Scene: academic journal for space and scenic production
"Scene is dedicated to a critical examination of space and scenic production. The journal provides an opportunity for dynamic debate, reflection and criticism. With a strong interdisciplinary focus, we welcome articles, interviews, visual essays, reports from conferences and festivals. We want to explore new critical frameworks for the scholarship of creating a scene."
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Home: a call to action to halt global warming
"In the past 200,000 years, humans have upset the balance of planet Earth, a balance established by nearly four billion years of evolution. We must act now. It is too late to be a pessimist. The price is too high. Humanity has little time to reverse the trend and change its patterns of consumption.
Through visually stunning footage from over fifty countries, all shot from an aerial perspective, Yann Arthus-Bertrand shows us a view most of us have never seen. He shares with us his sense of awe about our planet and his concern for its health. With this film, Arthus-Bertrand hopes to provide a stepping-stone to further the call to action to take care of our HOME.
HOME is the first film that has been made using aerial-only footage. The film marks artist-activist Yann Arthus-Bertrand's feature film directorial debut.
HOME the movie is carbon offset. All of the CO2 emissions engendered by the making of the film are calculated and offset by sums of money that are used to provide clean energy to those who do not have any. For the last ten years, all the work of Yann Arthus-Bertrand has been carbon offset."
(Yann Arthus-Bertrand)
CONTRIBUTOR
Simon PerkinsSHARE
The Billionaires Bankrolling The US (and Australian) Right
"Oil billionaires Charles and David Koch's tremendous spending power and reach--what the media has dubbed the 'Kochtopus'--is unrivaled. The conservative nonprofit David founded, Americans for Prosperity, has said it plans to spend $45 million this election cycle, more than three times the $13 million the Democratic Governors Association has on hand as of mid-October. There's no way of knowing how much the Kochs have given to the AFP or any other group; new Senate legislation allows tax exempt nonprofits to raise unlimited funds without disclosure. Publicly, only about $3.9 million can be traced to the brothers, including a $1 million donation to the Republican Governors Association from David, a former vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party."
(Clare O'Connor, Forbes.com, 21 October 2010)
Fig.1 Scott Mitchell (6 April 2011 at 01:32pm). "The Beast File: Koch Brothers", ABC News, [available at: http://hungrybeast.abc.net.au/stories/beast-file-koch-brothers] via: mrpolity1 (uploaded 2 June 2011). "Koch Brothers - The Kochtopus", YouTube
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
H2Oil: dramatic animated expository sequences
"Alberta sits over one of the largest recoverable oil patches in the world, second only to Saudi Arabia. It covers 149, 000 square kilometers, an area larger than Florida, and holds at least 175 billion barrels of recoverable crude bitumen. Canada has become the largest supplier of oil to the U.S., with over a million barrels per day coming from the oil sands. Currently 40% of all oil produced in Canada is derived from the oil sands.
The crude oil produced from the oil sands, the dirtiest oil in the world, could keep the global appetite for oil at bay for another 50 years.
But oil sands are a fundamentally different kind of oil. They take a lot of energy and a lot of water and leave a very large environmental footprint compared to all other forms of oil extraction. Because of this, the massive changes to the boreal forest and the watershed have prompted the United Nations to list this region as a global hot spot for environmental change.
In addition, oil sands projects are major emitters of greenhouse gases. They accounted for 4% of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2005, making it impossible to meet obligations set out in Kyoto for emissions-reductions."
(H2Oil)
Fig.1 Dale Hayward & Sylvie Trouvé, James Braithwaite, Daniel Legace. 'La Moustache'.
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
Marker's image-inventory: thesaurus rather than taxonomy
"[Chris] Marker's production of an inventory for his filmic archive through gathering - shooting, finding existing footage, and editing - is enabled by this double power of the image. On one hand, the image-inventory simply lists images as instances of a collection, allowing each to resonate on its own, evoking its own possible meaning, descriptions, feelings, and thoughts and on the other, the shared qualitative aspect that links the images creates a pictorial inventory or catalogue of the growing filmic archive. The particularity of this catalogue is noteworthy. In linking images or collection-items by shared qualitative criteria, rather than by qualitative measures, this inventory constitutes a thesaurus of the collection rather than a taxonomy or classification. For, whereas the former loosely groups instances conceptually (words/images sharing a concept), the latter tightly organises the archive nomologically (according to a law: alphabetically, chronologically, etc.). This difference is crucial: classification is linear, laying out flat the vast heterology that is the archive, taming difference through a system that is based on sameness - items or terms belonging to the same latter of the alphabet, originating in the same year, being related to the same place etc. - imposing order through a movement from the many to the one. The inventory-building of the thesaurus, on the other hand, is rhizomorphous, starting from similarities and affinities and proceeding three-dimensionally from the one to the many, from similarity to difference. The shared quality or concept, the broader term of the thesaurus, moves through analogical bifurcations and creates a network of related, narrower terms, and arborescence of possible meanings without a classificatory claim on, or hope for precision, certainty and unique locatability. As such, the thesaurus enables a radically different kind of access to the archive from that gained through classification. Classification privileges individual items of a collection through a structure which allows their precise tracking while the thesaurus creates a conceptual archive from the archive that highlights the connections between items."
(Uriel Orlow, 2002)
2). Orlow, Uriel (2002) 'Chris Marker: The Archival Powers of the Image'. In: Comay, Rebecca and Knechtel, John, (eds.) Alphabet city #8: lost in the archives. Alphabet City Media Inc., Toronto, Canada, pp. 436-451. ISBN 0887846432
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Simon PerkinsSHARE
