Over time, trees died or perhaps were knocked over by flood waters or wind. Rivers carried the trees into the lowlands, breaking off branches, bark, and small roots along the way. Some trees were deposited on the flood plain adjacent to the rivers and others were buried in the stream channels. Most of the trees decomposed and disappeared. But a few trees were petrified, becoming the beautiful fossilized logs we see today.
CYBORG FOUNDATION is the Grand Jury Prize Winner in the $200,000 GE FOCUS FORWARD Filmmaker Competition. Watch the winners at focusforwardfilms.com/winners.
Neil Harbisson was born with achromatopsia, a rare condition that causes complete colour blindness. In 2004, Harbisson and Adam Montandon developed the eyeborg, a device that translates colours into sounds.
Harbisson has been claimed to be the first recognized cyborg in the world, as his passport photo now includes his device. In 2010, Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas created the Cyborg Foundation, an international organization to help humans become cyborgs. The foundation has also experimented with other sensory devices, including an “earborg,” which translates sound into color, and a “speedborg,” which allows people to detect movement through electronic earrings that vibrate.
“Clark is adept at taking the theoretical concepts of modernism and minimalism and reapplying them to conditions that are not ideal. With a laboratory full of objects culled from thrift stores he sets about reconsidering modernist painting and minimalist sculpture. While Jared’s use of rescued objects may liken him to those artists classified as making found-art, it is his affinity for the flatness of painting that imbues his work with a sense of newness. Jared’s sense of surface and texture serves to pull these pieces together, flattening and overriding their natural objectness in favor a privileged plane, a new painted image.
Given the extent of Jared’s materials it is easy to first consider his work a series of unrelated arrangements, a sprawling mess of objects. Certainly his choice of materials, which for the moment includes: cutting boards, luggage, soap, craft paintings, ceramic figurines, map pins, painted rocks, and Styrofoam, are chosen for the express purpose of challenging his connections to painting as associated with abstraction and modernism. Often with minimal intervention Jared succeeds in addressing major considerations of abstract painting, especially mark making and color. However I find his engagement with format and the consideration of the artist’s hand his greatest concerns. How these objects find themselves arranged is strictly through Jared’s manipulation. Yet it is the prompt of their form, either through color, scale, or character, that informs Jared as to what he is to make of them, creating an odd relationship between artist and object, disguising who exactly manipulates who.”
Excerpt from a text written by Andrew Kozlowski, 2011 at Jared Clark’s website
The Danxia landform (Chinese: 丹霞地貌; pinyin: dānxiá dìmào) refers to various landscapes found in southeast and southwest China that “consist of a red bed characterized by steep cliffs”. It is a unique type of petrographic geomorphology found in China. Danxia landform is formed from red-colored sandstones and conglomerates of largely Cretaceous age. The landforms look very much like karst topography that forms in areas underlain by limestones, but since the rocks that form Danxia are sandstones and conglomerates, they have been called “pseudo-karst” landforms. Danxia landforms cover several provinces in southeast China. Taining County, Fujian Province, has very good examples of “young” danxia landforms wherein deep, narrow valleys have been formed. As the landform gets older, valleys widen and one gets isolated towers and ridges.
The Danxia landform is named after Mount Danxia, one of the most famous examples of the Danxia landform.
A very peculiar feature of Danxia landscape is the development of numerous caves of various sizes and shapes. The caves tend to be shallow and isolated, unlike true karst terrain where caves tend to form deep, interconnecting networks.
In 2010, several Danxia landscapes in southern China, with a general name of “China Danxia”, were inscribed as a World Heritage Site.
Text via Wiki. Images via Melinda ^..^’s Photostream
Black-and-white judgments may be more literal than you might expect. A new study finds that people who view information on a black-and-white background are less likely to see gray areas in moral dilemmas than those who get the information alongside other colors.
The background, which participants weren’t aware was of interest in the experiment, did not push people to become either more lenient or more severe, researchers reported Friday (May 25) here at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science. Instead, it took people’s natural tendencies toward leniency or severity and intensified them — in other words, their judgments became more black-and-white.
Read article written by Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer HERE
It was the ‘magic moment’ that released Chris James from ten years of blindness.
Doctors switched on a microchip that had been inserted into the back of his eye three weeks earlier.
After a decade of darkness, there was a sudden explosion of bright light – like a flash bulb going off, he says.
Now he is able to make out shapes and light. He hopes his sight – and the way his brain interprets what the microchip is showing it – will carry on improving.
Mr James, 54, is one of two British men who have had their vision partly restored by a pioneering retina implant.
The other, Robin Millar, one of Britain’s most successful music producers, says he has dreamed in color for the first time.
Both had lost their vision because of a condition known as retinitis pigmentosa, where the photoreceptor cells at the back of the eye gradually cease to work.
Their stories bring hope to the 20,000 Britons with RP – and to those with other eye conditions such as advanced macular degeneration which affects up to half a million.
Mr James had a ten-hour operation to insert the wafer-thin microchip in the back of his left eye at the Oxford University Eye Hospital six weeks ago. Three weeks later, it was turned on.
Mr James, who lives in Wroughton, Wiltshire, with his wife Janet, said of his ‘magic moment’: ‘I did not know what to expect but I got a flash in the eye, it was like someone taking a photo with a flashbulb and I knew my optic nerve was still working.’
The external device that allows chip pairs to process images.
Written by y Jenny Hope (Hopeful article by the way) at the Daily Mail. Continue article HERE
Images via Daily Mail, and The Telegraph
Olafur Eliasson ‘Your Rainbow Panorama’
Olafur Eliasson, Movement microscope, 2011
HDV, 16:9
Duration 14:15 min.
Supported by LUMA Foundation
© Olafur Eliasson, 2011
Now family, lawyers and police at the new Justiz Vollzugs Anstalt (Prison/ Correctional institution) in Düsseldorf, can have a more vibrant sensory experience as they walk this tunnel to meet the inmates. Hopefully, these colors have a positive effect on all the visitors’ psyche so they can transmit it to the prison inhabitant. Artist Markus Linnenbrink was commissioned by Justiz Vollzugs Anstalt.
WANDERLUST 