Installation of Moving Image, Soundscape & Light
Concept & Creation: Bill Psarras
MA Digital Arts Exhibition | July 2010 | London (UK)
University of the Arts London
Camberwell College of Arts
Τρίτη 11 Μαΐου 2010
Δευτέρα 15 Μαρτίου 2010
Ludmilla My Side-It's ok for Tonight (Music Videoclip)
Ludmilla My Side
Song: It's ok for Tonight
Album: Flowerface (2009)
Filming|Concept|Editing: BIll Psarras
More info, news and music at:
Myspace page and Last fm page
Πέμπτη 11 Μαρτίου 2010
Σάββατο 16 Ιανουαρίου 2010
Bill Psarras | Feeding My Desire CD -Released!
Μόλις ολοκληρώθηκε το πρώτο μου επίσημο CD 'Feeding My Desire'!
Πρόκειται για guitar instrumental Cd.
Ηχογραφήθηκε & μιξαρίστηκε στην Αθήνα, στα Scythe Noise Lab (Chris Ntaskas) και το τελικό mastering έγινε στην Universal (mastering studios) στην Αμερική από τον Peter Doell.
* Περιέχει 8 κομμάτια κιθαριστικά
* Session Drums : Hector Tsolakis
Μπορείτε να το κάνετε download από το Isohunt, το Demonoid ή το What.Cd ! ή να το ακούσετε στον Last fm !
(temporary artwork)
Τρίτη 12 Ιανουαρίου 2010
Miroslaw Balka - How It Is | TATE modern | London
Miroslaw Balka at Tate Modern
Miroslaw Balka’s box of darkness is disturbing in its historical echoes but beautiful as well.
Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall commission has become an annual, highly-anticipated fixture of the art scene, ranging from a giant egg-clutching arachnid through a vast shimmering sun to a fissure that zig-zagged across the floor. Forget that famous, headline-hogging sun. The latest crowd-puller, by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka and due to be unveiled today, is quite simply the best Turbine Hall installation yet.
An enormous shipping container appears to have been plonked down at the end of the building. You can pace its perimeters or walk underneath it: it’s just high enough. “So what?” you might wonder until you remember that, to the vivid imagination, boxes have far more potential than the presents inside. This is certainly true of this new work by the Polish artist Miroslaw Balka. How It Ismay be the most sternly understated art work to occupy the Tate’s Turbine Hall to date. But imaginatively it is the most profoundly resonant.
At the farthest end of the vast steel box is a ramp. The visitor walks up it and into a blackness so thick that you can almost feel it brushing against your face. The walls must be reached for with outstretched fingertips. They feel slightly fuzzy. A light absorbent flock coating has been sprayed over the surfaces, apparently, although by this point it’s probably not the materials that the spectator is wondering about as he stands abandoned in the dark.
The experience is sombre, discombobulating and perhaps a bit sinister. But it is beautiful too — and not least when, as your eyes slowly adjust, you begin to discern the infinite subtle shades of grey or turn back to face the entrance and see other visitors vacillating nervously on the brink before, stepping into the engulfing shadows, they are transformed into stalking silhouettes.
Balka himself cuts a striking figure as he strides like some Giacometti figure through his Turbine Hall construction. He looks fairly terrifying: 6ft 3in tall with a steel-blue stare and dressed toe to crown in ascetic black. But though his work is always serious, he says, a glint of dark humour is seldom far from the surface. It glitters like the laughter that lights up his conversation.
Balka, born into a Roman Catholic family in communist Poland in 1958, was brought up in Otwock, near Warsaw, where he still lives with his wife, doing most of his work in his old family home. He sees himself in some ways as the inheritor of the artistic traditions of his forebears: of his grandfather, a monumental stone mason, and his father, 81, who engraved tombs. And though the latter would disagree (“he thinks my work is all rubbish”), the similarities are resonant.
Balka’s work, frequently using the dimensions of his body as an organising principle (height, arm’s length, weight, shoe size), has an elegiac quality. It is about memory and loss and the preservation of life’s fragile traces. Often inspired by cemeteries, Balka is haunted by the deportations and deaths of the Second World War.
His early works were figurative but, by the late 1980s, he had moved away from literal representation — “I didn’t want to do illustrations” — into a more symbolic domain, a world in which objects of personal significance also have a wider relevance.
Representing his country in the 1993 Venice Biennale, for instance, he presented a corridor of soap, a disquieting installation whose scents evoked not just his own schoolboy memories but the way the Nazis made soap from the rendered fat of gassed Jews. In his first major solo exhibition in Britain in 2002, at Dundee Contemporary Arts, he created a replica of the slatted, blond wood floor of the room adjacent to the gas chamber in the Majdanek concentration camp. The gaps between the planks were filled with salt: the essential reduction of sweat and tears.
Of course he was excited to be offered the Turbine Hall commission, he tells me. But he was daunted too. He had seen most of the previous commissions but he decided to work in dialogue with the Weather Project of Olafur Eliasson, the huge shimmering sun that rose like a mirage through its veil of mists. “But where he used light, I would use dark,” Balka says.
It was the open space and the simplicity of Eliasson’s installation that appealed to him, Balka says, but he didn’t like the David Copperfield-style spectaculars of the artificial smoke. “I wanted to make sculpture in an honest way,” he says. “What is important is the honest material.” He chose steel that had been allowed to rust. “I built up the structure quite logically” he says, and then laughs. “With a space the size of this you need something to organise yourself and logic will do as well as anything.
“The Turbine Hall often feels like an indoor playground. I was thinking about how to create limits, to bring calm and quiet to the place, to discipline people’s gestures. I also wanted to create something like a photographic black hole,” he adds. “Every day millions of photographs are taken in London. I wanted to create a place, a situation, where people would not be able to take good pictures. Their experience will be more intense.”
What will their experience mean? In the context of Balka’s past works, who can walk up the ramp into his sinister black box without remembering how the Jews were once loaded into cattle trucks? Such references are implicit, Balka admits. He grew up in a town in which 75 per cent of the population had been exterminated in the death camps. And yet he found this out only after the 1989 collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. “When I did I felt guilty,” he says, “guilty of not knowing.” From then on it became very important to him, almost a duty, he explains, to carry his camera to the sites of historical atrocities; to try, using his imagination and while there is still time, to collect traces of what happened. But his video pieces are very different from his sculptural works, he insists.
“My sculptures are about layers of interpretation. They are about being,” he ventures when pushed. “I don’t want people to look at my work with a strong spotlight. I prefer them to look with a small flashlight.”
In How It Is (the title purloined from Samuel Beckett is strikingly direct and comes complete with a set of simple hand gestures that the artist has apparently been teaching Tate functionaries to make) Balka wants only to “make a place that gives us opportunities for thinking”.
He succeeds. There is no obvious present inside his box. But the visitor stands surrounded by a sense of presence. It’s a powerful experience (as long as you’re not too worried about strangers purloining your purse under cover of darkness). How It Is may not prove as popular as Eliasson’s cultish Weather Project because it feels far more profound. On its tenth anniversary, the Turbine Hall offers its most successful commission to date.
Δευτέρα 11 Ιανουαρίου 2010
Τρίτη 8 Δεκεμβρίου 2009
Πέμπτη 26 Νοεμβρίου 2009
«Σοκαριστική» η σπατάλη τροφίμων στις ΗΠΑ
Τα μισά στα σκουπίδια...
«Οι αριθμοί προκαλούν σοκ» σχολιάζουν οι ερευνητές που χρησιμοποίησαν μια πρωτότυπη μέθοδο για να υπολογίσουν ότι το 40% των τροφίμων στην αμερικανική αγορά καταλήγει στα σκουπίδια. Και το πρόβλημα φαίνεται να επιδεινώνεται.
Η σπατάλη των τροφίμων, εξηγεί ο δικτυακός τόπος του περιοδικού Science, εκτιμάται συνήθως μέσω συνεντεύξεων με καταναλωτές, οι οποίες θεωρούνται μάλλον αναξιόπιστες, και μέσω επιθεωρήσεων στα αστικά απορρίμματα, μέθοδος γεωγραφικά ανεπαρκής.
Οι ερευνητές του αμερικανικού Εθνικού Ινστιτούτου Διαβήτη και Νοσημάτων Πεπτικού Συστήματος και Νεφρού (NIDDK) ακολούθησαν μια διαφορετική προσέγγιση: αφαίρεσαν από τη συνολική μάζα των τροφίμων που διατίθεται στην αμερικανική αγορά τη μάζα που εκτιμάται ότι απαιτείται για τη διατροφή του πληθυσμού.
«Το ονομάζουμε 'χαμένη μάζα' του αμερικανικού φαγητού» σχολιάζει ο μαθηματικός Κάρσον Τσόου, μέλος της ομάδας.
Οι ερευνητές αρχικά προσδιόρισαν τη μέση μάζα σώματος στις ΗΠΑ το διάστημα 1974-2003 και υπολόγισαν πόσο φαγητό απαιτούσε το σύνολο του πληθυσμού για αυτή την περίοδο. Στη συνέχεια η ποσότητα αυτή αφαιρέθηκε από τις συνολικές ποσότητες τροφίμων στην αμερικανική αγορά, όπως αυτές δηλώνονται από τις ΗΠΑ στον Οργανισμό Τροφίμων και Γεωργίας του ΟΗΕ.
Η διαφορά αντιστοιχεί στη σπατάλη τροφίμων, η οποία υπολογίστηκε στο 39% για το 2003.
Η ανάλυση βασίστηκε στην υπόθεση ότι τα επίπεδα σωματικής άσκησης στον πληθυσμό, που επηρεάζουν την κατανάλωση θερμίδων, είχαν μείνει στάσιμα αυτή την περίοδο (άλλοι πιστεύουν ότι μειώθηκαν, κάτι που θα σήμαινε ακόμα μεγαλύτερη σπατάλη.
Τα στοιχεία μάλιστα δείχνουν ότι η σπατάλη το 1974 ήταν μόνο 30% και αυξήθηκε δραματικά τα επόμενα χρόνια.
Τα αίτια της αύξησης παραμένουν ασαφή, ωστόσο οι ερευνητές υποψιάζονται ότι το μεγαλύτερο μερίδιο στης σπατάλης αντιστοιχεί στα νοικοκυριά και το πρόβλημα επιδεινώνεται από την πτώση στις τιμές των τροφίμων.
Η έρευνα δημοσιεύεται στην ηλεκτρονική επιθεώρηση PLoS ONE.
Newsroom ΔΟΛ
Κυριακή 22 Νοεμβρίου 2009
Bill Psarras - Recording Silence (EP) !
Bill Psarras
Recording Silence (EP)
Recording Silence (EP) consists an atmospheric guitar instrumental work, influenced by the clear sound of 80’s-90’s (Pink Floyd, Genesis, Marillion, Porcupine Tree and others). Check out the first 2 songs at Last.fm page!
There will be two EP's, Recording Silence pt.1 (December 2009) & Recording Silence pt.2 (2010).
Τρίτη 17 Νοεμβρίου 2009
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