The Thinker’s Garden
- “For what stronger pleasure is there with mankind…than the love of hearing and relating things strange and incredible? How wonderful a thing is the Love of wondering, and of raising Wonder!”
867 – The Thinker’s Garden
Tag: design
866
‘The country blooms – a garden, and a grave’, Oliver Goldsmith ‘The Deserted Village’.
Nick Groom – ‘Let’s discuss over country supper soon’ – Rural Realities and Rustic Representations
“The whole ambition of the picturesque was to rework the natural world into a ‘landscape’ – a word that came to England at the end of the sixteenth century
from the German, via the Dutch. Early English uses of ‘landskip’ are strongly cultural – the word is used to describe paintings,
particularly the backgrounds of paintings, and thereby any view that could conceivably be painted.”
“The picturesque encouraged the critical appreciation of nature as a spectacle. Observers of a scene – the word ‘scene’ itself reveals the implicit theatricality of viewing – became an audience, by turns appreciative or critical.
Hence natural landscapes became part of culture, and were understood, judged, and painted according to artistic conventions and aesthetic theories.
For a growing proportion of the increasingly urban population, initial encounters with natural landscapes would be through the medium of art: representations delivered either by pastoral poetry or in picturesque images.”
‘In grand scenes, even the peasant cannot be admitted, if he be employed in the low occupations of his profession: the spade, the scythe, and the rake are all excluded.’ What was allowed was pastoral idleness: the lazy cowherd resting on his pole . . . the peasant lolling on a rock’, an angler rather than a fisherman, and gypsies, banditti, and the occasional individual soldier in antique armour. The image of the countryside presented therefore looked very much in need of improvement – slack, inefficient, indigent, lawless, and archaic. Moreover, once ‘improved’ the landscape was likely to be as empty of agricultural labour as the picturesque depicted it since nearly all the peasantry would have been forced off the land.
0864 – BioShock 2 (2010 Video game)
timespace coordinates: city of Rapture 1968
BioShock 2 is a first-person shooter video game developed by 2K Marin and published by 2K Games. A part of the Bioshock series, it is the sequel to the 2007 video game BioShock and was released worldwide for Microsoft Windows, the PlayStation 3, and the Xbox 360 on February 9, 2010. Feral Interactive released an OS X version of the game on March 30, 2012. A remastered version of the game was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on September 13, 2016, as part of BioShock: The Collection.
Set in the fictional underwater dystopian city of Rapture, the game’s story takes place eight years after BioShock. Assuming control of Subject Delta, a hulking Big Daddy, players are tasked with fighting through “splicers”, the psychotic human population of the city, using weapons and an array of genetic modifications. The game also introduces a story-driven multiplayer mode called Fall of Rapture, which takes place during Rapture’s 1959 civil war, before the events of the first game.
SONY DSC
(Themes) In contrast to the first BioShock‘s focus on libertarianism and Ayn Rand’s philosophies, BioShock 2 focuses on collectivist ideals. Lamb’s philosophy of altruism is based on that of Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill. “Her motto is ‘Make the world your family’ meaning force your mind into becoming loyal to the world in a way usually reserved for your child, and that’s intellectually daunting,” said Thomas. In comparison to the first game’s questions of free will and destiny, Thomas said that the player character is “almost the ultimate individual” whom Lamb goads to fulfill her goals.
Professor Ryan Lizardi draws parallels between BioShock 2‘s themes of community versus the individual and the issues of McCarthyism and the hippie movement that occurred around the time period of the game’s setting. “As this sequel is an extension of the first game’s storylines and characters, there are direct contrasts between the extreme politics of Andrew Ryan’s objectivism and the extreme religion/politics of Lamb’s collectivism,” he writes. “Bioshock 2 specifically asks players to question all sides of debates when extreme stances are taken, and asks players to weigh their decisions in an alternate and complex history. ” (wiki)
steam // www.bioshock2game.com
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS (remastered version) MINIMUM:
Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system/ OS: Windows 7 Service Pack 1 64-bit. Platform Update for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1/ Processor: Intel E6750 Core 2 Duo 2.66 GHz / AMD Athlon X2 2.7 GHZ / Memory: 4 GB RAM / Graphics: 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7770 / 2GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 / DirectX: Version 11 / Storage: 25 GB available space / Sound Card: DirectX Compatible Sound Device
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855 – The Secret of Kells (2009)
timespace coordinates: 9th century Ireland
The Secret of Kells is a 2009 French-Belgian-Irish animated fantasy film animated by Cartoon Saloon directed by Tomm Moore and Nora Twomey.
The film is based on the story of the origin of the Book of Kells, an illuminated manuscript Gospel book in Latin, containing the four Gospels of the New Testament located in Dublin, Ireland.
Circa 800 AD, A manuscript from the illuminated gospel known as the Book of Kells, thought to have been created by Irish monks from the scriptorium of the monastery on the Scottish island of Iona between the 7th and 9th centuries AD. The tome now the most precious manu (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
It also draws upon Celtic mythology; examples include its inclusion of Crom Cruach, a pre-Christian Irish deity and the reference to the poetic genre of Aislings, in which a poet is confronted by a dream or vision of a seeress, in the naming of the forest sprite encountered by Brendan. Wider mythological similarities have also been commented upon, such as parallels between Brendan’s metaphysical battle with Crom Cruach and Beowulf‘s underwater encounter with Grendel’s mother.
The Secret of Kells began development in 1999, when Tomm Moore and several of his friends were inspired by Richard Williams’s The Thief and the Cobbler, Disney’s Mulan and the works of Hayao Miyazaki, which based their visual style on the respective traditional art of the cultures featured in each film. They decided to do something similar to Studio Ghibli‘s films but with Irish art. Tomm Moore explained that the visual style was inspired by Celtic and medieval art, being ‘flat, with false perspective and lots of colour’. Even the clean up was planned to ‘obtain the stained glass effect of thicker outer lines’. (wiki)
853 – 9 (2009)
9 is a 2009 American computer-animated post-apocalyptic science fiction film directed by Shane Acker and written by Pamela Pettler. The film is based on Acker’s Academy Award-nominated 2005 short film/student project of the same name, created at the UCLA Animation Workshop.
9 final movie poster Shane Acker
0852 – Another World (1991 video game)
Another World, also known as Out of This World in North America and Outer World in Japan, is a 1991 cinematic platformer action-adventure game designed by Éric Chahi and published by Delphine Software. The game tells a story of Lester, a young scientist who, as a result of an experiment gone wrong, finds himself on a dangerous alien world where he is forced to fight for his survival.
Another World was developed by Chahi alone over a period of about two years, with only help with the soundtrack from Jean-François Freitas. Chahi developed his own game engine, completing all the game’s art and animations in vector form to reduce memory use, with some use of rotoscoping to help plan out character movements. Both narratively and gameplay-wise, he wanted the game to be told with little to no language or user-interface elements. The game was originally developed for the Amiga and Atari ST but has since been widely ported to other contemporary systems, including home and portable consoles and mobile devices. Chahi has since overseen release of various anniversary releases of the game.
Another World was innovative in its use of cinematic effects in both real-time and cutscenes, which earned the game praise among critics and commercial success. It also influenced a number of other video games and designers, inspiring such titles as Ico, Metal Gear Solid, Silent Hill, and even Delphine’s later Flashback. (wiki)
TimeSpace Warps 