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Amazon says:
Customers who bought this item also bought Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’.
From http://www.petermiller.info: ‘Bolex Baby is a love song for my 16mm film camera.’
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Amateur Hour is a showcase for exciting new learning, skills, entertainment and public actions. Submissions in any form welcome to selfinterestandsympathy [at] gmail [dot] com
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Liberty Hall, Dublin, Friday February 20th. Photo by Sarah Browne.
Venice, Italy, December 2008.
Amateur Hour is a showcase for exciting new learning, skills, entertainment and public actions. Submissions in any form welcome to selfinterestandsympathy [at] gmail [dot] com
A Romantic Interlude is the title given to a work that exists at different times as a structure, object, event and super 8mm film (all images here). This work is a response to my research into representations of the Leitrim landscape and emotional attachments to it, my own included. These representations, visual and textual, ranged from the Lovely Leitrim tourist board films of the 1980s to more current journalistic texts in papers such as The Irish Times. I’ve been particularly interested in recent migrations to the county: ‘Leitrim’ is a place, but becomes a kind of ideal when spoken about from afar.
After a good three weeks, the rainbow finally submitted to the heavy rain and winds of this uniquely cruel Irish ‘summer’ and fallen. The fall has also broken it.
I had thought to gather the team again (or another team) to carry out repairs – I welcomed the idea of the structure as something vulnerable that was in need of attention and care. However in the end I decided not to pursue this: aside from safety concerns, I was won over by a plea for ‘non revival and non permanence’. So the rainbow will most likely by rescued and removed… perhaps with something left in its place as a very, very modest monument.
Above: Plan of rainbow with colour charts and notes for construction. Studio photograph, August 2008
Sunday August 24th: seven volunteers, two child helpers and two dogs gather on a deforested site in North Co. Leitrim to errect a wooden rainbow; a roadside hoarding that advertises nothing.
Where rainbows occur naturally and by chance, this event was planned and engineered in detail, and involved a good deal of physical work – drilling, sawing, hammering, lifting.
Part barn-raising, part folly, part idiosyncratic architecture, the rainbow is a sincere (if kitschy) expression of collective labour: huge thanks to Gordon, Craig, Bryonie, Anna, Ciara, Gareth, Peter, Ruth, Leander and Celia who made this possible.
The rainbow is built near Lurganboy, and is visible leaving Manorhamilton on the Kinlough Road. It will remain until the end of October – if it doesn’t collapse first.
This work is part of the New Sites, New Fields project at Leitrim Sculpture Centre that will open on October 4 2008. A super 8mm film has been shot to document the process of building the rainbow which will be screened later in 2008/9.
Arthur C. Brooks has written a great series of posts over at Freakonomics about personal happiness, according to politics, religion and the relative extremes of these beliefs. He’s recently published a book on Gross National Happiness.
Among his findings/ conjectures are that Conservatives Are Happier than Liberals.
A commenter says:
One possibility that springs to mind: Perhaps people who label themselves as “extremely” liberal or “extremely” conservative are also more likely to call themselves “very” happy. That is, someone who uses immoderate terms to describe his political views might also use immoderate terms to describe his degree of personal happiness — and that might reflect a difference in rhetorical style rather than a difference in life satisfaction.
There’s a correlation here between happiness and faith, it seems.
Earlier in the year I was at a seminar for utopian studies where the issue of religion and utopian thinking arose (this was specifically in relation to science fiction literature, and ‘religion’ seemed a relatively disparaging term in the way it was used).
This led me to wonder, could being an atheist – or at least lacking a belief in the afterlife – lead to an inability to imagine the future?
My recent work has involved making objects that use ‘technologies of their time’ in order to reflect on questions of memory, nostalgia and the gaps in collective histories. This has sometimes involved recording a sound or image digitally and ‘translating’ it into an analogue technology. (I know I’m treading all kinds of fine lines here).
Typically this gives the recorded image or sound a much more ‘thing’-like’ quality: unreliable memories, expressions and conversations suddenly become more solid and weighty. Vinyl acetates, 35mm slide film, magnetic VHS tape – all these technolgies are thrown into a kind of sculptural relief when imagined alongside the floating ephemera of mp3s, tiffs and jpegs. Read the rest of this entry »
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