Tag: Germany
558 – Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry by Esther Leslie
“Through coal’s carbon chemistry, and its waste product of coal-tar, a realm of synthetic colours and substances is unlocked from a dense and primitive blackness. The first magic act is coal-tar becoming colour, the first of thousands of substitutions. This magic is a black force. Gravity’s Rainbow lets loose its narrative strands amongst a world of acronyms and neologisms, fictional and actual. spqr, arf, mmpi, soe, spog,
cios, bafo, nta, shaef, pwd, cns, pisces, viam, tsagi, niso, bafo, okw, achtung, Kryptosam, Hexeszüchtigung, ctenophile, Oneirine. These clatter like the evil spells from a necromancer’s manual. These clotted words spell out the coordinates of military, economic and technological power. The most important of these cryptic formulae, the acronyms that generate the rainbow and allow the tracing of its arc,are the colour factory ig Farben and the German Second World War rocket weaponry known as v-1, v-2 or a4. Pynchon brings these two industrial-technological forces into proximity with magic, mysticism and alchemy.”
“Inside the arcades, the ur-architectural phenomenon of the nineteenth century, transitional colours, twinkle, glimmer and reflection danced, and all the more charmingly as night fell. In the early days the gas lighting, whose illumination was an uneven flickering, cast a sparkly sheen over everything. In the arcades, their historian Walter Benjamin claimed, ‘falser colours are possible’, and everything is doused in a special ‘glaucous gleam’, which is reminiscent of aquariums, as Friedrich Gerstäcker imagined in a fictional transposition and, after him, Aragon made so vivid in Paris Peasant. In Gerstäcker’s The Sunken City, the hero sees, to his amazement, that
with the gradual infusion of twilight, these undersea corridors just as gradually lit up by themselves. For everywhere in the bushes of coral and sponge were sitting broad-brimmed, glassy-looking medusas, which already at the outset had given off a weak,greenish phosphorescent light that quickly picked up strength at the approach of darkness and now was shining with great intensity.
The arcades are zones of special effects where optical illusions, tricks of the light and transformations readily occur. This is why the arcades appear so magical, but it also intimates something of their propensity to deception and delusion. The very magic of the space colludes with the commodity promises on sale.”
“Celestis offers space burials, with the ashes compacted in a capsule and sent into orbit (before re-entering) or fired to the moon or into deep space (for ever). That which is legally a ‘final deposition’ can be commodified further in an effort to afford a technologically guaranteed sublime.They also offer a star-naming service. At the start of the twenty-first century, a Chicago company announced that it had created a new way to memorialize loved ones: by turning their charred remains into a gem. The ‘patent-pending’ LifeGem offers to press the cremated ashes of a lost one into a diamond. You can have your loved one with you whenever you choose, which is something that no other memorial product offers, remarks Greg Herro, LifeGem’s chief executive. ‘Nothing else quite offers that everlasting love.’ (…) ‘The proprietary LifeGem creation process creates diamonds from the true essence of our loved ones, the carbon.”
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry by Esther Leslie
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Der Bildungstrieb der Stoffe : veranschaulicht in selbstständig gewachsenen Bildern (Fortsetzung der Musterbilder)
by Runge, F. F., 1795-1867 (Includes 23 smaller chromatograms mounted on the title page surrounding the title, and 60 larger chromatograms mounted on 31 leaves. The chromatograms consist of concentric circles of color produced by applying a liquid chemical compound to filter paper.)
0552 – Mute (2018)
spacetime coordinates: 2030’s futuristic Berlin
Mute is a 2018 neo-noir science fiction film directed by Duncan Jones, who co-wrote the script with Michael Robert Johnson. It stars Alexander Skarsgård, Paul Rudd, and Justin Theroux, revolving around a mute bartender searching for the love of his life who has mysteriously disappeared.
Jones described the film as a “spiritual sequel” to Moon, heavily inspired by the Ridley Scott film Blade Runner (1982). Sam Rockwell reprises his role from Moon in a cameo appearance that acts as an epilogue for the character. The film is the second installment in a trilogy consisting of Moon, Mute and yet to be announced third film.
Clint Mansell composed the film’s score. In a series of Instagram posts titled Mute & Me, he cited the culture of 20th century Berlin and Jones’ father David Bowie‘s Berlin Trilogy of albums as being a major influence in terms of representing Berlin culture, along with other Brian Eno-produced albums like Ultravox!.
0479 – Human Flow (2017)
Human Flow is a 2017 German documentary film co-produced and directed by Ai Weiwei about the current global refugee crisis. Ai Weiwei also comes from a past of displacement; his entire family was exiled to an isolate village of Xinjiang in the Gobi desert due to his parents being writers in the midst of the Cultural Revolution in China.
Like Human Flow, Ai has created similar art installations such as the “Law of the Journey” that features a 200 foot inflatable boat carrying 258 refugee figures, “Laundromat” where he filled a New York City gallery with discarded clothing and personal notes left by refugees in a camp in Idomeni Greece, and the recreation of the captured image of Aylan Kurdi, the young Syrian who drowned off the coast of Turkey.
387 – I Served the King of England (2006)
spacetime coordinates: Czechoslovakia, 1963 >> 1930’s – 1940’s Prague
I Served the King of England (Czech: Obsluhoval jsem anglického krále) is a 2006 comedy film written and directed by Czech New Wave master Jiří Menzel, based on the novel I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal. It is Menzel’s sixth adaptation of the works of Hrabal for film.
“A look at the glamorous life at an old-world Prague hotel.”
370 – A Plastic Ocean (2016)
A PLASTIC OCEAN begins when journalist Craig Leeson, searching for the elusive blue whale, discovers plastic waste in what should be pristine ocean. In this adventure documentary, Craig teams up with free diver Tanya Streeter and an international team of scientists and researchers, and they travel to twenty locations around the world over the next four years to explore the fragile state of our oceans, uncover alarming truths about plastic pollution.
357 – German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2014)
spacetime coordinates: 1945 Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, Germany // Buchenwald, Weimar, Thuringia, Germany // Dachau, Bavaria, Germany // Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp, Oswiecim, Malopolskie, Poland // Majdanek, Lublin, Lubelskie, Poland
(DISTURBING CONTENT)
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is the official British documentary film on the Nazi concentration camps, based on footage shot by the Allied forces in 1945.
The film was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then with the British Ministry of Information, with Alfred Hitchcock acting as a “treatment advisor”. The script was written by Richard Crossman and Colin Wills. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Nolbandov was production supervisor.
The project was abandoned in September 1945, and the film was left unfinished for nearly seventy years. The film’s restoration was completed by film scholars at the Imperial War Museum. The finished film had its world premiere early in 2014 at the Berlin Film Festival, and was shown in a limited number of venues in 2015. It was released in North America in 2017.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_Concentration_Camps_Factual_Survey
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3455796/
A 70-minute documentary on the making of the 1945 film, entitled Night Will Fall, was assembled from the partially finished material and new original footage by director Andre Singer and producers Sally Angel and Brett Ratner. The New York Times, in its review of the documentary, said that “what the new film accomplishes, more than anything else, is to make you wish you could see the original.”
TimeSpace Warps 