·~{dRNn}~·

Hola, el último post del 2008 se lo quiero dedicar a Berlín.

Tres: agua aire y tierra.
Tres lugares, que me recuerdan tres mitos: dios, el estado y los medios. Cada uno de estos sitios, cubierto por un cielo azul de otoño, inspiró unas cortas palabras que fragmenté para acompañar a su vez cada foto. Uno tras otro los textos y las fotos se superimponen en interminables imágenes de poder y de control que también son diferentes formas de escape. Mas que cualquier otra cosa me recordaron las estéticas del agua, la tierra y el aire, junto con sus contrastes en la ciudad donde todos los ángeles caen.

Odiseo, orden, ojo.
El primero es Poseidon, supremo soberano de las aguas, su imponente imagen sobre ostras domina la naturaleza. Su mito es bien conocido, decidió el destino de Odiseo de Itaca e inspiró su historia épica. El segundo es una estructura que contrasta con el dios: el estado. La organización social ideada para organizar la existencia y poner en regla la vida de las personas. La tercer es el emisor de imágenes, la tecnología del siglo XX trajo una organización industrial sin precedentes que lleno nuestras retinas con símbolos y mitos de consumo de forma uniforme. De los tres el medio-mito paradojicamente es la superficie omnipresente y brillante que domina los cielos de Berlín, como lo hace en cualquier otra ciudad del mundo (civilizado).

Un feliz año y próspero 2009.

En cada foto están las palabras extras.

HI, a post just right before X-mas, Chris Marker La Jetée (1962).

Posted thinking of my good friends Javier and Hugo and our unforgettable times together.

Merry Xmas to all of you for kindly stopping here to read.

Update 26 May 2015:
This website is dedicated to Maker’s work https://www.artsy.net/artist/chris-marker It is worth looking at it.

HI, in the first chapter of my thesis I wanted to do a special mention to Blahbalicious (1997) by Avatar & Indigo, however right now is somehow not fixing in the text. So I just decided to use this short words here.

This movie was not only of the most awarded of Quake movies but also took skinning and parodying to an upper level. Its directors Avatar & Indigo used in Blabalicious a unique game-character specially designed for this movie (the fat guy). They identified themselves as puppeteers rather than film makers. It is easier to recognise in machinima the techniques and well established conventions of film grammar like camera angles, camera positions and camera movements; particularly because of its output as movies that are shot inside a 3D game engine. However, it is more foggy to identify that in machinima there is no actors, and that what occurs in machinima is rather an extended performance of puppets, a sort of supermarionation [Kelland 2005, p.76].

A machinima maker utilises the game characters or avatars as marionettes. The game models are dressed, made up and their movements controlled externally by the player. Strings are replaced either by keystrokes or scripts and voices are synchronised externally in the same manner is done puppet theatre. This feature permitted Avatar & Indigo a high degree of parody, irreverence and caricaturisation, an aesthetic rarely seen in mainstream animation nowadays.

Here the movie.

In 1994 Lapham derived the following pairs from McLuhan’s Understanding Media (Link broken, new link: here – update: 03.07.2009)

As all comparisons do, they seek out to separate and differentiate aiming at better comprehension—especially when put on a table; its logic is more similar to a well rooted tree-like structure rather than to an interconnected mesh of elements in perpetual change.

Hola, otro de los infaltables sitios que visite en Berlin fue el monumento al holocausto judío del arquitecto Peter Eisenman.

Eisenman también marco una influencia importante durante mis estudios de diseño industrial, durante aquellos años me dedique a buscar fuentes teóricas y estéticas por fuera de lo que usualmente se tiene como cuerpo del conocimiento en diseño industrial. Donde usualmente los discursos del objeto derivan hacia la mercadotecnia, la estetización de la forma, publicidad y a los “usuarios” (mercancías que usan mejor); una dimensión el diseño muy parecida al vació discurso televisivo.

Si algo me queda de Eisenman es el fin, la idea de romper con lo clásico, de terminar con el inicio y el fin. Que es otra forma de decir con los valores de representación y de la razón. De deconstruir la forma, la forma de generar forma, la razón que genera la forma y el objetivo de generar forma. De criticar la imposición y dominio de la perspectiva como ente regulador del discurso formal de un objeto. Muchos de sus planteamientos finalmente me alejaron del mundo de diseño industrial y me sumergieron en el de los objetos, en particular de los objetos digitales. Su texto me introdujo al Baudrillard de la sucesión de replicas y simulacros, muy diferente del de los objetos. Finalmente Eisenman me llevo a la forma digital, a la inmutabilidad de bit y a la velocidad del electrón. Posiblemente a ver la estructura y configuración de la superficie y no a los siempre brillantes contenidos.

Finalmente una fotos de su obra en Berlin.

Hola,
mi corto viaje a Berlin me permitió visitar uno de los edificios que con atención estudié durante mis últimos años de diseño industrial, la ampliación del museo judío en Berlin. Una construcción de Daniel Libeskind. Aquí un enlace a la página del proyecto.

Aquí abajo una fotos (en cada una, unas breves palabras). Muchas gracias C.

HI,
recently for n-time I watched again (yeah I know) Blade Runner. I cannot stop finding meanings and inspirations, being awed and getting scared by this film. A couple of sequences made me think again about the nature of the images and its artificiality. Images, in Blade Runner attested both authenticity and proof. In this fictional world there is concern about what is authentic and the humanity of artificial beings is under question. The replicants are perfect simulations of living creatures, they simulate everything at the more finest details, but as simulations they are meant to be something they are not, to possesses something they were denied to have. However, paradoxically they want desperately to be.

The Voight-kampf test.

[…]you are talking about memories

Images, memories, self-imposed references of a source. The production, circulation and consumption of images is a kind of paranoia. Just by looking at my hard drive I came to discover the amazing amount of pictures, images, memories I’ve stored. Some of them are so far away in the time and the space they simulate, that they have become something totally different from my memories, they have life by themselves. Even though I know I’m doomed to continue producing and consuming images. I have to recognised that after a while they are any longer about me and my selfish attempts to save imperceptible moments to live my past again. They replicate themselves and threat me.

A world constructed of images is the final triumph of a chain of simulations to separate ourselves of the alien nature surrounding us. The more clean, immaculate, pure the images the better, this is very well known by Roy Batty, his (its) entire world is an outside-imposed image. Why do we identify much more easier logos, trademarks, people’s images than trees, flowers or mountains? Why do we want to frame everything? Why do we continue believing about the actuality, reality, and neutrality of images? Images are any longer about reality, the world is not the images. Why do we, with anxiety, follow the beauty impose by the generators of images? The meaning-machines are doing a great job, ruling the meanings. We are not away from the images, we are trapped in the images, they one of the new gods. Even worst, as in a Huxleyan nightmare we are happily filling in our world with millions of images every millisecond, all the same, all with an endless replicated selfish meaning(less). The person of the year is you! screamed a big machine, but the picture was empty, nothing in there just a mirror and we looking narcissistically at ourselves, this is our brave world, just a mirror we are too afraid to look beyond it. All these framed moments, are dying like flickrs under a rain of images…

[…] it’s time to die.

[…]you won live, but than again, who does?

We wanted to give you a shave like no other you ever had. We said, It’s about time a man’s face got a little loving. We said, With Ubik’s self-winding Swiss chromium never-ending blade, the days of scrape-scrape are over. So try Ubik. And be loved. Warning: use only as directed. And with caution.

HI, the sentence opening this post correspond to one of the most strange, delirious and provocative novels I ever read: UBIK by Philip K. Dick. It is enough to say that I was severed influence by this author during my university years.

Regression and restoration
UBIK (lat: ubique) makes us to think about the nature of reality and how we perceive it, a recursive theme in Dick’s work. Besides aspects related to limits between live and death (half-life); in UBIK Dick explores one interesting aspect: the obsession with consumerism and the influence of technology and advertisement in this game. Coloured with control mind exerted by psychics who influence our desire for a certain product.

In UBIK there is a group of people with psychic powers which suffered an attack while working for Rucinter’s organisation. As a consequence every consumable seems to rotten faster and reality to suffer a regressive state, the only wait to scape or delay this process: a magic all-mighty and ubiquitous product: UBIK. It has reminded me briefly a series of post my friend Cesar has dedicated to talk about publicity and design and the forces in both practices towards making something desirable and the standardisation of consumption. Dick used a SF metaphor to explore the smoke-walls of our society and in doing so UBIK appears as a complex and delirious book but on the other hand Dick points to the deeply rooted believe that consumption is a magic wand to solve all matters and consequently the ones with power over that image are the ones that rule. Something my good friend Cesar is overlooking.

If you have not read that book do not worry soon the factory-of-dreams is going to produce a film about UBIK.

While researching for concepts about animation for my thesis work I found this a great old animation referred in The technique of film animation by John Halas and Roger Manvell. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

More Info about Tuslava here, and a short review here:

With the screen split asymmetrically, one part in positive, the other negative, the film documents the evolution of simple celled organic forms into chains of cells then more complex images from tribal cultures and contemporary modernist concepts. The images react, interpenetrates, perhaps attack, absorb and separate, until a final symbiosis (or redemption?) is achieved. Written by Stewart Naunton {snaunton@online.ru}

HI,
Starflyer a short clip I did with some other fellows is being shown, this time in the Freimarkt Bremen web-site. There, under Freimarkt Videos is the link to Starflyer and to Our youth another clip done last winter term. In the picture you can see where to click.

For more information about starflyer and the youtube version please visit here.

Many thanks for any comment!

P.D. Freimarkt web-site has been updated from now on the videos are available here