Opera Poster - 1: background image

This could be a cover - 2: animals

Found images - 2: animals

This could be a cover - 1: hearth

Found images - 1: the earth

80's portuguese music

Pop Dell'Arte


Heróis do Mar


Trabalhadores do Comércio (portuguese Pink Floyd!!)


Radar Kadafi


Grupo de Baile


Repórter Estrábico


Táxi (pure ska)


Jáfumega (portuguese Police!)


António Variações


Carlos Paião



Doce


Lena d'Água

Obsessions

VAUGHAN OLIVER
Music "tickles things in me and takes me into a different state of mind – a dreamlike state. When I'm in a gig, music affects me tottaly physically and I don't think rationally about how I'm going to describe it. I get images and I would like to leave enough mystery and vagueness in those images for someone else to bring their experience to it. That's why I've been with 4AD for so long, because it has been so natural to me.I would get inspiration from virtually everything that Ivo was giving me. Voosh! It would affect me. I was full. I was somebody else. Inspired."

This intensification of ordinary experience, the sense of being possessed by music, lost in sound, the ego dissolving, blissfully or sometimes darkly adrift in a primal zone of colour and image, recurs through Oliver's work. Many of these lustroud designs are metaphors for psychic states – reverie, dream, abandonment, ecstasy – attainable through surrender to music. There is a constant emphasis in his selection and use of images on the body as the locus of these physical sensations and on the senses as their transmitters, synaesthetically, to images representing the other senses: sight, touch, taste, even smell (...). Bodily images to which Oliver returns include eyes, hands, the thumb, the toe, the tongue, teeth, hair (shaped as heart, vagina and skull), sexual parts (clitoris, penis) and various kind of meat – heart, pig's liver, eel, ox tongue, bull's eyes, human stomach lining. (...) To intensify the sensation of nerve endings in sharp or even painful contact with tactile reality, he uses devices such as bandaging, gloves, injury to a thumb, prosthetic devices, surgical instruments, a drill, and a shattered knife, a recurrent image at the mid-point in his career.

As a teenager he was drawn to surrealism, and though he would not now descibe himself as a surrealist, the movement's visual strategies and favoured lexicon of images offer keys to help unlock his work. The surrealists, too, discovered intimations of the sublime in the corporeal reality of the flesh.

In his image-making, Oliver has an instinctive craving for the mysterious convulsive beauty {ah! ah!} and for the deeply gratifying state of being and heightened awareness that the surrealist poets and painters termed le merveilleux.
RICK POYNOR

"When seeking the object of its fulfillment the demands of desire exert a strange power over external phenomena, tending egoistically to admit only that which can serve its purpose."
ANDRÉ BRETON

VAUGHAN OLIVER, CINDY SHERMAN, LISA GERMANO AND COUNTESS DI CASTIGLIONE
What is it they have in common? They take (have taken...) their own obsessions very serious.
They are made of that. So their work is made of that as well.
Obviously?
Well... maybe I was to young to know.

Remove everything that is not absolutely necessary for your own work/pleasure. Focus

The original convulsive beauty

A GODDESS OF SELF-LOVE WHO DID NOT SIT QUIETLY
By SARAH BOXER

Published: October 13, 2000, Photography Review

We are all narcissists now. These days it is not considered pathological for people to acquire hundreds of photographs of themselves in a lifetime. But in the middle of the 19th century you really, really had to try.

The Countess de Castiglione was a rare creature indeed: a full-blown 19th-century narcissist with unlimited access to a camera. From 1856 to 1895, she had more than 400 photographs of herself taken by Mayer & Pierson, a fancy studio in Paris that specialized in hand-colored photography. And she did not sit quietly and leave it up to the photographer, Pierre-Louis Pierson, to decide the pose. She called the shots.

The countess had herself photographed as a frowning nun, as Medea with a knife, as the tragic heroine Beatrix, as Judith entering the tent of Holofernes, as a drowned virgin, as Lady Macbeth sleepwalking, as a courtesan flaunting her legs, as Anne Boleyn, as Goya's ''Maja,'' as a nurse to her dying dog and as a corpse in a coffin. And she was no actress.

A century before Cindy Sherman made her well-known ''film stills'' starring herself in nonexistent movies, and a half-century before Claude Cahun, the Surrealist, photographed herself as a bald man and a big doll, the Countess de Castiglione made photographic fiction of her own image. At first it seems to have been simple self-love, but by the time she died in 1899, it had gone far beyond obsession.

The countess was a Surrealist, or, to adapt Andre Breton's phrase, the original convulsive beauty. Long before Surrealism existed, she discovered its tricks one by one. She created alternative identities for herself. She used mirrors to fragment and multiply images. And she had an obsession with eyes and detached body parts.

The 50 photographs that make up ''La Divine Comtesse: Photographs of the Countess de Castiglione,'' an exhibition in the Howard Gilman Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art organized by Pierre Apraxine, are not lovely. They are bizarre. Many have been hand-colored to look like paintings. But to watch the countess evolve from self-conscious doll to morbid mourner, to follow her restless preening from youth to the brink of the grave, is mesmerizing.

Virginia Oldoini was born to a noble Florentine family in 1837. At 17 she married the Count di Castiglione. It was a bad match; she cheated on him shamelessly and bankrupted him. The two separated in 1857, and the countess spent most of the rest of her life living with her son, Giorgio, and seducing important men in Paris.

''She would appear at gatherings like a goddess descended from the clouds,'' a contemporary noted, and she would ''allow people to admire her as if she were a shrine.'' The Princess Metternich oohed about her: ''Wonderful hair, the waist of a nymph, and a complexion the color of pink marble! In a word, Venus descended from Olympus!'' But, the princess added, ''after a few moments she began to get on your nerves.''

Her vanity was as famous as her beauty. She sent albums of her portraits to friends and admirers. She would not speak to women. She was endlessly enraptured with herself and assumed that others were as well.

The earliest portraits, taken in 1856, when she was 19, are more or less straight. But then she began to fiddle. She created scenarios for herself. She had a few accomplices to help her with her fantasies: Pierson, her friend and photographer, and Aquilin Schad, who colored the pictures according to her instructions. But the countess's favorite accomplices were mirrors.

In ''The Eyes,'' she holds a pocket mirror away from her face so that her eye is the only thing showing in it. Then she fixes this eye on the photographer. In ''The Opera Ball,'' all you can see is her back. She appears to be diving headfirst into a full-length mirror while a tiny pocket mirror watches from a chair.

There are other oddities in the photographs. In one of the pictures designed to show off her ''Elvira'' dress, the countess reclines in a huge billowing skirt, like Manet's portrait of Berthe Morisot come to life. The effect is comical and surreal. She looks as if she has tipped over and is being carried upward by the ballooning dress. In other shots, the countess tries to make herself more imposing by standing on a stool hidden under her gown. The effect is just a tad strong. She is Alice in Wonderland, too tall to see her own feet.

It's hard to pinpoint when the countess's sense of narcissistic mischief gave way to madness. But at a certain point it seems pretty clear that she was using her photographs as a kind of voodoo.

When the countess's husband tried to take their son away from her, she responded by sending him a Medea-like portrait of herself titled ''Vengeance.'' She has a murderous look. She has a knife dripping with blood painted into her hand. Apparently, she made her point; she kept Giorgio. (He became the most photographed child of the 19th century and even served as a photographic stand-in for her, with his hair pinned up in flowers and his shoulders draped in velvet.) Her conquests continued. And so did her life in pictures.

Years after she pleaded the cause of Italian reunification to Napoleon III, she had herself photographed as the Queen of Etruria to take credit for it. She also had a portrait made of herself dressed as the Queen of Hearts. That was to commemorate her illicit affair with Napoleon III and her shameless appearance in 1857 at a ball with him, dressed as the Queen of Hearts. The empress summed up both the countess's dress and her liaison with the emperor in a stinging remark: ''The heart is a bit low, Madame.''

With those words, intended as an insult, the empress cut right to the core of the countess and her aesthetic. In the photographs the countess treated her body as a kind of foreign material whose parts she would move around at will.

As the countess grew older and less beautiful, she began showing body parts disconnected from the body. For ''Scherzo di Follia'' (''Game of Madness''), she used a small oval picture frame to isolate one of her eyes, letting the stand of the frame form an alien ear. She had her legs photographed, swinging free. She had her feet photographed and then she had them cast in terra cotta, creating a fetish. Prettiness was not the point. By this time, she knew she was falling apart. She subtitled one indelicate photograph of her foot ''Amputation of the Gruyere.''

She was dealing with the way of all flesh. There are a few faded portraits of her dead terrier. One grim photo shows the countess in a policeman's cap pulling up her sleeve to show her ugly arm, as if she has uncovered a crime. But the strangest view of all is a portrait of the countess playing dead in a coffin, a picture that appears to have been taken from somewhere close to her head. To look at this photograph is to see the countess's photographic project as a lifelong out-of-body experience. She was desperate to know what it must be like for others to behold her.

This strange show raises more questions than it answers. Was the countess making fun of herself, or was she making a dead serious point about the role of women? Did she know how strange her project was? What is the connection between narcissism and Surrealism? Between Surrealism and feminism? One thing is clear: the countess was her own best audience, and she would have loved this show.

Portrait of the Countess by Pierre-Louis Pierson

Here the countess poses with a passe-partout in the tradition of those paintings of eighteenth-century ladies who cast a coquettish look at the observer from behind a fan. At the same time, the fragmentary nature of photography — the way it simultaneously reveals and conceals — is emphasized by a prop used to present the hidden portions. The countess, famous for her extraordinary beauty, turns the voyeurism of the period back on the observer by retiring behind a veil and fixing the public with an inquisitive eye.

photographic credits: D'epartementales du Haut-Rhin, Mus'ee d'Unterlinden, Colmar
Mayer & Pierson, Comtesse de Castiglione
text: Freedy Langer

Album Covers

New Order/PETER SAVILLE


The Breeders/VAUGHAN OLIVER


Joe Henderson/REID MILES


Matthew Herbert Big Band/?


"Lisa Germano"/Me :)

Music to illustrate...

Jóhann Jóhannsson
Melodia (Guidelines for a Space Propulsion Device based on Heim's Quantum Theory)





Vaughan Oliver

Acoustic Image: Brief 3: One Minute, One Shot

Film Still



Q: What can you get from a video that you can't get from a still image?
A: Tension, specially caused by "time".
But it's less memorable.
This is an exercise based on Untitled Film Stills by Cindy Sherman. Trying to get the best out of both mediums.

Untitled Film Stills - Cindy Sherman

The still dis-stills. It does not so much give us a frozen moment of a continuous action (like a freeze frame) as it condenses an entire drama. The stills are dense with suspenses and danger, and they all look as if they were directed by Hitchcock. The invariant subject is The Girl in Trouble, even if The Girl herself does not always know it. In Barbie-doll garments, in the suburbs or at the beach or in the city, The Girl is always alone, waiting, worried, watchful, but she is wary of, waiting for, worried about, and her very posture and expression phenomenologically imply The Other: the Stalker, the Saver, the Evil and Good who struggle for her possession. She is the Girl Detective; she is America's Sweetheart; she is the Girl We Left Behind, soft and fluttering in a world of hard menace (...).
The Girl is feminine to her fingertips, Vulnerability is her middle name, and yet she has all the great virtues: bravery, independence, determination, spunk and tremulous dignity. (...)
Each of the stills is about the Girl in Trouble, but in the aggregate they touch the myth we each carry out of childhood, of danger, love, and security that defines the human condition where the wild things are.
ARTHUR C. DANTO

Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

super- "above"
cali- "beauty"
fragilistic- "delicate"
expiali- "to atone"
and docious- "educable"
Atoning for educability through delicate beauty.

"what you say when you don't know what to say"
docious-ali-expi-istic-fragi-cali-rupus
sue-codiliap-exit-silly-garf-illa-creapus



"The Undying Monster" (directed by John Brahm)
"She has an overactive supercalifragilis."
He goes on to define the word as "female intuition."

Power of Ten

Charles and Ray Eames
1971

Graphic Films

Man With a Movie Camera
Dziga Vertov
1929




Cinematic Orchestra - The Man With the Movie Camera

From: Modern Life and the Univernacular

Jessica Helfand

Minimize difference. Maximize reproducability. Make it easy, accessible, understandable to all. This is the univernacular, ultra-homogenized and distinction-free, the international language of the status-quo. Indeed, as the boundary between public and private dissolves further into the untamed wilderness of our modern sensibilities, the degree to which design can be used to articulate any distinctions remains highly questionnable. Identity—whether it is understood to be private, as in the identity of an individual, or public, as in the identity of a place—is riddled with ambiguity. Stripped of the physical references that define self and site, gender and geography, we drift in a peaceful (if monotonous) no-man's land of intangible relationships and dematerialized transactions. Screen names masquerade as real names. Jargon replaces language. Hieroglyphs and buttons proliferate. We locate one another through a mysterious wayfinding system of numbers and letters, keywords and bookmarks, abbreviations and acronyms, random punctuation slicing and dicing through run-on sentences. It's a loopy lexicon of dot-this and slash-that and e-everything else, that's about as qualitatively informative about the "places" you are visiting as a pre-fab suburban development.

So we click. Scroll up. Page down. Life on the screen becomes a rigorous, Cartesian journey from East to West, up North, down South. It's an aesthetically simplistic, curatorially ill-defined flip book, in which four-dimensional experience is forcibly retrofitted to conform to the unforgiving parameters of two-dimensional representation. "Life" in this new "public" realm is physically constrained and programmatically curtailed by the economics of space (via screen) and time (via bandwidth) and, increasingly, appears largely predisposed to adopt the broadly accepted cultural bias opposing idiosyncrasy or individuality or anything that dares challenge the essential rules of the system itself. Fast and easy and mass produced—this is the "space" we inhabit, the "landscape" we peruse, the "environment" we are helping to build.

And we are cowards, because we are doing so little to change it, to question its lack of innovation, to challenge the ludicrous banality that characterizes its essential mass appeal. Instead, we hide behind creatively engineered pedigrees – calling ourselves "strategists" and "consultants" and, God help me, "information architects", when we are really just graphic designers. And despite being graphic designers – despite being in the business of two-dimensional representation – we continue to talk-the-univernacular-talk while we perpetuate the hackneyed assumptions and pretentious misconceptions that do so much to frame this culture, yet do so little to advance our profession.

Today's great technological euphemism for privacy is customization: its philosophical premise lies in the notion that technology can be responsive to an individual's taste and needs, its insatiable appetite for retail therapy. Customization may be personal, but it is also propaganda: it makes "you" the brand! Indeed, the sudden ubiquity of the prefix "my" on Websites around the globe – MyYahoo, MyEbay, MyNavelGazingWebCam.

So distinctions are passé. Conformity rocks. As we all hold hands and sing another refrain of "We Are the World" how nice that we can sleep soundly knowing there is a place for everything, and everything is in its place. It is so easy. After all, everything "looks and feels" so much like everything else!