Archive for the ‘violence’ Category
michelle lord future ruins
Ballard was the great chronicler of the real and present dystopia – the American suburb. The photographer Michelle Lord pays homage with her haunting images. They show ‘ancient’ appliances stacked like blocks to make monuments and totems – pyramid, obelisk – against a backdrop of midcentury brutal prefab concrete facades. The concrete looks plastic. And in each an onlooker and his dog standing at the margins of the sickly aura of a highway light.
From Michelle Lord’s show Future Ruins on Ballardian.
Familiar architectural locations around the city take on the appearance of evacuated spaces occupied by strange, carefully arranged structures, built from the technological detritus of abandoned television sets, cars, computers and domestic appliances.
trevor paglen military satelites
Active Military and Reconnaissance Satellites of the United States of America
Multimedia Installation
Trevor Paglen writes books about and takes pictures of US military activity – recently with a particular interest in CIA rendition activities.
what happens when the one who dreamt us wakes up and feels ashamed?
I found a copy of Bergman’s The Shame and watched it last night. And of course highly recommend it. It’s about a couple who are artists and trying to avoid a war but it eventually comes to them and changes their lives. I’ve rarely watched a film that so convincingly and relentlessly takes you right to the human heart. And on the surface it’s just people moving around and talking while bombs go off in the background. Read the rest of this entry »
cronenberg – the new flesh
A documentary from 1986 about the films of David Cronenberg.
From the film, Cronenberg on horror – –
We have created our own universe and therefore what is wrong with it also comes from us. /…/ The idea that you carry the seeds of your own destruction around with you always and that they can erupt at any time is scarier because there is no defence against it, there’s no escape from it.
A very empathetic bit from Cronenberg on what it’s like to be a disease —
A virus is only doing its job, you know, it’s only trying to live its life. The fact that it’s trying to destroy you by doing it, is really not it’s fault. So, I think it’s trying to understand the interrelationship between organisms, even those that we perceive as disease. And to understand it from the disease’s point of view, of course it’s just a matter of life. It has nothing to do being a disease. I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered a disease at all. It has a very negative connotation. For them it’s very positive when they pick over your body and destroy you. It’s a triumph.
The director again, on the middleclass and how it deals with violence —
The strength of the middle class is that it’s like a giant amoeba, it can absorb anything. What seems radical and threatening to it, the way that it defends itself is not to put a shell around it that can be cracked and broken, but to just absorb everything and assimilate it.
Peter Rudd
strawdogs 
