Tag Archives: Russian

Four Invitations Into the Unknown

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Invitation 1 for ” The Environment as a Witness” exhibition.

(in Hebrew “הסביבה כעדות”).

The four different invitations I issued for my coming up exhibition  ” The Environment as a Witness”, borrowed their title  from a preprint on quantum mechanics by the same name, with the secondary title:  “Selective Proliferation of Information and Emergence of Objectivity in a quantum Universe”. see here.

A  perhaps somewhat tricky quotation from  the abstract may convey the  flavor of the article and his resonance on the exhibition:

…”We study the role of the information deposited in the environment of an open quantum system in course of the decoherence process. Redundant spreading of information — the fact that some observables of the system can be independently “read-off” from many distinct fragments of the environment — is investigated as the key to effective objectivity, the essential ingredient of “classical reality”.”…

However, in plain English, the meaning is: how we the common humans, aka this article, agree together to see what seems to us the same objective reality made  from ‘ .. many distinct fragments of the environment “….

As someone whose trade is to making pictures from what he sees, this allover passing agreement on a reality based on an unseen quantum substrate is an intriguing mystery.

So, if I want to marry human mysteries with quantum mysteries in an art gallery,  for the human side of this marriage, a good story is  Night Watch (Russian: Ночной дозор, Nochnoy Dozor) a fantasy novel by Russian writer Sergei Lukyanenko:

…”The story revolves around a confrontation between two opposing supernatural groups (known as “Others”): the Night Watch, an organization dedicated to policing the actions of the Dark Others—and the Day Watch, which polices the actions of the Light Others.”..

Additional story details can draw a speculative parallel between the human  reality and the underlying quantum mysteries:

“In the story’s worldline there exists a magical realm beneath the surface of all things—referred to as the Twilight (or Gloom in other translations). The action in the novel centers on a group of people referred to as the Others—human beings who tapped into the Twilight and gained supernormal abilities. The Others were the humans (shamans, soothsayers, and wisemen) from long ago who figured out how to step into the Twilight. However, the Others are different from humans, they are born as Others. Humans are not able (at least in the first part of the tetralogy) to become Others.” .. see here.

The novel was made into a movie in 2004 by by the Kazakhstan-born film director Timur Bekmambetov, see here.

The movie was my visual source for the human side drawings I made in a pseudo comics style. The ‘performed  marriage’ on the invitation  is best seen in invitation 2 (below) where the left hand side is in pixelike form hinting to the quantum mysteries and the right hand side hint to the human mysteries.

Is it a happy marriage or not ? Where mysteries are involved who knows..

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Invitation 2 for ” The Environment as a Witness”.

Invitation 3 for ” The Environment as a Witness”.

Invitation 4 for ” The Environment as a Witness”,

N.B.

Israel. Tel Aviv. ‘The Kibbutz, Art Gallery’.  The exhibition is through May 14. Curated by Yael Keni. ‘

Improvising an Art-Book as a Graphic Novel

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To view the full image, please click on the picture

Improvising an art-book as a graphic novel is perhaps a crazy idea, but after viewing the video on Keith Jarret where he talks about  “The Art of Improvisation” ” and remembering what he says:  …” improvisation is to begin a musical piece from scratch with no antecedents to be based on”…(loosely quoted from the video clip), I took the same idea to comics drawing.

My no-antecedent and from scratch comics drawing only source was the Russian movie ” Night Watch” by director Timur Bekmambetov. I remember vaguely what the film was about. Perhaps the  theme, a mystical battle between the forces of evil and the forces of good in his modern Russian version was the trigger to chose “Night Watch”.

Well  I hadn’t the slightest idea from where to begin. So I began to screen the movie on my computer and each time I was impressed by a passage I stopped the screening and draw the scene, drawing finally  a sequence of 250 pictures pictures guided randomly by my visual feelings .

With my first drawing   I was confronted with the question in what style to draw? Looking  at the art of well know artist I admired their fine artwork. Magnificent examples are the drawings by Dave Gibbons for Alan Moore’s graphic novel “Watchmen“:

To view the full image, please click on the picture

But I am not a graphic arts artist so my skills to make  something like Dave Gibbons’s drawings for “Watchmen”,  where very doubtful. It was  obvious to me that my drawings should be closer to my personal instincts: disliking ‘beautiful drawings but also appreciate them, and finding the right touch to merge   beauty and ‘bad’ drawing.

Finally, this ‘graphic novel’ was not intended to act as a graphic novel but more as an experimental art book, where what I draw was done on the fly without much correcting.

Here is a sequence from chapter 2 . To view the full images, please click one each  pictures.

WatchA4-1FLAT

For those interested in technicalities. Perhaps a bizarre choice, but I draw directly into a hardcover book by Nobel winner physicist Richard Feynman called “Feynman Lectures on Gravitation”. My drawing tools where black markers with different point size. The markers bleed through each page. Taking tipp-ex as a substitute for white acrylic  I painted  on the unwanted black  marks.  After restoring the white color and letting some black or gray spots on each page,  the original book text on gravitation shimmering through the tippex fluid serve as a canvas to draw each new picture.

Porno, Bombs, Internet and Belly Dance

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How to live under the new Hamas directives..
“Belly-dancing is naked women. This is not Islamic,” says the new Palestinian culture minister, Attallah Abu al-Sibbah, an Islamic scholar who has joined the Hamas government which was installed last week, (2006). ” …
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….”But there’s no doubt that Hamas wants to impose its narrow vision of moral purity on the Palestinians, who until recently enjoyed one of the most secular cultures in the Middle East. The ban on belly- dancing reveals Hamas’s intense suspicion, which it shares with all Islamist organisations, of pleasure and female sexuality’ it’s no accident, after all, that belly-dancing has been taken up with such gusto by feminists, myself included, who love its celebration of the natural female body.”.
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This was written on April 7, 2006.”… See here for the full article “Hamas, and the sexual power of real women”
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Today (2008), Under the excuse of the porno ban (see here ), remebering the above statement about belly dancing, Hamas is continuing monitoring  the internet in the Gaza Strip,  hearing seeing and reading any flow of news into his Internet jurisdiction area.

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 I quote from Menassat:
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..”Palestinian journalists in the Strip are up in arms about the whole affair as the filtering has slowed and even halted Internet traffic entirely during busy news days.
 ‘What Hamas wants from monitoring the Internet is  to control its impact on public opinion,’ Alyan said.”….
  The director of Reuters’ Gaza office, Nidal Al Mughrabi, told MENASSAT, ‘The decision has had a huge impact on our work, since we are an international agency known for our up-to-date news coverage, and we are in competition with other international agencies.’ “.. 
 
…”Saleh Al Masri, a journalist and editor at the Palestine Today website, told MENASSAT, “We are not against regulating the Internet, but we were highly affected in terms of download speed. Our readership too dropped by more than half.” …
 
Gaza-based writer Abdullah Alyan said, ‘Pornography is only an excuse for the filtering, the other reasons are monitoring people’s use of the Internet, especially news sites and forums, to curtail the widespread online campaign against the Hamas’ government and the behavior of its members in Gaza.’ “see here.
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Hamas’s monitoring Gaza’s strip Internet does not affect other to monitoring the Hamas sites.
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Two websites operated by Hezbollah and Hamas were being hosted by a Canadian internet service provider even though the militant groups are barred from operating in the country, CBC News has learned.
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Halevi wrote a letter of complaint to iWeb, the Montreal internet company that owns computer servers that play host to the websites.The company replied the websites were inoffensive and just “an informational portal such as CBC.ca.”Halevi said he was shocked by the response.”That was amazing because there is a big difference between CBC and the Hamas, al-Aqsa TV website. The messages are totally different.”
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CBC News translated some of the Arabic section of the Hamas website, a discussion forum.One post included a list of instructions on how to conceal a bomb in a crowded market. Another posting explained how to make a roadside bomb look like a rock.The site is also full of anti-Israeli rhetoric, and pages that glorify those who died in suicide attacks as martyrs, see here.

So  Hamas is banning any ‘import’ of so called porn and belly dancing but is exporting bomb making and shahid education for future explosing martyrs.

And a last remark by Palestinian culture minister Attallah Abu al-Sibbah (2006) wich may be actual today…”The Egyptians come here and do it [belly dancing]. And there are a lot of Russian belly dancers in Egypt and they come here too. People do it indoors, in secret. There’s lots of it. If the phenomenon of belly dancing spreads our people might react against it by killing people. We don’t want our people to become like the Taliban.”..see here.

A surprising belly dancer is Haifa Whebe .

haifa wehbe and ragheb alama

haifa wehbe and ragheb alama

Haifa Wehbe Belly Dances for Ragheb Alama  see here.
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