From the upcoming Sigur Rós album Kveikur, released worldwide June 17/18 on XL Recordings, here’s a look at their latest visual showcasing some dark psychedelic imagery to fittingly parallel their latest audio “Brennisteinn.”
Those wanting to see them live, Sigur Rós will launch their North American tour on March 24 at Madison Square Garden March. Pre-orders for the project is available here, while the video directed by Andrew Huang.
In the 1970s, Chris Burden produced a landmark series of late-night television commercials that blurred the worlds of entertainment, advertising and conceptual art. Appearing as idiosyncratic interruptions to the station’s regular programming, Burden’s sometimes shocking, sometimes dryly humorous advertisements reveal how easily notoriety and stature can be bought, manipulated, and subverted through popular media.
Writes Burden: “During the early seventies I conceived a way to break the omnipotent stranglehold of the airwaves that broadcast television had. The solution was to simply purchase commercial advertising time and have the stations play my tapes along with their other commercials.”
In this video, Burden shares the motivations and logistical complications behind his four historically significant ads: Through the Night Softly (1973), Poem for L.A. (1975), Chris Burden Promo (1976), Full Financial Disclosure (1977).
In high school, Michael Lucid was an artsy, friendly kid who floated around from one campus clique to the next. “I was more approachable and kids felt comfortable talking to me,” he says of his time at Santa Monica’s Crossroads School, where he graduated in 1996.
Because Lucid was likeable and trustworthy, his teenage peers granted him the kind of insider access into their lives that most filmmakers only dream about capturing on film. Filmmakers like Larry Clark (Kids, Wassup Rockers), Catherine Hardwicke (Lords of Dogtown, Thirteen) and Penelope Spheeris (Decline of Western Civilization, Suburbia) all launched their careers by making films that depicted the harsh realities of American teenagers’ lives, but Lucid had an advantage over all of these filmmakers: he was himself a high schooler when he shot his gritty, painfully intimate documentary Dirty Girls, which has now become an instant cult sensation ever since it was uploaded to Youtube this month.
It was initially shot by a 17-year-old during the course of just two school days. Maybe you’ve seen the still frame of two messy-haired young girls being interviewed in a high school auditorium — an image that’s become ubiquitous after having been reblogged thousands of times by fans on Tumblr.
Lucid’s short documentary starts out with the following text: “In Spring of 1996, my senior year of high school, I documented a group of 8th grade girls who were notorious for their crass behavior and allegedly bad hygiene.…” The eighth grade girls he’s referring to are the film’s eponymous dirty girls, a clique of feminist riot grrrls led by sisters Amber and Harper, who became campus legends when they put on a punk rock show at the school’s beginning-of-year “alley party” and smeared lipstick all over their faces. Lucid remembers the performance being provocative and angry, so much so that it sparked an ongoing flurry of gossip — and the coining of the term “dirty girls” — that continued throughout the school year of ’96.
That Dirty Girls is Lucid’s biggest Internet success is ironic, considering his day job writing, performing and uploading web videos for World of Wonder, the production company behind shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and features like The Eyes of Tammy Faye and Party Monster. And, in an oddly fitting twist of fate, he’s returned to interviewing and reporting — but through his drag persona, Damiana Garcia, whom he refers to as “an intrepid lady reporter,” appearing in World of Wonder videos online.
This is a video of the Beetle Juice roller coaster Youtube user nuropsych1 built in Minecraft creative mode on an X-Box, inspired by the 1988 comedy horror film Beetlejuice.
The five minute long Beetlejuice — A Minecraft Roller Coaster video takes the viewer on a ride full of twists, turns and unexpected drops through key scenes and characters from the Tim Burton movie. There’s Beetleguese of course plus Lydia, Adam, Barbara and Otho. Even the sandworms of Saturn make an appearance through a creative use of putting blocks in motion and perspective.
The Minecraft roller coaster ride was built “off and on” for two months in the creative mode of the Xbox 360 game by Rivergrl21 and Nuropsych1.
Big Air Package is Christo’s latest installation, designed and completed entirely after his wife, Jeanne-Claude passed in 2009. It is the largest of the Package projects and considered the largest indoor sculpture in ever created with a total volume of 177,000 cubic meters (6,250,000 cubic feet) and a total weight of 5,300 kilograms (11,700 pounds).
The white inflated sculpture occupies almost the entire gas tank, which is one of the largest tank of its kind in the world as well. The Gasometer Oberhausen was originally built in the late 1920′s to store the blast furnace gas, but has been decommissioned and used as a large-scale exhibition space since 1994.
Christo, who is considered to be an environmental artist and draws attention to the land, nature and man-made objects through his installations, is now drawing attention to this historic industrial artifact. Like the gas that at one time filled the space, Big Air Package occupies the area, but this time with light and air. Visitors to the exhibit enter through an air lock and can enjoy the peace and relative silence inside the space. Two air fans create a constant pressure of 27 pascal (0.27 millibar) to keep the sculpture inflated.
Big Air Package opened to the public on March 16th and will be open through December of 2013. It is unclear at this time what will be done with the thousands of square meters of fabric at the end of the installation. Christo’s work is often recycled at the end and we can only hope this fabric has a higher purpose then as well.
Robots capable of flight in cramped and cluttered environments have many advantages over their ground-based counterparts, but most current systems suffer from the same fundamental problem: any contact with obstacles has catastrophic, mission-ending results. What if instead of avoiding collisions, a flying robot can become robust to them, and even take advantage of contact with its environment?
Meet the AirBurr, an autonomous flying robot specifically designed for missions in difficult, confined environments under total darkness. Airburr is inspired b the simple navigation strategy that insects use to follow – It follows a path and if it collides, it has an excellent ability to recover.
In this video the AirBurr navigates a corridor and a narrow doorway towards a light source using the signals from 4 simple photodiodes. This strategy is particularly adapted to following faint signals in unstructured, cluttered environments, such as gas leaks in collapsed industrial plants. The AirBurr is then programmed to explore a small room using a random direction algorithm similar to the one used by most robotic vacuum cleaners. This exploration strategy is useful in situations where other sensors cannot be used. It is demonstrated through a flight in a completely dark room where vision-based navigation isn’t possible, and can also be used in smoke-filled environments where laser scanners have trouble functioning correctly.
Ken Russell’s long-suppressed Omnibus film Dance of the Seven Veils (1970), a “comic strip” biography of “Also Sprach Zarathustra” composer Richard Strauss, has turned up on YouTube in six parts.
If Song of Summer reached for the sublime, Dance of the Seven Veils, aims straight for the ridiculous — and ridicule was Ken Russell’s intention, as the programme’s subtitle ‘A comic strip in 7 episodes on the life of Richard Strauss 1864–1949′ makes clear. Comfortably his most extreme television film, its broadcast was preceded by a warning about its violent content, though it still caused widespread outrage.
Russell’s composer biopics were usually labours of love. This was the opposite: he regarded Strauss’s music as “bombastic, sham and hollow”, and despised the composer for claiming to be apolitical while cosying up to the Nazi regime. The film depicts Strauss in a variety of grotesquely caricatured situations: attacked by nuns after adopting Nietzsche’s philosophy, he fights duels with jealous husbands, literally batters his critics into submission with his music and glorifies the women in his life and fantasies.
Later, his association with Hitler leads to a graphically-depicted willingness to turn a blind eye to Nazi excesses, responding to SS thugs carving a Star of David in an elderly Jewish man’s chest by urging his orchestra to play louder, drowning out the screams. Unexpectedly, Strauss is credited as co-writer, which was Russell’s way of indicating that every word he uttered on screen was sourced directly from real-life statements.
This faded copy with bleary sound was smuggled on VHS from the BBC archives and illicitly uploaded online as an AVI, because the Strauss estate took exception to Russell’s comic strip, which deals, among other things, with the composer’s relationship with the Nazi party in the 30s. When Russell looked back on his career in a 1990s TV documentary, the only way he could even show a clip from this film is by changing the music.
Here, before it disappears, is a link to Part 1 that should also provide you with links to the other five parts. The print is timecoded and has turned mostly pink, but mind you, it was shown in B&W during its only BBC broadcast. Don’t let these minor annoyances deter you.
Aubrey Beardsley was born on 21 August, 1872, in Brighton, England. The family, of middle and upper middle class origins, was often nearly destitute. He attended Bristol Grammar School for four years as a boarder, indulging in his talents by drawing caricatures of his teachers.
In February of 1893, Wilde’s scandalous play Salome was published in its original French version. An illustration inspired by the drama was admired by Wilde and Beardsley was commissioned to Illustrate the English edition (1894).
Not content with art alone, Beardsley expressed an intense desire to translate the French text after Wilde found the translation by his intimate, Lord Alfred Douglas, to be unsatisfactory. This assignment was the beginning of celebrity but also of an uneasy, and at times unpleasant, friendship with Wilde, which officially ended when Wilde was tried and convicted of sodomy in 1895.
Beardsley’s fame was established for all time when the first volume The Yellow Book appeared in April 1894. This famous quarterly of art and literature, for which Beardsley served as art editor and the American expatriate Henry Harland as literary editor, brought the artist’s work to a larger public.
It was Beardsley’s starling black-and-white drawings, titlepages, and covers which, combined with the writings of the so-called “decadents,” a unique format, and publisher John Lane’s remarkable marketing strategies, made the journal an overnight sensation. Although well received by much of the public, The Yellow Book was attacked by critics as indecent. So strong was the perceived link between Beardsley, Wilde, and The Yellow Book that Beardsley was dismissed in April 1895 from his post as art editor following Wilde’s arrest, even though Wilde had in fact never contributed to the magazine.
The film After Beardsley attempts to depict today’s world through Beardsley’s eyes and in his drawing style. Showing Beardsley’s better known drawings, some of which take on a different guise later in the film. Written and drawn by Chris James.
