The Sunday Video: The Hellstrom Chronicle

Transcription

ARTLURKER
A Miami based contemporary art newsletter / blog - http://www.artlurker.com
The Sunday Video: The Hellstrom Chronicle
Sunday, July 12, 2009
http://www.artlurker.com/2009/07/the-sunday-video-12/
The Hellstrom Chronicle, 1979.
“The Earth was created not with the gentle caress of love, but with the brutal violence of rape.” - Nils Hellstrom,
M.S., Ph.D.
Produced in 1979 by Walon Green for the Entomology department of Florida Atlantic University, The Hellstrom
Chronicle stands alone as the most unnerving, creatively directed and frankly brilliant nature documentaries of all
time. If one were so inclined, one could glean a lifetime’s worth of writing from this one film. It is, without
comparison, the single most portentous and devastating account of our species’ collective arrogance to date,
brought with ease to the hither-to parched lips of perfection by sublime creative direction by Ed Spiegel and gut
wrenching and at times cacophonous music by Lalo Schifrin.
Starring Lawrence Pressman as Nils Hellstrom, M.S., Ph.D, a fictional character whose terrifying statements
relating to the impermanence of the human species were synthesized from opinions of the time, The Hellstrom
Chronicle, despite its drama, is factual and its statements comparing human and insect sociology, no matter how
unreasonable Pressman makes them seem, have been reviewed and corroborated by Roy Snelling and Charles
Hogue, Ph.D., of the Entomology Department, Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History.
Please note that as this is a rare film we have decided to present it in its entirety.
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For a DVD of the uninterrupted version of this recording please contact us.
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The Pirate Bay - A legacy of exasperating morality
Monday, July 06, 2009
http://www.artlurker.com/2009/07/the-pirate-bay-trail-sold-news/
Detail from a congratulatory diploma given by The Pirate Bay to the King of Sweden.
Technology news has been dominated these past few weeks by coverage of various sagas involving The Pirate
Bay [.org], a file-sharing website that was founded in 2003 by the Swedish file-sharing advocacy group Piratbyrån,
but which has been run independently since 2004.
Subsequent to the participation of Piratbyrån in Manifesta 7, which we featured back in October of last year, The
Pirate Bay stole the limelight on February 16th when three of its administrators and one of its sponsors were put on
trial charged with contributing to copyright infringement.
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A part from their gall, notoriety, Robin Hood style persona and claims that they are the largest of their kind on the
world, The Pirate Bay are much like any other file-sharing facilitator in that none of the pirated material is actually
stored on their servers. Because of this, such sites technically do not infringe copyright, however, despite stressing
this distinction in their defense, The Pirate Bay were still found guilty by Swedish law on the grounds that they
continued to operate knowing full well that their clients were being referred to pirated material. And even when one
of the court judges was revealed to belong to various copyright protection groups prompting The Pirate Bay lawyers
to motion for a retrial on ground of bias, their plea was rejected.
Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm, Rick Falkvinge and Marcin de Kaminski during the first day of The Pirate Bay Trial.
As a result of the trail the four men behind The Pirate Bay, Frederik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Carl Lundstrom
and Peter Sunde, were sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay damages of 30 million Swedish kronor to
entertainment companies such as Warner Bros and Sony Music Entertainment, although no one has been jailed
yet. That was in April.
The BBC reported: “In response to the ruling Peter Sunde said The Pirate Bay would now file charges against
Sweden for violating the human rights of the defendants.” Speaking to the BBC, the head of Sweden's Pirate
Party, Rickard Falkvinge, said this was another step in a "prolonged legal battle with the record industry".
And so the saga has continued. Those who stand to lose money from file-sharing have sought to close The Pirate
Bay down and The Pirate Bay, spurred by a belief that all media should be free have fought to provide it with
antagonistic abandon, publishing all their cease-and-desist letters on the site and taunting would be oppressors
with the development of a network of servers that make shutting down the site impossible for more than a few
minutes.
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The Pirate Bay Tracker Geo Statistics. 24H Statistics. Total unique users per minute: 1181978. Map data ©2009 Europa Technologies.
The industry knows that even if The Pirate Bay is forced to stop what it is doing that file-sharing will continue as
even victories over companies like Napster didn’t reduce the market. Even so, it would seem that the powers that
be must make an example of The Pirate Bay four lest a message that file-sharing is OK be conveyed.
In regard to the futility of this fight to save face, Falkvinge commented: "It's obvious that, given enough time, The
Pirate Bay will win this war which will go on as long as the record industry has yet another penny to file a lawsuit. I
think they [The Pirate Bay] are taking an important part in that battle, fighting for freedom of expression and culture
against monopolistic companies.”
Continuing that fight despite its founders technically being jailed in April, The Pirate Bay began video streaming
toward the end of last month. At the Open Video Conference in New York, Peter Sunde, one of the jailed founders,
announced The Video Bay.
The BBC reported: “Billed as a rival to YouTube, the service will offer unrestricted video content, in violation of
copyright law.”
An interesting note on this development is that the site is one of the first to use new open source methods (OGG)
for video compression and display over the web. In apparent opposition to YouTube’s use of proprietary flash
technology. Also, as frustrated users may have realized, the site’s infancy is not without toothing problems, namely
the fact that the majority of it doesn’t work. On that note, Sunde commented: “It will be done when it's done. This
site will be an experimental playground and as such subjected to both live and drunken coding, so please don't bug
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us too much if the site isn't working properly.”
Peter Sunde speaks to reporters. Photo: Oscar Swartz.
Literally hours after the announcement The Pirate Bay founders surprised the world by selling their site to Global
Gaming Factory X AB (GGF), a Swedish gaming company who specializes in software that helps run and maintain
PCs used in cybercafes and gaming centers. GGF hopes to use the site to develop a new model where by
copyright owners get paid for the use of movies, music and games linked to via the site.
In a statement to the Swedish news agency, TT, Sunde admitted: "We feel that we can't take The Pirate Bay any
further. We're in a bit of a frozen situation where there's not much happening and there are neither people nor
money to develop things." At least now The Pirate Bay Founders shouldn’t have trouble paying their fines.
In regard to the model for the new website, Hans Pandeya, head of GGF said "We would like to introduce models
which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site.
Content creators and providers need to control their content and get paid for it."
As yet no one knows exactly how GGF will charge for the content downloaded via the site or how the deal will
affect The Video Bay, nevertheless, the site will officially change hands next month[.]
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For more information please visit thepiratebay.org
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The Sunday Video: The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion
Incident
Sunday, July 05, 2009
This weeks Sunday Video is the longest of two acts of video piracy featuring someone in a Max Headroom mask
that briefly violated TV networks in Chicago, Illinois, on the evening of November 22nd, 1987. Known as "The Max
Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident" for obvious reasons, the illegal communications successfully
interrupted two television stations within a three hour period.
The first broadcast aired at 9:14pm during Dan Roan's Sunday night Chicago Bears report on WGN's 9 'oclock
news. On this instance the transmission was short - just twenty five seconds - and silent. However, during the
second, which occurred exactly hours later during the Dr. Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock" on PBS affiliate
WTTW Chicago Channel 11, local residents were treated to a much longer snippet that included audio, a sex toy,
refreshment endorsements and partial nudity. Unlike the first that was cut short by engineers at WGN, this second
run, which amounted to one of the weirdest, unauthorized things ever to hit the Chicago airwaves, terminated itself
and did not return. At the time WGN's Chief engineer Bob Strutzel was quoted as saying that those responsible
must have had at their disposal "some pretty sophisticated microwave equipment operating in the broadcast
auxiliary frequency bands and a significant amount of power."
Deliciously, despite investigation by both the FCC and the FBI who each sought to mete out the maximum penalty
of 100,000 dollars or one year in jail, or both, neither the hijacker nor their accomplices were ever found or
identified. This incident was the first of its kind in Chicago.
The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident, 1987. Courtesy of FuzzyMemoriesTV.
Below is an unofficial transcription by the publishers of this version of The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal
Intrusion Incident dialogue. Even when taking into account the audio distortion, the pirate's ramblings don't make
much sense. Here's what they were able to make out:
"He's a freaky nerd!"
"This guy's better than Chuck Swirsky." [another WGN sportscaster at the time]
"Oh Jesus!"
"Catch the wave..." [reference to a Coke commercial at the time of which Max Headroom was a spokesperson]
"Your love is fading..."
"I stole CBS."
"Oh, I just made a giant masterpiece printed all over the greatest world newspaper nerds." [??]
"My brother [mother?] is wearing the other one."
"It's dirty..."
"They're coming to get me..."
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For a collection of actual news reports on the incident please go here.
For detailed text accounts of the incident please go here.
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Road Trip to Ronchamp
Monday, June 29, 2009
http://www.artlurker.com/2009/06/notre-dame-du-haut-ronchamp-le-corbusier/
Notre Dame du Haut. Image courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra.
Miami artist George Sanchez-Calderon and his buddy Shelter Serra just returned form Basel. On their way back to
the States they visited the Notre Dame du Haut (chapel of our lady of the height), by Le Corbusier that was built
between 1950 and 1954. Sited atop a hillside in Ronchamp, a commune in the Haute-Saône department in the
region of Franche-Comté in eastern France, the building, nestled between the Vosges and the Jura mountains with
the horizon visible on all four sides, is among the more tremendous examples of Le Corbusier’s later style that
despite this example taking inspiration for the roof from the engineering of airfoils characteristically departed from
his principles of standardization and the machine aesthetic as outlined in Vers un architecture.
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Responding site specifically Le Corbusier’s design for the chapel, a shrine for a Catholic Church looking to prolong
its relevancy, is on the whole quite simple—an oblong nave, two side entrances, an axial main altar, and three
chapels beneath towers—as is its structure, with rough masonry walls faced with whitewashed Gunite (sprayed
concrete) and a roof of contrasting béton brut (unfinished concrete). Formally and symbolically, however, this small
building, which is accessible from the south, is immensely powerful and complex.1 On the morning before their
departure back to Miami via Zurich and New York, a few hours prior to its opening and after a night of excess,
Sanchez-Calderon and Serra gained access to the chapel "illegally" through a chink in a chain-link fence
surrounding the construction site of its new visitor center. Here follows a first hand account by Sanchez-Calderon of
the pair’s experience:
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Image courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra.
The last person you speak to is usually the one that can convince you to stay. We anticipated making Kunsthalle
our departure point, God alone knowing whom we could run into. It's an environment that embraces the visceral
and that night I met an angel who elevated me simply by taking me onto the dance floor. Her arm glazed over my
shoulder as she led the way, parting the ocean with the subtlety of her sway, God bless her. As the witching hour
struck at 4:30 a.m., she spat me out and I stepped outside to find Shelter deep in conversation.
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ARTLURKER
On route. Image courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra.
Driving with a friend is good and bad, you disagree, get lost, and finally you find the place. Driving through
Ronchamp / Champagne was charming and idyllic, but on reaching the top of the hill upon which the Notre Dame
du Haut stood at 6:30 a.m. in the morning we were shocked to realize the church was fenced in, not visible and
closed until 10:00 a.m..
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The Pilgrim's Path. Image courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra.
In the parking lot there was our Euro-car and a camper trailer with a crew of three or four people dead asleep inside
of it. Our options were simply wait or take a walk. Opting for the latter we headed slightly down the embankment
where we found a small path - which after a few steps we realized was the pilgrim’s path - that led us over the
newly excavated Piano site, (Renzo Piano has designed a new visitor center which should open in 2011) and back
up to a small ledge where we found an opening in a second, much taller fence.
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ARTLURKER
On the grounds of the Notre Dame du Haut. Image courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra.
Shelter stepped in and I thought of the countless people jumping fences to skate pools, visit girlfriends, or just
escape. It happens, and it happened that day, in the eastern region of France. Two Americans snuck a peak, laid
back, sketched and were humbled.
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We stayed about an hour and a half, left the same way we came in, didn't speak a word on the way back to Zurich /
NY / Miami, actually we didn't speak for a couple of days, no need to.
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ARTLURKER
George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra. Image courtesy of George Sanchez-Calderon and Shelter Serra.
A slideshow featuring more images like those above with a soundtrack of Going Hobo, 2009 from the “In Your
Hands Album” by Charlie Winston is available to view on YouTube.
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For more information please visit: www.ronchamp.fr and our Writers page.
1. Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman. Architecture: from Prehistory to Post-Modernism. p542-4.
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ARTLURKER
The Sunday Video: Clover
Sunday, June 28, 2009
This week's Sunday Video comes from Billy Rennekamp, a Kentucky based artist who uses new media as both
medium and platform, in addition of course to institutions like Rhizome and The New Museum. Here is a rather
clever piece which features a looped video from a Google street view vehicle traveling around a cloverleaf
interchange on the Kentucky interstate, specifically I-265 to I-71 to I-265 to I-71 and back again, again.
Looped HD YouTube on auto-play, 2009.
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For more information please visit: www.loshadka.org/billy/index.php
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ARTLURKER
The Sunday Video: Darwin's Endless Forms
Sunday, June 21, 2009
This weeks Sunday Video comes from the BBC. As part of celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of the birth
of Charles Darwin on February 12, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge England hosted an exhibition that
explored the impact that Darwin's scientific legacy had on the 19th Century art world. The BBC reported it to be
"an exhibition which reveals art's debt to Darwin" and provided a slideshow guided tour with the curators Diana
Donald and Jane Munro. This year marks the 150th Anniversary of the publication of Darwin's famous book, "On
The Origin of Species."
Audio slideshow: Darwin's Endless Forms. Music courtesy KPM Music. Slideshow by Paul Kerley.
Publication date 16 June 2009. Courtesy of BBC News.
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For more information please visit: www.darwinday.org
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The Sunday Video: The Hellstrom Chronicle

Transcription

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