Oblbenost je věc po níž se nejvíc touží
protože všichni co se válej v louži
musejí si přece vážit sebe
a věřit že údělem jich samo nebe
kam dospěli díky svému úsilí
když se mnoho namáhati musili

Není možno sedět ve hnoji a vědět že tam sedím
Vždy je nutno existovat se staženým hledím
Vždy je nutno věřit že mé jednání
cílevědomě a stále jedním směrem uhání
k zajištění nejvyšší mé i společenské prosperity
Za tím účelem jsou nejrůznější náboženské rity
za tím účelem je všechno oblbování
dření otroků i dobrých skutků konání
proto pracujeme
proto sereme
proto milujeme
i úplatky bereme
proto tvoříme a bádáme a máme víru
že jsme něco udělali ve vesmíru
proto zanecháváme po sobě děti
spisy peníze a jiné smetí
proto spoříme a žijem ctnostně
proto druhé okrádáme sprostě
proto věnujem se politice
neboť musíme se vyšvyhnouti nad opice
jejichž činnost
přece smyslu nemá
nehledě na to že je opice němá
Proto musíme se stále ubezpečovati
že to naše úsilí je všude znáti
že svou láskou získali jsme druhou osobu
jíž teď užíváme místo záchodu
že osoba ta nemůže bez nás již býti
že jsme dokázali prolnout její žití
neboť tím že vůbec někým jsme zde chtěni
cítíme se aspoň trochu ospravedlněni
proto stále musíme mít vědomí
že jsme morálního svědomí
že co stalo stalo se
naše skutky nesou ovoce
proto oblbenost není jenom přání
je to ona víra v naše skutky jež nás chrání
je to arkanum všech arkan pramen blaženosti
o němž nechcem míti žádné vědomosti
o němž pochybnosti nejsou dovoleny
jinak všechno kouzlem pozbude své ceny

Protože pak skutečně to jinak není
každý slušný člověk je radš oblbený
oblbeností pak spěje k blaženosti
kdy je přesvědčen že vykonal již dosti
k dosažení své představy o sobě
Pak je nejvíc blízek plné noční nádobě

[Zbytky eposu]

Dan Holdsworth is one of the most innovative British photographers working with landscape today. He expands how the "landscape" of photography has changed, and how the way we can know the world through images has altered fundamentally.

His latest comission Continuous Topography reimagines the Jura mountains on the borders of Switzerland and France. Each work reveals millions of minutely calibrated individual measurements spanning the mountains, revealing their surfaces with awe-inspiring detail and precision. Each image is created as a "point cloud", and is the result of weeks of meticulous fieldwork in conjunction with a research geologist, amassing hundreds of photographic images. For the first time in history, we are able to inspect every crevice and curve of a landscape’s contours as if from a God’s-eye-view. Continuous Topography invites us to reimagine our relationship to time: to the instantaneity of the digital era, to the inconceivable timescales by which the sublime rock formations were first forged, and to a future with or without humanity’s planetary dominance.

[Continuous Topography]

This portrait of the prolific artist and musician Lonnie Holley is an experiential reflection on art as a way of life. Holley’s work is a product of the environment in which he was raised and reflects the impact of being socially discarded. Holley creates compulsively and his work is a means to deal with loss and survive. It’s through his unique perspective and the process of creating beauty that Lonnie draws us into an imaginative and captivating world.

In the early 70s, Mike Mandel would walk from his house in north Hollywood to a busy intersection where he would stand on the pavement and point his camera at the cars waiting at the traffic lights. Around 45 years later, Mandel was convinced by his publisher to revisit the 75 rolls of film. The result is People in Cars, a sustained snapshot of a time when, as Mandel puts it, "people were not as paranoid about cameras." Some waved, some hid, no one wore a seatbelt and everyone smoked.

[People in Cars]

L’arbre pelé, 2013


Les papiers, 2014


L’arbre, 2012


Les livres, 2013


La racine brulée, 2015


Claire Claude's work deals with the construction and representation of memory of a place. When Water Comes Together With Other Water combines photographs of landscapes, self-portraits and installations of various materials such as plant remains or objects found in uninhabited or ruined places, in search of traces of life lived therein.

[Claire Laude]

[Isabel Kiesewetter]

[Lee Kyutae]

Standard Time was a 24 hour time-telling performance conceived by Mark Formanek and realized by Datenstrudel in Berlin in 2007, recorded on film. On display are 70 workers who, with a stoic sense of duty, are spending time on an apparently futile activity: assembling the time in the form of a digital display of man-sized wooden slats in sync with the real time.

[Standard Time]

[Jan Töve]

Cyrill Lachauer is a reader of traces: his works are the result of long journeys that take him from the hinterlands of the United States back to his own roots in Upper Bavaria and Berlin. In his photographs, films, and texts, gaps, quotations, and seemingly coincidental details become traces of hidden histories that have become inscribed into landscapes and enduringly shape them.

[Cyrill Lachauer]
[FutureGreat 2015 profile @ ArtReview]

Anne Clark has been considered as one of the pioneers in the spoken-word music genre, as well as being highly idolised over the board of synth-pop and new wave. By creating groundbreaking analogue synthesizer music she became a forerunner of the techno movement and has influenced an entire generation of musicians. The filmmaker Claus Withopf has accompanied Anne Clark for almost a decade and gives a deep insight in her life and work. He is visualizing the complex socio-critical oeuvre of the exceptional artist and is creating an unusual kaleidoscope of existential poetry and emotional music.

Flusser held this lecture at the Budapest Kunsthalle in 1990. He reflects on the Romanian Revolution through his own theories on technical images and their power, technical revolutions and the political effects of media, concluding that "the real experience is in the image, what happened behind the image is no use to us. Political reasoning is no longer valid. There is no reality behind the image. There are realities in the image. What is now happening in Romania cannot be history, it is something else. Political reasoning does not apply to it. It is the result of magic. It is a sort of technical voodoo. How can we judge it if we do not have the criteria for it? We do not have a philosophy of post-history. We do not yet have a philosophy of an image in power."

[transcript]

Mika Vainio’s death in April 2017 sent shock waves rippling through the electronic music community. The late Finnish musician left an indelible mark on noise thanks to his roles in the ‘90s group Pan Sonic and record label Sähkö Recordings. Artfully shot on 16mm by Jimi Tenor in 1995, Sähkö The Movie is a suitably abstract portrayal of the singular label in its prime.

[Sähkö The Movie]

Reflections - Mojave Desert is arguably Floating Point's most ambitious recording to date, if only because he availed himself of the Mojave Desert itself as his recording studio. Sam Shepherd and his ensemble incorporate the vast, rocky landscape of the California desert into the very fabric of their ambient post-rock. It's a far cry from the house and garage with which Shepherd made his name: Certain heads may find themselves waiting for Shine on You Crazy Diamond to burst forth at any moment.

Floating Points has always been especially attentive to the way sound exists in space; many of his most electrifying moments take place along the periphery of silence. Here, the painstaking way he details the psychoacoustic properties of the landscape is remarkable.

[Reflections – Mojave Desert]

[Jacob Ring]

Kathrin Sonntag distorts, refracts, and fragments quotidian objects in order to inspire her audience to untether their preconceived ways of looking and seeing. Her pictures regularly confound perception of illusionistic space and undermine assumptions about truth in photography. Encompassing sculpture, photography, film, and drawing, her work offers a complex analysis of the nature of objects and the division between fiction and reality.

[Kathrin Sonntag]

"Great films about photographers are hard to come by. Perhaps it’s something about the nature of the medium that makes it hard to translate into moving images. (Could it be that photography depends on a lack of context, and that film provides too much?) Laura Israel’s film is a great film and admirably succeeds in providing context not just for many of Frank’s photographs but for his films, as well. And in its own crazy and capricious way perfectly captures the crazy and capricious nature of Frank’s art. I loved it."
— Errol Morris

[Don't Blink - Robert Frank]
[Don't Blink - Robert Frank download (5GB)]

Cameraperson is a complex, self-questioning work that is entirely composed of sequences from Johnson’s previous films, which include acclaimed documentaries such as Fahrenheit 9/11, Darfur Now and Citizenfour. Determined to lay bare what she calls "the constructions of film-making", she has in turn constructed a montage of what at first seem unconnected scenes identified only by their locations, which include a farm in Bosnia to which a Muslim family returned after the genocide there, a Brooklyn boxing arena where young contenders do battle, a beleaguered natal unit in a Nigerian hospital and a courtroom in Texas where evidence of a horrific race crime unfolded. What emerges is a visually bold memoir and a revelatory interrogation of the power of the camera.

[Cameraperson]

In the 1997 book The Island of the Colorblind and the accompanying documentary, late neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks visits the small Micronesian atoll of Pingelap, where an unusually large portion of the population is affected by complete achromatopsia, or total color blindness. The story was brought to attention of Belgian photographer Sanne De Wilde who visited the island and produce work that meshes a social-documentary approach with a sort of experiment in point-of-view photography. She shot traditional black-and-white photographs, and also digital-infrared images, which she used to challenge her own understanding of color. After she returned to Amsterdam, in a workshop with a Dutch organization for achromats, she asked color-blind collaborators to paint over some of the black-and-white pictures. The resulting book will be released this month.

[The Island of the Colorblind @ The New Yorker]

A Light Transfer of Nature, 2015, mirror, copper, wood



Palette, 2006-2009, mahogany wood, shellac, wood stain



Nissan (Parallelwelt 1 + 2), 2009, two Nissan Micras

Right-hand-drive Nissan Micra turned into a mirror-image copy of a dented left-hand-drive version. These twin vehicles have been parked together in a variety of locations for exhibitions. Both vehicles were in daily use between 2009 and 2014 and each defect or scratch was copied mirrored in this period of time.



Bordsteinjuwelen, 2008-2012, various stones

Stones found in the streets of Berlin were cut in a classical faceted style by a gem cutter instructed to treat them as raw diamonds and to select the cut with the least amount of material loss.


The work of polish-born Alicja Kwade involves our assumptions about reality and the way we conceive it. Through her sculptures—as well as in her installations, photographs and films—she tries to make the invisible visible, the inconceivable conceivable. Often composed of everyday items, her works explore and question subjects like economic systems and power of natural resources, social agreements on the value and authenticity of objects, and philosophical notions about the character of time, the structure of reality, and the meaning of history.

[Alicja Kwade]
[Alicja Kwade interview @ Ignant]

A New Nothing is an online project dedicated to facilitating two-person, image-based conversations between artists. It operates as an ongoing platform for collaboration, one that highlights the tangential, meandering and surprising nature of visual exchanges.

[A New Nothing]

[Tatiana Gulenkina]

[Ketuta Alexi-Meskhishvili @ Micky Schubert]

[Screen Noise]

     Voices sit
     like broken chairs
     in a room.

     A room stands
     for the ceremony
     of impermanence.

     Impermanence cracks
     the façade
     of self.

     The self builds
     its walls
     of healing.

     Healing frames
     the house
     of wounds.

     Wounds bridge
     darkness and light
     over time.

     Time winds through
     the lake of memories
     in frozen tongue.

On This Date In Photography is a live blog by researcher, teacher and artist James McArdle, which provides a leaf from each day of the calendar of historical and contemporary photographic events, people, images, places and technology.

[On This Date In Photography]

Tomas Helbig’s paintings and sculptures appear to have a spiritual affinity to Surrealist automatic drawings and contain rapid flecks of colour, ominous shapes and faint references to mythological icons through the use of form and symbolism. In his sculptures, paint, resin and polyurethrane cover partially destroyed statue heads, tree roots and an array of thrift shop and castaway objects that have been dissolved, flattened and broken down to forms barely recognisable of the structures they once were. Coagulated and yet perceivably mutable Helbig’s sculptures seem to have a life force of their own, watching over the gallery space they act as arresting punctuation from the contemplative reverie invoked by his paintings.

[Thomas Helbig @ Galerie Guido W. Baudach]
[Thomas Helbig @ Thomas Brambilla]

From Chevette in Dub, 2016, oil on canvas


ladychatlati , 2012, oil on canvas


minuka, 2012, oil on canvas


suzimizi , 2015, oil on canvas


prototype to get out no. 2, 2012, oil on canvas


British painter Ivan Seal has attracted critical interest for his paintings which appear to be still lives but are in fact painted from his imagination. His practice rejects the traditional approach to the genre which conventionally depicts a moment in time, opting instead for an approximation of a memory. Poised formal arrangements in a space left undetermined but psychologically unsettling, with titles generated by a random computer programme, Seal offers up imagined subjects, with fictitious titles that refute the idea that figurative painting needs to have a subject at all. The paintings are set against an auditory accompaniment of computer-generated sound pieces aiming to prevent the imposition of meaning on the visual works associated with traditional exhibition guides.

[Ivan Seal]
[Ivan Seal @ RaebervonStenglin]
[Ivan Seal @ Carl Freedman Gallery]

Take stock of those around you and you will see them wandering about lost through life, like sleep-walkers in the midst of their good or evil fortune, without the slightest suspicion of what is happening to them. You will hear them talk in precise terms about themselves and their surroundings, which would seem to point to them having ideas on the matter. But start to analyse those ideas and you will find that they hardly reflect in any way the reality to which they appear to refer, and if you go deeper you will discover that there is not even an attempt to adjust the ideas to this reality. Quite the contrary: through these notions the individual is trying to cut off any personal vision of reality, of his own very life. For life is at the start a chaos in which one is lost. The individual suspects this, but he is frightened at finding himself face to face with this terrible reality, and tries to cover it over with a curtain of fantasy, where everything is clear. It does not worry him that his "ideas" are not true, he uses them as trenches for the defence of his existence, as scarcecrows to frighten away reality. The man with the clear head is the man who frees himself from those fantastic "ideas" and looks life in the face, realises that everything in it is problematic, and feels himself lost. As this is the simple truth—that to live is to feel oneself lost—he who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look round for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked.

John MacLean is a photographer who has produced several distinct, but conceptually linked bodies of work that go to the core of the conditionality of visual experience. Strategies of seeing—or rather, strategies that show the contours of seeing—are applied to familiar contexts in order to get beyond our habitual assumptions about how and what constitutes visual experience as an active shaping of what is seen.

His latest photobook, Hometowns—a layered investigation into the childhood environments of his artistic heroes—was awarded Best International Photobook of 2016.

[John MacLean]
[Strategies of Seeing: An Interview with John MacLean?]