There are currently circulating calls for a boycott of Amazon this holiday season called by UKUncut and others. The stated reason here is that, as reported in the Guardian, Amazon have made 7 billion in sales, but pay no UK corporation tax. I’ll leave the specifics of the pledge…
From Solidarity Federation. Why the fight against Pret really matters.
Get involved - reblog, retweet, phone!
What: Pret a Manger communications blockade
When: Thur 29th November, 2:00 - 4:00pm
In an effort to show solidarity to Andrej and PAMSU, we are requesting that supporters:
Conlon Nancarrow: Study for Player Piano, no. 25. Saw this (plus no.s 11, 20, & 21 – but this one was the best) performed at the Kube of the ZKM, Karlruhe last night, part of the Imatronic Extended festival. Wolfgang Heisig was manning the pedals. Magnificent.
“For centuries we’ve been strangely fascinated with the brain of the artist – ever since, perhaps, Beethoven’s autopsy revealed that his neural ‘convolutions’ were ‘very much deeper, wider, and more numerous than ordinary.’ (from Thayer’s Life of Beethoven). The French phrenologist of the July Monarchy period, Broussais, believed that the Maori people lacked the proper organ for producing great painters or poets. Upon the death of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Soviet scientists, eager to discover the roots of his genius, weighed his excised brain: it measured some 300 grams heavier than average. As I discovered during the three days of the Neuroaesthetics symposium, modern neuroscience may wield considerably more sophisticated tools, but some of their assumptions may be just as blunt as their 19th-century forebears: that artistry may be quantified statistically and organically located.”
Read more about the Imatronic Festival and the Neuroaesthetics Symposium at Frieze.
TweetFor the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity.
It is an all pervasive hum that we normally cannot hear. But boost it a little, and a metallic and not very pleasant buzz fills the air.
“The power is sent out over the national grid to factories, shops and of course our homes. Normally this frequency, known as the mains frequency, is about 50Hz,” explains Dr Alan Cooper, a senior digital forensic practitioner at the Met Police.
Any digital recording made anywhere near an electrical power source, be it plug socket, light or pylon, will pick up this noise and it will be embedded throughout the audio.
This buzz is an annoyance for sound engineers trying to make the highest quality recordings. But for forensic experts, it has turned out to be an invaluable tool in the fight against crime.
(Source: BBC, via new-aesthetic)
The Sorrow The Joy Brings, Noa Giniger, 2010. Currently on view as part of the exhibition Seuls quelques fragments de nous toucheront quelques fragments d'autrui,a group show dedicated to work involving collage, at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Marais gallery, Paris.
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“Forty-two dinner plate-sized discs of light shiver and pulsate on the floor of the venue. Around them, three piccolo players sit cross-legged, emitting a series of stuttered, syncopated pulses which at once excite and inhibit the shimmering blue discs. Each disc is engorged or diminished by a different pitch, and as the lights grow past a certain threshold, they make a high-pitched piping sound themselves which triggers in turn other sounds, releasing a micro-tonal Mexican wave of electronic sounds that the system’s creator, artist Tim Otto Roth, describes as a klangteppich – a "sound carpet”. It may not look much like it at first, but this is your brain on music.“
Learn more about Tim Otto Roth and his "Sonapticon” in my latest article for Wired.
TweetThere is a moment in Michael Haneke’s latest film, Amour, in which the wife, whose name – as in every Haneke film – is Anne, begins to utter a single word, “mal”, over and over again. Seeing the evident distress this causes on the face of Anne’s husband, whose name – as in every Haneke film – is Georges, the nurse comfortingly says, “Don’t take it to heart. They usually say something.” Implying: it’s normal, don’t think about it. “She could just as easily be saying ‘mum’.”
In the English subtitled version of Amour, “mal” is transcribed as “hurts” and given the situation – an elderly women, paralysed and helpless after a series of strokes – this seems the logical, sensible choice of translation. But if, as the nurse implies, Anne’s choice of word (though not, of course, Haneke’s) is as good as arbitrary, we might just as well consider the other common meaning of this French word: “evil”.
What do we think of when we consider the question of evil in relation to the films of Michael Haneke? I suspect that for most people familiar with his oeuvre, one of the first things that will come to mind is the face of Arno Frisch, turning to the camera with a smile and a wink in 1997’s original Funny Games. This is a wink which, like Shakespeare’s Iago, invites you to share in its schemes and, in so doing, implicates you as accessory; an evil which charms and immediately makes you feel guilty for being so charmed.
Read the full article on Michael Haneke and the Banality of Evil at The Quietus.
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