R. Murray Schafer's birthday chosen as World Listening Day at the Chicago Underground Library

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The Chicago Underground Library is hosting the first World Listening Day this Sunday, July 18. Activities include a soundwalk that happens inside the building and around the neighborhood, and a listening party, with field recordings of nature sounds and urban sounds being played. This event is being organized by the World Listening Project, in partnership with the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.

The purposes of World Listening Day are:

· to celebrate the practice of listening as it relates to the world around us, environmental awareness, and acoustic ecology;

· to raise awareness about issues related to the World Soundscape Project, World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, World Listening Project, and individual and group efforts to creatively explore phonography;

· and to design and implement educational initiatives which explore these concepts and practices.

July 18 was chosen as the date for World Listening Day because it is the birthday of the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who is one of the founders of the Acoustic Ecology movement. The World Soundscape Project, which Schafer directed, is an important organization which has inspired a lot of activity in this field, and his book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World helped to define many of the terms and background behind the acoustic ecology movement.

When: Sunday, July 18th @ 2pm

Where: Chicago Underground Library, 621 W Belmont Ave, 2nd Floor

This is nuts - Quornstruction: The house made of meat or the In Vitro Flesh House with Responsive Sphincter doors & windows

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A designer called Mitchell Joachim has suggested something rather disgusting -- a house made of meat. But before you go calling the RSPCA, you should know that it's entirely cruelty-free, unlike the meat ship, because it's built from flesh grown in a lab.

It's a concept structure created from flesh cells that have been grown in a Petri dish. It's called the In Vitro Meat Habitat, and Joachim says that he's actually developing the concept in a lab: "It is intended to be a ‘victimless shelter’, because no sentient being was harmed in the laboratory growth of the skin."

read more: wired.co.uk

The Rise of Fandependent filmmaking: Lynch three Project : T Shirts, exclusives & membership!

Check out this website I found at lynchthree.com.
We are currently in pre-production on the third and final full-length documentary film about David Lynch entitled "LYNCHthree” and would like to give all of his fans around the world an opportunity to share in the filmmaking process. As truly independent filmmakers, we know first-hand that raising money is always a challenge, so we’ve decided to fund this documentary through an innovative crowdfunding campaign. This is one of the best ways we feel we can engage you in the process and utilize the tools of social media to connect with Lynch fans like yourself across the globe. Here's how it all works: David has created a cool limited edition self-portrait exclusively for this project. If you donate $50 towards the production of the film through this website, you will become a member of the LYNCHthree project, gain access to exclusive footage and receive your choice of either a limited edition collectible print, t-shirt or tote bag.

I thank Thomas Mai for the lovely, useful & completely appropriate term 'Fandependent'

oh oh oh oh oh SO COOL! Microsoft and NASA create detailed 3D Mars map

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(source: wired.co.uk )

Google’s interactive map of Mars might be impressive, but it only scratches the surface of Microsoft’s new Red Planet map, which lets you zoom in so far you can see the tracks left by the Opportunity Rover in 2004.

In collaboration with NASA, the new WorldWide Telescope map features the highest resolution images ever taken of Mars, with 74,000 images from Mars Global Surveyor's Mars Orbiter Camera and a further 13,000 taken by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter's High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera. Those happy snaps contain more than a billion pixels each.

Don’t worry about your Internet connection though; like Google Maps, they’ve been split into half a billion smaller images, stitched together into a 3D image of the map that loads progressively as you span from the Cydonia Region’s "Face on Mars" to the Valles Marineris.

The trade off is that the super high-res images can also be super slow, and you’re forced to choose between installing the hefty desktop application or using Microsoft Silverlight if you want to see it in your browser...."

read more: www.wired.co.uk

How Caravaggio saw in the dark - did he use a camera obscura? fascinating

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The Italian master was a scoundrel and a killer, but did he also use a machine to help him 'cheat’ as he created his paintings? Martin Gayford sheds new light on a 400-year-old mystery.

By Martin Gayford
Published: 12:05PM BST 13 Jul 2010

David with the Head of Goliath, c. 1607, by the Italian artist Caravaggio Photo: GETTY IMAGES
On July 18, 1610, a man named Michelangelo Merisi died on the southern coast of Tuscany. Recently, a team of Italian forensic investigators made the international news by claiming to have discovered his bones. By all accounts, he died miserably – the latest, not very plausible suggestion, being that lead poisoning had something to do with it. Murder has also been suspected. The earliest accounts describe a fatal attack of impatience, causing him to pursue on foot along the scorching coast a boat that was carrying his baggage away. Whatever the cause, the deceased was the great artist better known to posterity as Caravaggio. He was 38 years old.
Four hundred years later, he is, by many indications, the world’s favourite old master. Canadian researcher Philip Sohm has established that in the past 50 years, Caravaggio has overtaken that other Michelangelo – Buonarroti – as the favourite subject of art historical research. More, it seems, has been written about him in the past half century than any other artist....

....A deeper reason can be found in Caravaggio’s work itself. There is a dark mixture of violence and sexuality that appeals to the sensibility of an age that relishes the art of Francis Bacon and Quentin Tarantino. As the art historian Robert Hughes pointed out, you can see from the way the executioner holds his knife in Beheading of St John the Baptist that Caravaggio knew precisely the most brutally effective way to wield a weapon.

read more: www.telegraph.uk

Too Hollyweird for Hollywood? David Lynch asks fans to help fund his movies & fans can input re. content!

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Source: www.independent.co.uk

By Arifa Akbar, Arts Correspondent
Monday, 12 July 2010

There used to be a time when a filmmaker had a clever idea, took it to a Hollywood studio executive and, by the end of a long lunch, had secured enough money to make their next movie.

For lesser known film directors, this process involved a few more begging bowls being taken to a few more financiers and subsidising bodies. But still it usually worked.

But now in the credit crunched climate of tightened belts and attenuated film funds, film-makers are turning to a new model: "crowd funding".

This involves the cinema-going public being invited to show their support for film-makers by giving to online appeals, in return for film mementos or even a credit at the end of their chosen film.

The latest high profile director to sign up to this method is David Lynch, famed for such cult films as Eraserhead and Mulholland Drive. Lynch, who was a trained artist before he turned to making films, has produced a self-portrait which any fan who is willing to donate $50 (£33) to a documentary about his life and work, will be sent as a gift.

Jon Nguyen, the producer for the film, Lynch Three, said he wanted to "give something back" to the fans who were being asked to donate money.

"A film can take a long time to finance so we had this crowd-funding idea. We went to David Lynch for his seal of approval and he was up for it. He ended up making an abstract self-portrait and we're going to give an original print of it to anyone who chooses to donate $50 towards the film, or a T-shirt featuring the print. We hope to raise part of the money in this way," he said.

The film will form the third documentary in a trilogy following Lynch's career and the making of his 2006 psychological thriller, Inland Empire, starring Laura Dern and Jeremy Irons.

Read more: www.independent.co.uk

THE Buzz at TED Global 2010 - Eyes-on: Peter Molyneux's 'Milo and Kate' project

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At the TEDGlobal 2010 conference in Oxford, games developer Peter Molyneux has shown off Milo and Kate, a forthcoming game for Microsoft's Kinect Xbox add-on. The game tells the story of Milo, a boy who's just moved to New England from London with his parents, and a dog called Kate.

Players take the form of Milo's friend, and interact without using a joypad. The Kinect camera tracks your hand and body movements and acts accordingly.

Molyneux showed off the early stages of the game, where Milo has just moved into his new house and is finding his way around. "Most of it is a trick", said Molyneux, "but it's a trick that works."

The earliest sections of the game show the player hunting down snails with Milo. Female players get butterflies instead -- Molyneux said that girls find snails too icky. You select them with movements of your hand, and at one point Milo asks if he should stamp on one. The demonstrator shouted "Go on Milo, squash it!" and he did.

All the while, the game is learning about the player. Using psychology techniques, the player is asked to make decisions that shape the character of who Milo turns out to be. Molyneux said, "No people's Milo can be the same", which may turn out to be somewhat of an exaggeration -- we were only shown a few of these decisions, so it's a little early to tell.

Milo then finds a pond, and the player is asked to teach him how to skim stones. Standing up, the demonstrator pretended to skim a stone, and the game responded. There was a tiny lag time as the movements were calculated, but it appeared effective. Each task earns the player a certain amount of points, depending on how well it's performed.

Read more:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2010-07/13/peter-molyneux-milo-and-kate-x...

Neil Gaiman And Eddie Campbell To Create Illustrated Story For Sydney Opera House Bleeding Cool Comic Book News and Rumors

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(source: bleedingcool.com )

"A new graphic storytelling, comics, animation and illustration festival will take place at the Sydney Opera House the first weekend of August. Neil Gaiman will read his new as-yet unpublished story The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains in the Concert Hall. Eddie Campbell has been commissioned to illustrate the story and Australian string quartet FourPlay will create a live underscore to the reading.

This is the kind of thing YouTube was invented for, right?

The festival will also have an evenings with Kevin Smith (who will no doubt try it on with Amanda Palmer if she comes along), the anime Akira, rescored live by Regurgitator and a performance of The Arrival by Shaun Tan with live score by Ben Walsh’s Orkestra of The Underground."