SCIENCE: The Bionic Man

Video Still via New York Times.

This is truly brilliant: "Les Baugh lost his arms as a teenager. Engineers at Johns Hopkins are trying to give them back, but better. Mr. Baugh is testing a robotic prosthetic that he can control with his mind." Have a look at the Zackary Canepari, Drea Copper and Emma Cott video in The New York Times Bits. E.T.P. 9'

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT: Simone de Beauvoir

Photo via Economía Hoy México.

Simone de Beauvoir explains why she is a feminist in a rare TV interview -as she didn't like to be in TV- with French journalist Jean-Louis Servan-Schreiber in 1975. "De Beauvoir picks up the ideas of The Second Sex, which Servan-Schreiber calls as important an “ideological reference” for feminists as Marx’s Capital is for communists. He asks De Beauvior about one of her most quoted lines: “One is not born a woman, one becomes one.” Her reply shows how far in advance she was of post-modern anti-essentialism, and how much of a debt later feminist thinkers owe to her ideas" Have a look in Open Culture. E.T.P. 9'

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION

Screenshot from Episode 3: Jamie.

Screenshot from Episode 3: Jamie.

We have just discovered the mini web series called High Maintenance, created, written and directed by Katja Blichfeld and Ben Sinclair. High Maintenance is the story of the brief encounters of a weed dealer with his clients in New York City. The short stories are funny, sweet, weird, moving, and the characters manage to get you engaged from the very first minute. I did a bit of research (meaning, I googled "High Maintenance Web Series") and I found that from the first season's 13 episodes (each between 5 and 15 minutes long which accounts to approximately 2 hours of procrastination) Katja and Ben got a funding deal with Vimeo to produce season two. Yay!

According to Vulture, the Vimeo deal was the company's first adventure into original programming "Vimeo had already established a service where filmmakers could set a viewing price and take 90 percent of the proceeds; Kerry Trainor, the company’s CEO, says it was just a natural step toward advancing some money to High Maintenance, a show he thinks “shows off everything we think Vimeo is in the world to do.” For Blichfeld and Sinclair, who glued together season one of High Maintenance with their own funds and through favors from friends, it represented an ideal way to keep a good thing going. Vimeo has been an extremely hands-off partner: “That’s the coolest thing about being here,” Sinclair says. “They haven’t even read a single script. They haven’t asked.” Vimeo sounds like the ideal executive producer, right? (Read full article in Vulture. E.T.P. 4)

The awaited second season is due to appear early November in Vimeo, this time it won't be free though, but they hope their fans will be willing to pay a small price to watch and keep a regular stream of income for them to be able to keep producing more episodes. In the meantime, go ahead and have a look at High Maintenance's first season, is meaningful procrastination for a lot of reasons; fresh and solid mini-stories from New York which are always nice to see, a great main character, and because it represents new ways of making stuff, "TV" entertainment being created in an organic way by new independent players. Estimated Time of Procrastination for the first season: 2 hours tops.

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION

Screenshots of Beijing Silvermine via Emiland Guillerme's Vimeo.

This week we came across Emiland Guillerme's Beijing Silvermine, a wonderful documentary about Thomas Sauvin and the work he performed in China, rescuing, scanning and classifying hundreds of thousands of photo negatives, to portrait the radical changes the country suffered during two very peculiar decades (from 1985 to 2005). The results of his experiment are not only visually beautiful, but very rich in an anthropological way as there are some really interesting insights about composition, favorite holiday places, clichés, fashion, family life, etc. and it is also a great approach to crowdsourcing. 

In Guillerme's vimeo you can read this description "Beijing Silvermine is a unique photographic portrait of the capital and the life of its inhabitants following the Cultural Revolution. It covers a period of 20 years, from 1985, namely when silver film started being used massively in China, to 2005, when digital photography started taking over. These 20 years are those of China's economic opening, when people started prospering, traveling, consuming, having fun."

Absolutely meaningful procrastination, in Emiland's Vimeo you have a look at Beijing Silvermine- Thomas Sauvin Part I (E.T.P. 12') and Part II (E.T.P. 5'20'') and to Silvermine (E.T.P. 15')

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Photo via Dazed.

So, Miranda July just released a very Miranda July App called "Somebody". This is how it is described in Dazed Magazine: "Ever wished a stranger could break up with someone for you? Ever needed to tell your platonic friend that you're completely in love with them but can't bring yourself to do it? Artist/actress/writer Miranda July's new app "Somebody" lets strangers deliver messages verbally, meaning that you can legitimately say "At least I broke up with you face to face". The app works by sending a message intended for you to the nearest Somebody user, who then has to track you down to deliver the information." You can chose who is going to deliver your message, and when you receive one, rate the deliverer. This video directed for July and produced by MiuMiu explains everything better.

I already have the app and sent a message, hope it's delivered soon. If you still don't have it, go ahead, it sounds like a fun/weird (aka Miranda July) technological-art-experiment. Read full article in Dazed Magazine. E.T.P. (with video): 12'

Photo via Brain Pickings.

A very nice post by Maria Popova in Brain Pickings: Anaïs Nin on Writing, the Future of the Novel, and How Keeping a Diary Enhances Creativity: Wisdom from a Rare 1947 Chapbook. "In December of 1946, Anaïs Nin was invited to give a lecture on writing at Dartmouth, which received an overwhelming response. The following summer, after receiving countless requests, Nin adapted the talk in chapbook titled On Writing, which she printed at her own Gremor Press — the small publishing house Nin founded in 1942 out of disillusionment with mainstream publishing, which led her to teach herself letterpress and self-publish a handful of elegant manually typeset books with gorgeous engravings by her husband. On Writing, in which Nin considers the future of the novel and reflects on what keeping her famous diaries since the age of eleven taught her about writing, was published in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, 750 of which were for sale. Only a few are known to survive." Read full article in Brain Pickings. E.T.P. 7'

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION

Image: Still of Eleanor Ambos: Interior World via Nowness.

Short video shared by our friend Carla about Eleanor Ambos, a lovely 'crazy' character that I didn't know before. It's called Eleanor Ambos: Interior World, it was directed by Michael Ellis and Nowness presents an extract of this documentary short that was an official selection at this year’s South by Southwest film festival. Watch the excerpt in Nowness. E.T.P. 3'25''

SCIENCE

Image via Gizmodo.

As impressive as Boston Dynamics' humanoid robot ATLAS moves, it's still not completely free to explore wherever it wants. Thick trunk lines keep it tethered to machinery and pumps that provide power, hyrdraulic fluids, and of course communications and data. But researchers at MIT are now working to free ATLAS of its leash-like umbilical cord sometime in the next six months. Read full article in Gizmodo. E.T.P. 5'

Photo: A mite on an eyelash via The Creator's Project.

There is no better way of describe what you are about to see than the way the Creator's Project did: Timelapses Of Microscopic Nature, In All Its Stunning (And Disgusting) Glory. Yes, disgusting. Louie Schwartzberg at TED 2014 in Vancouver unveiled "a National Geographic-sponsored voyage into glimpses of Earth that the naked eye could never see: microscopic mites on our eyelashes, the tongues of snails, and even the skin of sharks. The hyper-defined images are miraculous, but admittedly a little terrifying—especially the snapshot of nano organisms that crawl on already-microscopic parasites." Read full article and have a look at the video in The Creator's Project website. E.T.P. 9'

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION

Miranda July still via Nowness Vimeo.

Our lovely friend Carla DuArte Vidal sent us Miranda July's video made for Nowness. Definitely one of our favorites and always a good meaningful procrastination. Have a look at "A Handy Tip for the Easily Distracted" in Nowness Vimeo. E.T.P. 3' (no more, no less).

CULTURE & ENTERTAINMENT

Image: via Hal Lasko website.

The Pixel Painter. Hal Lasko, 98 years old, has spent the last years using MS Paint to digitally create amazing works of art, spending up to 10 hours a day on his work, a mix between pointillism and 8-bit art. Originally a traditional painter, he switched to MS Paint in 2005 when his vision was impaired by wet macular degeneration, an eye disease that causes blindness in the center of his vision. He has since created more than 150 digital works pixel by pixel. Watch a lovely video about Lasko and his work in Vimeo, and read Wired's article here.

Comedy (1921). Photograph: Tate Modern/PA Wire via The Guardian.

Looking forward to Paul Klee's retrospective about to open at Tate Modern, Philip Hensher in The Guardian, explains why comedy is at the heart of Klee's work – from joyously splodgy lines to grotesqueries that poke fun at dictators, and why he loves the artist's willingness to combat oppression with laughter. Read article in The Guardian.

Gia Coppola via Dazed Digital.

Gia Coppola is finally joining the family business! Palo Alto, her directorial debut based on James Franco's eponymous collection of short stories. Read Daniel Barna's interview and watch the trailer in Dazed Digital.

OUR WEEKLY PROCRASTINATION

Photo: Still frame from the video.

Our friends from Kiberó Studio in Madrid headed down to the opening of Dibujo a Domicilio exhibition in Habitar la línea Gallery last Wednesday, and made a lovely video. Have a look at it in Kiberó Studio Vimeo page.

Photo: Mass Observation: This is Your Photo exhibition. The Procrastinator (some) Times.

Photo: Humphrey Spender, Ashington - Washing in road between terraced housing. 
Via The Photographer's Gallery website.

Meanwhile, in London, we visited an incredible exhibition and attended a really nice open panel discussion at The Photographer's Gallery in Soho. The exhibition is called Mass Observation: This is Your Photo, and it's a very varied sample of the photographs, manifestos, newspapers and documents produced by the very unique and insightful Mass Observation Archive project founded by Tom Harrison, Humphrey Jennings and Charles Madge in the UK in 1937.

With a background on journalism, poetry, filmmaking and ornithology, these trio aimed to create a new kind of realism, an 'anthropology of ourselves' through artistic means and collecting anecdotal evidence from people's everyday lives. In their manifesto published in 1937 in The New Statesman and Nation, some of the topics proposed to observed were: behaviour of people at war memorials; beards, armpits, eyebrows; distribution, diffusion and significance of the dirty joke; and female taboos about eating.

Mass Exhibitionism, the panel discussion with Andrew Dewdney, Rózsa Farkas and Haidy Gesimar and Ben Burbridge, -featured in last week's To Do List- focused on the parallelism of the Mass Observation Archive and the digital networked exhibitionism that both digital cameras and social networks seem to promote or at the very least afford. How photography have blended into our everyday lives and how it's inextricably linked to social networking. How is the self being represented nowadays, and how archives are being democratized with the hashtag as a epistemology.

Mass Observation: This is Your Photo will be at The Photographer's Gallery until the 29th of September, the entry is free and I strongly recommend you to have a look because it is a very well curated exhibition of an incredible project.

TO DO (OR NOT TO DO) LIST

Our friends from Archeology Project invite us to their first live event: a video excavation of the Barbican Centre as part of Hack the Barbican. Become an explorer and record the collective memory of the largest performing arts centre in Europe, all you need is a phone with camera. Sounds good right. This will take place the next Friday 30th and Saturday 31st of August and you can just drop in or register here.

Hack the Barbican is also featuring a whole bunch of other activities to enjoy, like Haiku writing, narrating the Barbican, Pecha-Kucha performances, poetry hack and sounds installations. Have a look at the program for next week and remember that this Hack the Barbican's last week, don't miss out!

Photo: Tim Mitchell via Southbank Centre website

It's almost the last week of Southbank Centre's Festival of Neighborhood too, and there are still plenty of things to enjoy during this next week, but specially on Sunday it will take place the central piece of this finale: the Southbanquet. An invitation to share an alfresco meal of ethically sourced food to mark the end of summer on the terrace overlooking the Thames. The meal is cooked by Thomas Hunt, former River Cottage chef, founder of the eco-collective The Forgotten Feast and official chef of Feeding the 5000. There will be banquet-related workshops during the whole weekend and the weather, so far, promises no rain. Win!