Gatochy's "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

The "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award, created by Mariana Pinheiro of Gatochy-fame, is a way to counter-attack Blogger's censorship of erotic blogs, by drawing attention to the fact that many of these have quality content. More and more often you can´t visit fine blogds without the ridiculous splash screen by google/blogger that states that "Some readers of this blog have contacted Google because they believe this blog's content is objectionable...". This stupid content warning suggest in it´s quiete objectionable wording that porn, hate or racism lurk behind, where instead engaged bloggers present fine art that may (OMG) contain nudity.

I wish there was this list of sites censored by Blogger. I'd bet good money that they are ALL, without exception, censored for sexual content, and that not a single one is racist, or homophobic, or anything else like that would actually be a good reason for considering it offensive.
Mariana Pinheiro


expand to meet the first four laureates of the "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award.

Gatochy's first "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

art nudes



The internet has really influenced fine art photography in that the visual vernacular of pornography is being increasingly referenced. Sometimes the references are ironic and critical, sometimes celebratory, and sometimes fine art photographers shoot work that is simply pornographic. This is particularly true of ‘fetish’ photography, as it is by nature full of photographic potential. Psychologically, it’s about power relationships, sexual politics, and violence. Visually, it’s got great dark moody themes, shiny latex and all the various accoutrements that go along with it. Nonetheless, I seldom post that type of work, unless the photography is exceptional

Michael Barnes art nudes

Gatochy's second "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

Au carrefour étrange



My last blog has been censored because there were a pic of Brassaï when you could see a tit… a 1930’s pic with no pornographic content at all… and I didn’t want to delete the picture… So this time I prefered to anticipate the censors…it’s just SAD but I prefer to do that that to see hundreds hours of work disappear in 5 seconds…To describe my site in english is complicated… let’s say that this place exists to show that connections exist between surrealism, erotic popular expressions, science-fiction, B-movies etc… And this is a crossroad where all this cultures can be found. To me the crossroad is a place of magic and creativity.

Losfeld, Au carrefour étrange

Gatochy's third "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

fine Nudes



This blog was from the beginning on something like my personal collection of fine nude photography, something like the book I would print if I had the chance to do so, or the pieces I would like to hang on my walls. It is my very own definition of what I believe to be art in this specific genre. This definition of art is not only very personal, it is also something that is beyond language, something that cannot be defined by tags, labels or rules.Anyone who tries to approach art by using terms like objectionable or NSFW hasn´t understand anything at all.

fine Nudes

Gatochy's fourth "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" Award

A Flower A Day



photo by Ray Bidegain

This award is my way of showing solidarity with fellow bloggers whose sites have been censored by Blogger for puritanical reasons that, in my view, are just not justifiable. It's common for bloggers who have been tagged with the dreaded "I Understand and I Wish to Continue" splash screen to lose at least half of their usual visitors, because people just assume the screen must be there for a reason -- a good reason. If this award can in some way help to dispel that prejudice, I'll be happy.
Mariana Pinheiro

this just in

Madonna´s Home Destroyed By Jesus

Switzerland To Be Devoured By Black Hole

my inbox would be nothing without the spammers

Cities, Memory and Urban Development

China in Freiburg

Under Construction by Liu Zhenchen, 2007, 9 min

City planners decide to pull down parts of Shanghai’s old town in order to regenerate the city. Every year over hundred thousand families are forced to leave their homes and moveinto buildings on the edge of city. This video is a 2 and 3 dimentional flight across the now destroyed living areas of Shanghai which shows how random and brutal decisions can affect peoples’s lives.
Liu Zhenchen is a video artist who studied at Le Fresnoy art school who lives and works in China and France.

Marina Foxley, long time curator for Chinese independent cinema at Directors Lounge, is coming to Freiburg today (Tuesday) presenting a dedicated program of short documentaries at the Kommunales Kino. The subject deals with cities in China (Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou) and the urban development. Included are some of this years highlights of the February Lounge, like Under Construction and The Bridge.
Don´t miss this screening if you are in town

“The Bridge” is a non-narrative documentary on the border to the cinematic essay, comparable perhaps to the films NYC and Belgrade films we had seen on Monday, but with a decisive political undertone. The film's subject is the gigantic Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge, which is not only a important part of Nanjing's infrastructure, but also a kind of monument to the Chinese People's Republic's engineering potential. Xu Xin's film, though, ignores the heroic aspect of the bridge, focussing rather on small scenes of people somehow associated with the bridge or simply passing by, like a young tourist couple taking pictures, some workers whiling away time in their cabin or a man in a raincoat trying to cross bridge at a traffic light, which – judging from the display attached to the lights – is set to just 7 seconds, so crossing it within the allocated time frame and not getting stuck in the middle of the road seems like a veritable feat in itself. Obviously – besides taking pictures for your album –, the bridge is not intended for any kind of true interaction between architecture and the people; a problem often plaguing institutions and structures in political systems which have to put the identifier “People's” into their denomination, as the connection between “people” and “society” might be eventually overlooked otherwise. There is an irony to the social realist statue depicting the traditional warrior/worker/doctrinaire standing on the side of the bridge, shown at the beginning of the film – it should have rather been a miniature replica of the bridge itself, or maybe the Chinese mainland (think of Ai Weiwei's sarcastic “Map of China”, carved from the remnants of a destroyed historical temple), instead of any kind of even aesthetically & politically streamlined individual. Unsurprisingly, the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge is a popular suicide venue in China; Xu Xiu states a number of 2000 people at the end of the film, a supposedly unauthorised but still shocking statistic.

Jacob Birken

expand for program and location details



Cities, Memory and Urban Development

Kommunales Kino, a film art house theater in Freiburg (in Germany), organizes a special evening on China on Tuesday, July the 22nd 2008 from 7:30pm. A program of recent short documentaries proposed by Fragments will be presented and the subject deals with cities in China (Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, Guangzhou) and the urban development. The screening will be followed by another screening of the film Fish and Elephant by Li Yu (2001).

Under Construction (Liu Zhenchen, 2007, 9 min)
Rice and Coins (MaiZi, 2007, 1 min)
Floating Memory (Liu Wei, 2001, 10 min)
Up and Down (Wang Wo, 2007, 12 min)
The Bridge (Xu Xin, 2007, 16 min)
Lead To (Zhao Dayong, 2007, 12 min)
Perform (MaiZi, 2007, 1 min)
Empty Room (Zhang Xuezhou, 2006, 5 min)

full program (pdf)


Kommunales Kino,
Urachstr. 40, 79102 Freiburg, Germany

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Mona

The Real Story of the Superheroes V • Batman, the early years

The day comes when you leave your home and save the world

part of an ongoing series about The Real Story of the Superheroes



via superbomba

SING HAPPY SONGS

Olive says:

Hello, my dear friends. I'm very pleased you've found my blob's new address.


Mike often encourages people to sing more songs, and I've found that it helps me whenever I feel sad. If you're feeling blue, sing a happy song out loud. People might think you're going round the bend, but don't let that worry you.

I love singing that old favourite, Happy Days are Here Again.

Happy days are here again
The skies above are clear again
So let's sing a song of cheer again
Happy days are here again

I also enjoy singing that catchy Disney tune: Zippity Doo-dah
Zippity doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay
My, oh my, what a wonderful day
Plenty of sunshine headin' my way
Zippity-doo-dah, zip-a-dee-ay

Olive Riley, reputed to be the world's oldest internet blogger, she turned 108 last year, had posted more than 70 entries about her life since she began her blog (She referred to her blog as a ‘blob’) in February 2007.

She shared her thoughts on modern life and experiences of living through the entire 20th Century, including two world wars and the Great Depression.

In her final entry on 26 June, she described singing a happy song at her care home with nurses and a visitor.

Olive Riley passed away peacefully in the nursing home in New South Wales on Saturday.

... She will be mourned by thousands of internet friends and hundreds of descendants and other relatives.

Janez Vlachy

Through the camera’s lens, Janez Vlachy channels distinctive creative insight in order to capture fleeting and highly sensuous instants of time. His photographs, which have been recognized within the international art scene for over a decade (in 1988, he received the first international award of note in Luxembourg), nostalgically evoke the atmosphere of a passed age, one in which photography did not yet engage with its mimetic and positivistic nature. In these images, color, composition and perspective, which can be reduced to mere formalisms if depleted of an author’s idiosyncratic imprint, are skillfully handled and infused with a distinguishing, sensual charm. Vlachy’s luxurious photographs nurture the idea of an urbane eroticism as well as the pleasure of looking. But beyond this aesthetic sophistication, Vlachy’s pictures stage a deliberate examination of the age-old rapport between artist and model. While this exploration begins by emphasizing the voyeuristic gaze, it swiftly progresses to a more complex investigation of the model’s ambiguity. Combining sensuous playfulness with an undertone of restraint, Vlachy’s images highlight the model’s identity as indefinitely perched between vulnerability, influence and authority.

Janez Vlachy at gallery gora

The world of Risa Sato

She'll look South and he'll see West
He'll walk North and she'll run East
But let's stay together until we say "All the best!"
One, two, three
and the fourth is you

Four, size : h320 w 260 d 155 /cm, year : 2008, material : resin, steel flame, acrylic, etc.
place : Otemon Gakuin Kindergarten in Osaka










more at Risa Sato´s homepage and at foil gallery

media matters

Gary Hill Between Cinema and a Hard Place 1991 © Gary Hill; photograph Tate

Media Matters is a multi-phase project designed to provide guidelines for care of time-based media works of art (e.g., video, film, audio and computer based installations). The project was created in 2003 by a consortium of curators, conservators, registrars and media technical managers from New Art Trust, MoMA, SFMOMA and Tate. The consortium launched its first phase, on loaning time-based media works, in 2004, and its second phase, on acquiring time-based media works, in 2007.

Often only fully realised in their installed state, time-based media works are complex systems that pose new challenges for their custodians. Effective approaches to their stewardship rely on the blending of traditional museum practice with new modes of operating that derive from and respond to the complex nature of these installations. In many cases artists are very specific about the way in which the work should be installed and the technology used to show it. The installation of these works requires new skills and new areas of collaboration within museums. Whereas internationally agreed standards exist for the handling, installation and care of traditional works of art, there are no such standards at present for time-based media works. This project aims to raise awareness of the requirements of these works and to provide a practical response to the need for international agreement among museums.

The challenge of preserving time-based media is best met collaboratively, and it is the consortium's hope that others will not only benefit from this information but will also contribute over time to the further refinement of the methods of care for these works of art. We hope this material will be an aid to artists, collectors, dealers and museums, the primary custodians of time-based media.

the gentle migration of the golden rays

Looking like giant leaves floating in the sea thousands of Golden Rays are seen here gathering off the coast of Mexico. The spectacular scene was captured as the magnificent creatures, that measure up to 7ft (2.1 metres) from wing-tip to wing-tip, made one of their biannual mass migrations to more agreeable waters.



Gliding silently beneath the waves they turned vast areas of blue water to gold off the northern tip of the Yucatan Peninsula.Sandra Critelli, an amateur photographer, stumbled across the phenomenon while looking for whale sharks.
She said: "It was an unreal image, very difficult to describe. The surface of the water was covered by warm and different shades of gold and looked like a bed of autumn leaves gently moved by the wind.

By Nick Allen

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Lilian Bourgeat

Objets extraordinaires 1998-2008, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole, France, 2008 © P. Guenat

Rétroviseurs, 2007

Rétroviseurs, 2007

Le diner de Gulliver, 2008

By blurring reference marks, Lilian Bourgeat distorts the perception of not only the objects themselves, but also the space where they are installed.

Focusing on the ties between art and world, via the relationship of representation and perception, he questions our comprehension of reality and disturbs the natural process by which we understand the world around us.


Lilian Bourgeat at frank elbaz till July 31

via re-title