fieldarts

[fieldarts]

Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) Full Documentary by Werner Herzog

Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a 2010 3D documentary film by Werner Herzog about the Chauvet Cave in southern France, which contains the oldest human-painted images yet discovered. Some of them were crafted around 32,000 years ago.[4][5] The film premiered at the 2010 Toronto International Film Festival[6] and consists of images from inside the cave as well as of interviews with various scientists and historians.[7] The film also includes footage of the nearby Pont d'Arc natural bridge.

Herzog's interest in the Chauvet cave was prompted by Judith Thurman's New Yorker article "First Impressions".[8] Thurman is listed as one of the co-producers of the film.

The cave is carefully preserved and the general public is not allowed to enter. Herzog received special permission from the French Minister of Culture to film inside the cave.[7] Having received permission, Herzog nonetheless had to film under heavy restrictions. All people authorized to enter must wear special suits and shoes that have had no contact with the exterior.[9] Also, because of near-toxic levels of radon and carbon dioxide, nobody can stay in the cave for more than a few hours per day.[2]

Herzog was allowed to have only three people with him in the cave: the cinematographer Peter Zeitlinger, a sound recorder (Eric Spitzer-Marlyn), and an assistant. Herzog himself worked the lights.[7] The crew was allowed to use only battery-powered[2] equipment they could carry into the cave themselves,[7] and only lights that gave off no excess heat.[1] The 3-D cameras were custom-built for the production, and were often assembled inside the cave itself.[7] Herzog was allowed six shooting days of four hours each.[7] The crew could not touch any part of the cave's wall or floor, and were confined to a 2-foot-wide (0.61 m) walkway.[7]

The production encountered several technical difficulties in working with the 3-D cameras in a documentary setting. At the time of production, 3-D films were typically shot on stages with heavy use of digital manipulation. Often, foreground and background elements would be shot separately and digitally composited into the finished shot. Techniques for 3-D filmmaking in natural environments with a single camera and no compositing were largely undeveloped, and had to be worked out experimentally by the crew in post-production.[10]

Before production of Cave of Forgotten Dreams, Herzog was skeptical of the artistic value of 3-D filmmaking, and had only seen one 3-D film (James Cameron's Avatar). Herzog still believes that 3-D is not suited for general use in cinema, but used it in Cave to help "capture the intentions of the painters", who incorporated the wall's subtle bulges and contours into their art.[7] The idea to use a 3-D camera for the film was first suggested by Zeitlinger, who had imagined before ever entering the cave that 3-D might be appropriate to capture the contours of the walls. Herzog dismissed the idea, believing 3-D to be (in Zeitlinger's words) "a gimmick of the commercial cinema". After visiting the cave, however, Herzog immediately decided that the film must be shot in 3-D.[10] After the production, Herzog stated that he had no plans to use 3-D again

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Visions in Meditation #3: Plato's Cave (Stan Brakhage, 1990)

Plato’s cave would seem to be the idee fixe of this film. The vortex would, then, be the phenomenological world . . . overwhelming and, naturally, therefore, equivocal so that, for example, even a tornado-in-the-making will be both ‘dust devil’ and ‘finger of God’ at one with clockwork sun and the strands of ice/fire horizon, rock clouds, and so on. The film is I believe, a vision of mentality as most people must (to the irritation of Plato) have it, safely encaved and metaphorical, for the nervous system to survive. All the same I hope, with this work, to have brought a little ‘rush light’ into the darkness. The film is set to the three movements of Rick Corrigan’s ‘Memory Suite’. Its multiple superimpositions are superbly timed by Louise Fujiki, of Western Cine, as usual. – S.B.

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Ten Canoes - Trailer

Ten Canoes is a 2006 Australian period drama film directed by Rolf de Heer and Peter Djigirr and starring Crusoe Kurddal. The title of the film arose from discussions between de Heer and David Gulpilil about a photograph of ten canoeists poling across the Arafura Swamp, taken by anthropologist Donald Thomson[1] in 1936.[2] It is the first ever movie entirely filmed in Australian Aboriginal languages.

The film is set in Arnhem Land, in a time before Western contact, and tells the story of a group of ten men hunting goose eggs. The leader of the group, Minygululu, tells the young Dayindi (Jamie Gulpilil) a story about another young man even further back in time who, like Dayindi, coveted his elder brother's youngest wife. The sequences featuring Dayindi and the hunt are in black and white, while shots set in distant past are in colour. All protagonists speak in indigenous languages of the Yolŋu Matha language group, with subtitles. The film is narrated in English by David Gulpilil, although versions of the film without narration, and featuring narration in Yolŋu Matha, are also available.

Minygululu tells a story of the great warrior Ridjimiraril, who suspects a visiting stranger of kidnapping his second wife. In a case of mistaken identity, Ridjimiraril kills a member of a neighbouring tribe. To prevent all-out war, tribal laws dictate that the offending tribe allow the offender to be speared from a distance by the tribe of the slain man. The offender is allowed to be accompanied by a companion, and he takes his younger brother, Yeeralparil. Whenever one of the two is hit, the spear-throwers will stop, and justice will have been served. Ridjimiraril is hit and mortally wounded but survives long enough to return to his camp, where he is tended to by his eldest wife. After he finally succumbs, the elder brother's kidnapped second wife finds her way back to the camp. She reveals that she had been kidnapped by a different tribe, much farther away and had taken this long to return. She mourns her lost husband, who had attacked the wrong tribe, though now she and the elder wife take his younger brother as their new husband. The younger brother, who was only interested in the youngest of the three wives, now has to care for all of them, and satisfying their many and constant demands is much more than he bargained for.

Minygululu tells this story in the hope that Dayindi learns of the added responsibilities of a husband and elder statesman in the tribe, and in the end we see Dayindi withdrawing from his pursuit of Minygululu's young wife.

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Len Lye - Exact from Free Radicals

Free Radicals is a black-and-white animated film short by avant-garde filmmaker Len Lye. Begun in 1958 and completed in 1979, Lye made the film by directly scratching the film stock. The resulting "figures of motion" are set to music by the Bagirmi tribe of Africa.

In 2008, the film was added to the United States National Film Registry.[1]

Free Radicals appears on the DVD Rhythms, a collection of short films by Lye.[2]

In Experimental Animation : the origins of a new art, Len Lye's recollections of making Free Radicals are quoted: "I made Free Radicals from 16mm black film leader, which you can get from DuPont. I took a graver, various kinds of needles. (My range included arrowheads for romanticism.) You stick down the sides with scotch tape and you get to work with scratching the stuff out. … … You hold your hand at the right height and act is if you were making your signature. It goes on forever. You can carry a pictographic design in your head and make a little design. You can't see what you're doing because your hand is in the way. That's why those things have that kind of spastic look."

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"Si Nopo Da (By What Signs Will I Come to Understand)", Tribe of Niger, ...

"Title of the album refers to the disappearance of the 331/3 rpm microgroove vinyl/stylus format. This recording was issued in the last days of the LP and was conceived of then as an investigation into the effects (both negative and positive) of "Western" recording technology on the world's few remaining, at the time of recording, ancient pre-industrial cultures." "Originally released in LP format in 1987

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Werner Herzog film collection: Lessons of Darkness - Trailer

Lessons of Darkness (German: Lektionen in Finsternis) is a 1992 film by director Werner Herzog. Shot in documentary style on 16mm film from the perspective of an almost alien observer, the film is an exploration of the ravaged oil fields of post-Gulf War Kuwait, decontextualised and characterised in such a way as to emphasise the terrain's cataclysmic strangeness.[1] An effective companion to his earlier film Fata Morgana, Herzog again perceives the desert as a landscape with its own voice.

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Wild Energy by Annea Lockwood and Bob Bielecki

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Edward Burtynsky: Manufactured landscapes

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HOMO SAPIENS is a film about the finiteness and fragility of human existence and the end of the industrial age, and what it means to be a human being.

What will remain of our lives after we’re gone?

Empty spaces, ruins, cities increasingly overgrown with vegetation, crumbling asphalt: the areas we currently inhabit, though humanity has disappeared. Now abandoned and decaying, gradually  reclaimed by nature after being taken from it so long ago.

HOMO SAPIENS is an ode to humanity as seen from a possible future scenario.

"Nikolaus Geyrhalter's fantastical Homo sapiens  depicts a disquieting scenario whereby the world made by people is   slowly won back by nature: it is science fiction and documentary in   equal measure, equal parts contemporary and post-apocalyptic."

Berlinale Forum

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(Untitled) Human Mask (2014) Pierre Huyghe

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BOREALIS                5:36                                Single Channel                                Screening format: DVD                Shooting format: DVCAM Color                Aspect ratio: 4:3                Camera Edit,                with ambient sound                and Radio Frequencies.                Captured in location.                Shortwave radio signals.                KHz Range :                600-663-AM-20 Hz                                *Image+Ambient Sound:                400% speed increase                RF: Real Time°°°°°°                                Shot on location somewhere                on the Tundra,                Chukotka region,                Northeastern Siberia ,                Russian Federation .                                N 65˚37.916                W 172˚40.353                23:36-23:56                30 Sept. 2006                                Edition of 10                © 2007 Carlos Casas

[fieldarts]

Michael Snow - La Région Centrale (1971)

"La Région Centrale" was made during five days of shooting on a deserted mountain top in North Quebec. During the shooting, the vertical and horizontal alignment as well as the tracking speed were all determined by the camera's settings. Anchored to a tripod, the camera turned a complete 360 degrees, craned itself skyward, and circled in all directions. Because of the unconventional camera movement, the result was more than merely a film that documented the film location's landscape. Surpassing that, this became a film expressing as its themes the cosmic relationships of space and time. Cataloged here were the raw images of a mountain existence, plunged (at that time) in its distance from civilization, embedded in cosmic cycles of light and darkness, warmth and cold. La Région Centrale (Quebec, 1971, 180 min., 16mm, color) is arguably the most spectacular experimental film made anywhere in the world, and for John W. Locke, writing in Artforum in 1973, it was "as fine and important a film as I have ever seen." If ever the term "metaphor on vision" needed to be applied to a film it should be to this one. Following Wavelength, Michael Snow continued to explore camera/frame movement and its relationships with space and time in Standard Time (1967) an eight minute series of pans and tilts in an apartment living room and (Back and Forth) (1968­69), a more extended analysis. But with La Région Centrale, Snow managed to create moving images that heretofore could no possibly be observed by the human eye. For this project he enlisted the help of Pierre Abaloos to design and build a machine which would allow the camera to move smoothly about a number of different axes at various speeds, while supported by a short column, where the lens of the camera could pass within inches of the ground and zoom into the infinity of the sky. Snow placed his device on a peak near Sept Îsles in Quebec's Région centrale and programmed it to provide a series of continuously changing views of the landscape. Initially, the camera pans through 360° passes which map out the terrain, and then it begins to provide progressively stranger views (on its side, upside down) through circular and back-and-forth motions. The weird soundtrack was constructed from the electronic sounds of the programmed controls which are sometimes in synch with the changing framing on screen and sometimes not. Here, allusions to other films occur, especially science fiction works like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) which similarly reveals a barren, human-less primal landscape (with odd sounds) and spatially disorients the spectator. In La Région Centrale's second hour, the world is inverted for so long, that when the camera swings vertically through a full circle to restore the horizon line to its rightful position, above the earth, it looks wrong. In the complete absence of human or animal forms, one can imagine the outlines of animals in the silhouetted shapes of rocks at twilight. It is impossible not to notice "camera movement" in this film, and, as Locke notes, one is inclined to observe the frame edge leading the movement (rather than the center) much of the time. I can only imagine what it would have been like to see La Région Centrale, captivated in the extreme dark and quiet of New York's Anthology Film Archive theater built specifically for the screening of experimental films in the 1970s. But, in any event, seen under any condition, the last hour offers up an incredible experience, with unbelievably high speed twisting and swirling motions rendering dynamic color and line abstractions. Finally, by rephotography ‹of the film jumping out of the gate‹ and flaring out of the image to red and yellow colors, and, closing with the camera apparently motionless on the sun, Snow presents a reflexive impression of the camera as the ultimate transformative, creative apparatus, capable of any magic. La Région Centrale presents a definitive "metaphor on vision."

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We Can See Someone Looking, But Can We Hear Someone Listening? | Lawrence

Lawrence English is composer, media artist and curator based in Australia. Working across an eclectic array of aesthetic investigations, English’s work prompts questions of field, perception and memory. He investigates the politics of perception, through live performance and installation, to create works that ponder subtle transformations of space and ask audiences to become aware of that which exists at the edge of perception.

http://www.lawrenceenglish.com

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Large Scale Sound Installation at MIT by Carrie Bodle in collaboration with MIT Haystack Observatory. "Sonification / Listening Up" is a multi-speaker site-specific sound installation on I.M. Pei's iconic Building 54 at MIT. The speakers broadcast audio representations of sound waves embedded in the Earth's charged upper atmosphere, or ionosphere, a region under active radar study by the Atmospheric Sciences Group at MIT's Haystack Observatory. This project utilizes sound as a representation of research at MIT, extending to the public what is normally invisible.  Sound Off (closing event)

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VLF radio + electrical noise - Disinformation on Raw TV - 1999

Joe Banks is a sound artist, author and researcher, originally specialising in radio phenomena and electromagnetic noise. For over twenty years Joe has been performing, releasing albums and exhibiting under the guise of Disinformation. This Disinformation brand name allows for a critique of corporate identities and modern communication, and uses a sonic palette sourced from errant radio waves, natural earth signals, and interference from the sun and from the National Grid, etc. In 2012, Joe published “Rorschach Audio – Art and Illusion for Sound” on Strange Attractor press, a book that explored the subject of EVP (ghost voice) research in contemporary sound art practice. Joe’s work currently focusses on language and evolutionary neuroscience. Joe lives in London, 40 metres from the spot where physicist Leo Szilard conceived the theory of the thermonuclear chain reaction.

https://earroom.wordpress.com/2017/03/04/joe-banks-disinformation/

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Alvin Lucier - Sferics

'Sferics is the shortened term for atmospherics, natural radio-frequency emissions in the ionosphere, caused by electromagnetic energy radiated from nearby or distant lightning. These signals - resonant clicks and pops, called tweeks and bonks by scientists - occur in the audible range of humans and may be picked up by antennas and amplified for listening. They are best received at night, far from power lines. Occasionally, certain sferics get caught on and travel long distances along the magnetic flux lines around the earth, producing whistlers - downward-gliding signals which may last up to two or three seconds. My interest in sferics goes back to 1967, when I discovered in the Brandeis University Library a disc recording of ionospheric sounds by astrophysicist Millett Morgan of Dartmouth College. I experimented with this material, processing it in various ways - filtering, narrow band amplifying and phase-shifting - but I was unhappy with the idea of altering natural sounds and uneasy about using someone else's material for my own purposes. I wanted to have the experience of listening to these sounds in real time and collecting them for myself. When Pauline Oliveros invited me to visit the music department at the University of California at San Diego a year later, I proposed a whistler recording project. Despite two weeks of extending antenna wire across most of the La Jolla landscape and wrestling with homemade battery-operated radio receivers, Pauline and I had nothing to show for our efforts. About ten years later composer Ned Sublette, who was interested in radio waves of all kinds, recommended a book by Calvin R. Graf, Listen to Radio Energy, Light and Sound, which describe a simple method of building a large loop antenna with which to receive these natural phenomena. Sferics was recorded by the composer on August 27, 1981, in Church Park, Colorado. The sound material was collected continuously from midnight to dawn with a pair of homemade antennas and a stereo cassette tape recorder. At regular intervals the antennas were repositioned in order to explore the directivity of the propagated signals and to shift the stereo field.

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The Sound of the Big Bang

I'm a Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of Washington in Seattle.   About 10 years ago, when the WMAP data on the cosmic microwave background (CMB) became available, I did a Mathematica calculation to produce "the sound of the Big Bang", I wrote an Alternate View column published in Analog Science Fiction/Fact Magazine about it (see AV-122 in the May-2003 issue of Analog), and I put it online, where it received a great deal of attention.  I have decided to do the same thing with the new data from the ESA's Planck Mission analysis of the CMB, which analyzes the temperature variations of the cosmic microwave background into angular frequency components or multipoles.  The new frequency spectrum goes to much higher frequencies than did the WMAP analysis, and therefore offers a more "high-fidelity" rendition of the Sound of the Big Bang.  The Planck multipole spectrum looks like this:

It was not as easy to use the data this time because, while the WMAP group provided an easy-to-find table of multipole strengths from their analysis, the Planck group has set up an arcane system of data archives and ".fit" files that, after several hours of effort, I was not able to penetrate to obtain the data I wanted.  Finally, with the help of Dr. Richard Gass of the University of Cincinnati, who provided a sample notebook and advised upgrading from Mathematica 8 to Mathematica 9, I was able to extract the Planck multipole data, which is plotted above and included below as a .txt file.

   The Sound of the Big Bang simulation includes three important effects: (1) The multiply peaked frequency spectrum measured by Planck is made into a single sound wave (monaural, not stereo) by the process described above; (2) According to the Planck analysis, the emission profile of the cosmic background radiation peaked at 379,000 years and dropped to 60% intensity at 110,000 years before and after the peak emission time. The simulation represents the first 760,000 years of evolution of the universe, as the emitted CBR rises and falls in intensity following the Planck profile; (3) The universe was expanding and becoming more of a "bass instrument" while the cosmic background radiation was being emitted. To put it another way, the expanding universe "stretches" the sound wavelengths and thereby lowers their frequencies. To account for this effect, the program shifts the waves downward in frequency to follow the expansion in the first 760 thousand years of the universe. How fast the universe initially expanded depends on what cosmological model is used. I decided to follow the predictions of the flat-space Robertson-Walker metric with zero cosmological constant. That model predicts that the radius of the universe grows as time to the 2/3 power (R ~ t2/3). Therefore, instead of the component sine waves varying as (frequency ´ time), they vary as (frequency ´ time1/3) to implement the cosmological Doppler shift. The sound frequencies used in the simulation must be scaled upward by a huge factor (about 10 to the 26 power) to match the response of the human ear, because the actual Big Bang frequencies, which had wavelengths on the order of a fraction of the size of the universe, were far too low to be heard by humans (even had any been around).

   I made .wav files from the simulation with playing-time duration of 20, 50, 100, 200, and 500 seconds.  These may be downloaded here, along with the Mathematica notebook that produced the .wav files and the data file of the Planck multipole spectrum:

http://faculty.washington.edu/jcramer/BBSound_2013.html