Primal Source (video documentation) from haque d+r.

Specially commissioned by the City of Santa Monica, California, for Glow 08, Primal Source was an all-night performance/installation brought to life through the active participation of festival-goers (estimated at approx. 200,000 over the course of the night).

Located on the beach near the Pier in an area that had been specifically landscaped over the course of several days, and making use of a large-scale outdoor waterscreen/mist projection system, the mirage-like installation glowed with colours and ebullient patterns created in response to the competing and collaborative voices, music and screams of people nearby.

Responding to sounds emanating from the crowd, the system’s modes changed every few minutes depending on how active the crowd participation was (more quickly when there was more noise). Each mode responded in a slightly different way to the individual voices and sounds picked up by 8 microphones distributed towards the front.

Some modes created “creatures” whose colour, shape and movement followed the frequency and amplitude dynamics of individual syllables and sentences picked up; other modes responded to wider collective phenomena, e.g. distorting a grid in response to the crowd volume, or creating a rush of wind through a wheat-field landscape.

Going out in a trendy club and feel good because you contribute to positive environmental processes, such as generating electricity by dancing and upcycling of waste into decoration. This idea forms the basis for the Sustainable Dance Club. The Sustainable Dance Club is a creative concept of Rotterdam based organizations Enviu – innovators in sustainability and Döll – Atelier voor Bouwkunst.

The Sustainable Dance Club incorporates innovations in the field of sustainable design and applied techniques with social responsibilities in attractive club surroundings. No more counter culturists and moralizing attitudes but sustainability as a positive, young and profitable alternative for a broad target group. The Sustainable Dance Floor will generate electricity from the movements of dancing people. This human powered floor is now being developed in cooperation with the Technical University in Delft and will most likely be the projects’ piece de résistance.

Site:

This year, World Water Day coincides with the International Year of Sanitation, challenging us to spur action on a crisis affecting more than one out of three people on the planet.

Every 20 seconds, a child dies as a result of the abysmal sanitation conditions endured by some 2.6 billion people globally. That adds up to an unconscionable 1.5 million young lives cut short by a cause we know well how to prevent.

Poor sanitation combines with a lack of safe drinking water and inadequate hygiene to contribute to the terrible global death toll. Those who survive face diminished chances of living a healthy and productive existence. Children, especially girls, are forced to stay out of school, while hygiene-related diseases keep adults from engaging in productive work.

Leaders who adopted the Millennium Development Goals in 2000 envisioned halving the proportion of people living without access to basic sanitation by the year 2015 — but we are nowhere near on pace to achieve that Goal. Experts predict that, by 2015, 2.1 billion people will still lack basic sanitation. At the present rate, sub-Saharan Africa will not reach the target until 2076.

While there have been advances, progress is hampered by population growth, widespread poverty, insufficient investments to address the problem and the biggest culprit: a lack of political will.

With the right resolve, there are many steps that members of the international community can take. World Water Day offers a chance to spotlight these issues, but this year, let us go beyond raising awareness — let us press for action to make a measurable difference in people’s lives.

Curated by the celebrated artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, the Derek Jarman exhibition presents a selection of work by the leading British film-maker of his generation; it highlights Jarman’s work in film and painting, including his pioneering presentation of the moving image within the gallery context.

Jarman was arguably the single most crucial figure of British independent cinema in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. He struggled for Gay Liberation and with the impact of AIDS and lived as a participant observer, recording all that passed before him, from punk to Thatcher, Hampstead Heath to film premiere.

This exhibition is a timely reappraisal of Jarman’s work, conceived as an immersive environment by Julien, featuring rarely seen films from the Derek Jarman Super-8 archive, an installation of his film Blue, 1993, as well as a selection of his paintings.

Julien has also created a series of photographic lightboxes documenting Jarman’s cottage and garden in Dungeness.
The exhibition will mark the premiere of Julien’s new film about Jarman, Derek, the centre of which is a day-long interview Jarman recorded.

Derek Jarman Curated by Isaac Julien
23 February – 13 April 2008

Performance For Blue
Friday 14 March
7 pm
by Simon Fisher Turner
with Black Sifichi

For Blue is a new reworking of the film’s music and sound with narration by poet and musician Black Sifichi presented live in the Serpentine Gallery.

http://www.serpentinegallery.org/

15,000 women marched through New York City in 1908 demanding shorter hours, better pay and voting rights.

http://www.internationalwomensday.com/about.asp

100 years on, the pertinence of this event is honored through IWD’s 2008 global theme ‘Shaping Progress’.

Around the world, websites link to this site. Add your own IWD events and news.
There are currently 612 IWD 2008 events listed from 52 different countries

Overheated Symphony is all-women directed interactive mobile phone film. This cinematic symphony of women’s voices from around the world is part of the Birds Eye View film festival taking place in London next month which showcases the work of female film-makers.

Women across the world are being asked to make a short film -a “quick flick” – between 40 seconds and four minutes long on a mobile phone and then send it via the internet to a London-based film director who will edit all together.

“If it’s hot, we’d like to see it,” the project’s Web site declares: “Ladies, wherever you are, whoever you are, we want you to join in.”

The inspiration for “Overheated Symphony” was the 1927 film by German filmmaker Walter Ruttmann called “Berlin – Symphony of a Great City,” which used a montage of still pictures from many sources to document city life.

Rachel Millward, director of the Birds Eye View festival, which is now in its third year, says via Reuters the film is as much about new technology as it is about women and heat … Making a film from all these female voices around the world is quite a beautiful thing, but also it’s about shooting down the idea that women are not up to date with technology.”

Contributors are being asked on www.birds-eye-view.co.uk to upload their cinematic efforts onto the festival’s own YouTube channel to be edited.

LIVE EDIT

On Sunday March 9th, between 12noon and 5pm, celebrated artist and film director Sarah Turner (see also her feature screening of Ecology at the festival) and sound designer Annabelle Pangborn will use the structure of a symphony to edit your work. Films submitted by women from around the world will be sampled into one fiery flick, LIVE in London, in the ICA bar, and later published on this website and on youtube.

DEADLINE

Films must be submitted by Sunday 2nd March.

UPLOAD

Once you’ve completed your phone-film please follow instructions (here) and upload it to www.youtube.com with the tag: OVERHEATED SYMPHONY, being sure to put your name and contact information in the descriptions box so that we can credit you and keep in touch.

L’AGE D’OR (The Golden Age)

France, 1930

Director: Luis Buñuel

Production: Black and white, 35mm; running time: 60 minutes (some French sources list 80 minutes). Released 28 November 1930, Paris. Filmed in Studios Billancourt-Epinay, France. Producer: Charles Vicomte de Noailles; screenplay: Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí; photography: Albert Duverger; editor: Luis Buñuel; production designer: Pierre Schilzneck; original music: Van Parys, montage of extracts from Mozart, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Debussy, and Wagner.
Cast: Lya Lys (The Woman); Gaston Modot (The Man); Max Ernst (Bandit Chief); Pierre Prévert (Péman, a Bandit); Caridad de Labaerdesque; Madame Noizet; Liorens Artigas; Duchange Ibanez; Lionel Salem; Pancho Cossio; Valentine Hugo; Marie Berthe Ernst; Jacques B. Brunius; Simone Cottance; Paul Eluard; Manuel Angeles Ortiz; Juan Esplandio; Pedro Flores; Juan Castañe; Joaquin Roa; Pruna; Xaume de Maravilles.

The Retrospective of the 58th Berlin International Film Festival will honor Spanish director Luis Buñuel, who died in 1983, by presenting a comprehensive program of his works.

Luis Buñuel Retrospective will commence and conclude at the Volksbühne with two special presentations focusing on Buñuel’s famous directorial debut: his silent film Un chien andalou (France 1929) is to be screened four times, and each time it will be accompanied live by different works of contemporary music.

On February 9, 2008, Un chien andalou will be shown alongside another masterpiece of surrealistic film, Jean Epstein’s La chute de la maison Usher (The Fall of the House of Usher, France 1928), on which Buñuel worked as assistant director. Both films will be presented in restored versions and accompanied live by Dutch musicians Maud Nelissen, Merima Kljuco and Frido ter Beek. With their improvisation, they will provide the proper acoustic environment for the intense and poetic cinematic worlds of Buñuel and Epstein.

On February 17, 2008, the Berlinale Kinotag, the 21 musicians of the Spanish Grup Instrumental BCN216 will approach Buñuel’s debut film in three successive screenings of Un chien andalou at the Volksbühne. Under the programmatic title 3 chiens, each composition has its own conception: Clonic Mutations by Catalan musician Sergio López, an acoustic “demystification” of Buñuel’s classic work, full of black humor; Szénario by Mauricio Kagel, a composition for the film from 1981/82; and Las siete vidas de un gato by Martín Matalón, a free association of images and sounds.

In addition to Buñuel’s 32 directorial works, the Retrospective will present a program of eight films to introduce his contributions as assistant director, producer and screenwriter. Buñuel worked for the first time as assistant director on Epstein’s film Mauprat (France 1926), in which he also played two small roles – a monk and a guardsman.

After the Berlinale, the programme will go on tour: partners in this cooperation are the Österreichisches Filmmmuseum Wien, which will present the program immediately following the Festival; and the Filmmuseum München, which will begin screening the films in March 2008.
From February 7 onwards, 3sat will augment the Retrospective with the film series “Der Zauber des Surrealen. Luis Buñuel und die Folgen”.

Payment for recorded music has become voluntary, and it will become ever more so as time goes on.

Music is an essential aspect of our human existence, virtually a human right in that when we see people deprived of music, oppression is usually not far removed.

Traditionally accessed via concerts and performances, radio, jukebox, and hard carriers bearing recordings, music has historically been relatively easy to control even when the means of reproduction have challenged the existing music business. Player pianos, electricity, radio and the changes in physical sound carriers have all forced radical changes, but essential music business structures have managed to adjust after the adoption of new business models and the passage of some time.

The digital technologies that became ubiquitous in the early 21st century however, have made the recorded music industry descend into panic.

The digital revolution has fundamentally transformed all the processes of the traditional recorded music value chain. These technologies have made recording easier and cheaper, and made the distribution and manufacture of those recordings cost almost nothing. Promotion and marketing has morphed as well, creating the possibility that we have entered a business environment dominated by a mass of international niche markets, rather than a world of national mass markets (though the mass market will probably survive, but as a smaller proportion of the total market).

Radio, film, video and TV are all also going into flux, along with the newspaper/magazine industry, advertising, and all the other industries which have been based on the monopoly rent derived from copyright and intellectual property laws.

Maybe the most interesting question is: what remains the same?

Clearly the two essentials for a music market remain the same, the creators and the audience (though they are starting to blend into each other with the rise of user generated content). What certainly has changed is the way that recorded music gets from the creator to the audience, and how it is paid for. This fundamental change is affecting the whole structure of the traditional value chain, and the consequent distribution of revenue between all the various parties who make up the industry.

Music-related businesses need to actively pursue new opportunities for growing both their own businesses and those of the new players in the modern global economy.

The fundamental nature of the new technology – the replication of digital files cheaply and easily – cannot be controlled in the same ways as the traditional music business was controlled. Trying to control these activities will have no other effect than to thwart creativity, entrepreneurialism and cultural diversity, and worst of all delay the development of new business models that work with the technology rather than against it.

The music industry of today can, perhaps, best be described as a three-dimensional chess game where multiple strategies are simultaneously unfolding between creators, consumers, investors in music (record labels, publishers, etc), residential and wholesale broadband companies, mobile phone networks and a variety of other entities that populate the supply and distribution chains of the music business.

All of these old and new groups are trying to cope with licensing regimes and customs that are totally unfit for the new reality. The arcane and complex rights issues on which the whole industry has built itself make no sense to the new players. The historical antipathy and baggage that all the sectors carry around with them, combined with their desire to protect their existing businesses, has had the affect of completely frustrating anyone in the new digital distribution business trying to build a new 21st century business legally.

How can we rebuild the supply chain of the music industry?

A solution based on actual consumer behaviour is needed, one that allows access to music in a way that addresses how people engage with music today.
A seemingly reasonable solution looks to be a system where each customer with a broadband subscription, whether at home or via their mobile phone, would pay a small monthly fee to compensate creators and rights-holders for any unauthorised use of music that might occur via their subscription. This Access to Music Charge could be an indemnity, for networks and customers, against being sued for the unauthorised accessing of copyright protected music.

Excerpts from http://midemnetblog.typepad.com/midemnet_blog/2008/01/peter-jenner-th.html