Tyger, Tyger in a Folded World

I just came across this, pretty much by accident.  It's amazing, a small film by Guilherme Marcondes, a Brazilian filmmaker, based on the William Blake poem. He uses puppetry, illustration, photography and CGI to make a fantastically rich little gem:


Mr. Marcondes is influenced by the pastiche of Brazilian culture and the DIY quality of the Brazilian film schools of which he came.  Clearly, he uses anything he can get his hands on, including things like origami and the ancient Japanese puppet-art of bunraku.  It's all very stylized and fabulous, and makes me want to know more about his earlier life -- did he study all these kinds of art?  He must have.

I went to his website, where he has samples of his work, and I found this, from a movie called Bunraku, the opening sequence of which he was given carte blanche to do:


 I never heard of this movie, Bunraku.  It looks like it was released in France and Canada, but not here...?  It looks like a very violent movie, definitely not my type of thing, but the art direction looks really interesting: the pans through cities seem to unfold like a pop-up book, and the scenery is an odd conglomeration of bits.  Which leads me to the fact that Mr. Marcondes originally studied architecture: 

"I like experiencing architecture, not practicing it. Just as I go to the movies or listen to music, I like to wander around a city, paying attention to how the space is organized, how the transportation works, etc. I’m interested in how the environment we live in changes and conditions our personalities. That’s clearer in Tyger than in any other film I’ve made. That also explains why I like J.G. Ballard so much!"  [link]

And on that note, I will leave you to ponder a world where cities are made to pop up as you move through them, and when the apocalypse comes, flowers of light grow through the cracks of the world.

DreamCon 2009

So I had this dream. I've had it before, where I'm sitting in workshops at a conference and walking around. There's always a workshop or a panel I forgot about, and wish I'd gone to, like the panel where everyone is learning to change the colors of crystalline rocks in jars. Or the one where they are learning to install beehives in pieces of furniture (taught by the same guy, interestingly, an intense young man who seems to hold it against anyone who didn't come to his workshop, and in fact puts a chair full of bees in my car to show me what I missed).

There's a panel on Do Spiders Understand Geometry? and one on Static Electricity As Art Form.

Some of the groups, such as the one of mechanical wind-instrument geeks, had their own rooms with terrine-style displays of items of interest such as working valves from tuba-like items, odd keys from unusual bassoons, and interesting bits of other, lesser known instruments - things which I had no idea could be so complex and magical. One group, Ants for Architecture, had a whole display on using ants to build your house. A little like the bee-furniture, I suppose; I'm not certain why there are so many insects in this particular convention.

Some other popular panels and activities:

- Writing Live Code: codemakers as zookeepers, or how to keep your functions from escaping into the next code-object
- Designing Electronics Through Intuitive Fields: how to use the emotion of electronic fields to guide your circuit-building
- Direct Optical Music: redesigning your optical drive to play the tonal qualities of, say, a piece of metallic lace or a piece of tin foil
- Ethernet Fishtank: teaching your fish to swim the network

There were so many more; what I liked about this particular con was how much the different compartments of our worlds intersect to create something never before seen. I do wish I could go to some of these panels when I was conscious, though.

What panel or workshop would you like to see at DreamCon? Any suggestions?