bohoe
photography

The future of TV? I installed it on my mac and it looks great. I can actually control it with my MacBook remote! There is a small selection of channels so far, perhaps not the best ever, but Im sure if they keep at it the guys that brought us Skype will make an amazing use of the media. You need an invite to join, but I found a way to invite your self to Joost at here. Try it, just watch out for your ISP monthly download allowance!

From Spam Poison:
WWW Robots (also called wanderers, spiders, crawlers, or bots) are programs that crawl the Web continually retrieving linked pages. When a spammer’s bot visits your website, blog, forum, etc, all pages and sites linked to it will be searched looking for email addresses.
Now you can fight back against their robots!

The links added to your site will redirect email harvesting bots to trap sites that will feed it with an almost infinite loop of dynamically generated fake email addresses, mostly on known spammer owned domains! This will render their harvested lists pratically useless and of no commercial value.

If you are a blogger, add the code from their site to your footer. The code will look like this:

Get it at Spam Poison

“Report, view, or discuss local problems like graffiti, fly tipping, broken paving slabs, or street lighting” online. Great, where? at Neighbourhood Fix-It. This is the story of a site built by mySociety. They build websites which give people “simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives”. As far as I know it only relates to the UK, but it serves as a good example of what the future of the internet will be like. We need more practical sites that allow us to improve our everyday experiences, and better communicate with those on power. Another great example is WriteToThem, where you can contact your Councillors, MP, MEPs, MSPs, or Northern Ireland, Welsh and London AMs for free. Very well done!

More community sites at mySociety projects.

Matthew Monteith: Czech Eden
by Michael Famighetti

After the Velvet Revolution marked the end of Czechoslovakia’s Communist regime tourists from across Western Europe, and the world, arrived by the busload in Prague to marvel at this spire-marked capital that had effectively been off limits, for a half century, to those outside the Soviet empire’s reach. Naturally, many of these visitors took photographs, proof that they had visited this fairytale-like place where time had seemingly stood still. Digital photography was not yet the norm, so a friend of mine, who worked in a photo lab near the center of Prague processed, day after day, photographs of the Charles Bridge, the Castle, and the famed astronomical clock, bemoaning that for all their good intentions, the photographs hit the same flat notes again and again. They were fine images to show to their friends back home but they ultimately revealed very little, beyond what Susan Sontag called “the indisputable evidence that the trip was made.”

Amateur photographs, however, can be resonant, revealing, and accomplished in their own right. Though Matthew Monteith is a prodigiously skilled, highly technical photographer, he understands this well. During his first visits to the Czech Republic in the 1990s, he developed an appreciation for Czech vernacular photography and postcards from the 1920s and ‘30s. In them he found scenes of day-to-day life that were that were at times sentimental, romantic, humorous, and mysterious, but almost always anonymous. Although these authorless photographs had functioned primarily as aide-memoire for someone unknown to Monteith, he was equally stuck by both their senses of idealism and uncanny. He then set out to create a body of work inspired by the fragmented stories to which these images had alluded.

“Czech Eden” is named after an officially protected park in the Czech Republic, a place known for its vertiginous sandstone formations and remarkable natural beauty. However, few of Monteith’s photographs depict this preserve. Instead, most were taken in or around Prague, in his friends’ homes, on the streets, or in small towns where it is as likely to find a centuries-old castle as an ominous nuclear cooling tower looming large. Although it is important to know where these photographs were taken, ultimately their meanings are not contingent upon place. “Czech Eden” should not be viewed as a documentary project. It is not a literal description of life in the Czech Republic but instead an open-ended allegory, one that references old images but articulates a vision of contemporary life that is at times disquieting and humorous. In one image a boy plays amidst the ruins of a brightly colored building; in another a man sitting in a vertigo-inducing patterned chair contemplates a hammer at his side. Elsewhere, an elderly couple, their clothing tattered, take a break from cutting wood, to pose for a picture.

They seem happy, or at least willing to oblige the photographer, but standing far apart the viewer can be forgiven for assuming that they don’t seem entirely happy with one another. Whether a landscape or a portrait, each image, however visually seductive it may be, is underscored by a revealing, albeit often disquieting, tension. The great Czech writer Ivan Klima identifies this quality in his essay in Matthew Monteith’s forthcoming monograph, suggesting that these photographs are “like a tour of the world as perceived” by Kafka, a Czech writer (though he wrote in German) known for his portrayals of alienation in the modern world. Monteith’s “Czech Eden” does not picture anything resembling paradise but instead a place that conjures a feeling of loneliness that is a basic, if unsettling, part of experience today—a mood of alienation that would be as familiar to my friend processing those pictures as to the people who took them in earnest.

via www.matthewmonteith.com
book available at Photoeye

The Gallery of Photography will is curating 5593 as an online exhibition entitled ‘3×3′, hosted on this website.

A 4 day event combining exhibits, workshops, screenings and master classes, discussions. Form the 21st to the 24th of June 2007, at Film Base, the Irish Film Center, and Cineworld Dublin.

FRIDAY 22nd June

Forum 1. TELEVISION 2.0 - The Future of TV
10.00 - 11.15am

Are we entering a time where genres are evolving with a new fluidity between art, design, film, TV practices and platforms, where commissioners are looking to grass roots producers and the tyranny of TV scheduling may be a thing of the past? What was previously considered “television content” is being burnt onto DVDs, time delayed by Personal Video Recorders (PVRs), broken into fragments, piped on demand over the Internet, downloaded into mobile devices and syndicated around the globe. How is this affecting the type of programmes being made and commissioned?

Forum 2. THE EVOLUTION OF SHORT FILM:
From Production to Distribution, Networked Communities Consuming Culture.
1.30 - 2.45pm

How has short film evolved as an artform in recent times? Responding to digital production methods, desktop movie making, interactive narrative, access to audiences through networked communities and downloads, we will ask a number of short filmmakers, writers, curators and distributors to respond to these questions.

Forum 3. ANIMATING FILMS AND GAMES:
From Dioramas to Real Time FX: The Impact of real time technology on Film production.
3.15 - 4.30pm

Filmmakers and animators are getting new and more sophisticated tools to achieve their vision. Users are getting in on the action too as gaming technology allows them to indulge in ever realistic worlds and even create films of their own. How exactly is technology developed for gaming impacting film, SFX, animation and motion graphics

SATURDAY 23rd June

Forum 4. ARTISTS AND FILMMAKERS:
New Practices in Production, Exhibition and Education.
11.00 - 12.30pm

In recent years, the familiar boundaries between art and film have been called into question by practitioners, critics and educators. While artists seem increasingly drawn to the modes of exhibition and production that were traditionally associated with cinema, the film and television industries are currently undergoing a period of significant change, in which multiple and diverse structures of production and exhibition are emerging. Is it possible for artists and filmmakers to learn from each other, particularly in relation to low-budget projects? For example, do those coming from a visual art discipline have access to different resources, enabling them to produce work on much smaller budgets than is usual in the industry?

Forum 5. MEMORY TECHNOLOGIES
2.30 - 3.45pm

This forum will investigate current and future technologies for archiving creative digital content. To look at this issue from a long term Perspective, a historical perspective and a practical one, to raise awareness in Irish media artists, filmmakers, designers etc. and try to come up with some practical suggestions for them of how or why to preserve their creative work.

To book a place for the event you must register at www.darklight.ie or send a cheque or postal order with your name and contact information to

Darklight Film Festival,
69 Dame St,
Dublin 2,
Ireland.

“Dear Voter,

Do you know who you will vote for next Thursday 24th May? Do you even know for sure what the main parties really stand for? Wouldn’t it be handy if you could compare each of them side-by-side, issue-by-issue? Yes, it would.

So to that end, dear voter, I introduce to you Fx3 VoteAssist.”

Sponsored by Fingal Fitted Furniture, this downloadable software will help you to decide by giving scores to the actual polocies that the parties themselves emphasise in their manifestos, and not to their image campaign.

Lets try it.

Thomas Allen at Foley Gallery

http://www.juliafullerton-batten.com

Monochrom is a great site for all your photographic needs, whatever your budget. I recently purchased a portfolio for under 40 euros that looks like a +100 euros one. Nice feeling on the hands, velvety, and very well built. I would recomend you to have a look at their infinite catalogue, mind the German.

http://www.monochrom.com