Danbusha

[T]here was a moment when I was writing Upstream Color where I fell so hard for what it was becoming that I couldn’t think of anything else.

- Television Without Pity

It really started with this notion of personal identity. […] And I think I had this view that, if you could strip away all that subjectivity, strip away everything you’d learned or that you’d been taught or accumulated, that maybe underneath would be this core—that would be plurality of thought, that would be the ability to be malleable to circumstances instead of having a predefined understanding of them. Eventually [it] lead to the idea that maybe there wasn’t anything inside, that maybe we are just an accumulation of these subjective key points of experience. That’s the bit that started to make this whole thing horrific, this idea that you’re not left with anything, that you’re just a lost consciousness in the world.

[…]

[on his next film] It’s actually set all over the world, in all sorts of remote places. It’s about shipping routes and trading commodities, pirates and privateers. It’s a tragic romance. I really can’t wait. It’s going to be a good thing. 

- Interview

“My ability to make another film is directly connected to whatever revenue this movie generates,” he says. “It’s not like, ‘Maybe I can buy a house someday.’ It’s more like, ‘I get to make this film exactly the way it needs to be.’ ”

- Wired

JH: But you act in both your films and you’re a handsome boy. You could probably get acting work.

SC: Oh, well…thank…well, I don’t even know if that’s true. No. No one’s ever – well, actually, that’s not true…

- Film.com

I’m not saying I’m developing a thing for Shane Carruth, I’m just saying he is an engineer and a genius who has decided to use that genius to make movies and I’m not sure how to finish this sentence so I’ll just stop typing.

Photos by Brooke Shaden

Conceptual photos resembling surreal paintings.

I began photography in December 2008 and have been shooting just about non-stop ever since then. I try to shoot every day or at least a few times a week. No matter what, the thing that keeps me feeling most alive is creating new worlds through photographs and so I am constantly creating, editing, and posting them to the online world.

Birthday

Safwat Saleem

Paintings by Jenn Shifflet

Abstract paintings exploring the interplay of color and shifting light.

My work is an exploration into the inner dream like experience of time, fleeting moments of perception, and reflections of the natural world. Ethereal and organic in nature, my paintings rest in the pause between movement and stillness, emergence and dissolution, where time may unfold slowly through subtle interplays of color and shifting light. I am interested in a visual language that speaks to how the ineffable beauty of life is held within a profound fragility of impermanence.

Through his brand ONDU, woodworker Elvis Halilović has been making lensless pinhole cameras for over seven years along with a wide variety of ceramic and structural objects, including kits for geodesic domes. This week the Slovenian designer unveiled a beautifully designed series of pinhole cameras made from wood and held together in part by strong magnets. Forget your camera phone, filters, and “likes,” these tough little lensless film cameras are old school and completely manual, relying on direct exposure of light to film. The cameras come in six different dimensions and film sizes, from the more common Leica 135 format to a 4″ x 5″ film holder camera, and looking at the examples above they really do seem capable of making some beautiful photos. You can learn more over on Kickstarter. (via THEmag)

Shiba Ryotaro library | Tadao Ando

Shot with Black Magic Cinema camera and 5D mark II, using a 100mm Canon lens from a remote controlled helicopter in combination with the Freefly MoVI MR. 100mm on the Black Magic equals to 240mm on a full frame DSLR, very interesting!!!

The next Kubric with have drones.

Berlin

Lost Children

The Cocktail Chart of Film & Literature (larger)

colchrishadfield:

With deference to the genius of David Bowie, here’s Space Oddity, recorded on Station. A last glimpse of the World.

Huge thanks in the making of the video to the talented trio of Emm Gryner, Joe Corcoran and Andrew Tidby, plus Evan Hadfield and all at the CSA.

I’m not being hyperbolic in any way whatsoever when I say this might be the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen.

Eeva Karhu


Eeva Karhu


Eeva Karhu


Eeva Karhu

Vanishing Point

Some interesting data about how protected bike lanes in NYC dramatically increased retail sales of local businesses.

A new study from the New York Department of Transportation shows that streets that safely accommodate bicycle and pedestrian travel are especially good at boosting small businesses, even in a recession.

NYC DOT found that protected bikeways had a significant positive impact on local business strength. After the construction of a protected bicycle lane on 9th Avenue, local businesses saw a 49% increase in retail sales. In comparison, local businesses throughout Manhattan only saw a 3% increase in retail sales.

And that's just one of the many tidbits from a NYC DOT report released last November (right around the time of Hurricane Sandy, which is probably why no one noticed at the time); read the whole report here:

Among them: "retail sales increased a whopping 172% after the city converted an underused parking area in Brooklyn into a pedestrian plaza", and traffic calming in the Bronx decreased speeding by ~30% and pedestrian crashes by 67%. (via @lhl)

Tags: business   cities   cycling   NYC

The quick progress of the US space program in the 1960s and 70s and the science fiction of the 70s and 80s seemed to point towards humans living permanently in space. What happened?

Ironically, our actual experiments in space living have largely reinforced this stark perspective. Real life in space is often cramped, unpleasant and even pointless. Some years back, I visited Star City near Moscow, the training centre for cosmonauts since Gagarin, where I had a chance to clamber inside a full-scale training mock-up of the Mir space station. The experience was more like residing inside a computer terminal than one of O'Neill's cylindrical islands, so proximate and abundant were tubes, wires, levers, buttons and unnameable gadgets.

More disorienting was the placement of controls and conveniences: because space was limited, these were distributed throughout the station without reference to Earthly gravity, thus making use of 'ceilings' as sleeping quarters, walls for toilet cubicles and virtually any other surface for any other activity. One could get used to such things (and you'd have to be a true cynic to tire of the view outside your window). But it's a far, far cry from strolling the wide corridors of the Starship Enterprise.

They promised us life in space, flying cars, and jetpacks but all we got were pocket-sized rectangles containing all human knowledge. FAIL.

Tags: science   space

““I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon… And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

- Joan Didion

19 Emotions For Which English Has No Words

In 1845, a critic for the patrician North British Review decried [the work of Charles Dickens] as an unhealthy alternative to conversation or to games like cricket or backgammon. Anticipating Huxley and Bradbury by a century, he railed against the multiplying effects of serialization on the already hallucinatory powers of the novel: 

The form of publication of Mr. Dickens’s works must be attended with bad consequences. The reading of a novel is not now the undertaking it once was, a thing to be done occasionally on holiday and almost by stealth … It throws us into a state of unreal excitement, a trance, a dream, which we should be allowed to dream out, and then be sent back to the atmosphere of reality again, cured by our brief surfeit of the desire to indulge again soon in the same delirium of feverish interest. But now our dreams are mingled with our daily business.

Frank Rose, The Art of Immersion (via thenotes)

This is amazing: Alan Taylor rounds up some homemade inventions from China, including DIY submarines, giant motorcycles, home-built robots, and can't-possibly-fly airplanes. I can't pick a favorite, but this homemade welding mask is outstanding:

Ok, and this giant motorcycle:

Oh, and this rickshaw-pulling robot:

And, and, and... (via @faketv)

Tags: Alan Taylor   China   photography

Shot by Czech photographer Miloslav Druckmüller from the Brno University of Technology, these amazing composite images capture the moon during a total solar eclipse revealing a vast solar corona. To achieve the crystal clear effect the shots are comprised from some 40+ photos taken with two different lenses. Additional clarity was achieved due to the incredibly remote location chosen to view the eclipse from, a pier just outside the Enewetak Radiological Observatory on the Marshall Islands, smack dab in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. You can see several more images from the project at Druckmüller’s website and don’t miss this much higher resolution version including some 209 stars. All images courtesy the photographer. (via this isn’t happiness)

Crop it

Today in Ecuador 

Meet me here.

Poseurs will call Windows versions by their programmatic version numbers. For example, they will call Windows Vista "NT6" and Windows 7 "NT6.1". Trust me, nobody on the Windows team calls the products by their programmatic version numbers. Whenever anybody says "NT6" I have to go to Wikipedia and look up what they're actually talking about. If I even care to bother, and usually I don't.

Actually, since I work in the client division, I also have to go look up what Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2 corespond to. People will ask question about client-related issues on server, and we have to go back and match it up.

It's like TV insider poseurs who refer to episodes as "Season 3 Episode 9" instead of by their title or just a plot description. If you say to somebody who works on a TV show, "In season 3 episode 9, Anna clearly states that she is an only child, yet in season 5 episode 12, she talks about her older sister," they will have no clue what episode you're talking about.

They will also tell you to get a life.

Bonus chatter: The phrase "clearly states" is a pretty good tip-off that you're dealing with somebody who needs to get out of their parents' basement more.

Oscillate is a thesis animation made by Daniel Sierra for his MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. While essentially an experiment in animation, Sierra says the project was an attempt “to visualize waveform patterns that evolve from the fundamental sine wave to more complex patterns, creating a mesmerizing audio-visual experience in which sight and sound work in unison.” Make sure you view it full-screen, headphones on, you know the drill. I could have watched this continue for twice as long. Hope he got an ‘A’. (thnx, neil!)

Swiss artist Remo Lienhard (aka Wes21) has an imagination to kill for. His acrylic and spray paint works are explosively detailed and often depict a sort of dystopian fusion of people and the natural world. Though despite the grittiness and abundance of detail found in each of his works it’s clear he also possesses a keen sense of humor. Lienhard belongs to a collective of graffiti artists and illustrators called Schwarzmaler where you can find much more of his street art and other works. Also don’t miss him over on Facebook. (via street art utopia which has a killer roundup of street art this month)

Grace Kim

In this series of illustrations created for a British TV show, historical figures are depicted as they might look today. Shakespeare becomes a Williamsburg hipster, Henry VIII is Richard Branson-esque, and Elizabeth I is a cross between Tina Brown and Tilda Swinton.

(via @DavidGrann)

Tags: William Shakespeare

The Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas is considered one of the crowning examples of organic architecture, a philosophy credited to Frank Lloyd Wright that promotes a harmony between the natural world and human habitation. The non-denominational chapel was designed in 1980 by an apprentice of Wright’s, architect E. Fay Jones, who employed the use of steel and glass to create a weightless, almost translucent structure that offers sweeping views in all directions of the surrounding Ozark habitat. In keeping with the organic design of the chapel Fay asked that no construction element be larger than what two people could carry through the woods by hand.

Recently a power company has applied to build a 48-mile high voltage transmission line through Northwest Arkansas that will cut through the woods right next to the chapel, shattering the views and serenity offered by the extremely unique building that was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. For those interested, the Arkansas Public Service Commission is accepting comments from the public regarding the proposed power line construction. You can also read much more over on Hyperallergic.

100 Books that SHOULD be written