Enter Zen from there

John Cage about silence
July 4th, 2011

A Zen Master was walking in silence with one of his disciples along a mountain trail. The disciple, a young monk, had been thinking a lot about the state of Zen, and wondering just how to achieve this state of being. After hiking through the mountains for some time, the two stopped for a break and rested in silence along side a large boulder. The disciple broke the silence and asked, "Master, how do I enter Zen?" The Master remained silent. After several minutes, the disciple began to feel uncomfortable, wondering if his Master would ever reveal the secret. Just as he was about to ask another question, the Zen Master spoke. "Do you hear the sound of the mountain stream?"

The disciple has not been aware of any mountain stream. He had been too busy thinking about Zen and how to achieve such a state. Now, as he began to listen for the sound, his noisy thoughts subsided. At first he heard nothing. Then, his thinking gave way to a heightened alertness, and suddenly he did hear the hardly perceptible murmur of a small stream in the far distance.

"Yes, I can hear it now," he said.

The Master raised his finger, and with a sage-like look in his eyes that was both fierce and gentle, he said, "Enter Zen from there."

The disciple was stunned. It was his first satori – a flash of enlightenment. He knew what Zen was without knowing what it was that he knew!

They continued on their journey in silence. The disciple was amazed as the aliveness of the world around him. He experienced everything for the first time. Gradually, however, he started thinking again. The alert stillness became covered up again by mental noise, and before long he had another question. "Master," he said, "I have been thinking. What would you have said if I hadn’t been able to hear the mountain stream?" The Master stopped, looked at him, raised his finger and said, "Enter Zen from there."

All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

by Adam Curtis

June 29th, 2011

 

Via Wikipedia: "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace is a three part BBC documentary series by filmmaker Adam Curtis, well known for other documentaries including The Trap and The Power of Nightmares. It claims that computers have failed to liberate us and instead have distorted and simplified our view of the world around us."

 

Via Top Documentary Films: "1. Love and Power. This is the story of the dream that rose up in the 1990s that computers could create a new kind of stable world. They would bring about a new kind global capitalism free of all risk and without the boom and bust of the past. They would also abolish political power and create a new kind of democracy through the Internet where millions of individuals would be connected as nodes in cybernetic systems – without hierarchy.

 

2. The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts. This is the story of how our modern scientific idea of nature, the self-regulating ecosystem, is actually a machine fantasy. It has little to do with the real complexity of nature. It is based on cybernetic ideas that were projected on to nature in the 1950s by ambitious scientists. A static machine theory of order that sees humans, and everything else on the planet, as components – cogs – in a system.

 

3. The Monkey in the Machine and the Machine in the Monkey. This episode looks at why we humans find this machine vision so beguiling. The film argues it is because all political dreams of changing the world for the better seem to have failed – so we have retreated into machine-fantasies that say we have no control over our actions because they excuse our failure."

 

Thanks to Sascha Geddert!

Routes Not Roots

by Terre Thaemlitz

June 27th, 2011

 

Via Resident Advisor: "But that's what Routes Not Roots is all about: Thaemlitz makes his audience feel things, channeling every bit of pain, deprivation and release that led to house music's birth into what sounds like a rebirth, an idea he would go on to focus and perfect with Midtown 120 Blues. Even if it's a little meandering at times, imperfections or not, Routes Not Roots is about one of the most unique and affecting house albums you'll ever hear."

 

Am a huge fan of Terre Thaemlitz aka DJ Sprinkles. His mission can not be appreciated enough in this newborn century, which is so concerned with identity and self.

 

Thanks to Marcus Schmickler!

Respect

Bazon Brock, 75 today

June 2nd, 2011

 

From e-flux: "Bazon Brock, born in 1936, studied German philology, philosophy, art history, and political sciences in Hamburg, Frankfurt, and Zurich. During his university years, he also studied to become a dramaturge at the Landestheater Darmstadt. From 1969 on, he initiated first happenings together with Joseph Beuys, Nam June Paik, Hundertwasser, and Alan Kaprow. He held a professorship for non-normative aesthetics at the College of Fine Arts in Hamburg from 1965 to 1978. In 1978, Brock was appointed professor for the theory of design at the College of Applied Arts in Vienna where he taught until 1981. From 1981 to 2000, he held a professorship for aesthetics and cultural education at Wuppertal University. He has organized visitor schools for the documenta in Kassel since 1968. Bazon Brock regards himself as an executive engine propagating his aesthetics of reception in the context of an unusual practice and theory and strives to reintegrate culture into the material process of life in a radical change. A generalist operating in many different media, Bazon Brock has published numerous books, papers, manifestoes, projects for radio and film and presented himself in the USA, Japan, and Europe with about 1600 action teachings, audio-visual performances, and happenings. Aesthetics as Communication. Biography of a Generalist (1977) is regarded as his main work. The focus of his present work is on neuronic aesthetics and imaging sciences. Brock is a member of Forscher-Familie bildende Wissenschaften, an association primarily concerned with cultural genetics and the development of concepts for the civilization of cultures."

 

Bazon Brock supervised my diploma thesis and dissertation. Still a huge influence on various levels.

Much appreciation and respect plus happy birthday, professor!

Meet Edward Tufte

The graphics guru to the power elite who is revolutionizing how we see data

May 18th, 2011

 

Via Washington Monthly: "Edward Tufte is a philosopher king who reigns over his field largely because he invented it. For years, graphic designers were regarded as decorators, whose primary job was to dress up facts with pretty pictures. Tufte introduced a reverence for math and science to the discipline and, in turn, codified the rules that would create a new one, which has come to be called, alternatively, information design or analytical design. His is often the authoritative word on what makes a good chart or graph, and over the years his influence has changed the way places like the Wall Street Journal and NASA display data. (…)

 

If Tufte’s first book was a critique, his second was a manifesto. Envisioning Information, published in 1990, implored readers to think of information design as a discipline that encompassed far more than the charts, tables, and other purely quantitative forms that had traditionally dominated the field. Graphics aren’t just useful for displaying numbers, in other words, but for clarifying just about anything one person is trying to tell someone else. The book opens with a print of a visitor’s guide to the Ise shrine in Japan and ends around 120 pages later with Galileo Galilei’s drawing of the rings of Saturn from 1613. (…)

 

As Tufte explains it, basic human cognitive questions are universal, which means that design questions should be universal too. 'I purposely don’t write books with names like How to Design a Web Site or How to Make a Presentation,' he told me.

 

This attitude puts him in opposition, at least in his own mind, to much of the contemporary design world. As Tufte sees it, graphic design has become a tragic field, a rich and storied craft knowledge that has been taken out of the realm of nonfiction, as he calls it, and into that of fiction, or marketing and propaganda. He told me several times of his contempt for commercial art, the graphic design that is 'part of a fashion and a style and will be different someday.' Most designers, he said, want to do something new each time. 'But I’m interested in the solved problem,' he said. 'I’m interested in high art and real science.' (…)

 

'That’s the very reason I’m here!' he told me, laughing. 'To fight against decoration replacing precious substance.'"

 

On another note, also check out the visualcomplexity site.

Too many birds

by‪ Bill Callahan‬

May 12th, 2011

 

One last black bird without a place to land

One last black bird without a place to be

Turns around in hopes to find the place it last knew rest

Oh black bird, over black rain burn

This is not where you last knew rest

You fly all night to sleep on stone

The heartless rest that in the morn, we'll be gone

You fly all night to sleep on stone, to return to the tree with too many birds

 

Here is a rare interview, but go see him live.

Cooperate with reality

That which is in the way is the way.

April 30th, 2011

 

Eckhart Tolle talk @ Omega Institute in 2003.

A bit repetitive, but worth your time. Wonderful teaching tales and very funny.

Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton vs. Marx Reloaded

Double Feature

April 19th, 2010

 

Via Quantum Leap: "There is a striking contrast between the extremely formal structure of giant Vuitton and Jacobs's extremely laidback attitude. Hired in 1998, confident and media-wary, he has invented Vuitton's ready-to-wear line, and turned over the world of luxury with limited series of handbags designed by contemporary artists. Marc Jacobs stands at the center of this globalized organization. He is recognized as one of the most potent purveyors of taste and trendsetting. Yet, Marc Jacobs neither sketches nor sews… He is no sewing hand, he is an eye of fashion.

No camera has ever been allowed to film Vuitton's and Jacob’s creation process yet the film unravels an economic and artistic system in a lively manner, maintaining the accuracy of the facts and the glamour, with maximum pleasure for the viewer.

The narrative is not only the classical suspense that builds up before a collection, it is also a demonstration of a new way to make fashion, a very modern mix of chaos and glamour."

 

Via Medea Film: "Marx Reloaded is a cultural documentary that uses some of the central ideas of 19th century German socialist and philosopher Karl Marx to try to make sense of the global financial crisis of 2008-09. This crisis prompted the US government to spend more than 1 trillion dollars in order to rescue its banking system from financial meltdown. But can the largest financial losses in history really be put down to the natural risks and uncertainties of the free market? Or is there another explanation as to why the crisis happened and what its implications are for the future of our society, our economy – for our whole way of life?

In the early months of 2008 a huge event began to rock the global financial system to its foundations. Billions of dollars were wiped off share prices and commercial banks throughout the world began to collapse like a pack of cards. As the global economy entered the deepest recession for 70 years the message from the mainstream media was simple: this was an anomaly, an isolated financial blip as unpredictable as a tsunami or lightening strike. Although devastating for the millions of ordinary people around the world whose homes were lost and whose jobs and savings disappeared into thin air, the crisis itself was simply one of those extraordinary things: a cataclysm that escapes all rational thinking.

But what were the real origins of this crisis? And what are its ongoing implications for the future prosperity of us all?"

 

Thanks to Georg Brüx!

Access All Areas

Taryn Simon, photographer

April 17th, 2011

 

Via Frieze Magazine: "While her photographs are so frank and tightly composed that there is little room for abstraction or interpretation, the density of information in the texts that accompany them opens each one up again, like unlocking a Pandora’s box. An image of a handgun frame being poured from molten metal allows for a caption concerning handgun statistics in the USA, while the caption beside an image of four apprehended Mexicans at the US/Mexican border provides data about the number of times each of the four men had attempted to cross illegally. But Simon skirts a definitive position or agenda. The texts maintain a consistently objective voice, like that of an instruction manual, offering details almost ad absurdum. Her command of arcane statistics and terminology such as Exotic Newcastle Disease or Cryostasis adds to the intrigue of an image rather than explaining it away. She hasn’t just photographed these sites, she has become an expert on each one, and we trust her expertise implicitly: what we see and what we read make for a complete, authoritative package. Without the captions, we wouldn’t know the difference between a controlled avalanche blast and the blast of nuclear weapons testing."

 

Via Wikipedia: "Taryn Simon (born 1975) is an American fine art photographer. She is a graduate of Brown University and a Guggenheim Fellow. She was born in New York. (…)

Her series The Innocents documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates the role of photography in that process. Her series An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar documents a diverse range of subjects within the United States that are largely unknown to its citizens. Her most recent body of work Contraband includes 1075 photographs of items detained or seized from passengers and express mail entering the U.S. from abroad. Simon is also known for her photographs documenting international regions in turmoil."

 

Taryn Simon's TED talk.

The Joy of Not Being Sold Anything

Banksy

March 23rd, 2011