Interview with Goergekutty A.L. of Voices from the Waters Film Festival, Bangalore, India 
by Kashish Das Shrestha
Y! Magazine,
Kathmandu, Nepal.

Kashish: Why a film festival on water? What was happening around you at the time you decided to start this festival?

Georgekutty: By 2004, the biggest anti-dam movement in India –if not across the world – had reached its climax. Also the period witnessed the biggest anti Coco Cola movement in Plachimada, Kerala because of the water pollution and scarcity the Coco Cola bottling plant created there. There was strong opposition to the privatization of water by the government of India.

These movements received further impetus with the findings of Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi that the soft drinks produced by Coco Cola Company contained chemicals far beyond permissible limits. Many state governments and educational institutions banned the sale...

Blog written by Cecelia Lawless, Spanish, Cornell University

John Valadez is back in Ithaca with his latest film La Onda Chicana.

It is with great enthusiasm that the Cornell/Ithaca/FLEFF communities welcome back John Valadez, the award-winning director who has been producing documentaries for the last ten years.

His film The Last Conquistador has become part of the Spanish curriculum at Cornell. He has established a firm fan base through his appearances at FLEFF, Cornell and Ithaca College.

Now, on Wednesday September 30th, John will present his latest film La Onda Chicana at Uris Hall 7:00 pm on the Cornell campus.

After viewing the 52 minute film, the audience can experience John's charismatic presence during a question and answer session. Articulate and knowledgeable, Valadez is a...

Estimadas amigas y amigos:

1º FESTIVAL DE CINE INVISIBLE "FILME SOZIALAK" Bilbao 2009 el día 2 de octubre.

En esta primera ocasión está dedicado a Cuba y sus 50 años de Cine, pero en próximas ediciones será un festival con obras audiovisuales de todo el mundo, esperamos contar también con vuestros trabajos, pronto estarán preparadas las bases del 2010.

Podeis ver las imágenes de la inauguración en Bilbao:

www.cubainformacion.tv/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=11371&Itemid=86

También esta saliendo en EITB:

www.eitb.com/videos/cultura/cine/detalle/241869/eitb-kultura-15092009-cine-invisible/

Un abrazo

J. Carlos Vázquez Velasco
Zuzendari /...

Blog post written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Berlin, Germany

For the past two years, I lived in Nuremberg and commuted to teach in Berlin. On the train during my four hour commute on a train traveling at 190 miles per hour,  I wrote many blogs. Many were reflections on a concert or topic that concerned Berlin. 

Two friends, a French conductor and a Spanish violinist, have queried  why their respective countries are so fixated on their capitals. Barcelona offers some competition to Madrid’s hegemony, but Paris reigns supreme in France. 

In contrast, Germany is strangely decentralized. Frankfurt is the economic center, Dusseldorf the fashion center, Munchen the Beer and Lifestyle center,  and Berlin the government center. In terms of the arts, many cities like Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Munich, Berlin…and even Nuremberg offer varied cultural events.

Nuremberg enjoys a golden medieval past as an engineering, crafts and cultural center. It is the

Blog written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Berlin, Germany

During my (too) many years as a starving doctorate student at the University of Washington, I splurged on subscriptions to the Seattle Opera (http://www.seattleopera.org/index.aspx).

Seattle Opera mounts gargantuan productions like the whole Ring of the Nibelungen by Wagner as well as non-standard repertoire as the Dialogue of the Carmelites by Poulenc and Florencia en Amazonas by Daniel Catan.  

John and Ruth Briehl, two friends of mine, attended the same performances as I did. We would meet at intermission to discuss the tenor’s acting capabilities, the soprano’s vocal clarity, how wonderful the contralto aria was, the scenery effectiveness, and, when lucky, the inevitable operatic ‘accident’. 

We actually witnessed a real ‘wardrobe malfunction’ as the Governess in The Turn of the Screw continued her high B flat, arms up in the...

Blog written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Berlin, Germany

Last month a former student of mine at Ithaca College, Justine Popik, visited me for a weekend in Nuremberg.  She told me that her classmates would take note of my (in) famous catchy phrases about music.  I have been known to use any means possible to get students to remember certain concepts. 

In one class, I asserted that the fourth degree in a scale can be harmonized with either the subdominant or dominant seventh chord--a bisexual scale degree.  I am sure that the students in that class still remember the sexual inclinations of the fourth degree of a scale. 

Justine mentioned to me that one of her favorite phrases that she heard from me was: “You thought that you came here to learn the A flat minor scale but I will teach you the art of seduction”.  I do not recall how I came to such a statement . It might be related to the fact that every scale had its ‘dance’ so that students would remember...

Blog written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist based in Berlin, Germany

Moving

I will move to Berlin this summer.
 
So I began the hunt for the large, well situated, extremely comfortable, well designed, charming, impressive, and of course, reasonably priced apartment. 

The real estate market in Berlin is very different than what one would expect in such a large city.  I have heard horror stories from colleagues and friends living in Manhattan.  They have shared that to get the perfect apartment at a reasonable (…) price one must be smart and aggressive beyond any measure. 

Germany has strong laws to protect renters and only a few empty apartments come up for sale.  One would expect that they would sell quickly.  Quite on the contrary, they linger forever on the German version of realtor.com (www.immobilienscout24.de). 

I believe that in large cities, many people able to buy an apartment often...

Blog written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberb/Berlin, Germany

During my teenage years, I joined a theater group that specialized in children’s musicals.   I helped with the scenery, rehearsed the singers, and recorded all the background music. I also acted and sang in one of the plays: “Everything is Blue in the Blue Land” (http://www.livrariacultura.com.br/scripts/cultura/resenha/resenha.asp?isbn=8572722025&sid=89824519712210258011020111).  That meant wearing make-up so I would not look like a pale corpse onstage. Bold make-up.

In my native Brazil, I have recorded a couple of times for a TV program called “Metropolis” (http://www2.tvcultura.com.br/metropolis/). Metropolis was a hip late-night variety show that also featured the elite of classical music in Sao Paulo City. I was the pianist in the chamber music group Novo Horizonte, directed by...

Blog posting written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberg, Germany

The Berlin Wall fell on November 9th, 1989.

Twenty years later 31 heads of state (current and past) gathered in Berlin to celebrate this historical occasion.  Everybody from Hillary Clinton, Russian President Medvedev and French President Sarkozy to historical titans Mikhail Gorbatchov and Lech Walesa showed up.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancelor, met in the morning with Gorbatchov at the Bornholmer Strasse Bruecke. It was the first bridge between West and East Berlin to be opened in 1989. It is  also famous as the place where many spies were exchanged during the Cold War years.  

Attended by ten thousand people soaked by rain, the evening celebrations started with a concert on the Pariser Platz, the area immediately on the east side of the Brandenburger Gate.  The Staatskapelle Orchestra conducted by Daniel Baremboim--he had been in Berlin in 1989 when the...

Large cities often struggle with a contingent of people living on the fringe. In Europe, they often migrate from other countries; only the next generation will function within the society like natives. These foreigners to these new environments their music, their customs and their cuisine. Delicious foreign food easily crosses boundaries--and always sells.

Growing up in Brazil, I heard the accordion on old French recordings and at the winter Folk Festivals, generally accompanying dances that vaguely resembles square dance (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RetlvTcLj8). For me the accordion was an instrument of character but certainly not cool. I never considered playing or owning one until two years ago, when my garage sale buddy bought one for me, amidst a fierce price escalation. Garage sale etiquette is highly regulated and treasured by the ‘regulars’.

My accordion is fake white ‘mother-of pearl’. I intend to buy a white...

Blog posting written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberg, Germany

I recently learned that Sao Luis do Maranhao, a large, beautiful city in the northern coast of Brazil, founded by the French, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sao_Luis,_Maranhao) has become a mecca for child prostitution. 

Brazil’s image as a paradise of bossa nova, samba and small swimsuits propels the growing international market of sexual tourism to take advantage of Brazil’s extremely poor population.  Corrupt authorities silently support the system in order to pocket  some dollars and euros.  The children remain in misery, robbed of their childhood and dignity

I admire intelligent marketing. The tobacco industry impresses me with their ad campaigns.  Hip, comic book advertising indoctrinates teens, while sexy, healthy and smart smoking people emulate the ideals of an adult market.  I imagine that the most questionable companies offer the highest salaries to the...

Blog posting written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberg, Germany
 
On November 8th,  I will play  a program entitled Three Trios, Three Players, Three Lands  with two of my colleagues.  

The program at the Rathaus Schoneberg, the City Hall of West Berlin and now a cultural center, will include  Johaness Brahms’ Trio opus 8 (Germany), Paul Schoenfield’s Café Music (USA) and Astor  Piazzolla’s Four Seasons of Buenos Aires (Argentina).  I have played the four-hands version of the same piece by Piazzolla with  Diane Birr as part of a  previous FLEFF production .  Sexy music plus tango plus historical footage spells great project!

Piazzolla had a colorful life, living in Argentina, US and Europe . His main...

Blog posting written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberg, Germany
 
I do not drink alcohol but I am a member of the Martini Mafia.

The president of the Martini Mafia, Charles*, a retired piano professor and the owner of the largest collection of portraits of Queen Elizabeth II outside England, has introduced me to Sarah.  Sarah studied piano with Charles and recently gave me her first book, filled with watercolor portraits.  People, pianos, blues, greens, browns.
Charles, Sarah and Jeremy, a piano professor always happy to talk about his promising piano students met regularly to go to concerts, talk about music and  discuss our dear piano students. 

Sarah is a founding  member of the Martini Mafia, even though she also does not drink alcohol! Charles introduced me to Robert, an active New York singer and actor that shares his time between NYC and his second home in Montgomery, NY where he tends his garden, hosts parties for friends and rents his house for film productions.  Charles and...

Blog written by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberg, Germany　

The Berlin wall fell on November 9, 1989. In the 20 years since, Berlin has reinvented itself as a single city. Borderless.

The infrastructure of East Berlin needed extensive modernization. The subway system--oddly cut into two-- became one again. New traffic patterns mirror a new organization of the city. Berlin needed a new main train station: the largest crossing station in Europe was erected, or rather emerged from the sand (www.hbf-berlin.de) a pas de deux of glass and curves. This gargantuan transparent double centipede, a stone throw from the Branderburg Gate, dwarfs the fast speed trains supported by single pillars and crisscrossing subway lines. All open, all see-through.

Twice a week, I rush through this space on my commute to Berlin, marveling at the station’s scale and lightness. This week, I eyed a temporary round black structure, fifteen feet in diameter, eight feet tall with two large openings. It was...

Blog entry by Jairo Geronymo, pianist, Nurnberg and Berlin,  Germany

Two weeks ago,  I saw a show in Berlin by a group called ‘Chamäleon’  The show itself was called ‘Soap’. One of my concert companions was a ten year-old boy. This show seemed the perfect choice for a mind immersed in Nintendo and Disney.

The show mixed acrobatics, special effects, comedy, skin, and hardcore arias by Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Wolf. Unusual.

The scenery consisted of bathtubs used as a base for acrobatics. The highest bathtub functioned as the throne of a very good soprano wearing a bathing suit.  The pairings were a delightful surprise: Wolf  with contortions, Schubert with fabric swaths holding muscular bodies, Mozart with soap bubbles.

At the moment, the streets of Berlin are plastered with advertisements for the "Blue Man Group". In Las Vegas, it is difficult to score tickets for...

But it seems that Uzbek political elite need not worry anymore. The recent change of the regime in Kyrgyzstan is a rather an example of the failed Revolution than a call to do the same in other countries of Central Asia. All hopes and cheers surrounding the Revolution of 2005 clearly evaporated when Kyrgyz economy sank, corruption increased and misery became wide-spread. One corrupt official has been replaced by another. Street clashes became a norm. Political protests would often turn into fist fight among opponents. The freedom of speech suffered.

"People outside of Kyrgyzstan often think that the Tulip Revolution brought positive changes," a friend of mine who lived and worked in Kyrgyzstan once said....

Post-colonial republics of Central Asia have been pretty slow to adopt cyber-rituals of social networking platforms. But when people finally got a taste of new forms of communications online, they were unstoppable. The leading social network in the former Soviet Union Vkontakte.ru (In Contact) has 10 million members and no competitors. Looking awfully like Facebook.com, Vkontakte.ru quickly became a platform where different generations of Russians, Uzbeks, Kazakhs, etc. in different countries of the world meet to share their life stories, family photos and... art.

A new phenomenon in the virtual space of the former Soviet Union is a cyber-graffiti. Users of Vkontakte.ru consider it a sign of a great respect to leave a virtual painting on the "wall" of another user. As you can see from this video (other impressive videos are here and

Blog post written by Vadim Isakov

It is fascinating to think about how my hometown, the ancient city of Bukhara, blossomed with wealth and culture eleven centuries ago challenging Cairo and Baghdad, the largest and wealthiest cities of the ancient world, in its glory. It is thrilling to realize that formerly one of the biggest cultural and economic centers of the ancient powerful civilization currently known to just a handful of people outside of Uzbekistan, Bukhara was as compelling and glorious as modern New York, London, Berlin, and Hong Kong.

The Old City district of Bukhara used to be a home to thousands of Bukharian Jews who, after suffering the Babylonian exile 25 centuries ago, never returned to the Promised Land until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Nobody in the booming city of ancient Bukhara could probably imagine that it would become a place of misery and stagnation a thousand years later. Modern Bukhara suffers from high unemployment and widespread...

Blog written by Rodrigo Brandao, director of publicity, Kino Lorber Films

By the end of 2009, the internet was flooded with Top 10 lists. The best of the year, the best of the decade, and of course, the best of the best. The assumption was that we needed someone to cut through the clutter, and that these lists are (or would be) useful tools as historical and curatorial documents – maybe an express lane to our past.

Of course, the assumptions within these selective practices need to be examined, and although not all lists are born equal, most of them (at least in the film world) seemed to bring a whiff of the canonical, as if motivated by the simple desire (and excitement) of creating a hierarchical division.  

It goes without saying that looking back (i.e. making history) should be an act of re-interpretation, or at least, a moment to re-examine the very process in which selection takes place – and not an opportunity for exclusion.  

Mostly made by young and still independent filmmakers in Brazil,...

Blog posting written by Rodrigo Brandao, director of publicity for Kino Lorber Films

At the end of 2009, film blogger Mario Diaz, together with Cinema Tropical, put together a list of the Top Ten Latin American Films of the Decade (2000-2009) according to a select group of New York “film professionals” involved with the marketing and distribution of Latin American films in the US.  The idea was to ask select critics, scholars and film professionals to submit their own list of best Latin American films of the decade and simply tally up the results at the end.

In all, 124 films (representing 14 Latin American countries) were nominated for the distinction of being Best of the Decade, and the presence of three Lucrecia Martel films on the final list, as well as the notoriety of most of the films on the list, proved to be a bit controversial for many. On the podcast below, Carlos A. Gutiérrez (Cinema Tropical), Judy Mam, Soldanela Rivera, Rodrigo...

Blog written by Rodrigo Brandao, Director of Publicity, Kino Lorber Films

Carlos A Gutiérrez, together with Monika Wagenberg, launched Cinema Tropical on February 19, 2001, with a special screening of Martín Rejtman’s Silvia Prieto at the (now-extinct) Two Boots Pioneer Theater in New York’s East Village.

Since then, Cinema Tropical has incorporated as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and expanded to create a national non-theatrical circuit that would also hold regular screenings in 13 of the most important cinematheques around North America, including Facets Cinémathèque in Chicago, the NW Film Center in Portland and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, among others.

Today, Gutierrez’s non-proft is at the heart of Latin cinema distribution in the United States, and it continues to thrive as dynamic and groundbreaking media arts...

Blog written by Rodrigo Brandao, director of publicity, Kino International

Soldanela Rivera was born in Puerto Rico.  Moving to New York in 1990, she attended Sarah Lawrence College, receiving a BFA with a concentration in dance, and in 2005 received an M.A. in arts administration from Columbia University.

In addition to her performance and research experience, Soldanela has worked extensively in production and marketing in the Latin music industry. For 15 years, she and partner Blanca Lasalle, founder of Creativelink, was responsible for publicizing a broad roster of clients, including corporations, non-profit organizations, and well-known figures in Latin music.

Soldanela was recently hired to oversee the new Hispanic Division for...

Blog written by Rodrigo Brandao, director of publicity, Kino International

While thousands of cheerful Brazilians celebrated the historical selection of Rio de Janeiro as the host city for the 2016 Olympic Games, many in Chicago, Illinois (USA), were relieved to have the losing bid.

More than 18 months before The International Olympic Committee selected Brazil’s postcard metropolis over other three finalists (i.e. Chicago, Madrid and Tokyo), Chicago residents were already organizing (together with leftists organizations and progressive urban planning institutions) to fight against the Olympic fever -- and protect the housing rights of low-income dwellers threatened by the city’s Olympic ambitions.

“I am afraid that if the city wins their Olympic bid, it would displace many of us poor, Black folks,” said Cathy Weatherspoon, 88, in an a article that appeared on the New America Media website (

Blog written by Rodrigo Brandao, writer and director of publicity for Kino International

The notion that Latin America exists as a clearly defined space and as a positive identity seems to be the status quo in our day and age.

Yet, the two largely diffused notions of Latin America (i.e. Latin America as comprising all land south of the US border with Mexico, or as a region made of all American countries shaped by French, Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers) can not easily co-exist. If the former notion was an absolute truth, Quebec would have to be considered part of Latin America. And on the same token, if the latter was the governing rule, English speaking countries like Belize and Barbados would have to be excluded from the “continent.”

My point in raising these somewhat conflicting notions of Latin American is neither to question the term's validity nor to highlight its obvious complexity. Instead, I want to make a case that the concept of Latin America demands both abstraction and historical precision, since the spaces in which...

Blog post written by Kole Ade Odutola, Nigerian poet, activist and scholar

First Words

An important media event was recently held in Lagos, Nigeria. It was the African Media Leadership Forum hosted by Nduka Obaigbena, the CEO of This Day newspapers.

In attendance were over 120 proprietors, publishers, broadcasters from 42 African countries. It is very easy to ask ‘what next’ after this important meeting of the so called "movers and shakers" of the industry.

Locating the response may just not be that easy. As with all conferences, ideas of a sort had to open the minds of the participants so a key-note address was delivered by Mr. Ted Koppel, a former ABC Nightline Anchor in the United States and currently, NPR and BBC senior news analyst.

There was also a presentation by the Dean of Medill School of Journalism, Professor John Lavine, who we were informed left Lagos for Qatar to attend to...

Blog written by Kole Ade Odutola, Nigerian poet, scholar, activist

Introduction

If anyone told you that there are Nigerians (or even Africans) who have expertise in the production of animations; would you believe it or will you like me reach out to the nearest search engine to fish out one example?

In my case I looked through some sections of the World Wide Web to seek out someone who could tell me about the state of affairs in the art of animation and maybe express fears in the present or in the future. I did not need to look too far when facebook came to my rescue and delivered as it were a graduate of Civil Engineering to my in-box. It is imperative that you read his story yourself and check out the various links he graciously supplied.

Ha !! before you enjoy (or reflect on)  his responses to my curiosity, I will like to know why no one has written a comment on the last entries. What is going on? I may just stop this...

Blog written by Kole Ade Odutola, Nigerian poet, cultural activist, intellectual

It is debatable if the present situation in the film/video market can be referred to as an industry where capital, machinery and resources are in place.

One very heartening development is the presence of a film policy for the country. The history of the policy dates back to 1991 when Nigerian Film Corporation (NFC) constituted a panel to look into the existing regulations with a view of harmonizing and distilling the essence of a film policy. The film policy fortunately is a beautiful document that not only articulates the many possibilities and options open to the country but also attempts at providing enabling environment for the production of films.

The document on its face value seems not to lack in the necessary guidelines and visions, for example the preamble recognizes that "the film is a unique means of communication, it is a means of education and entertainment, socialization, information and mobilization. More than any other means of...

Blog entry by Kole Ade Odutola, poet, activist, intellectual 

In real life the two words open spaces will immediately bring to life open fields where all can roam and get lost or reclaim self. Such open spaces hide memories and sometimes help relieve hidden emotions. In a virtual world an open space allows for all manners of objects and subjects within its bowels.

As a first step in a journey of a thousand words I want to use this opportunity to kick-start the bond between my computer screen and yours. Remember this is the age of hide and seek, hide and type till the fingers hurt. I promise you that nothing in this blog will make you sick but I can bet my last dime that I will make you think about the continent of Africa.

I will connect the delicate net that links us all and comment on issues from different points of views. If I come across any news I think you can use, be sure I will spare nothing till you are made aware.

In the spirit of the spoken word I leave you these ideas. If you dare; feel free to send to me what you think about...

Blog written by Ulises Mejias, assistant professor of new media, SUNY Oswego and designer of the FLEFF Open Space Alternate Reality Game

The logic of the network revolves around the principle of nodocentrism. One property of networks, as Castells (2000, The Rise of the Network Society) suggests, is that the distance between nodes within the network is finite: while any two given nodes might not be directly linked, they are connected through the indirect links that form the network itself, and information can reach them even if it encounters the occasional barrier.

At the same time, however, the distance between a node and something outside the network is, for all practical purposes, infinite. Thus, nodes can only ‘see’ other nodes. While networks are extremely efficient at establishing links between nodes, they embody a bias against engagement with—and knowledge of —anything that is not a node in the same network. If it is not a node in the network, it is not real; it might as well not exist as far as the network is...

Blog written by Ulises Mejias, assistant professor of new media, SUNY Oswego and designer, Open Space Alternate Reality Game for FLEFF 2010

A network, defined minimally, is a system of linked elements or nodes.

A digital technosocial network, therefore, could be defined as an assemblage of human and technological actors (the nodes) linked together by social and physical ties (the links) that allow for the transfer of information among some or all of these actors.

Even though they are a fairly recent invention, digital technosocial networks have significantly altered and continue to change our society, to the extent that we now refer to ourselves as a network society. Many authors have differentiated between mass societies, characterized by densely knit location-bound communities that are isolated from each other but still organized under a broad concept like the nation-state, and network societies composed...

Blog posting written by Ulises Mejias, assistant professor of new media, SUNY Oswego and designer of the Open Space Alternate Reality Game for FLEFF

I had prepared this timeline for a presentation. I think it is instructive to review it here. My argument was that although we tend to think of Iran as a repressive and technologically backward place, it has a vibrant blogosphere that constitutes an important public sphere. 

1996
There were only 2,000 internet users in Iran (mostly email users).

1997
Election of reformist President Mohammed Khatami. Emergence of many independent newspapers. However, the ruling mullahs shut down more than 100 newspapers and jail many reporters and editors. This forces journalists to move online in order to avoid censorship.

1999
The number of internet users increases to 48,000.

2001
First Iranian weblog (by Salman Jariri).

2003
Already...

Blog posting written by Ulises Mejias, assistant professor of communications and new media, SUNY-Oswego and designer of the Open Space Alternate Reality Game

Do social media services like Facebook and Twitter invigorate the public sphere by providing enhanced opportunities for discourse, or do they exploit and undermine the public by capturing user-generated content and redistributing it in an environment saturated with advertising?

It was argued that Web 2.0 heralded the end of cultural monopolies and their one-to-many models of dissemination. But what has the monopoly been replaced with?

In this era in which users—not monopolies—generate content, those users must still make decisions about which tools to use to distribute their content. If, for instance, a user has captured the antics of an adorable cat on video, and that person wants the video to be seen by the largest possible audience, she or he will think...

Blog written by Ulises Mejias, designer, Open Space Alternate Reality Game and assistant professor of communication studies at SUNY Oswego

I have received three interesting comments from Dale, Noelle and Koon to my previous post that I think merit a response here (instead of getting lost in the comments).

Yes, these are interesting times indeed, especially with the recent announcement of the imminent collaboration between the National Security Agency and Google (Google asked the NSA for help in securing its networks; will the NCA ask anything in return?). 

I work for a higher ed institution that is apparently switching to Gmail.

 As a state school undergoing budget cuts, we can't afford to maintain our own email servers. This raises all sorts of questions.

 Will I effectively work for Google (contribute to their bottom line) simply by virtue of sending school email? Do I have a choice to have my email forwarded to another client, or to my own email...

Blog written by Ulises Mejias, ARG designer for FLEFF Open Space 2010 and assistant professor, SUNY Oswego

Most people assume that if you Google something in the US and you do the same in another country, you will get the same results. It's called the <em>World Wide</em> Web, right? Not so. Countries can and do exert influence on search engine companies to control the results that their citizens can access. Which is why there's been a lot of talk recently about whether Google will pull out of China. Apparently, the Internet giant whose code of conduct is "Don't be evil" has finally gotten tired of the Chinese Communist Party stipulating the kind of search results it can or cannot provide. Competing for a share of one of the world's largest markets is good and well, but after it was revealed that the attacks that compromised the private  information of thousands of Google users came from China, the company decided that enough was enough. Although no final decision has been made, the mere mention that Google was considering leaving...

Blog posted by Ulises Mejias, assistant professor of new media, SUNY Oswego, aned designer of Open Space ARG

What is often lost in framing the ongoing Net Neutrality debate as one that pits the Left v. the Right is how both sides are often after the same thing: advancing the corporate agenda. The debate is increasingly eroding the notion of Internet users as citizens instead of just consumers. Sadly, this points to the lack of any real political alternatives or 'open spaces' around this issue. But let us examine each side's position more carefully. 

Net Neutrality started as a call from idealist cybernauts to keep the government off the Internet (wait... wasn't the Internet a government invention to begin with?). The goal was to resist any attempt at censorship, taxes or bureaucratic regulations. Information, after all, wanted to be free! This position was popularized by academics and now, in the Obama age when it is cool to trust the government again,...

Blog posting by Ulises Mejias, digital theorist and designe

Networks are powerful determinants. They condition the ways we think and interact with the world. I'm not talking about the network just as a material structure, but as a way of thinking. From the design of living spaces to the design of information spaces, the network episteme has emerged as the dominant model for assembling the social, organizing knowledge, and mapping reality.

As with all dominant structures, the network episteme needs to be questioned. The network has become a template actualized and enforced by code, by the circuitry of electronic devices. Everything can be connected, we are told. But as Kothari and Metha remind us, total inclusion allows for total exclusion.

In my work, I am interested in exploring the network as a machine for increasing participation while simultaneously widening the gap between 'rich' and 'poor' nodes. Networks produce inequality. The larger the scale, the more efficient the network will need to be at creating and managing...

Blog posting written by Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Driving down the L.A. freeway to Westwood in a persistent drizzle, I was wondering whether audiences would melt away for our screening of Jack Hill’s COFFY (1973), starring Pam Grier. The Director-Screenwriter had agreed to participate in a Q & A between a double bill which was to end with CLEOPATRA JONES (1975), both films a part of a film series I was curating with my colleague Allyson Fields for the Billy Wilder Theater: “Paint It Black: Revisiting Blaxploitation and African American Cinema in the 1970s.”

COFFY was the mega hit that initiated the cycle of blaxploitation films featuring super strong African American women, a cycle primarily...

Post written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

My dad was a concentration camp survivor, incarcerated in Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg. A great uncle of mine was executed by the Nazis at Plötzensee in 1941. As a child growing up in Chicago, I wasn’t aware of these facts, but I did know that leaving food on your plate lead to major family crises and spoiled food in the fridge meant my mother had hell to pay.

Not surprisingly maybe, one of my careers has been as a Holocaust scholar, writing not only my dissertation, but also numerous essays and reviews about the cinematic depiction of the Nazi terror. As a graduate student, I free-lanced as a film archive researcher for films, like Edgar Reitz’s HEIMAT, searching for images of war and persecution. How does one depict the Holocaust in images without exploiting audiences or succumbing to a tourism of evil? How real are images of the Holocaust?

These questions arose again watching Yael Hersonski’s new documentary, A...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive, UCLA, Los Angeles

Held in Hollywood at the Academy Film Archive’s Linwood Dunn Theater, the 25^th iteration of “The Reel Thing” proved to be as innovative and thought provoking as the first, back in October 1995. Indeed, thanks to its two originators and tireless organizers, Grover Crisp and Michael Friend, both of Sony Pictures, “The Reel Thing” has provided us with a seamless documentation of the technological revolution of moving image archiving from the mostly analog era of the mid 1990s to our decidedly digital present in 2010.

That bridge from the analog to the digital was illustrated most convincingly at “The Reel Thing” (2008), when “First Sounds” software programmers digitized charcoal voice recordings, which not even their inventor could playback. Suddenly, through digital technology we clearly heard a voice from an analog imprint, a “phonautogram,” recorded in 1857, thus...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

Last the Fall I wrote a blog about my professional mentors who had influenced me while I was a student. Since completing my PhD. more than 25 years ago, I have become a mentor to many of my own students. They are in many ways my proudest accomplishment. Publishing a book or restoring a film has nothing on the emotional kick I have gotten watching some of my students grow, develop, and succeed. I’m incredibly proud of them, like a mother hen with her brood.

Two of my former students are now themselves moving image archive directors with PhDs. Claude Bertemes has been the Director of the Cinémathque Luxembourg since 1997. He took a seminar with me as an undergraduate thirty years ago when I was at the beginning of my teaching career, myself still a doctoral candidate. He recently confessed to me that he was not very happy with the grade he received in my “Photography as Communication” seminar.  Hayden Guest was my student at the School of...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive

21 June, 10 AM, which happens to be 1 AM (California time), according to my body clock, and I’m standing in front of a group of eager film students. We are doing a one week academic seminar in and around PEOPLE ON SUNDAY to prepare five German film students (from the IFS) and five American film students from UCLA to spend the next five weeks making a film, which will be a portrait of Cologne, the way PEOPLE was a portrait of Berlin in 1929.

We start with an initial discussion of the film, made by Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, Robert and Curt Siodmak, Eugene Schuefftan, Fred Zinnemann, and Seymour Nebenzahl, all of whom were exiled from Germany in 1933 and had high profile (or less substantial) Hollywood careers. Along with Prof. Dr. Gundolf Freyermuth (IFS) and Dr. Lisa Gotto (IFS), we discuss the incredible modernity of MENSCHEN AM SONNTAG, given its non-plot and hand-held camera, its amateur actors and documentary views of a vibrant city.

Next, I...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

When I discovered film history as a sophomore in college, the first thing I did was to start collecting. Not objects on paper or celluloid that are the Grail of film collectors, but rather filmographic information. I used 6 x 9 index cards to create lists of directors and their work, then marked the cards, when I saw the films. This was, of course, long before IMDb, and even before there were many reference works. I would spend hours in the library, copying data from far flung sources. There was a certain comfort in collecting data, in organizing information, in cross-referencing, in short, in managing the world through the fetish of data control.

Collecting filmographic information later became a part of my academic life. My dissertation included an appendix that was several hundred pages long, constituting a filmography of German Jewish refuges to Hollywood, which was published as a separate...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Not many people would go to Syracuse, N.Y, in the dead of winter, but for cinephiles who love old movies, Cinefest is the place to be.

Leonard Maltin has been a regular for years, as have David Sheppard (Blackhawk Films) and numerous film archivists. Cinefest is a convention of film collectors, which includes a market for film memorabilia and 16mm film screenings at a local hotel from 9 AM to 12:30 AM, as well as 35mm screenings in a local cinema. Almost none of the films are available on television or video.

Some of the highlights of this year’s program included: THE VALIANT (1929), starring Paul Muni, directed by William K. Howard. A very sweet little melodrama by Frank Borzage, LIFE'S HARMONY (1916), which is one of his earliest films, but instantly recognizable as a Borzage in its focus on family life. CONRAD IN...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

This week I had the pleasure of meeting Jamaa Fanaka in Hollywood when he paid me a visit, because he had agreed to put his films on deposit at UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Jamaa is an African-American filmmaker in Los Angeles, who directed the hugely successful Penitentiary (1979), followed by Penitentiary II (1982) and III (1987). Like his earlier features, Emma Mae  (1976) aka Black Sister’s Revenge and Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975) aka Soul Vengence, Fanaka’s films play with the conventions of  “Blaxploitation,” while simultaneously commenting on the genre in a highly self-reflexive genre. 

The term “Blaxploitation” was originally dreamed up by Variety for a wave of Hollywood films with...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

As we enter into the second decade of the new millenium, moving image archives have taken a few more steps towards complete professionalization by establishing formal training programs for moving image archivists. Not surprisingly, the major impetus for the yearly Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) conference had originally been the real need for training and the professional exchange of archival methodologies and practices for moving image preservation.  Thus, the second official AMIA conference instituted workshops where older colleagues spoke to novices and younger colleagues, a sort of moving image archiving 101.  

Beginning in the mid 1990s, then, film archives in connection with universities began for the first time to offer professional training courses for moving image archivists.  One of the...

Blog posting written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

While the NEA discontinued funding moving image archives in the early 1990s, other organizations took up the challenge. As early as the late 1980s, the American Film Institute’s campaign “Nitrate Won’t Wait” had increased public consciousness about the need to save and preserve the precious moving image heritage. Through theNational Film Preservation Act of 1988, Congress established a National Film Preservation Board and created a National Film Registry (25 titles are added each year by the Librarian of Congress), which identified ‘National film treasures”. The initial impetus for the Act was the concern over the commercial treatment of classic films, including re-editing to fit television time...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

 With the development in the United States in the late 1960s of government funding sources for preservation through the National Endowment for the Arts and the growth of local, regional, and television archives, a sea change occurred in the U.S. archival community. While moving image preservation had previously been handled by only a few nitrate-holding archives, including George Eastman House, UCLA Film & Television Archives, Museum of Modern Art, and the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division, literally dozens of new archives were founded in the following years, making the need for a North American organization apparent. Suddenly a host of regional archives, archives of special collections (dance film), and television news archives appeared on the scene. What...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive,
      
The first generation of film archivists were essentially collectors interested in showing their treasures. Before the age of television, old films were virtually impossible to see, since producers had little interest in saving material that had outlived its economic usefulness. Furthermore, mainstream cultural institutions and governments considered the cinema a crass commercial enterprise, a form of communication not worthy of serious intellectual consideration. Having what Roland Barthes has called "bad object status", the cinema was mistreated by governments, institutions of education, and commercial interests, alike. 

In the 1920s, a minority of intellectuals began championing the cinema as a new art form, advocating the creation of non-commercial screening spaces and the establishment of archives for...

Blog posting written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

Last week the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) met in St. Louis for their 19th annual conference. Despite dire predictions that the economy would drive down attendance, attendees flocked to the “gateway to the West.” Founded in 1990, AMIA this year saw over 450 film, television, and digital media archivists from the private and public sector, laboratory specialists, vendors, and a healthy dose of students in moving image archive programs at UCLA, NYU, Rochester, and Texas Austin, all hoping to learn from practitioners and make contacts for future employment. 

The pre-conference kickoff is called “The Reel Thing,” a day technical symposium, where the newest methodologies of media preservation are introduced by an international group of speakers in powerpoint, before the actual results are shown. The day started with a talk about the restoration of a Cyd...

Blog posting written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

A few days ago I spoke at a memorial for George Bluestone, who was my one of my mentors and a life-long friend. We first met in fall 1973, when I was a freshly matriculated graduate film student at Boston University. George was well-known for his book, Novels into Film, which has remained in continuous print since 1957; an accomplishment matched by only a handful of film books. Looking over my notes from that time, I was struck most of all by George’s intensely humanistic perspective, and the intellectual breath and depth of his thinking about film. 

In a lecture in my first seminar, “Religion in the Cinema,” George drew an arch from Milton, Dante and American transcendentalist poetry, to Carl Dreyer and Ingmar...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

The first thing you do when you get to Pordenone, Italy, a provincial capital northeast of Venice, is walk a lot. The town is small enough to promenade around in half an hour. Invariably you meet colleagues on the street, because everyone is walking to and from various hotels. I first started going to the Giornate del cinema muto in 1988, when I was curator at George Eastman House. I mention this because I realized, how many people I know at the Festival. There are the many archivists, who show their latest preservation work or　come to look at other restorations; there are the American and European academics, who specialize in silent film historiography; and there are the cinephiles, who come faithfully every year at their own expense, just to see rare silent films. This year’s program is focused on canonical films, the French company Albatross, divas, and Sherlock Holmes. 　

The Albatross films turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag....

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, director, UCLA Film & Television Archives

In the general public there is the notion that archives are spaces where almost everything is saved and preserved for posterity. However, the founding of an archive is no guarantee that its contents will ultimately be saved. This tells us that while the archive exists in an idealist sense to capture both the evident and hidden meanings of our culture, through the preservation of objects and information, the reality of such institutions is more chaotic, survival much more a matter of the serendipity of time than archival management.

Some of the largest and most important film archives in the world, like the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris or George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., were founded by collectors who were cinephiles, hell-bent on collecting every scrap of film and film history. Other archives, like the Library of Congress or the Czech National Film Archive were started by enlightened governments, wishing to preserve national culture.  Still others...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive
      
      The professionalization of moving image archives over the past three decades has been accompanied by changes in film studies, which have precipitated a new consciousness not only in media historians, but also in moving image archivists themselves. Earlier generations of film historians perceived film history teleologically as a progressive evolution towards film art, a hermeneutic upward spiral of technical and aesthetic improvements that brought the medium to its maturity with the addition of sound, color, and 3-D. But history is not that easily compartmentalized. Moving image media and culture have been subject to breaks, fissures, dead-ends, two steps forward and one step backwards, all of which did not inevitably lead to what we now term classical Hollywood narrative or some variation there of. 

      The new film historians have been much more interested in...

Blog post written by Jan-Christopher Horak, Director, UCLA Film & Television Archive

      There is a paradigm shift of enormous proportions going on in the real world, and in the archive world. We are moving away from a culture of objects to one of electronic bytes. The very materiality of traditional media will become obsolete. Now some of us may see this as an advantage, others will perceive the loss of that materiality as a fact to be mourned.  How many theories of art, of photography, of cinema, are in fact grounded in the specific physical characteristics of the media?  How will these media change when they no longer exist in any form other than as free-floating information in cyberspace? Archivists are by nature conservatives – at least in the sphere of art, culture and technology. This is true, because as archivists it has traditionally been our job to conserve cultural artifacts in their original state. While commercial enterprises are constantly improving technology in the interest of efficiency and cost,...

Blog written by Jan-Christopher Horak, UCLA Film & Television Archive

While the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival has only shown a few documentaries that one could characterize as "wildlife films,"this genre certainly speaks to the environmental concerns of the festival.

We are now observing a paradigm shift in the functionality of wildlife documentary films and television. For nearly eighty years, filmed images of the natural world conformed to the classic documentary aesthetic: Moving images were perceived to be

1.) an expansion of human vision

2.) a means of entering into a world that was invisible to the human eye,

3.) an extension of the physical body of the subject

4.) the creation of visual pleasure by bringing animals in their natural habitat closer to humans.

And while it is true that such visual documentation of animal life entailed narrative conventions that communicated overt and covert ideologies, these images referred to a real, physical world in which animals existed along side...

 According to Michael Foucault, the totality of intellectual activity over time within a given culture constitutes the archive of human knowledge. The archive in the real world gathers together in physical form the articulations of our culture, whether books, papers, films, video, art objects, and all other accumulations of human labor. Archives generate history.

Archive, libraries, and museums, then, have always been somewhat sacred places where we go to find the raw data for historical inquiry, where (re)searchers study and examine objects to seek the truth.

The creation of the internet, however, has changed all that. With each passing day, more and more objects are being digitized, knowledge from the physical world is losing its corporality. The Archive is now virtual, rather than physical.

The question is, how does knowledge change in cyberspace?

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Introduction

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Map Open Space exhibition at FLEFF 2010, La Buena Vida/The Good Life  is a video project comprised by more than 400 interviews with pedestrians in the streets of twelve Latin American cities conducted between 2005 and 2008.

Along with several commissioned texts that respond to the question ‘What is democracy to you?’ from different social and theoretical perspectives, the video interviews can be accessed through an online archive.

The project is also a multi-channel video installation that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2008 and has been also exhibited in Aarhus, Berlin, Bogotá, Buffalo, Buenos Aires, Castelló, Florence, Gijón, Lyon, New York City, and San Francisco.

Sharon and I have...

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Part One: Conception and Realization

Winner of the Jury Prize in the Map Open Space exhibition at FLEFF 2010, La Buena Vida/The Good Life (http://la-buena-vida.info) is a video project comprised by more than 400 interviews with pedestrians in the streets of twelve Latin American cities conducted between 2005 and 2008.

Along with several commissioned texts that respond to the question ‘What is democracy to you?’ from different social and theoretical perspectives, the video interviews can be accessed through an online archive.

The project is also a multi-channel video installation that premiered at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia in 2008 and has been also exhibited in Aarhus, Berlin, Bogotá, Buffalo, Buenos Aires, Castelló, Florence, Gijón, Lyon, New York City, and San Francisco.

Sharon and I have received lots of...

Blog by Sharon Lin Tay, co-curator of Map Open Space for FLEFF Open Space 2010 and author of Women on the Edge:  Twelve Political Film Practices

Introduction

Sharon Daniel, Professor of Film and Digital Media at the University of California in Santa Cruz, is the creator of Blood Sugar, a "new media documentary" that won Map Open Space's Curators' Prize for Design.

Blood Sugar http://bloodandsugar.net is an audio archive of conversations with current and former injection drug users whom Daniel met at a needle exchange in a HIV prevention programme in 2000.  Here, she engages in a conversation with one of the curators of Map Open Space about the context around, and inspiration for, Blood Sugar.

The Interview

SLT: How do you see Blood Sugar as...

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Introduction

Spectres of Liberty  is an on-going public, hybrid media project by Olivia Robinson, Josh MacPhee, and Dara Greenwald that examines the history of movements to abolish slavery in the United States.  The project explores ways to make the histories of anti-oppression movements visible by excavating public memory from collective amnesia.  The project also animates history by asking the public to interact with history — and reanimate other repressed histories.

The project’s first iteration, “The Ghost of the Liberty Street Church,” was staged in May 2008 at the site of a church that served as an important meeting place for organizers of the Underground Railroad, a network of anti-slavery activists who helped slaves escape to areas in the northeastern U.S. and Canada where slavery was not officially practiced.

Formed in...

Blog written by Sharon Lin Tay, visiting associate professor at Nanyang Technological University and cocurator of Map Open Space

As curators of Map Digital Space, Dale and I couldn't resist JODI's submission for this year's competition, to the extent that we created a special prize to honour these two net art guerilla warriors for their commitment to disruption.

The piece submitted by JODI, GeoGoo, can be found at http://globalmove.us.

Unlike most of the works we received, GeoGoo does not use or submit to the conceptual idea of Map Digital Space. Instead, GeoGoo subverts the conventional use of Googlemap in order to make us think about the ubiquity of the Internet in our lives.

In a much earlier piece <wwwwwwwww.jodi.org>, JODI simulates computer failure that elicits panic in the viewer.

Watching the BBC World News on a loop all day on my sick bed (just a cold, but then I'm a wimp), I came across a programme called "Super Power," about how the Internet has changed our lives <

Blog posting written by Babak Fakhamzadeh, Map Open Space juror

After some deliberation, the FLEFF Map Open Space jury chose to award Carlos Motta's The Good Life http://www.la-buena-vida.info the jury prize of FLEFF 2010.

With quite an interesting collection of submissions, the actual number of works where 'mapping' as a concept formed an integral part of the creation was small. However, several were interesting for a range of reasons.

In the end, Motta's work came in on top of the list.

For one, The Good Life features an exceptionally large body of work with a host of video interviews focusing on 'the man in the street' commenting on the United States' imperialist behavior of the previous few decades. As a result, the piece's spatial and political depth of field is impressive: this piece is thus both topographic and topologic.

At heart, many artists have leftist...

Blog written by Sharon Lin Tay, cocurator of Map Open Space for FLEFF 2010 and Visiting Associate Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore

In a previous post, Dale talks about the interface between "new" and "old"media paradigms. I would like to flag up one example of such remediation: our juror Christina McPhee's La Conchita mon amour <http://www.christinamcphee.net/la_conchita.html>.

In particular, I'd like us to think about the extent to which digital and Internet technologies can enable the move beyond certain limitations that affect conventional documentary practices and open up some ideas about the image and representation in documentary film within the context of digital convergence.

McPhee's La Conchita mon amour taps into the states of panic and paranoia that characterize political events post-9/11, albeit in a different way. La Conchita mon amour...

Blog written by Dale Hudson, co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of “Map Open Space” exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

The forthcoming FLEFF exhibition Map Open Space asks artists, activists, and academics to consider the digital environments on networked communication in relation to radical cartography and data visualization. In short, the exhibit continues the work of the previous exhibitions that Sharon Lin Tay and I have curated for FLEFF since 2007.

Map Open Space does, however, take a more specific focus on work that engages with the unsettled and ongoing debates and conversations about anything that falls under FLEFF’s rubric for the environment — public health, war, labor rights, women’s rights, human rights — according to the technical and imaginative possibilities of web-based projects. We were less interested in work that could be streamed online, for example, than we were interested in work that could only operate, run, or happen online.

We are very fortunate to have South...

Blog written by Dale Hudson,co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of ‘Map Open Space’ exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

In his monthly column in an issue of Sight & Sound last summer, Nick Roddick reasserted what many critics have already made clear: “the old cinema paradigm” continues to face challenges after movie audiences, particularly in the global North, have enjoyed nearly two decades of screening media online.

Roddick notes three angles of “attack” by new media paradigms: (1) screenings are more likely individual acts involving an “iPod with earphones” than collective acts in a theater; (2) a top-selling videogame, such as Grand Theft Auto IV, is more profitable for transnational media corporations than a movie, such as Pirates of the Caribbean 2 — and, moreover, such videogames are “often narratively more sophisticated”; and (3) the film industry now faces a situation comparable to that faced by the music industry in pervious decades in the form of de-centered...

Call for New Media Art:
Map Open Space,
a juried competition and exhibition for FLEFF 2010

The Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival (FLEFF) launches a yearlong exploration of nomadic routes and provisional maps in Open Space. We invite submissions of radical cartography and other new media art that engage the themes of mapping and spatiality in a juried competition and online exhibition, Map Open Space. Two prizes of $US200 will be awarded: a jury’s prize and a curators’ prize.

Open Space assumes myriad forms. It migrates across diverse practices. It loosens multiple meanings. It roves across technologies, social relations, landscape design, politics, ecology, development, critical theory, and media formations. Open Space swaps rigid vertical hierarchies for more fluid horizontal modes. Open Space serves as a catalyst for collaboration, communication, and convergence. It spawns biodiversity, public usage, green neighbourhoods, cultural resources, and land protection beyond development. Open...

Blog posting written by Sharon Lin Tay, Map Open Space curator and film/video/new media theorist at Middlesex University, England

A weekend in sunny Rome saw me playing the tourist at the Colloseum. Looking down at the arena from my vantage point several floors up in the seating area, I tried to imagine the gladiatorial spectacles that would have taken place there. I tried recalling all the bits of Roman history that I had studied at college in order to make sense of the ancient ruins I see before me.

Much of the original arena is gone, but I was able to see the outlines of what would have been the subterranean floors where convicted criminals, prisoners of war, and assorted wild animals were kept. The flat, horizontal structural outline of the subterrenean levels was fascinating and pleasurable to look at, and I had a good few minutes of picturing Russell Crowe on an imaginary arena fighting the lions.

I suppose it's a similar thing when we think about...

Dale Hudson is an assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos and co-curator with Sharon Lin Tay of Map Open Space exhibit at FLEFF 2010.

Try to remember a time when it wasn’t possible to book your own flights or make your own hotel reservation online, when it wasn’t possible to pay your credit-card bills and your manage bank account with a few key stokes?  It’s like trying to remember life before mobile phones.  How did people manage?  Or, phrased differently, who performed labor before everything became self-service?

It seems that almost any service can be rendered online.  Do it yourself — no bother of scheduling one’s time around someone else’s office hours, no bother of taking the subway to some remote part of town or a train out to the suburbs.  Just open a web browser, upload personal data, and click a mouse.  DIY service is now a marker of convenience.

This convenience, of course, is another form of outsourcing.  As consumers, we work for transnational...

Blog written by Sharon Lin Tay, film/video/digital theorist and curator, Middlesex University

The Borders bookshop near where I live has a little section dedicated to local history. Trying to while away 15 minutes while waiting for someone to show up this weekend, I browsed through Gavin Smith's Islington in Old Photographs.

It is interesting to see photographs of what your neighbourhood looked like in the 19th century. In particular, I was particularly struck by pictures of the Archway Bridge.

The Archway Bridge sits above the Archway Road (duh!) between the Highgate and Archway tube (subway) stations. It's not a particularly salubrious stretch of road; in fact, I look at it as a stretch of cement to be endured to get from one place to another.

It doesn't help that Londoners regularly refer to it as The Suicide Bridge.

Yet, in that book of old black and white photographs, the Suicide Bridge looks rather more dignified.

I learnt that it was once a much narrower gateway, and one photograph depicts it...

Blog written by Dale Hudson is an assistant professor at Texas State University–San Marcos. His work on global cinemas and new media appears in Afterimage, Cinema Journal, Journal of Film and Video, Screen, and Studies in Documentary Film. He has been a co-curator of new media art for FLEFF since 2006.

The more waiting lounges that broadcast the CNN Airport Network, the less news seems to travels, particularly on September 11th. The static of U.S. patriotic affirmations can effectively generate a ‘media blackout’ on the day’s events.

Despite the cable network’s statistical claims in its press kit, I did not feel better informed about what was happening in the world, nor did I feel that its special news broadcast enhanced the airport environment. As CNN blasted on the LCD flat-panel display screens that surrounded me, I quickly realized it was not a day to get stuck in an airport without access to a 3G...

From Sharon Lin Tay, online digital arts curator for FLEFF 2010 and professor at Middlesex University, London, England

As I began writing this blog, I am hoping that I won't die from the three large painful blotches on my legs that show no sign of subsiding--despite overdosing on antihistamine.

I got them from some nasty bug while digging in my friend Carol's allotment in the English countryside over the weekend.

I'm cultivating my green fingers,  and  volunteering as farm labourer in the late summer when the fruit and vegetables are ripe for harvest is a very good way to go about it.

There are more tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, and raspberries than Carol knows what to do with. I have carted home enough vegetables to last a week.

Most readers of this blog are no doubt familiar with the mad and obsessive way in which the English garden and the allotment function as a visual and soil testament to the inalienable right to garden.

The community garden is a space of congeniality...

I received excellent treatment from my physiotherapist for my upper back pain and was able to complete the hot 168km Bike Rally 2010.  Physiotherapists in Singapore are like physical therapists in the U.S., however they are not yet licensed professionals though acupuncturists are. They are working with the government to change their status. 

My physiotherapist, Sylvia Ho, co-founder of Core Concepts Physiotherapy Centre, was trained in Australia where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  She prefers to use manipulative therapy and massage to ultrasound or electrical stimulation machines. She believes my discomfort came from a major change in my ergonomics related to my daily use of 2 computers at new desks and subsequent poor posture. My upper back and neck pain improved more with each visit, exercises she recommended I do at home, and...

Alexander Zehnder is the Scientific Director of the Alberta Water Research Institute in Edmonton, Canada. A few weeks ago, he gave a lecture entitled “Water for Life, For How Many?”  at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore where I am currently Visiting Associate Professor. 

Zehnder listed 6 major challenges facing the world regarding water:

Good water for a growing population

Water induced disasters protection

3)   The water infrastructure for distribution and collection

4)   The distribution of water between humans and ecosystems

5)   Solutions for water conflicts and fair water share for all

I finally gave in and saw a health provider for my painful upper back. It felt like a bad stiff neck that normally would go away in a couple of days. Only it didn’t go away.

I made an appointment with an orthopedist. He had a tiny two room office in a fancy medical center complex. There was no examining table in the room only a bench. He spent about 3 minutes asking me questions and said I needed an x-ray, which I got immediately by going down the hall to an imaging clinic.  I waited for the results and they gave me the x-rays to take back to the doctor.

Back in his office, the doctor said that my problem was inflammation. He recommended an injection of shincort and a course of the medication celebrex. I  had never heard of shincort and asked him if it was like cortisone. He said it was a new and improved version. I am never eager to get invasive treatments, but I was in pain and desperate to heal (I signed up for a 168km bike ride at the end of the month) so I...

Since the beginning of January, I have been living in Singapore. It is almost exactly halfway around the globe from my home in Ithaca. The plane from Newark that brought me here traveled due north to the North Pole, then due south to Singapore.   It is a mere 85 miles north of the equator. Ithaca, it is not.

If you twirl a globe or look at a world map you will notice that the equator traverses mostly water. Going west from Singapore, it crosses Maldives then Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Congo, Sao Tome and Principe, and Gabon in sub-Saharan Africa .  It cuts across the Amazon in northern Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador in South America. From there, it’s a long ocean passage west to Kiribati and Indonesia, with Singapore nearby.

This geographic location made me think about the health issues of people who live near the equator, where the weather is hot and sticky in some places, hot and dry in others, but always hot. Images of the equator conjure worries of insects...

 I cannot recount the number of times in the past few weeks friends, relatives, students, and strangers have asked me whether they should get the H1N1 vaccine.

 Some are concerned about the side effects or wonder whether the vaccine has been tested. Parents are worried for their young children.  They are concerned about the claims of links between vaccines and autism even if they know that there has never been a credible study demonstrating it.  Some of my students say that the flu sucks, but it isn’t bad enough to get a vaccine.  They ask: Is it effective? Will the vaccine make me sick?

 Let me be clear: I am neither a physician nor a scientist.  On the other hand, many don’t seem to trust physicians or scientists who claim the benefits of the vaccine with near unanimity even while some admit that we really will not know how effective the...

 What we really need is health reform, not just health insurance reform.

 Interesting, exciting, confusing, frustrating, and disappointing are just few of the more generous terms I can use to describe the current state of what is being called the “health reform” debate in the U.S. 

 I pose a few basic questions and respond based on what the likely outcome appears to be: an private insurance-based system with no “public option”.

 Is it really “health reform”? 

Hardly.  Let’s call it “health insurance reform.” It’s about removing one major barrier for those without health insurance: money. However, providers of care – hospitals, physicians, and others- do not have to accept whatever payment system will be in place. So access may still be...

I don’t need to know if you are sick. Or do I? How about if you have a contagious illness? Perhaps H1N1? 

Fortunately, the latest pandemic has not been as fatal as we had feared. While tragedy has struck some families, the death rate is about the same as or less than seasonal flu. Most of those who have perished had prior illnesses or conditions that left them susceptible to opportunistic infections like H1N1.

In the Ithaca community, tragedy struck a Cornell senior who became the third college student to die from H1N1 in the US.  We do not know if any prior conditions contributed to his death. Yet, headlines in the Cornell Daily Sun this week read:

Hospital Says It Has Not Discussed Whether Any Underlying Condition Contributed to H1N1 Death

The laws are clear: patient privacy is secure and protected. Only the patient or the family has the right to grant access to health...

Public health spaces are everywhere.

Public health is about prevention through collective action involving teams of health professionals from engineers, to basic scientists, policy makers, health providers, and dozens of others.

Medical Care is about treatment and cure primarily revolving around the physicians’ treatment of individuals. About 95% of resources in the US go toward medical care.

So as public health advocate, medical care is “strange” to me as in the metaphorical sense that Heinlein presented in his famous novel. This blog will attempt to articulate my public health position as a counterpoint to the dominance of medical care.

In other words, I am a public health stranger spying on the spaces occupied and colonized by medical care. 

What's now known as the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City is quite the place.  The office and residence of former President Nguyen Van Thieu, the corrupt dictator that the U.S. installed into power after the U.S. assisted suicide of Ngo Dinh Diem, marks a startling contrast to Ho Chi Minh's stilt house up north, and perhaps better than anything, symbolically encapsulates the reason for the South's fall. It's done in a style that could be best described as 1960s modernist, with unintentional references to Hugh Hefner and Andy Warhol.  The Vietnamese government wisely left it open and intact after the fall of Saigon, as living testament to the pretensions and isolation the U.S. backed...

I finished my trip down the coast of Vietnam at Mui Ne, a long string of resorts and hotels on the southern coast.  From here, it's the bus to HCMC.  There's rule somewhere that the last day of a bicycle tour has to be the hardest, and that turned out to be the case, lengthy with a strong headwind. But the last 50k or so was on an unpopulated secondary road up through sand dunes and a couple of small villages, and it was spectacularly beautiful.  

A few random notes from the trip:

North to South:  As you move southward, Vietnam seems to become more prosperous.  The South is where most of the big tourist places are (other than Hanoi).  It reminds me of Thailand.  But the North is more interesting with its greater relative isolation from the global everything.

Food:  I love the open-air Vietnamese restaurants, where friends and families sit in large groups together.  The seafood has been amazing. Sometimes there's a menu and sometimes not. But we usually figure...

Highway One out of Hanoi heading south seems more like a long street than a highway.  It's crowded with stalls selling food, water, clothing, motorcycle repairs, and lots of other things, most of the way down to the DMZ.  Leaving Hanoi on my bicycle I was surrounded by thousands of motorbikes, a parade of trucks, as well as bicyclists like myself.  I'm getting used to all the honking.

Once away from the city, I have clearly been perceived as an oddity.  Granted, I look completely out of place on my loaded-up mountain bike, wearing black bicycle shorts, a blue jersey, and now faded Sundance Film Festival baseball cap.  Kids have been yelling "hello," to me much of the way down.  If I don't answer, they just get louder and louder.  When I...

I left Mongolia last Saturday, or was it Sunday?  In any event, I flew to Singapore to drop in on colleagues and fellow-bloggers, Stewart Auyash and Patty Zimmermann.  The later, of course, co-director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival.  They gave me a great tour of the city, which, as far as I can tell, is one of the most well-planned, not just in Asia, but in the entire world.  Quite a contrast to Ulaanbaatar, which struggles with over-population and continuous stress on its overburdened infrastructure.

On Tuesday I arrived in Hanoi, for the final leg of my Asian tour, which will involve bicycling from here to Ho Chi Minh City in the South.  Given the impact that Vietnam has had upon me in the few days that I have been here, I thought that an occasional blog post might of interest as I make my way down the coast.

I have never been to a place like Hanoi.  The sheer level of human activity is completely mind-boggling.  The streets are filled with Vietnamese and (in the Old Quarter where I am staying)...

This will be my last posting from Mongolia. It's hard to believe that my time here is almost over. And, as always, my final memories are of the wonderful people that I've had an opportunity to meet  while here, especially my colleagues on the Political Science Department of the National University of Mongolia. 

We had a misunderstanding as to when I was going to leave, so I actually had arranged a ticket for the day that they wanted to throw a going-away party for me out in the countryside.  I felt bad, but there really wasn't much that I could do to change the flight, once I had it booked.

But today Undrakh said that I should drop by the office at around four so everyone could say
goodbye.  I got there at around 3:50, and only Dovchin was there, so I thought, well, at least
I'll get a change to say goodbye to him. Besides, I'd had lunch with Turo and Ultzii last week.

But then around 4:10, people started showing up, and they brought pizza and beer, and, of
course vodka.  We had a really...

I took the bus out to Kharkhorin over the weekend.  The old Mongolian capitol is a six-and-a-half hour bus ride from Ulaanbaatar.  First you have to get yourself to the bus station, out on the edge of town, no easy task with the roads all torn up for repairs.

Much of the terrain, at least at first, looks like West Texas. The wind raised large clouds of dust, and when the rain fell through, it landed on the bus’s windshield as mud.   I was on the lookout for the dead cattle carcasses, given what I’ve read about the effects of the zud, and saw a few here and there. 

There’s only one official stop along the way, in a little town that seemed like Mongolia’s version of Tombstone Gulch---dry,...

In 1995, my second semester in Moldova, I taught a course on Environmental Politics. It was a tough sell.  I don’t know how many times my students told me, “Our lives are difficult.  This material isn’t relevant to us.”   I pushed it for a while.

Moldova, I insisted, had significant environmental problems, one of which was the poor water quality.  In the Soviet days, copper sulfate was used as an pesticide, and Chisinau’s water supply was heavily silted with it. 

But the students continued to communicate their lack of concern.  Eventually, I gave up, and we focused on their interests:  colloquial English and American popular culture.

With that in mind, I didn’t include such a course when I applied for...

Thursday after class Turo asked if I was interested in visiting the Chinggis Khan Statue Complex over the weekend.  He had a couple of friends in town who had expressed some interest.  I jumped at the opportunity.  I'd read about it in the New York Times just before I left for Mongolia. 

We drove the 30 miles or so out to the site on a warm, windy Saturday afternoon.  It’s been dry this spring. Out in the countryside, you can see large columns of dust rising up over the landscape. The terrain, driving eastward, is rolling hills and grasslands, reminding me of the American West.  After the city’s abrupt end, you see only small herds of cattle and the occasional ger.  

The huge stainless steel statue offers a marked, almost surreal, contrast to the open spaces that surround it.  Turo said that the developer...

Unlike the National History Museum, which is a top notch, the Mongolian Natural History Museum is a little rough around the edges.  The floors have the lumpy brownish linoleum that I now associate with the Soviet era.

The building is large with a warren of interconnected halls and exhibit rooms.  It’s easy to get lost.  Some of the exhibits could use a good dusting. Some descriptive labels are starting to yellow. 

But, in spite of its shortcomings, I felt an immediate connection.  It has some gems, such as the camel exhibit and one on wild Mongolian horses.  Two large maps detail locations of all the various flora and fauna across Mongolia. And, of course, getting lost isn’t always a bad thing. 

The dinosaur rooms are another highlight.  Except maybe for some...

Every day while I have been in Mongolia, or virtually every day, I have gone to the Orchlon Health Club.  Thirty-five minutes on the treadmill. Thirty five minutes on the exercise bike.  Before I came here, other than in hotels, I'd never used either before. I prefer being outside.  But that's not possible in UB for a variety of reasons involving traffic, weather, pollution, and, well, everything.

This has given me an opportunity to listen to music while I exercise, something I've never done before either.  I bought an iPod, and I have enjoyed having it. I downloaded several hundred cds before I came, but am always looking for something new.  I learned how to get around the Amazon blocks on international downloads.

As a result, I have listened to a lot of music while here, more even than when I am back home. And since I'm listening to music while working out, I have definite requirements.  Primarily,...

Last semester, after one of my lectures on the origins of the U.S. constitutional system, my colleague Ultzii said, “America has a short history, but an interesting one.”  I guess it depends on where you start. But I got the point the other day when I visited the National Museum of Mongolia. Lonely Planet  describes it as a “national treasure,” which seems to be a fitting description.

Three floors of carefully arranged exhibits take a visitor through the vast stretch of Mongolian history. Mongolia was one of the first settled places on the planet, and early stone implements date to nearly 800,000 BC.  These are followed by examples of Bronze Age deer stones, rectangular structures, with inscribed images of deer and other animals, which apparently once dotted...

I have had two language teachers this semester. I left my university class, because of the daily time commitment that it required, and I thought I’d make better progress with a tutor.  UB has lots of language schools, mostly teaching English to Mongolians.  I think I’m the only student at my school studying Mongolian.

Over time, I’ve learned that the place is a bit of a sweatshop .  Teachers have many students, many hours, and relatively low pay.  Both Nada and Oyuna have expressed dissatisfaction, and we’ve discussed strategies for them to deal with it. 

About three weeks ago, Nada told me that she was going to apply for a job with the Oyu Tolgoi Mining consortium. They require that their employees, at least at the staff and administrative levels, speak English. So, while the job was entry-level, as a receptionist, it required...

When I first arrived in Mongolia, I had a meeting with three Fulbright Research students and the U.S. Embassy’s Public Information Officer. I’d only been here for a few days and was just getting oriented, but something the embassy official said stuck:  Mongolia is a place in rapid transition.

I first noticed this with the roads.  When I arrived, there were huge traffic jams, as first one, then another of the main roads in town were shut down for a rehab.  Then one day I noticed that the sidewalk that I’d been using had been ripped up and workers were starting to replace the tiles. After a few weeks, the newly paved roads reopened, and the traffic jams moderated (although they have by no means disappeared).  

Around the same time, Mongolia signed an agreement with the Canadian firm, Ivanhoe, to develop...

Over time, I have developed a deep appreciation of the beauty of the Mongolian language, and, along with it, the use of that language to create Mongolian names.

Other than with hippies and hip hop artists, American names tend to be fairly mundane, and detached from any linguistic meaning.  The same could not be said of Mongolian names. I got a hint of this when, before I arrived, I did a little research on Ulaanbaatar and learned that the city’s name combines ulaan, or red, with baatar or hero.  The city was renamed in the 1920s, by socialist revolutionaries, to reflect the glory of the recent revolution.

Once here, you quickly notice that baatar crops up frequently.  Sukhbaatar, one of the founders of the modern Mongolian state, has a name that means axe hero. The first person that I met in Mongolia, who at the time worked for the

How big was the crowd at last Monday’s protest?  An AP report put the number at ten thousand, but the New York Times said five.  My Mongolian language tutor Oyuna, who was there about the same time that I was, estimated two or three, matching the UB Post  estimate of  “several thousand.”  

What are the aims?  During the last election, a number of parliamentary candidates apparently promised each Mongolian 1.5 million Tugroks (approximately $1000) if elected.   Two years later, they haven’t delivered.  But the demands go beyond that. Teachers, for example, who held their own march on Sunday, want a raise.

It’s not uncoincidental that such a...

At my Mongolian language lesson yesterday morning, my teacher Nada mentioned that there would be a political demonstration at Sukhbaatar Square later in the day.  I asked why. She said that the government hadn’t been keeping its promises, and the cost of living had continued to rise. President Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, elected last June, as a member of the Democratic Party, was a particular target of ire.  I told her that I wanted to go check things out.  “Be careful,” she said.

After the 2008 election, a demonstration occurred at the Square in response to the results. Some demonstrators converged on the headquarters of the People’s Revolutionary Party and set fire to it.  Five people were killed. ...

After the Soviets had disposed of  P. Genden, Anandyn Amar was appointed as Prime Minister. Within the year, he would be accused of collaborating with the Japanese, tried and executed in Moscow.  The Soviets installed Khorgoolhiin Choibalsan as leader.  And he is the Mongolian leader now most closely associated with the purge.  The primary targets were Buddhist Lamas, but Buryats and intellectuals were often included as well.

The Buryats, closely related to Mongolians, but considered a separate ethnic group, traversed the Russian-Mongolian border.  They actively resisted Soviet collectivization efforts in the  late 1920s. After an unsuccessful rebellion, put down by the Red Army, many fled to Mongolia. Stalin apparently reserved a special antipathy for them.

An accurate...