Penguin has created a very cool audio/visual tour of London locales that appear in Zadie Smith’s new novel NW. The “tour” covers four significant locations in the book, including Camden Lock. Users can launch location videos with layered audio readings and floating text from the novel. Take a look.
Last week, the U.S. train network Amtrak finally began its much awaited testing of 165 mph “high speed trains” on its busy Northeast Corridor route. If these tests pan out, our trips from Philadelphia to New York City should drop to below forty minutes and a train trip to Boston from Philly should shrink to a little over two hours. Fingers crossed.
Banned Books Week is the national book community’s annual celebration of the freedom to read. Hundreds of libraries and bookstores around the United States draw attention to the dangers of censorship by mounting displays of challenged books and hosting a variety of events. The 2012 celebration of Banned Books Week will be held from today September 30 through October 6. Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 in response to a sudden surge in the number of challenges to books in schools, bookstores and libraries. More than 11,300 books have been challenged since 1982. For more information on Banned Books Week, click here.
Celebrated broadcast journalist and author Bill Moyers addresses book banning and the dangers of censorship in his video “The Bane of Book Banning”, which commemorates the 30th anniversary of Banned Book Week in the United States.
Media artist/provocateur Paolo Cirio has created a new take on street art using images of unsuspecting people captured by Google Street View. Cirio prints life-size pictures of the unidentified pedestrians and pastes the cut-outs on walls at the exact spots where they are seen in Street View for his unauthorized Street Ghosts project. According to the artist:
“In this case, the artwork becomes a performance, re-contextualizing not only data, but also a conflict. It’s a performance on the battlefield, playing out a war between public and private interests for winning control on our intimacy and habits, which can change permanently depending on the victor. Who has more strength in this war? The artist, the firm, the legislators, the public concern or the technology? This reconfiguration of informational power provokes engagement between those social agents, who are recruited through simple visual exposure.
Ghostly human bodies appear as casualties of the info-war in the city, a transitory record of collateral damage from the battle between corporations, governments, civilians and algorithms. Some of this battle has played out in the courts: for instance, the Swiss and German governments have placed legal restrictionson Google, claiming that capturing people on the street in this way violates their privacy. Google rejoins with the accuracy of its facial blurring algorithm, though it doesn’t always work. But even if it does, this is hypocrisy: the rest of their bodies, their hair or clothes are more than enough to identify them, especially for someone really interested in their private lives. On the street, the public encounters the random victims of this war as unclear, impermanent colors and shapes, inclined to fade away but always there, like ghosts haunting the streets and sometimes reappearing from the ethereal hells of digital archives.”
I’ve made two brief visits to Iceland and was awestruck by the stunning landscape. But nothing that I saw compares to the mind-blowing aerial photographs of Iceland by the Russian photographer Andre Emolaev.
These bird’s-eye view images of the volcanic landscape offer amazingly abstract combinations of pattern and color. Emolaev said of the series:
“Iceland is a wonderful country; I would even say that it is a true paradise for all the photo shooting-lovers. But what has become a real discovery for me is the bird’s eye view of the rivers flowing along the black volcanic sand. It is an inexpressible combination of colors, lines, and patterns. The photo represents the mouth of the river falling into the ocean. […] A little bit upstream there is a yellow-colored brook flowing into the river, but yellow currents fail to mix with the main water flow. One can estimate the scale judging by the car tracks that are clearly seen on the black sand. This is just a river, just a volcano, just our planet.”
You can see more of Andre’s work on his website.
Even if we have the opportunity (or chore) to travel by air on a regular basis, we rarely, if ever, get this vantage point on the trip. The video below was produced by SmartWings pilot Jakub Vlk to document a week of flying around Europe. The musical accompaniment is by Tycho.
More than 1,400 museums and cultural institutions across the United States will be offering free admission during the eighth annual Museum Day Live! on Saturday September 29, 2012. Sponsored by the Smithsonian magazine, the event invites participation institutions to get on board with the free admission policy of the Smithsonian museums, if only for a day.
Visit the Museum Day website to find a museum or cultural attraction in your area and be sure to download the required free tickets.
I’m hoping to get to Philadelphia’s fantastic Rosenbach Museum and Library and the National Constitution Center.
Tens of thousands of tourists and Barcelona residents were treated to a breathtaking multimedia spectacle at the iconic Sagrada Familia church on the nights of September 21,22 and 23.. Entitled Ode a la Vie, the installation was produced by Montreal’s dynamic Moment Factory. The gobsmacking 15-minute extravaganza utilized a complex array of projectors, computers and sound equipment to realize a narrative of rebirth and hope layered on Antonio Gaudi’s awe inspiring church façade.
Moment Factoryis a media and entertainment studio specializing in adventurous multimedia productions combining lighting, sound, video, special effects and architecture.
Freelance Berlin photographer Christian Ruhm’s series world dis_order offers a unique way of seeing some of Europe’s iconic tourist sites. From Berlin’s Reichstag to London’s House of Parliament, Ruhm’s multi-layered, multiple exposures add a sense of excitement and a pinch of chaos with their tilt-a-whirl views. Take a look at Ruhm’s website to see more of his challenging work.
Here’s the perfect little tool for crafting witty three-word responses to those churlish, boil-brained flap-dragons who post ridiculously offensive comments to your Facebook posts. Just choose one word from each column and let the Elizabethan insults fly.
Travel Between The Pages 