La Jetée

I saw an exhibition of Chris Marker's photography not long ago at Wexner Center, which made me more eager to watch his masterpiece La Jetée (1962)composed of still images. Finally saw this 28-min long sci-fi on YouTube and was totally overwhelmed! It keeps lingering in my dream. I was amazed by the idea in Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys, now I know it is just a mainstream movie version of La Jetée.

Rather than feeling inside the filmic time, the viewer remains in a more detached position due to the use of still images. Time gets fragmented and frozen, catching the most memorable images, memory and impressions from the characters, which results in an incredible sense of melancholy, poetry and haunting. The movie is an extreme montage, something between film and photography, between narrative and documentary.

Tom Dixon on Sustainable Design

Not being a conscious green designer, Tom Dixon brought a few new perspectives on sustainable design esp. the second cycle idea.
Source: Inhabitat

Remind Me

Another infographical MTV found on YouTube of Röyksopp's song Remind Me. Those animated 3D diagrams and sections illustrate infinite hidden circulations and connections within our daily life at different scales, very interesting. They also seem perfect as architectural presentations.

Manufactured Landscape

Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky takes beautiful large-scale photographs of landscapes that have been industrially altered by mankind to the very extreme. The documentary Manufactured Landscapes by Toronto-based filmmaker Jennifer Baichwal now visits, along with the photographer, places in China and Bangladesh and shows how these amazing pictures are taken. It gives you with a weird as well as surreal experience of the grotesque and grim consequences of mass production. For example, fifty percent of all world‘s computers end up in China, amongst many other used materials… You don’t have to be too ecologically minded, but this documentary will leave you thinking, no doubt.

Source: Pingmag

Click here to watch Edward Burtynsky's TED talk about his works and vision on sustainability. It's very thought-provoking, esp. those disturbing images revealing the huge scale factories filled with cheap labors working like non-stop machines in China.

Architorture

Architorture is a documentary that captures five diverse students in a single studio at one university throughout the entirety of their thesis project. The film will convey a mere sliver of time, wholly representative of the experience to create a student’s paramount work. The footage will illustrate the range of emotions and process of this extremely intense period at the conclusion of an academic career. It is our goal for the documentary to possess educational, entertaining, realistic and inspiring qualities in response to the dynamic world these students cross.

more info: http://www.architorturefilm.com

Architorture, I'm going thru. it right now from working intensely on a competition...

Eye For an Eye

Amazing animation for UNKLE's song Eye For an Eye -

The voiceovers come from the movie The Thin Red Line :

Does our ruin benefit the earth? Does it help the grass to grow, the sun to shine? Is this darkness in you, too? Have you passed to this night? ...

This great evil. Where does it come from? How'd it steal into the world? Who's doin' this? Who's killin' us? Mockin' us with the sight of what we might've known...

What The World Eats

Photographs by Peter Menzel from the book Hungry Planet - illustrating the weekly food consumption of 15 homes from around the world. These photos tell so much: lifestyle, culture, climate, economic condition...

Click here to see all.

Kunek

Enjoy the hypnotically beautiful music from Kunek, a fabulous emerging band of six multi-instrumentalists. The animation just blew me away!

All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from My Cat

We stayed at Cat Nap Inn, a cat-themed cabin, during the Great Smoky Mountains trip. A picture in the bathroom titled All I Need to Know About Life I Learned from My Cat caught my eye - that also explains my obsession with Garfield :P

Life is hard and then you nap.

Curiosity never killed anything except maybe a few hours

Variety is the spice of life: One day ignore people, the next day
annoy them, and play with them when they're busy.

Climb your way to the top -- that's why the drapes are there.

Never sleep alone when you can sleep on someone's face.

Make your mark in the world -- or at least spray in each corner.

When you go out into the world, always remember, being placed on a pedestal is a right, not a privilege.

Another funny wall art says:

A BALANCED DIET IS A COOKIE IN EACH HAND :)

60-Story Single-family Home

In the most conspicuous sign yet of India's unprecedented prosperity, the country's richest man, Mukesh Ambani, is building a new home in the financial hub of Mumbai: a 60-storey palace with helipad, health club and six floors of car parking.

The building, named Antilla after a mythical island, will have a total floor area greater than Versailles and be home for Mr Ambani, his mother, wife, three children and 600 full-time staff.

Source: Guardian Unlimited

It reminds me of the eating scene in The Five Obstructions which took place in the red light district of Bombay.... Well, at least it looks like a green building.