This small book gives a most disturbing summary of all the many things which have gone wrong in Australia over the past 20 years, at every level: Federal, State and Local, but particularly focussing on the Federal scene.
If you've been wondering about many issues which have arisen in recent years such as the way our Federal Government selected the French contract for our Submarine fleet which was recently aborted at short notice by the person we call our "Prime Minister"... well this horrible grimy little episode of national shame is exceedingly well explained by Ms. McLeod in just a few pages.
If you are concerned about how much abuse of office has been going on in so many instances, from the MacDonald and Obeid infractions in NSW which have been in the news lately (but really for the past 10 years) or Berejiklian's current enquiry by ICAC in NSW, or the Victorian shemozzle involving Adem Somyurek and Anthony Byrne and others, well this little book explains very well how these issues arose and how endemic they are in our political system.
It also explains a great deal about how perpetrators get away with their devious actions for a long time before a few of them have to face the music and end up in ICAC or IBAC, or even end up in jail as occasionally does come to pass.
But of course the Federal Govt. is not keen to let loose such scrutiny among its own pollies. Well why would they? They have a great deal to lose by doing so.
I'm not going to go further with this at the moment except to this:
thank you Fiona McLeod for your powerful expose of issues underpin and enable the problems we are hear about from day to day, week to week, month to month, some of which have been hanging around for more than 10 years. Your have done us a great service in writing this book.
I hope that any of my friends who have not yet read this book will put it on their list.
And many thanks to my friend DD (no not Donald Duck) for lending you copy to me.
Today I received an email from our friend Ian whose work I have posted previously.
This time it's a bit different as Ian has had two works selected at
Tranås At The Fringe International Arts Festival
Hi Peter
Last night, did an interview with a big arts and film festival in Sweden about the creative processes involved in making the two videos I have showing there. It might be of interest to you blog?
Here’s a link to the post on my website which in turn has links to the interview, the festival, the fabulous interviewer and curator, and the videos themselves.
Two of the newly colorized paintings: Jurisprudence (left) and Medicine (right) Courtesy Google Arts and Culture
Austrian painter Gustav Klimt created some of his best-known masterpieces during his so-called Golden Phase. Spanning the first decade of the 20th century, this period saw the artist produce such works as The Kiss (1908), a sensual scene of two lovers embracing in a field of multicolored flowers, and Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I(1907), in which an elegant woman in a strikingly geometric dress stands surrounded by a sea of gold.
Not all of Klimt’s vibrant paintings survive today. Nazi looting during World War II led to the destruction of many prized Klimt works, including the Faculty Paintings: three enormous allegorical scenes titled Philosophy, Medicine and Jurisprudence.
To study these paintings, all of which were likely destroyed in a 1945 fire, art historians have long had to make do with black-and-white photographs. Thanks to machine learning, however, researchers have now restored historical images of the Faculty trio to approximations of their original colors, offering viewers a sense of what Klimt’s works looked like before their destruction, reports Mexican newspaper El Universal.
Watch as a black-and-white historical photograph transitions to an A.I.-generated approximation of color in Klimt's Medicine, one of the three Faculty Paintings destroyed by a 1945 fire. Courtesy Google Arts and Culture
To create the images, Google Arts and Culture and the Belvedere Museum in Vienna developed a tool that culled information about Klimt’s use of color from disparate sources. As Shanti Escalante-De Mattei reports for ARTnews, the data set included contemporary journalistic descriptions of the Faculty Paintings, 1 million pictures of the real world and 80 full-color reproductions of Klimt paintings from the same period.
Google engineer Emil Wallner spent nearly six months coding the artificial intelligence (A.I.) algorithm to generate color predictions. He tells El Universal that some aspects of the final paintings surprised the researchers: For instance, one might expect the starry sky featured in Klimt’s Philosophy to carry a blue tint, but the A.I.-colored version is saturated with an emerald haze, based partly on journalistic accounts that describe the painting’s greenish hue.
“It really creates a kind of shocking effect, because you expect it to be something else,” says Wallner in a Google Arts and Culture video.
In a statement, Franz Smola, a curator at the Belvedere Museum who worked on the restoration with Wallner, adds, “The result for me was surprising because we were able to color [Klimt’s works] even in the places where we had no knowledge. With machine learning, we have good assumptions that Klimt used certain colors.”
Art lovers can explore these colorful recreations through a new online hub dedicated to Klimt, created by Google in collaboration with more than 30 partners. The restored paintings are paired with a virtual exhibition, “Klimt vs. Klimt: The Man of Contradictions,” that explores the painter’s idiosyncratic life and legacy.
Klimt portrayed Jurisprudence, pictured here, in an abstract scene of deep reds that features three naked women wrapped in snakes. Courtesy Google Arts and Culture
Simon Rein, a program manager at Google Arts and Culture, tells El Universal that the show’s title refers to the “ambivalence of an artist navigating between tradition and modernity, a womanizing artist but also a devoted lover, a private person and at the same time a revolutionary.”
Viewers can also zoom in on 63 high-resolution images of the artist’s masterworks, which Google has organized together under a single digital roof in an Augmented Reality Pocket Gallery.
The lengthy history of Klimt’s Faculty Paintings brims with scandal, conflict and unresolved mystery. The tale begins in 1894, when the University of Vienna commissioned the rebellious Klimt and contemporary Franz Matsch to create allegorical paintings for the ceiling of a luxurious new assembly hall.
Klimt contributed three enormous panels of his own strikingly original design. Standing more than 14 feet tall, the compositions showed wild, unrestrained visions of an allegorical world “roiling with sex, death and chaos,” writes Sam Gaskin for Ocula magazine.
Gustav Klimt, The Kiss, 1908 Courtesy Google Arts and Culture
Naked women wrapped in snakes, pregnant women, children, skeletons and wraithlike beings with cascading hair populate the canvases, highlighted by the shimmer of Klimt’s trademark gold foil. According to the Belvedere Museum, the artist employed references to mythology and more: To represent the concept of philosophy, for example, Klimt painted a sphinx, “the keeper of unsolvable secrets and riddles ... whose shadowy figure emerges from a cosmic fog.”
Critics decried the works as pornography, with one anonymous observer deeming them “deeply offensive to the general public.” After being asked several times to revise his creations, Klimt refused to deliver the paintings and returned his fee of 30,000 crowns (about €162,000 today), notes the Gustav Klimt Foundation.
The artist eventually sold the canvases to Serena Lederer, a wealthy Jewish woman who lived in Vienna and was an avid collector of Klimt’s works, the Austrian National Library explains in an essay on the Google hub.
Nazi forces looted Lederer’s collection of Klimt paintings as part of a widespread campaign of cultural pillaging across Europe. As art historian Tina Marie Storkovich reported for Austrian newspaper Die Pressein 2015, Klimt’s paintings were stored with other precious artworks at Schloss Immendorf, a castle in remote northeast Austria. (Lederer, for her part, was forced to flee to Hungary, where she died in 1943.)
A newly restored version of Klimt's PhilosophyCourtesy Google Arts and Culture
Tragedy struck on May 8, 1945, when the castle burned down in a fire—likely the result of arson. Some historians argue that the Nazis started the blaze as they fled the approaching Soviet Red Army.
Exactly how many Klimt works were destroyed in the fire is unclear. While the Klimt Foundation lists 16 lost works, including the Faculty Paintings, the National Library suggests a figure closer to “at least ten.”
Even if some Klimt works did escape the 1945 fire, it’s unlikely that the Faculty Paintings were among the survivors.
“Due to the enormous size of the Faculty Paintings … removing them at any speed during the events in the castle in 1945 would hardly have been possible,” the library essay notes. “This fact supports the general assumption that these three Klimt paintings were not saved.”
Nora McGreevyis a daily correspondent for The Smithsonian.
Diane has worked with Carolyn Masel on both projects. Diane is the filmmaker and Carolyn the poet. Here are some process reflection notes which Diane has written for the Liberated Words site at the invitation of the creator Sarah Tremlet:
“Dad by Numbers”: Process notes
“Dad by Numbers” is my first poetry film but certainly not my first film. I have been making films, or teaching about filmmaking, since university days. I first began making films at film school in Melbourne, Australia. This particular school was oriented to experimental and abstract filmmaking rather than the more traditional genres. This early influence has had a great bearing on my work, particularly in more recent years. After leaving film school I worked as a documentary maker: director, writer and editor for a Melbourne government film unit. Here I made more conventional documentaries suitable for school use and broadcast television. After this experience I moved into academia, teaching filmmaking. When I undertook my PhD by creative practice I decided to expand my filmmaking to embrace the world of multi -screen video installation, viewed in an art gallery rather than in a cinema or on television. Since then I have moved more towards experimental film using found footage. I think all elements of these approaches are evident in “Dad by Numbers”
I have long been fascinated with old family photos and family stories that are passed down from generation to generation and I was eager to pursue a means of visualizing these stories for others to enjoy. Being a filmmaker, I was particularly interested in exploring how best I could develop these stories to create meaning for myself and others. Moreover, I had always been drawn to the medium of Super 8 film and its inherent ability to provide an aura of nostalgia which was fueled by an interest in the reuse of found Super 8 home movies. In my work I have been exploring how a filmmaker can best use the film medium to elicit memories and promote storytelling in the viewer. I began this journey by referring to my personal experience withy my grandmother’s stories which I used as a basis for a video installation, “Roses Stories; revisioning Memories.”I then moved to exploring the family stories of others I knew and using their found super 8 footage as a catalyst for further video installation. I became more and more interested in found home movies particularly on Super 8, and was influenced by the work of Jasper Rigole and Derek Jarman. In my work “Remixed Memories” I use found footage from the internet to create a piece that I hope elicits memories in the viewer.
Recently I have been drawn to the poetry world. I am not a poet myself but really am inspired by the spoken word experience. Carolyn Masel, who wrote the poem “Dad by Numbers” was a colleague and close friend. I started following her spoken word career and was very excited about the poetry she was writing. At the same time, I had been attending a series of alternate underground film screenings in Melbourne. As part of this, a night was devoted to poetry video and I was totally inspired. I felt this was the direction I wanted to move my practice. I came across “Dad by Numbers” in Carolyn Masel's poetry anthology, “Moorings”, and was instantly drawn to her poems devoted to family memories and stories. I asked her if I could make a poetry film some time and she agreed.
In 2020 in Melbourne we had a long lock down due to COVID which gave me plenty of spare time to think and wonder. I began working on the poem film. Of course, I instantly thought of going to found footage as a source, family photos, home movies, old vintage footage. I trawled the internet for footage of the 1920s that featured babies, of the 1960s in Melbourne, of the second world war. I also asked Carolyn if she had any photos of her Dad that she wouldn’t mind me using. When I started I had many different ideas for approaches . Initially I thought I could just feature shots of random fathers, from any source, past and present and home movies featuring fathers. Then I decided to do a combination. Some photos in the film are actually of Carolyn’s father and others are not. These are purposefully woven together as it’s the memories and feelings they evoke that I am concerned with not any historical accuracy or documentary or memorial.
I asked Carolyn to record the reading of her poem as she is an active spoken word poet with a great voice. I also asked her to send me some examples of music her father liked to give me direction with the soundtrack. These varied quite a bit from upbeat jazz to Maria Callas. I went with Maris Callas which gives the piece a melancholic and ethereal feel, I believe.
Because we were in lock down we couldn’t’ collaborate in person, only via zoom or phone and initially I was just playing about but soon got stuck into the project with a passion. I sourced all of the found footage which proved quite a feat and chose a series of photographs. Also, I decided to break up the piece with audio and moving images about the start of the war to add a different dimension. With the audio, I initially edited Carolyn’s spoken word the way I felt it had the most emotional impact, reinforced by the music and the pacing of the images. After seeing a cut, Carolyn wanted me to stick to the meter of the verse more and was very specific about where the words should be and how they were grouped. This I found difficult at first, as I felt that my first version had more emotional impact . Also, Carolyn wanted me to change a couple of images that I had selected. I did this but still had some reservations.
As a filmmaker, I have mainly written my own scripts and had full control of my work. Collaboration as to content and style is an interesting departure for me, not without its challenges but also very inspiring. Since the film was finished, Carolyn has since found some really great old footage that she would like me to include and we have talked about a slightly new version. Thus ,I can see that the poetry film medium is quite unique and offers many opportunities for new forms of collaboration. We are talking about collaborating more, particularly with her family story poems and I am very excited about this.
On May 28 this year, I posted a blog on AMA, the underwater breathhold ballet by Julie Gautier. At that time I wrote: "What is amazing is that Guillaume Nery was also holding his breath while shooting this."
I was under the strongest impression that the underwater films by Guillaume Nery and Julie Gautier were filmed by each other while holding their breath. If Guillaume was performing, Julie would be filming and vice versa and both would be holding their breath.
I guess it's what I wanted to believe because it made them into true heroes of underwater filming and to get such exceptional quality while holding one's breath would be just amazing.
I've since discovered my hypothesis was not true.
These free divers actually have an underwater film crew on Scuba gear to film their exploits. Below is how they made AMA. It clearly shows the camera crew sitting comfortably on the bottom blowing bubbles from tanks and regulators while setting up and making sure everything is ready for the performance.
Julie was certainly breathholding. She used a drop weight to get to the bottom quickly for each take. This meant she did not have to expend energy and oxygen actually swimming down.
Have a look at the video and please accept a mea culpa from me. It in no way detracts from the amazing underwater ballet she performed.
Some weeks ago I shared this film from "Aeon/Psyche", or let's say I tried to share it with all our friends. But I could not embed it the way I do with most films I send on to you. It must be limited for embedding by some privacy thing.
I asked Richard about this and he suggested I post a simplified or shortened version of the link which would enable friends to access the movie more easily, so here it is:
Normally I would not go to all this trouble unless I felt the film was really worthwhile.
Here's Richard's comment on seeing it:
"This is so relatable. I remember many years ago (maybe in the 80s when I used to catch public transport to school every day -- a 1.5hr or more commute each way) thinking about this very thing. This was prior to my filmmaking life.
This is exactly the kind of film I would love to have made of this exact thing. Catherine and Jimmy beat me to it :)
A captivating piece, bringing to life this common experience through a strong, yet gently flowing cinematic experience."
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