"My Favorite Artistic Advice" Tales Of Mere Existence
via youtube.com
Based on a letter by the artist Sol LeWitt, written to the artist Eva Hesse.
I don't have a LIFE, I create one... Images in REAL-TIME
http://tiil.posterous.com
http://stiil.posterous.com
http://cccc.posterous.com
http://tiil.us
http://www.scoop.it/t/images-in-context/
Based on a letter by the artist Sol LeWitt, written to the artist Eva Hesse.
Helvetica is a feature-length independent film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture. It looks at the proliferation of one typeface (which recently celebrated its 50th birthday in 2007) as part of a larger conversation about the way type affects our lives. Helvetica has been shown at over 200 film festivals, museums, design conferences, and cinemas worldwide.
In this new RSAnimate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public events programme. To view the full lecture, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbUHxC4wiWk
The protest against inequality and corporate control of the government is spreading to 70 cities in the U.S. A list of the occupations can be found at http://www.occupytogether.org/.
The Guardian reports Occupy Boston shows great promise in a story titled, "Occupy Boston: smart, savvy, and aiming to emulate Wall Street protests." Writes Paul Harris,
Anna is the model citizen. The 31-year-old self-described professional volunteer spends Mondays running a free bike workshop, Wednesdays counselling others in the community, and in her spare time is helping to build a community garden in Camberwell, South London.
For her it's about taking responsibility for where she lives. "If I didn't believe that what I spent most of my time doing made people's lives more pleasant, I'd be pretty lost. I'm hoping that I make life easier for others."
Among her projects: Free computing workshops, a shop set up to help young mothers who cannot afford their kids' back-to-school clothes, free skill-share workshops.
People like Anna are helping to make David Cameron's Big Society "vision" a reality. From free judo lessons to building adventure playgrounds or residents uniting to protect their libraries from the threat of closure, across London communities are uniting to help one another.
Just one thing… all these programmes are run by anarchist groups.
In a speech in February 2011 about the Big Society, David Cameron described the Big Society in a nutshell: "What this is all about is giving people more power and control to improve their lives and their communities."
But when he set out his vision he probably didn't have anarchists in mind. Dr Jo Haynes, a sociologist from Bristol University says the comparison is telling. "It's interesting that theoretically, a smaller state - or no state - chimes with anarchist principles as well, but the power taken by the people through anarchist community activity and political mobilisation would be at odds with the kind of 'soft power' envisaged within David Cameron's Big Society idea".
Jesse Norman disagrees. The Conservative MP, who has written a book on the Big Society, says while anarchists would be "absolutely appalled" to be considered at the vanguard of an idea which originated from the Conservative party, the two are are not so dissimilar.
"If you reach past the labels, it may be that as a matter of labels, anarchists are deeply uncomfortable with being concerned with any government programme... if you get away from the labels, an awful lot of what the Big Society is about is about restoring meaning and energy to people's lives. I think this is built into the idea that David Cameron’s talking about."
Dr David Chapman, a research analyst at the consultancy Monitor Group currently researching social entrepreneurs, believes Conservative advocates of the Big Society should look to anarchist groups.
"They have a pretty essential role to play within the Big Society agenda. Certainly within the middle-class Tory consciousness the word anarchist conjures up people in masks rioting. But that’s not what these people are doing, they are building communities. The point of social entrepreneurs, they are innovators, they don't do things in a normal way.""To my mind an anarchist group in Dalston creating a community garden is exactly the same as some middle class parents in Oxfordshire trying to provide a free school. It's the community coming together.
"The only thing that differentiates an anarchist group from the kind of traditional Big Society perspective is the cultural perspective of who is an acceptable person."
But Dr Chapman says for the Big Society to work, everyone has to feel empowered.
The Big Society is a very, very powerful idea but it does raise lots of questions about who, in a broad cultural sense, society deems as a valid individual.
A film taken from a streetcar traveling down Market Street in San Francisco in 1906, a few days before the earthquake/fire destroyed the area.
How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush. Watch this funny, mind-bending talk to see the explosion of creativity and diversity of skills a single artist is capable of.
There are six alkali metals: Lithium (Li), sodium (Na), potassium (K), rubidium (Rb), caesium (Cs) and francium (Fr). You're probably familiar with lithium, since it's inside the batteries of all your electronic devices.
But did you know that you could cut a block of it with a simple knife and that it floats on water while it hisses hydrogen out? And that caesium just explodes when you throw it into water?
I didn't, probably because I skipped that chemistry class. Or maybe I didn't skip it but I forgot about that school year entirely. In any case, I'm a sucker for demonstration videos in which things explode while being explained by British narrators.
