The term database in itself always conjures one word in my head: Wikipedia. Used oftentimes everyday by NYU students, it’s one of the most extensive databases available and I find that in a since it is both a narrative and a database. Upon first entering the sight, one has the option of searching or clicking onto a variety of topics. But, once one has reached their topic, the data is always presented in a narrative style. If you wiki Beyonce, her page presents her life early childhood, to her breakthrough into music, a career with Destiny’s Child and keeps on listing data until we reach the present. Not only that, but at the bottom of most wiki entries, in keeping with a database format there are links to other pages of data, at the bottom of Beyonce’s one can access her discography or a little less related, one can access a roster of other Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Cover Models.

In addition, the Wikipedia database can be thought of as syntagm and paradigm as well. When one jumps to a particular page, what’s in front of you is the model or interface that has been prepared.We see a finished product that presents as much data based on a particular topic. Thus the web page is explict. But, if one chooses to, they can can manipulate the text or data on the web page, making the imaginary real, directly affecting what’s in front of their eyes. This is why many professors and authorities feel that Wikipedia is not a credible source, because anyone has the ability to manipulate it. Personally, I’ve conducted searches where the results have been spliced with naughty words or personal attacks, just to see it anyone notices.

Something else I find fascinating that connects to the Wiki database is Wiki Race. Wiki Race, is in a way someone trying to use a database to produce a narrative. On Wikirace.org, one can engage in a game where they can click through successive links in order to reach a new target-topic. One example is Curry-Michael Phelps. The two topics are very unrelated, but when playing wikirace, one starts at Curry and links to different pages until they reach Michael Phelps. What we are left with is a series of web pages, that while they aren’t narrative, they still lead from point A to Point B in the way a narrative explains things from point A to point B.

On another note, one thing I found especially intriguing from the two class videos was the music. The video for Catalog shows a series of John Witney’s analogue work, but as futuristic as the images may scene, one might expect something very uptempo or techno-like. On the contrary, the music was very somber and classical. This immediately made me think of a similar phenomenon in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the legendary opening features dramatic and out-of-this-world images set to Richard Srauss’ Also Sprach Zarathustra. Stanley Kubric, the director of the film, is known for choosing nonverbal music for the film because he didn’t want to rely on the traditional techniques of narrative cinema. Which in a way was forming a database between the music and the film, two unrelated concepts, presented together. Here’s a link to the films opening scene.

John Whitney, born in Pasadena, California in 19 17 is widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. He began working in film, and collaborated with Saul Bass in the opening titles for Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). In 1960, after founding his company Motion Graphics Incorporated, he began using a mechanical analogue computer to create commercial work. By the 70s he had transitioned into digital computing. One of his first digitally made animations was Matrix III, created in 1972:

In 1975, John created what is widely considered to be the pinnacle of his career, Arabesque:

John’s younger brother, James, born in 1921, became a pioneer in visual music (the translation of music into related visuals) working mostly with film. One of his most representative films, entirely hand made by punching holes into 5″x7″ cards and painting the resulting pattern onto a new set of 5″x7″ cards, is Yantra. It took James 5 years to complete this film, which was finally released without a musical score in 1955 (it acquired a score a few years later).

A decade after Yantra was finally released, James Whitney was able to use analogue computer equipment developed by John for his next film, Lapis (1966). The aid of a computer allowed James to complete the film in only two years. Like in Yantra, Lapis was made by punching holes into a card, except that the camara’s position was controlled by a computer, which allowed James to produce multiple exposures from different angles.

By Jordan Belson

Jordan Belson was an American experimental filmmaker and artist. You can access his films by visiting this site and picking up the excellent DVD entitled Jordan Belson: 5 Essential Films (2007). Check out this video by John Whitney (Of course, youtube is the worst venue for these kinds of work- go see it on a properly released DVD or better yet in a cinema!!):

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Alien-like lady: Tilda Swinton. Read Worn Fashion Journal’s on-line piece about her here (be sure to check out the comment section for Serah-Marie’s refreshing analyis).

Tilda Swinton, Oscars 2008

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SO, all of this because an asteroid passed very close to Earth the other day. From CNN.com (March 3rd 2009):

“While a direct hit on Earth could be a devastating natural disaster, McNaught said keeping track of asteroids can make a hit “potentially preventable.”

A HUGE asteroid crashed into Siberia in 1908 and the effects were devestating! It was called the Tunguska event:

“At around 7:17 a.m. local time, Tungus natives and Russian settlers in the hills northwest of Lake Baikal observed a column of bluish light, nearly as bright as the Sun, moving across the sky. About 10 minutes later, there was a flash and a sound similar to artillery fire. Eyewitnesses closer to the explosion reported the sound source moving east to north. The sounds were accompanied by a shock wave that knocked people off their feet and broke windows hundreds of miles away. The majority of eyewitnesses reported only the sounds and the tremors, and not the sighting of the explosion. Eyewitness accounts differ as to the sequence of events and their overall duration.

The explosion registered on seismic stations across Eurasia. Although the Richter scale was not developed until 1935, in some places the shock wave would have been equivalent to an earthquake of 5.0 on the Richter scale. It also produced fluctuations in atmospheric pressure strong enough to be detected in Great Britain. Over the next few weeks, night skies were aglow such that one could read in their light, caused by dust suspended in the stratosphere by the explosion.”

There are eye-witness accounts on the Wiki page, linked above. Thanks to Mike for sharing some ideas with us!

Photograph from the Soviet Academy of Science 1927 expedition led by Leonid Kulik

Leyendo “Cultura visual digital”, de Adrew Darley, redescubro algunos de los primeros artistas que trabajaron con imagen digital y animación por ordenador, un mundo apasionante que me tiene enganchado a la pantalla de mi ordenador desde hace ya varias semanas.

De todos ellos, el que más me interesa es John Whitney, verdadero piornero del movimiento y creador de piezas absolutamente alucinantes. Su trabajo, parafraseando sus propias palabras, consisten en “evocar las emociones más explícitas de una forma directa, mediante sencillas configuraciones formales de tonos de tiempo”

A modo de ejemplo os dejo “Perputations” (1966), una de sus composiciones más famosas y revolucionarias.

JOHN WHITNEY - PERMUTATIONS

Today we bring you another installment of My Columbus Film Beat wherein area film types introduce themselves.

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Director/Producer/Writer
John Whitney

Born in Texas, John moved to Dayton, Ohio, in the late 60’s when his father obtained a job as a reporter at CBS affiliate, WHIO.  Growing up around television production, it was only natural that John would follow that path.  After attending the Ohio State University where he studied film, he started to freelance in the Columbus market where he began as a PA and worked his way through the ranks to an Avid editor and a Director/DP. During that period of apprenticeship, John worked on over 400 television commercials and a number of independent feature films. Currently John is working for American Signature Inc. where he is a staff AVID editor and DP.

As an independent filmmaker, John has been at the helm of music videos as well as short films including “Solve for X,” which was nominated for best drama at the 2001 Ohio Independent Film Festival in Cleveland. It also won for best short subject at the 2005 Nebula Film Festival.  “A Passion for Filmmaking” was the winner of the 2004 Sixty Second film competition. This film also appeared on the Independent Film Channel’s original series, Media Lab. It also is available as pre-loaded video content in all Microsoft Zunes. “Horrors of War,” won a Chris Award at the 2006 Columbus International Film Festival. “Horrors of War” is currently available on home video worldwide and in current release in North America by Maverick Entertainment..

His current project, “Measured Sacrifice,” is set in a dystopian future America. This low-tech science fiction/drama follows the story of Terry, a young woman in trouble. As the war on terror rages and with the public’s distaste for the draft, the Government enlists all women in their child baring years to volunteer for “The Program”. Pregnant and unemployed, Terry stands at a crossroads. She struggles between honoring her mother and the memory of her father, who died 20 years earlier serving in Iraq, or to do what she thinks is right for the country.  “Measured Sacrifice” is currently making the festival rounds.

John lives with his wife, Jen and son, Kirk in Columbus, Ohio.

Some VJs are machines. Literally machines. Programmes that generate visuals to synchronize with an audio input.

I picked out this film by Low North to show you what I’m talking about (link for more info). Watch to see pixel-per-pixel mapping of an audio track:

I reckon it’s a stunning piece of work. But you may feel differently. We’re desensitized to audiovisual synchronization by the everyday viewing of cartoons, music videos, even 3D fractal screensavers with their precise, ambient motion.

What’s so impressive about this kind of animation, and what are its precedents?

Low North pay homage to Lillian Schwartz. Here’s one of her seminal films – Pixillation (1970):

It’s not quite pixel-per-pixel, is it? But nearly 30 years ago, Pixillation was one of the first digital films to be shown as a work of art.

It was the result of groundbreaking work by Lillian Schwartz as a consultant and researcher in visual and colour perception at Bell Laboratories.

As she says in The Computer Artists’ Handbook:

“A computer can have (be!) an unlimited supply of brushes, colors, textures, shadings, and rules of perspective and three-dimensional geometry. It can be used to design a work of art or to control a kinetic sculpture.”

But Ken Knowlton, her Bell Labs colleague and author of the BEF LIX (Bell Flix) animation programme, spoke of a troubling dichotomy. Whereas artists – human animators – were “intuitive… sensitive and vulnerable”, programmers were “constricted… cold and inscrutable”.

Look just a few years further back to John Whitney. Is that dichotomy so clear?

Like Lillian Schwartz, John Whitney has immense stature in the history of the digital arts. He’s sometimes credited (see the Wiki) as one of the fathers of computer animation. And his vision was simple:

“Above all, I want to demonstrate that electronic music and electronic colour-in-action combine to make an inseparable whole that is much greater than the parts.”

In the 1980s, Whitney was responsible for the invention of an AV “synthesizer for the future”, the Whitney-Reed RDTD. But earlier in his career he worked with Saul Bass on title sequence for Vertigo (1958).

Imagine Whitney’s vision pre-electronic. Pre-computers. When you watch the minutely synchopated animation of Fantasia (1940), for example, you don’t imagine a computer in sight. You might, however, when you watch Oskar Fischinger’s work – because it has that level of detail and timing:

As the date will tell you, this animation involved no computer. Fischinger worked for Disney as an animator on Fantasia. He’d used charcoal-on-paper for his early works. He’d played with coloured liquids and a “Wax Slicing Machine” in between, and invented the Lumigraph (a colour organ) in 1950.

Some of the most visionary animators and filmmakers of the pre-digital era laboured with incredible precision to synchronize visuals with music. There’s a separate strand of film history – one that competed against narrative cinema, the talkie, but appeared to have lost.

You’ll see origins of this battle in the early 1920s, with films by the Dadaists and particularly Hans Richter.

If you want to VJ, in my opinion, you should be aiming for “an inseparable whole that is greater than its parts”. The results can be as revolutionary as you make them.

It doesn’t matter what you use to create. But when you produce audiovisual synchronization, regardless of programmes, software or dialectics, you’re pumping new blood into a rich, historic vein of cinema.

Make it human. Make it how you feel. Because an audience will feel it with you.

Feel like some more? Check out the Center for Visual Music.

L’amour de l’étymologie is a feature exploring the etymology of English words. Today’s entry: the noun vertigo! You may rarely find this word spelled (vertego, verteego, virtigo) and pronounced (although this is the standard pronunciation) in any number of ways. If you’re feeling adventuresome, branch out and use related words such as the adjective “vertiginous”!

Let’s get one thing out of the way: Vertigo should not be confused with acrophobia, the fear of heights.

I have been consistently fascinated by the word vertigo since childhood, having seen Hitchcock’s classic of the same name at a tender age. Hypnotized by the film’s salient imagery, captivating score, and general pathos, I found myself returning to the term time and again. Only about a year ago I discovered that the title – Hitchcock’s personal favorite for the film – barely survived the journey to the marquee. (There were around fifty suggested titles ready and waiting to oust Vertigo.) In late October of 1957 the studio asserted that “No execs like Vertigo and believe it handicap to selling and advertising picture whether potential customers know what word vertigo means or not”. (Auiler 113)

This quote most likely explains why the original trailer for Vertigo opens with a shot of a dictionary. The book opens and the camera zooms in on a page as a quick dissolve takes viewers to a detail shot of the entry for “vertigo”. A voice-over informs the audience that the word means “a feeling of dizziness … a swimming in the head … figuratively a state in which all things seem to be engulfed in a whirlpool of terror.” As the book spins and dissolves into one of Saul Bass and John Whitney’s iconic spiral motifs – known properly by the name “Lissajous spirals” – it seems reasonable to ask just how much of this definition is fact and how much is hyperbole.

In truth, the clever mind that thought up this educational prelude got the meaning pretty much right.

In the original Latin, vertigo meant “a turning around, giddiness”. The Romantic languages inherited this term, and it can be assumed that Anglophones adopted the word from either French or Spanish. The first known use of vertigo in English has been dated to 1528 in Paynell’s Salerne’s Regim, which describes “The heed ache called vertigo: whiche maketh a man to wene that the world turneth”. The main gist of vertigo has followed this pathological assessment. The Oxford English Dictionary’s primary entry: “A disordered condition in which the person affected has a sensation of whirling, either of external objects or of himself, and tends to lose equilibrium and consciousness; swimming in the head; giddiness, dizziness”. The term can also be applied to animals such as horses, sheep, and hawks–although any link between dizziness and these animals’ diseases seems tenuous.

All that jazz is without adding an article. You can slap an “a” or “the” before vertigo if you don’t mind sounding a bit backward. Similarly, using plural forms (vertigos, vertigoes, verteegoes, vertigines) may sound awkward to contemporary ears.

Figurative uses of the word came along later, with the first recorded use in 1634. Vertigo in this case means “A disordered state of mind, or of things, comparable to giddiness.” The OED quotes people who wrote that art, power, and intellectualism may induce this state.

The final use of vertigo is as a noun which encapsulates the “act of whirling round and round.” Although loaded with poetic potential, this usage seems relatively rare; the only historical quote the OED cites is 19th Century writer Thomas de Quincey’s use of the word to describe a top in his Autobiographical Sketches.

That’s all she wrote. Stay tuned for more etymologies and musings on Hitchcock’s Vertigo!

:: Bibliography ::

Auiler, Dan. Vertigo: The Making of a Hitchcock Classic. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. ISBN: 0312169159.

“Vertigo.” Oxford English Dictionary. 2008. 2 Jan. 2008 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/findword?query_type=word&queryword=vertigo&find.x=0&find.y=0&find=Find+word>.

di MARIO CALABRESI

NEW YORK – La Compagnia di Gesù pagherà 50 milioni di dollari per risarcire 110 eschimesi che subirono abusi sessuali da religiosi gesuiti quando erano bambini o adolescenti, tra il 1961 e il 1987.
Gli scandali nella Chiesa americana continuano a rivelare nuove e inaspettate storie, cominciati nel 2002 a Boston, sembravano dover finire con il grande accordo di quest’estate tra la diocesi di Los Angeles e 508 persone che erano state molestate o stuprate negli ultimi settant’anni.

Ma ora dall’Alaska arriva la notizia che per tre decenni in 15 minuscoli villaggi, tra i più isolati e remoti al mondo, abitati dagli Yupik, che insieme agli Inuit formano il popolo eschimese, si sono ripetute violenze e abusi da parte di una decina di preti e da tre missionari della Compagnia fondata da Ignazio di Loyola.

Da quattro anni erano cominciate le denunce, ma prima del processo si è arrivati ad un’offerta di risarcimento che eviterà il dibattito in tribunale. Secondo l’avvocato degli eschimesi, Ken Roosa, si tratta di una cifra record per un ordine religioso, grazie all’accordo extragiudiziale ogni vittima riceverà oltre mezzo milione di dollari, in cambio nessuno dei gesuiti verrà incriminato e non è richiesta alcuna ammissione di colpevolezza.

La Compagnia di Gesù, attraverso il padre provinciale dell’Oregon, John Whitney, responsabile per l’Alaska, ha mostrato fastidio per la pubblicità data all’accordo, ha definito l’annuncio prematuro e ha negato che i gesuiti abbiano inviato per anni “in esilio” in Alaska sacerdoti di cui conoscevano le tendenze sessuali, come invece sostengono alcune delle vittime. Lo stato nel nord-ovest del continente americano viene invece definito dai gesuiti come “una delle terre di missione più difficile” e per questo la Compagnia sostiene di inviarvi i missionari più coraggiosi e preparati.

A St. Michael, un’isoletta lunga 15 chilometri che si trova nel Norton Sound, la baia del mare di Bering scoperta dal capitano James Cook nel 1778, il diacono Joseph Lundowski abusò di quasi tutti i bambini di Stebbins e St. Michael, i due minuscoli villaggi abitati da 150 famiglie.

Accusato da 34 persone, che nelle testimonianze raccontano delle violenze avvenute in una minuscola chiesa, dopo il catechismo, durante i bui pomeriggi dell’inverno dell’Alaska, Lundowsky era un gigante con la testa pelata e gli occhi blu, lavorava come diacono per la diocesi anche se i gesuiti hanno negato alcun legame con il loro ordine e ufficialmente non sapevano chi fosse. Lasciò l’isola nel 1975 e ora si è scoperto che è morto una decina di anni fa a Chicago alla Pacific Garden Mission, un ricovero religioso con mensa e dormitorio. La maggior parte dei sacerdoti accusati sono ormai morti e le vittime, scelte nel tempo tra chi aveva tra i cinque e i quindici anni, oggi hanno tra i trenta e i sessant’anni.

In questa causa, come nel caso di Los Angeles, i gesuiti pagano per un mancato controllo e per aver tenuto nascosto per anni lo scandalo, nel 2004 si erano poi aggiunte accuse di aver bruciato e distrutto documenti che dimostravano il comportamento dei religiosi. Tra i sacerdoti sotto accusa il reverendo James Poole, fondatore della radio cattolica del Nord dell’Alaska, che oggi vive in una casa di riposo. Secondo l’accusa i gesuiti sapevano fin dal 1960 che teneva “comportamenti sessuali inappropriati” ma anche quando lo richiamarono a Portland lasciarono che continuasse ad insegnare ai bambini.

L’avvocato delle vittime, da Anchorage dove ha lo studio, racconta che nessuno aveva mai avuto il coraggio di denunciare finché non arrivò notizia dello scandalo che aveva investito la diocesi di Boston, allora a poco a poco emersero storie di disperazione, alcolismo e suicidi. “In alcuni villaggi eschimesi – sostiene Roosa – è difficile trovare un adulto che non sia stato sessualmente abusato. Ma nessuno ha ammesso che i preti problematici venivano confinati in Alaska. Ora per i nostri clienti questo accordo significa che le loro storie di abusi, sempre negate, sono finalmente riconosciute”.

Fonte: Repubblica.it – 20 novembre 2007