major veterinary hospital in the 1960s did not stock narcotic analgesics for animal pain control. In his interactions with scientists, he was often asked to "prove" that animals are conscious, and to provide "scientifically acceptable" evidence that they could feel pain.
Singer writes that scientific publications have made it clear over the last two decades that the majority of researchers do believe animals suffer and feel pain, though it continues to be argued that their suffering may be reduced by an inability to experience the same dread of anticipation as humans, or to remember the suffering as vividly. In the most recent edition of Animal Liberation, Singer cites research indicating that animal impulses, emotions, and feelings are located in the diencephalon, pointing out that this region is well developed in mammals and birds. Singer also relies on the work of Richard Sarjeant to support his position. Sarjeant pointed out that non-human animals possess anatomical complexity of the cerebral cortex and neuroanatomy that is nearly identical to that of the human nervous system, arguing that, "[e]very particle of factual evidence supports the contention that the higher mammalian vertebrates experience pain sensations at least as acute as our own. To say that they feel less because they are lower animals is an absurdity; it can easily be shown that many of their senses are far more acute than ours."
The problem of animal suffering, and animal consciousness in general, arises primarily because animals have no language, leading scientists to argue that it is impossible to know when an animal is suffering. This situation may change as increasing numbers of chimps are taught sign language, although skeptics question whether their use of it portrays real understanding. Singer writes that, following the argument that language is needed to communicate pain, it would often be impossible to know when humans are in pain. All we can do is observe pain behavior, he writes, and make a calculated guess based on it. As Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, if someone is screaming, clutching a part of their body, moaning quietly, or apparently unable to function, especially when followed by an event that we believe would cause pain in ourselves, that is in large measure what it means to be in pain. Singer argues that there is no reason to suppose animal pain behavior would have a different meaning.
Art Director Jopsu Ramu from Musuta Ltd. (a multidisciplinary design agency based in Helsinki & Tokyo) has created together with Shun Kawakami (artless Inc) an artist and designer from Tokyo - a piece titled Urban Abstract. This digital art piece is being shown as the November break bumpers on one of the biggest commercial TV channels in Finland: TV Nelonen.
Urban Abstract -piece was born in Tokyo during 2009. It consists of 40 X five second clips or it can be viewed as a one 200 second journey.
Urban Abstract is a first piece created in collaboration with Ramu and Kawakami. The artists have plans for new pieces and are currently looking for interesting projects to work on and to continue this Helsinki - Tokyo collaboration.
The website http://www.urban-abstract.com works as a part of the piece and creates an extra dimension for the clips shown on TV.
is a set of festival activities which are celebrated in many towns and cities of Spain, mainly in the southern Valencian Community; according to popular tradition the festivals commemorate the battles, combats and fights between Moors (or Muslims) and Christians during the period known as Reconquista (from the 8th century through the 15th century).
Medieval fashion. Christians wear fur, metallic helmets, and armor, fire loud arquebuses, and ride horses. In contrast, Moors wear ancient Arab costumes, carry scimitars, and ride real camels or elephants. The festival develops among shots of gunpowder, medieval music, and fireworks, and ends with the Christians winning a simulated battle around a castle.
english info in Wikipedia
I would say guillotine!
what scares me the most in all this evil reckless mess is how they are pouring thousands of hundreds of gallons of thinners/solvents into the sea!
Like making it invisible to the human eye is actually diminishing toxicity, while doing the exact opposite...so fkn retarded and so totally unethical!
The EPA has already condemn the use of such levels of solvents and BP keeps pouring more shit into the sea...
I see hell coming!
5d, 5dmkII, Anamorphic 35mm
Beautiful motion piece, constructed as a technical exercise, but that uses as subject nature. It is impossible to ignore the power of our ecosystem cycles, its patterns and its constant rhythm. I find this piece extremely beautiful in a time where humans' efforts for profit ignore the system we belong to, the same system that gives us the gift of life.
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