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Founded in 1987 and based in Grenoble, Metamkine (known in French as La Cellule d’Intervention Metamkine) is made up of musician Jérôme Noetinger and filmmakers Christophe Auger and Xavier Quérel. The trio’s research into the relationship between image and sound has resulted in works they refer to as live “musico-cinematic” creations.

Through the use of mirrors, multiple projectors, a live soundtrack of tape fragments, and ingenious on-stage editing, they produce and direct a new film live—simultaneously a performance and its document. A sensory immersion that must be experienced to be believed, Metamkine is brought to Crossing the Line in cooperation with Anthology Film Archives.



A Manifesto for the Planet




Stewart Brand is a rare breed of environmentalist: in his own words, “an ecologist by training, a futurist by profession, and a hacker (lazy engineer) at heart.” In the 60s, Brand campaigned against nuclear power and staged a “Hunger Show” to dramatize the global famine predicted by his mentor, Paul Ehrlich, but he also began printing a decidedly pro-technology handbook for saving the planet. Whole Earth Catalog, first published in 1968, was premised on the notion that given the right information, tools, and awareness, people could—and would—create a more sustainable world. It was, many have said, the beginning of environmentalism.

Since that time, Brand’s own views on core “green issues,” from atomic energy to genetic engineering, have shifted under the weight of scientific evidence. Rather than quietly backpedal, Brand has now issued a bold challenge to the very movement he helped create: Can you forsake ideology for the good of the planet? Whole Earth Discipline contains every reason why they should: 300 pages of data, anecdotes, and arguments that illustrate, in withering detail, the scale of ecological problems we face today, and the utter inability of faith-based environmentalism alone to fix them. Seed editor Maywa Montenegro recently caught up with the 70-year-old Brand, ahead of a multi-city book tour.

Seed: It’s been 40 years since the first edition of Whole Earth Catalog. Why publish the sequel now?
Stewart Brand: There was actually no periodicity. In fact, I kind of hate the “40 years later” stuff that’s going on. But what did happen is the realization that I’d accumulated a set of contrarian views on some important environmental issues—specifically, cities, nuclear energy, genetic engineering, and geoengineering—and that it added up to a story worth telling.

That led me to the larger strategy of trying to move the environmental movement from a romantic identification with nature toward a more scientific basis. And moving on from that, toward an engineering approach to solving environmental problems.

El compositor puertorriqueño Mario Paoli se une a la oferta del Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) para mañana miércoles, 26 de agosto. A las 9:00 p.m., luego del conversatorio sobre la obra del artista Leopoldo Maler, Paoli interpetará en vivo algunas de sus composiciones de música electrónica, improvisará otras piezas, así como mostrará una selección de vídeos realizados a lo largo de su carrera en la Sala Nuevas Tendencias. Para más información sobre este evento, los interesados pueden llamar al 787-977-4030. El Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC) está localizado en la Avenida Ponce de Leon, esquina Avenida R.H. Todd, Parada 18 en Santurce.

Autress- Cover Art

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Desing By:
C.M. and L.F.

Famed space photographer David Malin talks about why his new compilation, Ancient Light, is in black and white and on the role of aesthetics in astronomy.

In the 1970s astronomer and photographer David Malin became the first person to photograph the faint colors of the night sky. His pictures taken from the Anglo-Australian Observatory have become the canonical images of many celestial sites, from the Horsehead Nebula to our nearest-neighbor galaxies. Now the architect of space color has published Ancient Light, a book of black-and-white prints that includes his shots of the surface of the moon, the Corona Australis nebula, and beyond. These stark and lovely images often recall lace spread across a coal-black surface (galaxy NGC 300) or handfuls of ash-colored silk bunched on an inky table (the Lagoon nebula). Seed editor Veronique Greenwood spoke with Malin about why he abandoned color in his latest collection, the role aesthetics plays in astronomy, and how the field of astrophotography has changed in his three-decade career.

Seed: You’ve written vividly about the importance of color in astronomy, and you’re widely known for having developed a way to capture the colors of stars. Why a book in black and white?
David Malin: When I started doing photography in the late 1950s, it was essentially all black and white. You could create your own images in the darkroom fairly easily, and that creative process was very rewarding because you could make a picture say exactly what you wanted it to say. I’ve gone back to my roots here to explore again the nice tonal ranges and structures you can fish out in black and white. It’s a kind of journey back. And when I first remember looking at science books as a child, all the galaxies and star forming regions were in black and white. So it’s also nostalgic in a way.

Seed: What was the practice of astronomical photography like when you first arrived at the Anglo-Australian Observatory in the 1970s?
DM: It was a challenge. The technology was new to me, and the business of preparing photographic material before use was quite complicated. It involved baking these big glass plates in an oven for a few hours in the dark, and then giving them a big dose of hydrogen for a few hours, and then using them in the telescope a few hours later because they didn’t last long after that. And all of this had to be done just to gather extra faint light through very long exposures, which lasted an hour or more. This process was quite challenging and fascinating, but I enjoyed it and got it to work. And I even became a bit of a guru at it.

Seed: Most photographs of the night sky are mosaics of many smaller images, but yours are all single shots. How is your process different?
DM: My photographs are taken on glass plates 14 or 10 inches square. The solid-state detectors that are now used to take digital pictures now are the size of big postage stamps—half a bank note if you get a large one. That’s much smaller than the plates I used, so you have to photograph the sky in sections. It’s a perfectly respectable way of working, but from an aesthetic point of view, it’s not very satisfactory, and it all happens at a computer, which changes the feel of the process.

Seed: Modern light-sensitive materials, known as solid-state detectors, are used in digital imaging. How does this process compare to film photography?
DM: Film is actually a solid-state detector, too. There are tiny particles of silver chloride and bromide in it, and these are sensitive to light. They capture the light’s energy, and you release the image by plunging the film into a sea of electrons known as a developer.

With digital imagery, you use a different kind of solid-state detector, a kind of doped silicon chip. Instead of being developed, the photoelectrons are collected in the pixels and then read out by a computer so you get an array of images on your screen. The digital version gives you many more opportunities for manipulation, translation, addition, and general handling. But analog photography has some special qualities. It strongly over-samples: There are many more samples per unit area than you get with digital photography. That gives you some leeway and a wonderful plasticity in images that you don’t really see with digital pictures.

Seed: You mention in the introduction to Ancient Light that astronomers were midwives at the birth of photography in some sense. What did you mean by that exactly?
DM: When the daguerreotype—the first photograph—was invented in the 1840s, it was Francois Arago, a famous French physicist and astronomer, who persuaded the French government to give its inventor a pension if he released the information about the daguerreotype to the world at large, which was a very unusual step in those days. And it was John Herschel, another famous astronomer, who invented the photographic fixer that really makes photography possible. There have been light-sensitive materials around since the time of Adam—literally, as apple skin is light-sensitive—but no way of fixing that image, making it permanent. John Herschel invented a way of doing that. Two astronomers were intimately involved with the beginnings, so it’s quite appropriate that photography should have transformed astronomy once it got working really well.

Seed: And how has digital photography transformed your field?
DM: The Hubble Space Telescope wouldn’t be possible without digital photography. You’d never get any information back from it. You can’t imagine it squirting canisters of film out to the void. There were some satellites that used film. In the 1960s a lunar surveyor went to the moon and it used film to record the image, process it, scan it on board the satellite, and send the scan back to earth by radio transmission. So that was a kind of hybrid, and it worked fairly well.

Seed: Who should we be watching in the world of astronomical photography today?
DM: I’ve been really impressed by the Cassini group, which manages the satellite out by Saturn. Those are some unabashedly beautiful images they’re returning. One of the key people there is Carolyn Porco. She has a real eye for aesthetics and it shows in all of their stuff.

Seed: It sounds like aesthetics has a pretty significant role in astronomy. How does it influence what you capture?
DM: The thing is, scientific data is made for science, but it can also be aesthetically pleasing. The science isn’t compromised by this. What I’ve aimed for with all of my pictures is to make them scientifically useful while keeping an eye out for aesthetics as well.



Bibliologue / by Veronique Greenwood / June 24, 2009

Eyebeam is an art and technology center that provides a fertile context and state-of-the-art tools for digital research and experimentation. It is a lively incubator of creativity and thought, where artists and technologists actively engage with culture, addressing the issues and concerns of our time. Eyebeam challenges convention, celebrates the hack, educates the next generation, encourages collaboration, freely offers its contributions to the community, and invites the public to share in a spirit of openness: open source, open content and open distribution.

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