I was supposed to go to an event for sopitas.com last week. As you remember I could not go so I went to Grupo Reforma’s sixth art show at the Siqueiros gallery at the WTC on Insurgentes ave in Mexico city. One of my friends had a painting he made in the gallery compiting for a prize.
The next picture is my friend’s painting. I really liked it. It looks like he really put an effort into his work.
Different types of paintings. Oil, acrylic and other interesting tecniques. Take a look at the following pictures I took in the gallery. The picture I liked the most is the one with the corona beer and a piece of of meat, half a cow to be exact…
Do you remember your junior year, back in 2004, filling up your college application late at night, so you could put it in the “mailbox” and have the mailman take it to the post office, and weeks after you´d be waiting for days at your window waiting for the mailman to come back with your college applications and see if you actually got accepted into UCLA, USC, Rio Hondo College or Cerritos College, etc, etc? Man, I would be stuck on the couch for hours, waiting impatiantly for about 2 weeks, until I finally recieved an answer. Wouldn´t it have been easier for me, if this same process could had been sent over the internet, using gmail like nowadays?
This was the vision of a great mind, Nicholas Negroponte, who is a Greek American architect, best known as the founder and Chairman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab (MIT), he is a pioneer in the field of computer-aided design and also considered a guru in the communications field, as his predictions traveled the entire world only to have them all come true, . He had a phrase “Move bits, not atoms” part of his Wired Magazine campaign. Founder of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) a non profitable foundation.
Being digital (1995) is basically a compilation of his columns from Wired, and turned it into a best selling book, in which he makes a forecast on how the interactive world of communications will come to be what we know now, prophesying that wired technologies such as telephones would definitely need to become unwired, known as the Negroponte switch.
This Negroponte switch, describes, how the future of communication would cease to be wired, only to be taken wireless, transform the atoms into bits. In other words, make all data transfer possible without using a cable, but through air waves at the speed of light. He knew and stated “The change from atoms to bits is irrevocable and unstoppable”. Since Negroponte´s ideas started to be very popular and very innovative, data compression and error correction techniques, all media, especially in the United Sates, is now digital, this is as a result of putting all sort of media, books, newspaper, video, music, images into bits, creating then the multimedia.
I think this has made us more and more dependent of technology nowadays. I cannot imagine myself a day without my cellular phone. Yes the atoms are now bits. I keep my emails, messages, pictures, books, documents and even very important files in my cellphone´s memory. Negroponte pointed out that the hardware, sometimes is not as valuable as the software. Take for example your cellphone, when you happen to loose it, what hurts more? Loosing your phone, or loosing all of your contacts, your messages, maybe some extraordinary pictures you took or files that you considered to be very valuable? Of course you can always buy a cellphone, but your info you wanted is now long gone and unable to get back. Although it is very convenient, it is also risky. Specially if you are in Mexico City.
The internet has been part of digitizing the world. Where the internet users have increased %400 in homes and personal computers, having up to over 2 billion people as of January 2011. Thanks to the bits its possible for us to now have a WIFI connection, new technologies that were developed as a result of changing the bandwidth from copper and/or fiber optic cable to air waves we can now have microchips, mp3 players, answer machines and computers. All of these items and tools help our lives be more at ease, keeps us less busy with our activities and gives us more free time to spare. We are relaxed, less dependent of people. However, it is ironic how the less dependent we are from people, the more we rely on technology. But then again, as the author said “Bits will be borderless, stored and manipulated with no respect to geopolitical boundaries.”
Without a doubt, being digital, has been a major breakthrough not only in the communications area, but in many such as in the business world, sports, literature, art and many others for being in the market, advertising has played and important role as the technologies advance. They have become part of our daily life, the remote control, the ipod, a tablet, all part of our activities that, because of our job, school or business, we must use and take advantage of.
Below there is a very interesting video, take a quick glance!
“Being digital is empowering; the access, the mobility and the ability to affect…”
Jeff Wall is a “visual artist“, a Canadian photographer from the city of Vancouver, born in 1946. Best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver’s art scene since the early-1970s. He just wanted to have a “nice” photograph and he made a lot of recreations.
This is some of his work I really liked. A photograph based on Hokusai’s painting “Travelers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri”. Hokusai lived from 1760 to 1849, before the invention of cinema.
“Travelers Caught in a Sudden breeze at Ejiri” by Hokusai
Mmm, well talked about the type of colors. I saw this ad on my way home. I really liked it. But, would you consider this as complementary color? They sure are two contrasting colors and an very attractive ad for this movie “Diente por diente”
¿Te ha pasado que vas al cine y a lo mejor la película que viste, no tuvo un buen guion, pero que fotográficamente fue impactante? ¿Cuál es tu criterio de buen cine o buena fotografía? Cada quien tiene diferentes perspectivas e interpretaciones. Lo que sí podemos afirmar es que el cine y la fotografía son hermanos de la misma madre, son dos lenguajes complementarios que se alimentan mutuamente.
Lenguajes complementarios
Podríamos decir que la fotografía es la hermana mayor del cine. Es decir, el cine, tal y como lo conocemos, se basa en los principios de la fotografía, que es el arte y la técnica de obtener imágenes duraderas a través de la luz. Así, podríamos afirmar que el cine aparece gracias a los experimentos con la cámara oscura y a la invención de la fotografía, pero con un objetivo muy diferente, el cine surge de la idea de crear movimiento en la imagen, prácticamente es la técnica de proyectar fotogramas de forma rápida y sucesiva para crear la impresión de movimiento, mostrando algún vídeo.
En los años 90´s comienza la digitalización de la fotografía.
Con la digitalización de la fotografía y el cine moderno, este medio a visto su apogeo y continua sorprendiéndonos hasta hoy en día. Desde la cámara digital de hoy en día, las grandes producciones de Hollywood y nuestra creatividad han dado cabida a técnicas usadas hoy por cineastas caseros como el time lapseo el stop motion. Así que no es de extrañarse que encontremos a muchos fotógrafos incursionando en la pantalla grande para jugar con el movimiento de las imágenes, o a grandes cineastas que se distraigan con la fotografía, como otro medio para expresar sus ideas.
Hoy en día los exponentes que me parecen más interesantes son Stalin Kubric, Wim Wenders, y David Lynch, famosos cineastas que tienen un interesante trabajo fotográfico.
Aquí hay un video de propaganda para la primera película a color “Becky Sharp”
Alfredo el "fLAkoH" Artista 