Winter leaves

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Camera

So, I am back from Denmark, and since then the
weather in Gothenburg has proved really unfriendly. Snowfall is in full steam (if i may use this word) for two days. But i braved it last night and went to check out the discounts at the electronics stores in Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen. The idea was that maybe I will get myself a cheap mp3 player. But! i ended up buying a camera!

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Link: Ninjam

Realtime Music Collaboration Software - Ninjam

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Goteborg - Frederikshavn - Aalborg

Took a cool rollin tumblin ride on a Stena Line Ferry to Aalborg yesterday. Its pretty barren place... but good to be among old friends... to see those old faces again. Hope to have a nice time here.

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Looking Back: Somewhat Damaged

That was the name of the work we did for the 'Hidden Agenda' project. An oversized comic book with the story of a person who relies on his imaginary friends - the two conflicting sides of his psyche to survive. The creations of his imaginations were really parts of him, and portrayed as real persons and the main character named 'Nadie' was drawn always as an outline except for that one page where we put in a trip back to his childhood.

None of the pages had text on them, just pictures, drawn by hand (sketches and paintings), photographs, cut outs, collages etc. Every page however had a soundtrack to it which starts when one turns the page. For this to work we made a contraption over the top which sents a signal to the computer which in turn identifies the page from the signal and plays the corresponding soundtrack.

Anyway, here are some pictures of our work:

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Looking Back: Hidden Agenda Exhibition

Ok, the exams are over! done with. Now i have time and i have been able to get some of the photos of our 'Hidden Agenda', exhibition of our term projects for the Art & Technology Project Introduction course. Martin did a good job of teaching and Mats and Palle did a good job of directing the students. All the teams worked extremely hard, wracked their brains and produced the best they could.

Here are some pics from that day...

Last minute preparations...















Opening Night:

















A little something in the bathrooms too -




Dan was his usual 'Robot Cowboy' self...

























All Photos Courtesy of
Yuan Yuan

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Going back to Monuments....

Guess which monument is in trouble according to 2006 World Monuments Watch:

http://www.wmf.org/html/programs/resources/bycountry.html


Its been a while (years and years) since I have been there. Its funny even how meaningless our movements have become. Supposing I was home at this instance and went there for a visit, would I notice its decay? If I did, would I do anything about it?

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All mixed up.

SO, the hurly burly is done (the exhibition and all that leading to it) and now the new hurly burly is on... the EXAMS. yikes. catches me off guard every time, no helping it. We had a day long exam today. first lookup about the monuments the profesori put up on the board [mostly relating to the monuments made is remembrance to the atrocities against the Jews in WWII]. I got to read up on Horst Hoheisel's proposal for one that the German govt. wanted to be for the murdered jews of Europe. His proposal was to blow up the Brandenburger Tor (Pic). Of course the proposal wasn't approved (it was in fact approved after a long time of debates and thought, and two competitions), but here is what he planned:

1. Blow up the Brandenburger Tor
2. Grind its stone into dust
3. Sprinkle the remains over its former site
4. Cover the entire memorial area with granite plates.

All the english articles/excerpts I found relating to this was by a profesori by the name of James E. Young, and here is what he said about it:

"Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the construction of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with another destruction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people.

...

How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?"

I thought this was really interesting, also it sheds a light on his methods if you also look at this work of his which he did earlier: Negative Form

Then we had to write our own proposals for a monument commemorating some tragic incident of the past, and also read this epic about Gilgamesh or some account of it and write another proposal of an artwork relating to something from it. And in between all that was a short/long interview with the profesori about the readings we had to do so far. So all this was from 9 am to 7 pm, and now I am very confused. We had no idea what the exam will be like, and I expected it all to end at 5pm, whereby I would go home and sleep, and start on the next exam after that, since my oral session is at 8, it would be well to be awake till that time. But now, I am confused.

And for some reason I remember the office days where we would change Asif's desktop wallpaper to some crappy dhaliwood actress' wallpaper with exuberant colors whenever he would leave his desk. Hahhaha... sorry Asif but it was a lot of fun! hhahhah

I should study again....

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Fluxus: The "Art" in life.

if artists were on the lookout for things to portray things from life in their art decided that life just the way it is suffices... then what? isn't life good enough to be art? to be thought of and treated as art?

having done a presentation on Dick Higgins (1938 - 1998) a few days back I found out about a group of artists who had this viewpoint. Dick Higgins was a man with many talents - poetry, music, visual art... and also writing about art. There he spent a good amount of time and had his own publishing house named the "Something Else Press".

He writes about the art - life dichotomy:

“In the situation of art that is in a dialectical relationship with the ‘real world’ outside itself, the art work (as in both Dada and Fluxus, for instance) directly incorporates elements from daily living – treating the making of a cup of coffee as music, for instance. The purpose of this is not, of course, to shock or proclaim originality. If it were, the artist would surely propose to mix concrete and turds and fill the pot with that. Rather, it is to see something that many people experience in a new and aesthetic way, and thus it is very important that real water, real coffee, and a real stove (for instance) be used, not the illusions of them. In this way the overall experience of art will be enriched by one’s life, and one’s life will be enriched by art.”
[from his essay Modernism Since Postmodernism]

The group of artists were scattered over USA and Europe. And when George Maciunus and Dick Higgins started the publication for the kind of activities these like minded artists, a name was given to the collective... FLUXUS, from the word 'Flux' for change. The other artists associated with this style is John Cage, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik.

For an interesting short history of Fluxus, read Higgins' A Child's History of Fluxus

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Touch Table Roulette

Some of us have volunteered to work as testers for one company here for testing touch table roulette games they have developed. Its pretty neat and right now there are some sleepless zombies stooped over it running on adrenaline. not quite.. the machine has shown some signs of let up recently and there are guys working on it now. It was running from saturday afternoon till this morning. And the objective is to keep it running for 48 hours straight. I slept some in the middle, after like round 4 which was probably at 4 am today, and woke up for round 10 around 9 am! There werer those there who had gone all the way without sleep. Some had real fun with it. For me it was fun too, but my sleeping habbits have recently not allowed me to do anything overnight so far. Lost those undergraduate habbits right after starting on the working life. Anyway, the machine is cool and soon to hit casinos in a lot of places.

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1:41an

Thats the name of the block where the art tech programm goes on.. where the magic happens or the people sleep or party... some live some visit. Well, the last few days have probably been the busiest for most of us... and its still going strong. amidst all that the bunch of guys who set out to make a website for this planet have completed it. There is also the wiki where we put our notes up for the seminar course, and the stuff about the workshops we did, and the Hidden Agenda exhibition that is coming up.

Without further adieu.... the website:
http://www.141an.se/home/

Since the exhibition is the current focus, the default home page will lead to the exhibition's page... http://www.141an.se/

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Winter Updates.

so, we are in the middle of the winter now. From bangladesh to sweden.. the winter takes a different appearance... a different degree of cool. Before arriving here, most students i guess pack their bags with the heavy stuff... to survive the winter here. I did the same. But since coming here i have been hearing the same thing about the winter in Gothenburg. More Rain Less Snow. And so far, its been quite the 'universal truth'. We had one day of snow so far! well, that taking out of consideration the 'baby snow' (tiny white fluffy particles floated around one friday afternoon), and the wet icy snow (it was raining with little bits of ice also with it), and the ice downpour.

But frankly the one night of snowfall changed the view of the city I am used to! White white white.. all around, and with the help of the street lamps things just looked bright... and beautiful. here are some pics from that night... You'll notice that the pics from my phone are the shittier ones, compared to the ones from my friends' cameras!

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