I'm starting to knit for the I heart Kings Cross art project : http://iheartkx.wordpress.com - the knitted pieces are going to be tied to poles and trees as part of an art project in Kings Cross (Sydney) in october. I'm not really following a pattern of stitches - they said make it ~30cm wide and anything up to 3metres, the longer the better. so I'm just changing stitches and needles and colours as my mood decides. seeing how a mix of smaller (12mm) and larger (25mm) stitches go together. using 3 strands of yarn (8ply acrylic) to thicken it up. so far I like the textures. reminds me of Australian chocolates - cherry ripe, mint slice or maybe peppermint crisp. (I think I have chocolate on the brain tonight ;)
I bought some 15mm bamboo needles at lunch today. and saw some thicker yarn at lincraft. bright colours and the threads are different widths - like the silk yarn. but this is 50% wool & 50% acrylic. it's nice to knit up. maybe I should have bought a few balls of each colour though as the stripes will be narrowish.
was a great group of knitters in the park in Kings Cross today. all knitting for the I heart Kings Cross project. learnt some new stitches and spoke to lots of cool people. we'll be there every sat in september. was great that some people just walked by and sat down and joined in - including a woman on holidays from Taiwan who has a knitting group there. she was a fast knitter too! it was pretty windy towards the end - I think I'm wearing half of Kings Cross now as the wind stirred up the dirt iheartkx.wordpress.com
wow district 9 was great. it highlighted most of what's wrong with humans & on so many levels. I preferred the aliens to those humans. [1] who were the real human beings in that story. it was almost a Philip K Dick plot. [2] wikus seemed to become more human only when he became an alien. [3] I need to see it again to see if he could speak their language prior to becoming one of them. I got the feeling he couldn't. lazy humans. [4] [from twitter]
[from 23/08/2009 notebook entry]
saw District 9 today at the cinema. it's pretty gruesome in parts and was interesting that it was set in South Africa - Johannesburg. it was also interesting how they paralleled some of the human's attitudes towards the aliens - the "prawns" with the white/black apartheid struggle prevalent in South Africa. there was definately an apartheid towards the aliens. they were even living in shanty-towns / slums. I thought it was interesting that the Africans treated the aliens as badly as the whites had/have treated them in the past - like nothing was learned from it. I suppose after so many years, the ideas are in-grained into the population's mindset. there was a Nigerian gang running the black market in the slums - I wondered if this referred to Nigerian internet scams too.
the transition of the human, Wikus, into a "prawn" after exposure to the alien fluid/fuel was also interesting because at the end of the movie he looked just like the other "prawns". so I wondered if originally the aliens had had human form, and were morphed into the "prawn"-like form with hard crustacean coverings on their body in order to cope with the climate on their planet. it was mentioned that their planet had 7 moons - so I think this would cause very disruptive weather conditions. and perhaps they were closer to the sun - or another sun.
I felt sympathy towards the aliens and was hoping they'd get to go home - particularly after the Christopher & his son and friend characters were introduced, because they seemed to be more "human" that the actual humans in the film. I didn't notice if the humans could understand the aliens' language throughout the film - eg during the evictions in the slums. the aliens seemed to understand what the humans were saying, so they were the ones to attempt to learn the new language / culture. the humans just seemed to want to dominate the aliens. once Wikus became merged with the aliens he was speaking with them and seemed to pick up their language pretty quickly as time progressed. I think I need to watch the film again though to take more notice of this.
initially when the aliens were harvesting the fluid and I saw the affect it had on the humans, I thought perhaps they were trying to collect the fluid to harvest / convert humans with it to increase their own population for some reason. but then I heard how it had taken 20 years to harvest the small amount they had, and it was used for fuel to help them get the control module of the ship back to the mothership so they could go home.
the humans didn't treat the aliens well because they looked different, and they behaved different. I thought it was almost ironic that the black Africans were saying things about the aliens, that had previously been said about themselves. they hadn't learned from the past - but instead, humans had just found another species to pick on instead of picking on parts of our own species. I wondered how the relationship between whites & blacks had changed since the arrival of the aliens - I can't remember noticing this in the film so I'll have to watch it again to see if it was raised. I suppose after such a long time, the ideas were ingrained into all the people there.
I thought it was a very similar plot to a Philip K Dick book. the questions about what is human - what does it mean to be human. and the protaganist, Wikus, being an every day working man put into an unusual, unworldly situation, and seeing how he coped, or didn't cope. watching as he seemed to become more human, with more compassion at least towards the aliens, only after he'd started to morph into an alien himself. it was only then he communicated civilly with them, and listened to their concerns and tried to help them in their quest to go home. even if it was also partly because they'd said they could reverse his bodily & DNA changes and make him human once more. I think he was better off remaining as one of the aliens. he seemed like a nicer "person" as an alien. I think it begs the question - who was more human? the "humans" or the "aliens". the MCU company army guys seemed more alien - devoid of compassion, coldly killing aliens and enjoying themselves way too much.
a relaxing weekend of feeling sick :( then dvds, walks, unexpected phone call from a friend I hadn't spoken to in a while, chasing a pair of pigeons off the balcony (I think they want to lay eggs), going to the cinema to see district 9 - first time in months (since watchmen) - and finding a new alternative bookstore, reading & notebook writing.
today I bought the Celestine Prophesy dvd. I'd read the book when it came out years ago. but on the way home I had one of the synchronicities it talks about. I filmed these birds, then once I got home watched the movie and remembered the 'energy flows' it talks about and the give & take of energy/power. the video of the birds was a good example of this - I saw the energy flows between these birds, though it was a feeling, I didn't see the energy clouds around/between them. there were 2 pieces of food on the ground - I couldn't see what it was, though it looked like a couple of twisties. the magpie was guarding both - not letting the little bird have any. I was standing about 5metres away on the footpath, and zoomed in the video (which is why the quality isn't the best - the n95 video is better if you don't zoom). after I stopped filming, the magpie looked towards me and the little bird skirted around behind him and ate the smaller twistie/piece of food. lucky him! so, either it was the shift in energies. or probably the magpie saw me move as my hands moved down after I finished filming. :)
I don't worry about copyrighted music either. I figure if you're combining video beauty (even internal personal memory beauty in the videos) and sound beauty it's only creating even more beauty and can enhance the music too so it's a compliment to the artist imho. and as long as you're not making money off them I don't see the harm. I think of it as the visual mixtape of this age. I know the artist's perspective of copyright and have lots of music artist friends. but I think as long as you're respectful of it, it's all good. maybe others would not agree. as mentioned by one of the other comments, sometimes the music has such meaning to me - triggering memories & feelings in itself, that when you combine it with video/visual fragments of your own daily life it's the perfect soundtrack for the images. and sometimes even you've been reminded of the music during the day. surely that only highlights the power of the music for it to be able to trigger such feelings. how can it be wrong to want to capture them both together. of course the music is credited and links provided to the artist.
(--with spelling mistakes/typos fixed & some of the wording fixed to make it more readable + expanded ideas)
lounge singers at the delhi marriot (2006) - 12 seconds video - the tables near the singers were always empty as they were quite loud. and mostly singing flat. I would have preferred them to sing / play some of the local music. the restaurant upstairs had lovely quiet traditional indian music. but I think they're told to play the Western songs to keep the business visitors happy. all the hotels seem to have this policy - definitely the name brand Indian hotels
I've just finished my zine for the 24 hour zine thing project - we were supposed to make a 24 page zine from scratch in July in a single 24 hour period. since this was my first zine, I didn't quite fit in with the project rules - but I made the zine within 24 hours, though spread over the weekend. I typed it up on my new old Gabrielle 25 Adler typewriter - which took me ages! and gave my fingers a good workout. I went to Office Works today to do the photocopying and wasted a lot of money trying to get colour copies done - tip if you're new. do b&w copies for the test prints whilst testing the photocopier or you'll waste $$. the colour print worked on the first run but then lost the colours anyway, so I ended up doing 1 set in colour for the master copy and seven black & white copies for the actual zines. the zine is called "24 things I've made..." - not very original, but it was fairly easy to write up a list and a page on each thing. I think the zine's layout is a little plain and it's very self-indulgent in content - it's definitely "all about me"!!
download a scanned version of the zine (5.6Mb) - note the formatting is different in this scanned version to the printed copy. and the hand-made sheet of paper is not included/scanned.
also available at archive.org
- keeping the brain surviving outside of the body - experiments with animals
05:25 - total body transplant. Stephen Hawkings could possibly survive a total body transplant?
06:10 - consciousness can be transplanted. human soul? can be argued that this can be transplanted. they did experiments with monkeys - transplanted the head of one monkey onto another & it lived for 7 days before being rejected
01:10 - humanising the pig kidney/liver so it's not rejected by human body, then transplanting these into humans (pigs as donors)
01:35 metamouse - laboratory grown ear on back of a mouse. hasn't Stelarc been growing an ear on his arm? art project?
03:25 - artist - designing future human bodies. 'after all the body is an extension of fashion' -- I think the body was around before fashion...
10:00 - most people think you have to build a brain and a body will fall out of it. but when you look at nature, well over half the species on Earth have no brain to speak of at all yet manage to move around and survive very effectively.
00:00 - scientists have evolved very effective nervous systems. not brains
03:10 - history of humans is that they haven't treated other life that is similar to humans very well. even back to neanderthals when the homosapiens arrived - they didn't live in co-operation, even though they were very similar. even back to 500 years (or this year?) humans haven't treated other humans well (colonization)
won't be pleasant for the losers. -- joseph m rosen
08:30 - highlighted/coloured nerve cells - can see them working
04:45 - replacing part of the biological brain with microchip. inputs & outputs still work the same
06:45 - using these computer chip-brain replacements now for sound recognition - to recognise sounds of gunshots which make a camera zoom in on the sound - crime stopper cameras in high crime areas. member of the black community says that they are being watched whereas white community areas are not
01:30 fit onto a cd rom - 600Mb I bet that's all you need to copy a person
03:25 scientists can move a single atom from one place to another
05:50 they want to build nanobots (low number of atoms devices with computers more powerful than today) - inject them into the human body eg bloodstream to kill cancer cells, modify dna, etc
06:15 basic goal of nanotechnology is to build an assembler (auto-assembler) - a very basic device, that can build copies of itself
06:50 molecular nanotechnology is to physical reality what computer programming is to virtual reality. .. bit of an exaggeration, but gives the idea.. whereas computer programmers can program software to do what they want, molecular nanotechnology will allow us to change matter at the most fundamental level. it will allow us to build just about any kind of structure, to our exact specifications by moving individual atoms. ... this sounds like a world of magic(k) where all that we imagined becomes reality but the role of the good fairy is taken over by robots so miniscule that we cannot see them. (background images of Cinderella where pumpkin changes into a coach) and instead of saying the magic word, we program them to grant all our wishes.
>> myths, dreams & fairy tales - the human premonition of what we will one day create. or if not premonition, the imagination of what we want to create?
07:40 the other side of the fairy tale is what is called the "grey goo syndrome" - nanobots programmed for terrorist action or rapidly start reproducing themselves & a chain reaction causes planet to be reduced in 72hours into a grey goo of swarming nanobots
08:00 most scientists think that "grey goo syndrome" is very unlikely - we will have nanotechnology to control nanotechnology.
>> the "watchdog" - who's watching the watchdog??
00:00 this is not the end of history. becoming post-human creates new problems. still have same personality problems as before. you're just going to be "more" than you were before. you'll have more power. with more power comes more responsibility.
in the 1990's I used to make clocks from old broadcast tv equipment (tape heads, motors/rotors etc) and old computer hard drives (10", 5.25". 3.5", 2.5" etc) and the like. I used to give them to friends as presents. I found an old photo album with some of the photos of the finished clocks + some of the clock bits. it's a shame I wasn't a better photographer at the time! this was pre-digital camera days so I didn't know the lighting (& framing) until the film was developed. I found one box of clock bits, but not the box of clocks and other clock bits boxes - maybe I can make some more if I find the right boxes.
