Video
Speaking Piano – Now with (somewhat decent) captions!
Oct 10th
YouTube – Speaking Piano – Now with (somewhat decent) captions!.
A “speaking piano” reciting the Proclamation of the European Environmental Criminal Court at World Venice Forum 2009. Unfortunately it’s all in German, but what the piano says is all English, and it’s really neat to watch.
UPDATE: Astera on hackaday wrote a rough translation:
Pretty amazing, how all of a sudden the words of the Declaration become understandable to a European Environmental Criminal Court. Wien Modern was one out of ten cultural institutions asked for an artistic contribution to the event in Palazzo Ducale in Venice.
The ambitious goal was to make this message audible with musical means, without falling back to a simple setting.
Berno Polzer: I think, its partially understandable, partially not. And it plays well with the limits of our construction abilities. That is, we hear sounds that obviously arent normal Music, but neither they are language, and one could say that sometimes, a bridging happens. Personally, I think you can understand individual words even without knowing the text, and the Eureka moment happens when you see the text, and suddenly, the language is there.
Yet another bridge: Miro Markus, an elementary school student from Berlin, narrated the text for the performance: Youth as a hope for the older generation.
The Austrian composer Peter Ablinger transferred the frequency spectrom of the childs voice to his computer controlled mechanical piano.
Peter Ablinger: I break down this phonography, meaning a recording of something the voice, in this case -, in individual pixels, one can say. And if I have the possibility of a rendering in a fairly high resolution (and that I only get with a mechanical piano), then I in fact restore some kind of continuity. Therefore, with a little practice, or help or subtitling, we actually can hear a human voice in a piano sound.
Poetry – A Source of Life: Immaculate Motion Pictures (3rd edition)
Oct 9th
Immaculate Motion Pictures is a collection of contemporary contemplative poetry…
The Princess Protection Program: Disney’s Pseudo-Political Fairytale
Aug 3rd
Once upon a time, in the Kingdom of Costa Luna, the beautiful Princess Rosalinda played by Demi Lovato has to leave her kingdom shortly before becoming a queen because it is in danger of being taken over by an evil dictator. Disney’s new movie tells the story of her being taken under the wing of the “Princess Protection Program” an agency which shields innocent princesses from the tyrannies of megalomaniac rulers.
Special agent Mason and his daughter Carter (Selena Gomez) hide Rosalinda in their home, and construct a cover-identity for her which comes with the new name Rosie and the whole new life of “a normal teen.” Carter basically is an average girl who works in a local bait-shop and dreams of going out with Donny Adamson, the immensely popular school hunk, with whom she doesn’t see any chances – of course – because of her average “social standing”.
Rosalinda, the undercover princess, on the other hand, quickly rises to the highest popularity ranks in Carter’s school and although this leads to a tension between the two girls, they form a friendship in which Carter teaches “Rosie” how to become a perfectly normal, socially adjusted American teen girl and Rosalinda reveals to Carter the princess within her.
Finally, Carter has an eye-opening experience and has to admit that her dream love Donny is not worth it, so she goes to the dance with Ed Braun instead, her best friend who has been in love with her for a long time. And at the end, of course, Rosie finally becomes Queen of Costa Luna with everybody cheering and being happy.
Whether one might like the movie or not, one has to admit that only Disney has the audicity to take political ideas of tyranny and monarchy, substract all the complexity, violence and confusion and simply flatten it out into an all American teenager’s drama of being “socially accepted” at the school dance. Well…
img by mrkathika via flickr
Zen and the Art of Alice
Aug 2nd
Dr. Daniel Silberberg, life coach and teacher at the Kanzeon Zen Center, relates his job figuratively to that of an athletic coach.”I help them decide which mountain it is they want to climb, teach them how to tie the ropes and climb,” he said.”I support them, and believe in them, and when they meet a precipice, I help them continue moving.”
Most of the things we want are not that unreasonable, he says, and are in fact usually things that have been done before by many others.He finds his clients often can’t see the particulars of change, and can be overwhelmed.
bio via insight shift | img via lostcoin
