Niebla: short film about a village forgotten amid the fog
"As in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's magic-realist novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, Niebla's precise setting is uncertain-somewhere in rural Latin America-and the story's narrator is El Pep, an old man being interviewed in his living room by a documentary film crew about the mysterious fog of the title and the resulting visitation by a strange flock of flying sheep. 'The character is strongly based on my grandmother,' Ramos says. 'She was a very complex person, with many frustrations in life. She was born during the Mexican Revolution, so she experienced a lack of material possessions all her life. But she was also very kind and loving with her family (well..., most of the time). She was a combination of marked strenghs and weaknesses. At the end of her life, she suffered from dementia. 'My mind is leaving me,' she used to say, distressed, when she noticed. The only moments we could communicate with her were when we asked her about her past life. Those memories were the last to vanish.'"
(Emilio Ramos)
Fig.1 Emilio Ramos (2006). 'Niebla (Fog)', Short Film | México-Spain | 8 min. | 2d/3d digital
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Blur Building: Anti high-definition and visual fidelity
"The Blur Building was built for the Swiss Expo 2002 on Lake Neuchatel. It is an architecture of atmosphere. The lightweight tensegrity structure measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 75 feet high. The primary building material is indigenous to the site, water. Water is pumped from the lake, filtered, and shot as a fine mist through 31,500 high-pressure mist nozzles. A smart weather system reads the shifting climactic conditions of temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and processes the data in a central computer that regulates water pressure.
Upon entering the fog mass, visual and acoustic references are erased, leaving only an optical 'white-out' and the 'white-noise' of pulsing nozzles. Blur is an anti-spectacle. Contrary to immersive environments that strive for high-definition visual fidelity with ever-greater technical virtuosity, Blur is decidedly low-definition: there is nothing to see but our dependence on vision itself."
(Diller Scofidio + Renfro)
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
