Art Visible from Space
Have you ever wondered if any artworks are visible from space, or thought of going on a journey of “extra terrestrial” discovery using Google Earth?.
Artist Merrill Kazanjian explores art visible from space from Google Earth Gallery
This video was created by an artist looking at that perspective – Merrill Kazanjian is an artist who creates a lot of art tutorials and shares them on YouTube.
He gives his reasons for choosing this medium for sharing:
“I am dyslexic and I always struggled with text.
Video gives visual learners a great alternative to text, and I want to supply a textual alternative for artists.
I also taught as an art teacher for eight years. My job was eliminated three times in eight years due to budgets. My first step by step videos were created with the purpose of keeping misbehaving students occupied.”
Merrill uses mixed media of all kinds, digital manipulation and traditional art methods. In this video he uses mixed media and a photocopier.
“My friend Al Alvir has a very popular Boxing/Mixed Martial Arts blog- http://shootafairone.com/ and I decided to create a character for one of the writers he has on staff (O’Toole). Allen is a big fan of Mike Tyson (heavyweight champion) and his legendary trainer Cus D’Amato who also trained managed Floyd Patterson (olympic and heavyweight champion) and Jose Torres (light heavyweight champion) so I made this character with D’Amato in mind.
I used D’Amato reference photos for my initial drawing but also had fictional “Rocky” trainer Mickey Goldmill in mind (portrayed by Burgess Meredith). Using these two icons; one from pop culture one from reality, gave me an interesting image to illustrate. In this video, I documented my process. ”
Merrill calls his YouTube channel “Kazanjian – the Unspellable Art Channel.”
http://www.youtube.com/user/kazanjianm
http://www.merrillk.com/
If you know of other artwork visible from space and would like to share it or discuss it – post it on the rainbowzebra forums. www.rainbowzebra.com/forums
Read MoreConnecting Girls, Inspiring Futures: Women’s Day
A selection of women’s art to celebrate Women’s Day 2012:
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/artwork.asp
Left: Artist: Sarena Kirk
Title: Celebrating Women Helping Women
International Women’s Day theme
2012 Theme: CONNECTING GIRLS, INSPIRING FUTURES
If every International Women’s Day event held in 2012 includes girls in some way, then thousands of minds will be inspired globally.
Each year around the world, International Women’s Day (IWD) is celebrated on March 8. Thousands of events occur not just on this day but throughout March to mark the economic, political and social achievements of women.
Organisations, governments, charities and women’s groups around the world choose different themes each year that reflect global and local gender issues.
“Connecting Girls, Inspiring Futures” is the 2012 theme of the internationalwomensday.com website and this has been widely used by hundreds of organisations including schools, universities, governments, women’s groups and the private sector. Each year the United Nations declares an overall International Women’s Day theme. Their 2012 theme is “Empower Rural Women – End Hunger and Poverty”. Many organisations develop their own themes that are more relevant to their local contexts. For example, the European Parliament’s 2012 theme is “Equal pay for work of equal value”.
Find events in your area for International Womens Day:
http://www.internationalwomensday.com/theme.asp
The Challenge
We are challenging you to Walk In Her Shoes. The challenge is simple; choose any week in March 2012 and walk 10,000 steps per day for the whole week.
See the website for details http://www.carechallenge.org.uk/charity-challenges/charity-walks/walk-in-her-shoes
Paul Snelgrove: Making Ocean Life Count
“How inappropriate to call this planet Earth when it is quite clearly Ocean.”
— Arthur C. Clark
The world’s first comprehensive Census of Marine Life — past, present, and future — was released in 2010 in London, at the same time that Paul Snelgrove released his book: Discoveries of the Census of Marine Life: Making Ocean Life Count.
The Census of Marine Life was started by two scientists who realised that the Oceans were in trouble and we were doing nothing about it.
Planet Ocean
Although the oceans cover some 70% of our planet, providing more habitat than all other habitat combined, and produce about half of the new life everyday on earth as well as about half of the oxygen that we breathe, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about the oceans
The Census project was undertaken by a global network of 2700 scientists from more than 80 nations who engaged in a 10-year scientific initiative assess and explain the diversity, distribution, and abundance of life in the global ocean.
The three main components of the census were organised around the questions:
What has lived in the oceans?
What does live in the oceans?
What will live in the oceans?
They wanted to construct the history of marine animal populations since human predation became important – roughly the last 500 years. The Roman development of salting fish as a means of preservation changed fishing patterns from one of purely catching “the meal for the day” to industrial scale fishing.
New Technologies
The study examined and used new technologies to explore unknown species and habitats, migration routes and distribution patterns, how the oceans are changing and what we can expect from them in the future.
New technologies facilitated research, remotely operated vehicles combined with satellite communication enabled distant scientists to participate in scientific investigations thousands of miles away, and the new science of genetic bar coding , developed by geneticists enabled the exact recognition of fish species.
Results have been quite astounding, with 4-5 new species from the ocean being described each day. The information has proved extremely valuable already in many ways, for example, scientists in the Gulf of Mexico had just taken a census of species in the gulf which proved very useful when the Gulf Oil Spill happened , to establish a clear idea of how marine life in the area had been affected.
Paul Snelgrove gives a fascinating talk supported by illuminating graphics and astounding photographs.
Read MoreInto Eternity: A Few Hours to See a Hidden Place
Dont Miss This!
You have a matter of hours to see this film live-streamed for free.
See a place that has been carefully hidden from most of us,
along with the frightening realities it hides.
This may perhaps be the longest-lasting monument to our civilisation, and what will it say about us?
Watch it Live while it is available…here…
INTO ETERNITY is a multi award-winning documentary film about long-term safety issues in nuclear energy production. The film is set at ’Onkalo’ the world’s first permanent storage site for nuclear waste, which is under construction in Finland. However, all countries with nuclear energy facilities have to deal with nuclear waste for at least 100 000 years.
With the Fukushima disaster, Japan now has additional nuclear waste. Onkalo is an underground facility, but Fukushima is above ground, vulnerable to natural disasters, war, and economic crisis. The reactors, that suffered full or partial meltdown, will have to be permanently controlled and maintained for millenia on end.
THE EVENT
The radioactive evacuation zone is now uninhabitable. It has become a blind spot in the middle of
Japan, a symbol of the dangers of blindness in thinking about safety. We cannot secure ourselves
against things we cannot – or will not – see.
A TOTAL OF 150 837 PEOPLE ARE DISPLACED AS A RESULT OF THE FUKUSHIMA DISASTER.
A window of 150 837 seconds of free on-line streaming of the documentary
INTO ETERNITY has now opened.
WHEN
March 3rd, 2012 at 7.32 am (CET): The window opens
March 5th, 2012 at 1.26 am (CET): The window closes
AWARDS:
Wild & Scenic Film Festival, January 2012, California, USA
Best of Festival
FilmAmbiente – International Environmental Film Festival, November 2011, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Best International Feature Film
Baikal International Festival of Documentary, October 2011, Irkutsk, Russia
Grand Prix
Antenna International Documentary Film Festival, October 2011, Sydney, Australia
Best International Film
International Uranium Film Festival, May 2011, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Jury Award: Best Feature Documentary
Cinemaplaneta, March 2011, MEXICO
Award for: “the most innovative approach to an environmental issue”
Documentary New Zealand Trust, February 2011
Best international editing
Special Mention: Best International Feature Doc
FIFE, Paris, France, November 2010
Grand Prix
IDFA, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, November 28th 2010
IDFA Green Screen Award
Sheffield, UK, November 7th 2010
Special mention Sheffield Green award
Festival des Libertes, Brussels, Belgium, October 30th 2010
Lichtpunt Prize
CineEcoJúri Internacional, 25 October 2010, Portugal
GRANDE PRÉMIO CINE’ECO 2010
Youth Jury Award
Nordisk Panorama – 5 Cities Film Festival, Bergen Norway, September 29th, 2010
Nordic Documentary Award
Docufest, Prizren, Kosova, August 8th 2010
Special Mention
Planete Doc Review, May 17th 2010, Warsaw Poland
Green Award
Vision Du Reel, Nyon, Suisse, April 13th 2010
Grand Prix
CPH:DOX, Copenhagen, Denmark, November 16th 2009
Audience award
IN ADDITION MICHAEL MADSEN AS DIRECTOR HAS RECEIVED:
CPH:DOX, November 2010, Denmark
Reel Talent 2010 Award
The Danish Arts Foundation, The Committee for Film and Theatre, spring 2010
Award for Into Eternity
Read MoreCelebrating 200 Years of Charles Dickens
Tuesday 7th February 2012: There have been global celebrations marking the 200th anniversary of Charles Dicken’s birth. Prince Charles laid a wreath on the author’s grave in Poet’s Corner, at a service at Westminister Abbey.
There was also a ceremony in Portsmouth, where Dickens was born. with readings by actor and biographer Simon Callow and actress Sheila Hancock.
A 24-hour readathon, organised by the British Council is taking place from Albania to Zimbabwe, reaching the UK at 9pm on the evening of Tuesday 7th with readings by author David Nicholls from Great Expectations, at the British Film Institute.
The Dickens Anniversary was also celebrated by the charity NewstrAid – a charity which was founded n 1854 to help men and women from the newspaper industry who were in need, and of which Charles Dickens was President from 1854 until his death in 1870
Google celebrated the day with one of its Google Doodles, and the artist Mike Dutton points out some details about the work on the Google Doodle site.
Dutton says: “We have quite a number of characters who showed up today to help celebrate Charles Dickens’ 200th birthday. Twelve recognizable ones at least. This naturally made for a pretty busy doodle, and while we managed to squeeze in a few extra pixels to make the logo slightly larger than usual, we thought it’d be kind of nice to show you a couple close-ups here. ”
“Of course, arriving at the final image was a slight technical challenge (as crowd scenes depicted at 500 pixels wide tend to be). So I worked a bit at making the overall shapes and gestures of each character recognizable even at small sizes.
For example, Scrooge’s back is drawn exaggeratedly hunched over. Tiny Tim looks even smaller compared to the ghostly apparitions in the sky behind him. Pip’s arm is tucked behind him, and he looks meek compared to Estella, who towers over him.”
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