Random knowledge

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 - August 12, 198 was an American artist born in Brooklyn, New York City. He gained fame, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a highly successful Neo-expressionist artist in the international art scene of the 1980s. Many recognize Basquiat as a leading figure in contemporary art, and his paintings continue to command high prices in the art market.

Art periods

Basquiat’s art career is known for his three broad, though overlapping styles.
In the earliest period, from 1980 to late 1982, Basquiat used painterly gestures on canvas, often depicting skeletal figures and mask-like faces that expressed his obsession with mortality. Other frequently depicted imagery such as automobiles, buildings, police, children’s sidewalk games, and graffiti came from his experience painting on the city streets.

A middle period from late 1982 to 1985 featured multipanel paintings and individual canvases with exposed stretcher bars, the surface dense with writing, collage and seemingly unrelated imagery. These works reveal a strong interest in Basquiat’s black and Haitian identity and his identification with historical and contemporary black figures and events. On one occasion Basquiat painted his girlfriend’s dress, with his words, a “Little Shit Brown”.

The final period, from about 1986 to Basquiat’s death in 1988, displays a new type of figurative depiction, in a new style with different symbols and content from new sources. This period seems to have also had a profound impact on the styles of artists who admired Basquiat’s work. Basquiat’s lasting creative influence is immediately recognizable in the work of subsequent and self-taught generational artists such as Mark Gonzales, Kelly D. Williams, Raymond Morris, and Francesco Clemente. Carlitos Alvarez Villanueva was amongst those that inspired Basquiat during this time, which retrospectively, was the final stage for the influential artist.

Further resources:

• Brooklyn Museum retrospective of Basquiat, including photographs of the artist and his work.
• Selection of paintings, biography, and links to more information about the artist at Emory University
• Books and art print at Amazon

‘Robots could demand legal rights‘, the most attention-grabbing findings from the Sigma Scan and the Delta Scan, which deals with issues like The Extended Self, Intentional Biology and Artificial Extensions of Human Capabilities.

Reads like Star Wars sometimes, but it’s a good idea to try to structure ‘futurism‘.

Humans controlled computers with the power of thought, built an invisibility cloak, cracked the mystery of a 3,000-year-old computer, discovered a new element, unearthed a missing link and kicked Pluto out of the planet club–and those are just the highlights.

The editors of Scientific American list what they consider the most important science stories of 2006:

• Astronomers Relegate Pluto to Dwarf Status
• Newfound Fossil Is Transitional between Fish and Landlubbers
• The Year of An Inconvenient Truth
• The Passing of Steve Irwin
• Grigory Perelman, Genius Who Solved Poincare Conjecture, Declines the Fields Medal
• The Fountain of Youth at the Bottom of a Wine Bottle?
• Neanderthal Nuclear DNA Sequenced
• Mouse Finding Violates Laws of Heredity
• Cassini Captures Stunning Image of Saturn
• Differences Between Chimp, Human DNA Highlight Rapid Evolution of Certain Human Genes
• Firm Develops Revolutionary New Method for Generating Human Embryonic Stem Cells without Harming Embryos
• “Lucy’s Baby”–An Extraordinary Addition to the Ancestry of Humans
• Dozens of New Species Discovered
• Overfishing Could Take Seafood off the Menu by 2048
• Martian Gullies Show Traces of Flowing Water within the Past Decade
• Radiation-Fueled Microbe Has Thrived Deep Underground for Past 20 Million Years
• Existence of Dark Matter Proved
• Six Volunteers in Serious Condition after Receiving a Trial Antibody from Pharmaceutical Company TeGenero
• Fewer Breast Cancers Linked to Less Hormone Therapy
• Invisibility Cloak Proposed and Unveiled
• Wireless Energy Transfer May Power Devices at a Distance
• Element 118 Discovered Again–for the First Time
• Tiny Chip Converts Paraplegic’s Thought into Action
• Cervical Cancer Vaccine Approved
• First Teleportation Between Light and Matter
• Unique Marvel of Ancient Greek Technology Gives Up New Secrets
• Crossing Wild and Conventional Wheat Boosts Protein, Avoids Genetic Modification
• Ritualized Submission and Pseudocopulation Reduce Aggression Among Male Crayfish

John Ghazvinian in the Virginia Quarterly Review:

The Niger Delta is made up of nine states, 185 local government areas, and a population of 27 million. It has 40 ethnic groups speaking 250 dialects spread across 5,000 to 6,000 communities and covers an area of 27,000 square miles. This makes for one the highest population densities in the world, with annual population growth estimated at 3 percent. About 1,500 of those communities play host to oil company operations of one kind or another. Thousands of miles of pipelines crisscross the mangrove creeks of the Delta, broken up by occasional gas flares that send roaring orange flames into the already hot, humid air. Modern, air-conditioned facilities sit cheek-by-jowl with primitive fishing villages made of mud and straw, surrounded with razor wire and armed guards trained to be on the lookout for local troublemakers. It is, and always has been, a recipe for disaster.

The problem, in a nutshell, is that for fifty years, foreign oil companies have conducted some of the world’s most sophisticated exploration and production operations, using millions of dollars’ worth of imported ultramodern equipment, against a backdrop of Stone Age squalor. They have extracted hundreds of millions of barrels of oil, which have sold on the international market for hundreds of billions of dollars, but the people of the Niger Delta have seen virtually none of the benefits. While successive military regimes have used oil proceeds to buy mansions in Mayfair or build castles in the sand in the faraway capital of Abuja, many in the Delta live as their ancestors would have done hundreds, even thousands of years ago—in hand-built huts of mud and straw. And though the Delta produces 100 percent of the nation’s oil and gas, its people survive with no electricity or clean running water. Seeing a doctor can mean traveling for hours by boat through the creeks.

More here

Page 69 of ‘Stupeur et tremblements‘ (Fear and trembling) by Amélie Nothomb:

(…)
Je n’avais jamais recopié des colonnes de chiffres de ma vie.
- C’est quand même curieux ce handicap. Il ne faut aucune intelligence pour retranscrire des montants.
- Présisément: je crois que c’est le problème des gens de mon espèce. Si notre intelligence n’est pas sollicitée, notre cerveau s’endort. D’où mes erreurs.
Le visage de Fubuki quitta enfin son expression de combat pour adopter un étonnement amusé:
- Votre intelligence a besoin d’être sollicitée? Que c’est excentrique!
- C’est on ne peut plus ordinaire.
- Bon. Je vais réfléchir à un travail qui solliciterait l’intelligence, répéta ma supérieure qui semblait se délecter de cette façon de parler.
- Entre-temps, puis-je aller aider monsieur Unaji à corriger mes fautes?
- Surtout pas! Vous avez commis assez de dégâts comme ça!
(…)

Advice: read this book

Born in Washington, D.C., in 1953, Nan Goldin was introduced to photography at the age of fifteen by a teacher who passed out Polaroid cameras to students at the progressive Satya Community School in Boston. She began taking black-and-white photographs of her friends in the transvestite community of Boston in the early 1970s and had her first solo show at Project, Inc. in Boston in 1973. She received a B.F.A. from Tufts University in 1977 and an additional Fifth Year Certificate in 1978. As she progressed through school, she began using bright Cibachrome prints. After moving to New York, the setting for many of her most renowned photographs, she quickly became involved in the downtown New Wave scene, presenting slide shows of her images accompanied by music at punk rock venues such as the Mudd Club and later at art spaces. The ever-growing body of images she used in these slide shows formed the basis of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (1980–86). This series, with its snapshot-style portrayals of amorous or abusive couples, drug addiction, and intimate details of the artist’s life, established Goldin as a major photographer when selections were shown at the Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 1985. It was also presented at film festivals, such as the Edinburgh and Berlin festival (1985 and 1986, respectively). The life depicted in The Ballad of Sexual Dependency took its toll; many of the subjects of the series had died by the early 1990s, and in 1988 Goldin herself entered a rehabilitation clinic. She continued to candidly document her life, however, incorporating her hospital experiences into her work. Over time, her photographs have moved from representations of destructive youthful abandon to, most recently, scenes of parenthood and domesticity in increasingly international settings. In 1994, she published Tokyo Love, a series of images of Tokyo youth, in collaboration with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki.

Goldin’s numerous solo exhibitions include a mid-career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1996) and Le Feu Follet, a traveling retrospective organized by the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2001). In 1995, she made a film for the BBC, I’ll Be Your Mirror, with Edmund Coulthard and Ric Colon. Goldin has received the Englehard Award from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston (1986), the Photographic Book Prize of the Year from Les Rencontres d’Arles (1987), the Camera Austria Prize for Contemporary Photography (1989), the Mother Jones Documentary Photography Award (1990), and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (1991). In 1991, she received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a DAAD artist-in-residence in Berlin. She currently lives and works in Paris, London, and Luxor, Egypt.

Further reading:

• Nan Goldin interviewed by Adam Mazur and Paulina Skirgajllo-Krajewska
• The Ballad of Sexual Dependency (Aperture Monograph) (Hardcover)
• The Devil’s Playground, a major collection of photographs by Nan Goldin, representing over 35 years’ work (Hardcover)
• Centre Pompidou web site - interesting

From the BBC News

To return to Earth the space shuttle must make a series of complicated manouevres to align itself into the correct position to achieve a safe descent.

1. The shuttle flies upside down in orbit to control its heating.
2. To re-enter the atmosphere, the shuttle is turned tail first to the direction of travel, and fires its engines to slow its speed.
3. The orbiter is then flipped the right way up and enters the top layer of the atmosphere at about a 40-degree angle from horizontal with its wings level.
4. The orientation keeps its black thermal tiles facing the majority of the heat - as high 1,650C (3,000F) on the leading edges of the wings and nose.
5. As its speed drops, the shuttle starts to fly more like an aircraft, using its rudder and wing flaps for control. It banks sharply to slow its speed still further.
6. The shuttle falls from a height of more than 360km at speeds that top Mach 30, and at an angle of 19 degrees, far steeper than that of a commercial aircraft. The spacecraft comes to a dead stop half a world a way from where it began the descent.

The Chauvet Cave or Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave is near Vallon-Pont-d’Arc, in the Ardèche département, in southern France. It became famous in 1994 when a trio of speleologists found that it contained the fossilized remains of many animals, including those that are now extinct, and, even more significantly, that its walls were richly decorated with paleolithic artwork. The Chauvet Cave was soon regarded as one of the most significant pre-historic art sites, along with Lascaux, Altamira, and Cosquer.

Most of the artwork dates to the earlier, Aurignacian, era (30,000 to 32,000 years ago). Hundreds of animal paintings have been catalogued, depicting at least 13 different species, including those which have rarely or never been found in other ice age paintings. Rather than depicting only the familiar animals of the hunt that predominate in paleolithic cave art, i.e. horses, cattle, reindeer, etc., the walls of the Chauvet Cave are covered with predatory animals: lions, panthers, bears, owls, rhinos and hyenas. Typical of most cave art, there are no paintings of complete human figures, although there is one possible partial “Venus” figure that may represent the legs and genitals of a woman. Also a chimerical figure may be present; it appears to have the lower body of a woman with the upper body of a bison. There are a few panels of red ochre hand prints and hand stencils made by spitting pigment over hands pressed against the cave surface. Abstract markings—lines and dots—are found throughout the cave. There are also two unidentifiable images that have a vaguely butterfly shape to them. This combination of subjects has led experts in pre-historic art and cultures to believe that there was likely a ritual, shamanic, or magical aspect to these paintings.

Further reading

• Homepage of The Chauvet Cave or Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc Cave
• Dawn of Art: The Chauvet Cave by J.M. Chauvet, E.B. Deschamps and C. Hillaire (1996) Harry N. Abrams, Inc., New York. English translation by Paul G. Bahn from French edition La Grotte Chauvet

I have bought Xiangqi. I didn’t know this game but I was seduced by the name on the dark purple box and the strange symbols on the pieces.

Xiangqi is a two-player Chinese game in a family of strategic board games of which Western chess, Indian chaturanga, Japanese shogi, and the more similar Korean janggi are also members. Xiangqi is native to China and is therefore commonly called Chinese chess. The first character 象 xiàng here has the meaning “image” or “representational”, hence Xiangqi can be literally translated as “representational chess”. The second character, 棋, is a general term also used in the name 西洋棋 xīyáng qí — “Western chess”.

Chinese chess has a long history. Though its precise origins have not yet been definitely confirmed, the earliest indications reveal the game may have been played as early as the 4th century BC in China.

Xiangqi is one of the most popular board games in the world. Distinctive features of Xiangqi include the unique movement of the pao (”cannon”) piece, a rule prohibiting the generals (similar to chess kings) from facing each other directly, and the river and palace board features, which restrict the movement of some pieces.

Further reading

• World Xiangqi Federation homepage
• Introduction and rules

The wok is a versatile round-bottomed cooking vessel originating in China. It is used especially in East and Southeast Asia. The word “wok” comes from the Cantonese Chinese word for the item: “wok” (鑊). Standard Mandarin refers to woks by using the word “gūo” (锅, a different Hanzi), or the phrases “gūozi” (锅子), or “chǎo cài gūo” (炒菜锅). Although the word “gūo” in Mandarin refers to any type of cooking vessel, using the word on its own typically means a Chinese wok. More here.

And indeed, tonight we are going to a wok restaurant with friends. I’ll impress them…

Note to myself: look for some wok recipes and try them out.

Yesterday I bought some Elfquest comics for my sun (12 years). Nr 1 and 2.

Elfquest (or ElfQuest) is a comic book property created by Wendy and Richard Pini in 1978. The basic premise is a fantasy story about a community of elves and related species who struggle to survive and coexist on a primitive Earth-like planet with two moons. A number of related works of prose fiction have also been published in the setting. Over the years Elfquest has been self-published by the Pinis, then Marvel Comics, the Pinis again through their own company Warp Graphics and now DC Comics.

The Fantasticks is a 1960 musical comedy with music by Harvey Schmidt and lyrics by Tom Jones. It is loosely based on the story “The Romancers” (”Les Romanesques”) by Edmond Rostand. The play’s first iteration in 1956 was as “Joy Comes to Deadhorse” at the University of New Mexico; after substantial rewriting it appeared on a bill of new one-act plays at Barnard College in August, 1959.

Continue here

Today, 91 years ago, Edith Piaf was born “Édith Giovanna Gassion” in Belleville, Paris. She was one of France’s most loved singers and a national icon. Her music reflected her tragic life, with her specialty being the poignant ballad presented with a heartbreaking voice. Among her most famous songs are “La vie en rose” (1946), “Hymne à l’amour” (1949), “Milord” (1959), “Non, je ne regrette rien” (1960).

Bio

Her mother, Annetta Giovanna Maillard (1898 – 1945), was a partly-Italian 17-year-old girl, native of Livorno, working as a café singer under the pseudonym Line Marsa; from her, Édith received the middle name of Giovanna. Her father, Louis-Alphonse Gassion (1881 – 1944), was a street acrobat with a theatrical past. The little Édith was soon abandoned and left for a short time to her maternal grandmother, Mena (probably a Kabyle - just like Zinedine Zidane by the way). A brief time later, Édith’s father brought the child to his mother, who ran a brothel in Normandy, and then joined the French Army (1916). Thus Édith was in contact with the prostitutes and the various attenders of the brothel since her early years, a circumstance which must have had a deep impact on her personality and vision of life.

From age 3 to 7, she was blind. As part of Édith Piaf’s legend, she allegedly recovered her sight after her grandmother’s prostitutes went to a pilgrimage to Saint Thérèse de Lisieux. Later she lived for a while with her alcoholic father, whom she left by age 15 to become a street singer in Paris.

She was about 16 years of age when she fell in love with a delivery-boy, Louis Dupont, and shortly after had a child, a little girl named Marcelle. Sadly, Marcelle died in infancy of meningitis.

In 1935, Édith was discovered by the nightclub owner Louis Leplée, whose club Gernys was frequented by the upper and lower classes alike. He persuaded her to sing despite her extreme nervousness, which, combined with her height of only 4′ 8″ (142 cm) inspired him to give her the nickname that would stay with her for the rest of her life and become her stage name: La Môme Piaf (The Little Sparrow). Her first record was produced in the same year. Shortly afterwards, Leplée was murdered and Piaf was accused of being an accessory; she was acquitted.

In 1940, Jean Cocteau wrote the successful play Le Bel Indifferent for her to star in. She began to make friends with famous people, such as the actor Maurice Chevalier.

During World War II, she was a frequent performer at Nazi social gatherings in occupied France, and many considered her a traitor; following the war she claimed to have been working for the French resistance. While there is no evidence of this per se, it does seem to be true that she was instrumental in helping a number of individuals escape nazi persecution. Throughout it all, amazingly, she remained a national and international favorite. She became more and more in demand and toured Europe, the United States, and South America.

The great love of Piaf’s life, the boxer Marcel Cerdan, died in a 1949 plane crash. Later Piaf married twice : Jacques Pills, a singer, in 1952, from which she divorced in 1956 and Théo Sarapo in 1962.

Although she continued to work until near the end of her life, her final years were marked by tragedy. In 1951 she was seriously injured in a car crash; already a heavy drinker, she turned first to morphine and later to heroin to relieve the pain and was soon addicted. Piaf died of cancer in Cannes on October 11, 1963, one day before her friend Jean Cocteau. She was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris. Although forbidden a Mass by the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris (because of her lifestyle), her funeral procession drew hundreds of thousands of mourners onto the streets of Paris and the ceremony at the cemetery was jammed with more than forty thousand fans.

Legacy

Today she is still remembered and revered as one of the greatest singers France has ever produced. She is thé French singer - for whom we are still searching a heiress in vain. She matched talent with passion with her raw and powerful voice.
Listen to Piaf performing “Hymne à l’amour” and her tremendous talent will become clear :

and “Je ne regrette rien”…

and…and…

References and further reading

• Edith Piaf Song Collection, ISBN: 0793570549
• Edith Piaf: The Wheel of Fortune: the Official Autobiography, written by Edith Piaf, ISBN: 0720612284
• Wikipedia
• Edith Piaf, an unofficial tribute site with books, discography,…
• Biography and discography at RFI Musique
• Piaf at IMDB, bio and filmography
• Collection of song lyrics

11. One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.
19. The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing “is equal to” in his equations. He chose the two lines because “noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle”.
35. The name Lego came from two Danish words “leg godt”, meaning “play well”. It also means “I put together” in Latin.
56. The Pyruvate Scale measures pungency in onions and garlic. It’s named after the pyruvic acid in onions which makes cooks cry when cutting them.
89. Spanish Flu, the epidemic that killed 50 million people in 1918/9, was known as French Flu in Spain.

Read the others here

For numbers below 10:

For the square of 9 we go through the following steps:

• The nearest power of 10 to 9 is 10. Therefore, let us take 10 as our base.
• Since 9 is 1 less than 10, decrease it still further to 8. This is the left side of our answer.
• On the right hand side put the square of the deficiency that is 1². Hence the answer is 81.

Similarly, 8² = 64, 7² = 49, etc. (memorizing these squares is easier…)

For numbers above 10:

Instead of looking at the deficit we look at the surplus. For example:

11² = (11+1).10+1² = 121
12² = (12+2).10+2² = 144
14² = (14+4). 10+4² = 18.10+16 = 196
15² = (15+5).10+5²= 20.10+25 = 225
37² = (37+27).10+27²= 64.10 + (27+17).10 + (17+7).10 + 7² = 1369
and so on.

This is based on the identities (a + b)(a - b) = a² - b² and (a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b².

According to Wikipedia:

“Bling-bling” (usually shortened to simply “bling”) is a hip hop slang term which refers to expensive jewelry and other accoutrements, and also to an entire lifestyle built around excess spending and ostentation. In its essence, the term refers to the exterior manifestation of one’s interior state of character, normally displayed through various forms of visual stimuli.

According to Wordsmith:

It’s time for The Reduplicatives. That could be the name of a rock band — the one known for razzle-dazzle and a hoity-toity demeanor. They come in pairs, have a little chit-chat, and then hurry-scurry off to their next go-go gig.
Reduplicatives are words formed when a term is either repeated exactly (as in bonbon), or with a slight variation in the vowel (as in ping-pong), or consonant (as in higgledy-piggledy). This process of compound word formation is known as reduplication.
bling-bling (bling-bling) noun
Expensive, flashy jewelry or other items.
[From hip-hop slang, apparently imitative of the sounds of the clanging jewelry, or of the light reflecting from them.]

According to me:

Tasteless

Page 69 of ‘Slow Man‘ by J.M. Coetzee.

(…)be with Wayne Blight, the speedy youngster behind the wheel, than with Paul Rayment, the absent-minded old geezer on the pushbike.
And what sea-change does Marijana want him to bring about anyway? Does she really expect this handsome youth, bursting with good health, to spend his evenings at home curled up with a book while his mates are out having fun? To leave the gleaming new Yamaha in the garage and catch a bus? Drago Jokic: an name from a folk-epic. The Ballad of Drago Yokic.
He clears his throat. ‘Drago, your mother has asked me to have a word with you in private.’
Marijana leaves the romm. He turns to the boy. ‘Look, I’m nothing to you, just the man your mother looks after and very grateful to her for that. But she asked me to speak to you and I agreed I would. What I want to tell you is, if I could turn back the clock to before the accident, believe me, I would. You may not think it, looking at me, but I used to lead an active life. Now I can’t even go to the shops. I have to depend on other people for the smallest thing. And it happened in a split second, out of nowhere. Well, it could happen to you just as easily. Don’t take risks with your life, son, it’s not worth it. Your mother wants you to be careful on your bike. I think you should listen to her. That’s all I’m going to say. Your mother is a good person, she loves you. Do you understand?’
If he had been asked to predict, he would have said that young Drago would sit through a lecture of this kind with his eyes cast down, picking at his cuticles, wishing the old geezer would get it over with, cursing his mother for bringing him. But it is not like that at all. Throughout his speech Drago regards him candidly, a faint, not unfriendly smile on his well-shaped lips. ‘OK,’ he says (…)

Panamarenko (pseudonym of Henri Van Herwegen, born in Antwerp, February 5, 1940) is a prominent assemblagist in Flemish sculpture.

Biography

2005
To celebrate his 65th birthday in early February, Panamarenko is formally invited by Mayor Patrick Janssens to the Antwerp town hall. The artist is praised for his “non-conformist behaviour, also described as creativity,” according to the mayor.
2004
Panamarenko receives the Plantin-Moretus prize for his book Tekenen en Rekenen (drawing and counting), that was chosen as the most beautiful art book of 2003. His successful book For Clever Scholars, Astronomers and Doctors is being reprinted for the first time.
2003
At the request of the City of Antwerp, Panamarenko puts together the statue Pepto Bismo 2003 on St.-Jansplein. Publication of the book Tekenen en Rekenen (with the artist’s most significant drawings from the 60s to the present).
2002
Opening of Antwerpse Luchtschipbouw in Borgerhout. The venue is a workshop for artists as well as an exhibition space.
2001
First major one-man exhibition in New York City (Dia Center for the Arts). Panamarenko designs the artist book For Clever Scholars, Astronomers and Doctors.
2000
One-man exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London and at the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel.
1998
The flying boat Scotch Gambit is taking shape. Given the size of the piece Panamarenko has to move to a hangar in the Antwerp port, where the boat is completed.

1996
Panamarenko shows his steel submarine Pahama Novaya Zemblaya at the Ronny Van de Velde gallery, Antwerp. Its initial purpose was to sail to Spitsbergen.
1990
Builds the first Archaeopterix (intelligent chicken) after the model of the prehistoric bird.

1987-1990
Builds a series of Pastille motors.
1981
Panamarenko introduces his Negentroop. A natural science-based journey to the stars.
1969-1971
Building of the legendary zeppelin The Aeromodeller.

1967
First exhibit at the Antwerp Wide White Space Gallery. Starts building his first aeroplanes.
1965
Organises the first Happening in Antwerp alongside a small number of fellow artists. Panamarenko publishes Happening News.
1961-1962
Military service.
1955-1960
Studies at the Royal Academy for Fine Arts in Antwerp. At the same time begins his self-teaching of natural sciences at the Antwerp science library.
1940
Born in Antwerp.

His work

In his art works Panamarenko brings the wonderful world of technics and natural sciences back to life. In this way the dream of free and unhindered move, and the aesthetic aspect of the scientific analysis regain their place in the world they belong to: the world of the human being determining its position within the nature. In his projects the artist freely and inventively plays with the formal rules of mechanics and physics.
Owing to the unrestrained development of scientific knowledge the complexity of the idea of nature did also proportionally increase. This is the reason of the paradox that the human being of today is alienated from nature of which it nevertheless always deepened its knowledge. Joining Panamarenko we can now rediscover the riveting nature appearances and potentialities in the objects, drawings and sketches in which he has hidden a poetic approach to the world. His creative relationship with the gravitation laws is not aimed at taking off from the ground but at giving back to flying the poetic attraction it had when we were not yet able to fly.

Sources

• Official web site

On 14 December 1911 -today exactly 95 years ago- Roald Amundsen arrived at the Pole with his team.

Roald Engebreth Gravning Amundsen (July 16, 1872—June 192 was a Norwegian explorer of polar regions. He led the first successful Antarctic expedition to the South Pole between 1910 and 1912.

Further reading:

• Arctic passage, a web site with photographs, maps, excerpts from Amundsen’s autobiography and much more
• Amundsen at South-pole.com
• The Last Place on Earth, 1985 miniseries depicting the race between Amundsen and Scott

– by Thich Nhat Hahn