Archive for February, 2007

Posted on February 22, 2007 - by dionysus

the seamless art of rob gonsalves

This Canadian-born creator is master and maker of worlds where normalcy recurses into phantasy. Reality and the realms of imagination flow seamlessly into each other, usually through the imagination of a child.

His work depicts that time between sleep and wakefulness, creating a breathtaking, visual exploration of imagination and possibility that encourages us to think past the boundaries of everyday life, and see the possibilities beyond.Although Gonsalves’ work may appear to be surrealistic, it differs in that the images are deliberately planned and result from conscious thought. Ideas are largely generated by the external world and involve recognizable human activities, using carefully planned illusionist devices. Gonsalves injects a sense of magic into realistic scenes. As a result, the term “magic realism” describes his work accurately. His work is an attempt to represent human beings’ desire to believe in the impossible.

from Saper Gallery

Rob Gonsalves began his professional life as an architect, switching over to art full time upon receiving enthusiastic feedback to his first efforts. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that he builds, rather than paints?

Linkage
• many more Seamless Pictures
• prints ordered from this Gallery, among others.

Posted on February 17, 2007 - by dionysus

10600::1

Artists over at Psygarden released a panoramic Flickr-like mosaic composed of 10,600 photographs taken from their partypic database. Three resolutions are available for download. Printed at full size – five feet by two feet – you can actually see the individual images in each tile.

We recommend utilizing the Rasterbator to print extremely large posters on common color printers.

Linkage
• Boom Festival 2004 Mosaic Using 10.600 Tiled Images

Posted on February 7, 2007 - by dionysus

Please pass the Lemon Jelly

We first heard Lemon Jelly in rotation on di.fm chillout, with their first-ever track, In the Bath. Its the sort of song that makes you smile when you think about it (especially if you are taking a shower at the time), and it is one of the few nontrance tracks on our Must Hear At A Trance Party Someday wish list.

The English duo of Nick Franglen and Fred Deakin charts cool, ethereal courses through the little fluffy clouds, wandering off occasionally into candy-colored La La Land, while superimposing occasional samples of sleepy Discovery Channel/Mr. Rogers voices offering surreal, seemingly educationally derived narration. (more…)

Posted on February 2, 2007 - by dionysus

before groundhogs and superbowls

Thig an nathair as an toll
La donn Bride,
Ged robh tri traighean dh’ an t-sneachd
Air leachd an lair.

Imbolc (pronounced im’olk) from the Old Irish meaning “in the belly” (i mbolg), referring to the pregnancy of ewes, and is the Celtic reconing for the first stirrings of spring. The holiday is a festival of the hearth and home, and a celebration of fire, the lengthening days, and the return of life. It is the yin to the yang of Samhain.

Bits and pieces of the ancient feast day survive in contemporary Western culture. Most secularized is the ritual of the New Years resolution. As a time of the year associated with beginning growth, Imbolc was the time to prepare for the activities of summer. Fishermen would begin preparing their gear to go out, farmers would make sure their plows and other tools were in good working order; warriors, likewise, their weapons. This was a time of preparation for one’s summer activities, what ever they may be. It was also a time to check one’s food stores, to see if they would last the rest of the season for there was still little fresh food for some time.[1]

Groundhog’s Day is another long-surviving bit of Northern European lore, as the Gaelic poem above suggests. Weather prognostication was part of Imbolc. Snakes, or somtimes badgers, were said to use their shadow to divine the length of winter.

Since dark, cold, and snow blankted the land, travelling for large holiday gatherings was culturally discouraged. Instead, the festive energy was focused inward, on the village, the household, family and friends. Large feasts, to share what remained of winter stores in the final weeks before spring thaw, are common on Imbolc. Likewise, in modern secular America, on Superbowl Sunday, intimate clusters of families and friends gather around the modern hearth (television) and consume large quantities of food in communion with each other, and by association, with all the other households performing the same ritual at the same broadcast time.

Spring cleaning, a dreaded phrase in many large suburban homes, was a ritual enacted in ancient Celtic (and later, early Christian) homes, in preparation for a midnight visit from Brigid (later, St. Brigid).

The high holy significance of Imbolc to the ancients cannot be justified by the folksy bits of cultural flotsam stuck in the corners of the collective unconscious, however.

Sacred sites, such as Loughcrew and the Mound of the Hostages, feature inner chambers at the end of long passage tombs, perfectly aligned with the rising sun of both Imbolc and Samhain. At Newgrange, the rising Imbolc sun shines down the long passageway and illuminates the inner chamber of the tomb.

• Newgrange, a hallucinatory psy-ambient evocation of the Imbolc sunrise by AZukx.

More (more…)