Up&Up

Coldplay has released a bizarre new video for their third single titled Up&Up,from their current album, A Head Full of Dreams : I thought I’d post it because it shows everything beautiful around us,each part of the world and its opposite, so the imperfects of the world in all its greatness. But up is down, down is up, normally large concepts have been miniaturized and nothing is the same.  With the help of directors Vania Heymann and Gal Muggia, the Biritsh band turned seemingly ordinary activities and images into the extraordinary:

While its overall tone is quirky, dreamlike and playful, it also makes some serious political points, with imagery including boats overcrowded with people, a beach with a huge concrete wall blocking the sea and children in a war-torn landscape.

Heymann and Muggia commented in a statement that they were “inspired by many collage artists, past and present. Hopefully the images do the rest of the talking.”

sources
Creativity-online
Indiana Times

 

Giada Semeraro

Cartoons: The beauty of imitation.

We all know who is Elvis Presley, the legendary singer and actor who has been a myth during all his life. For this reason,he was and he is considered perfect.
There was a musical band ”The Cartoons”,who during all thie performances were dressed in a way that imitated not only Elvis but also a lot of characters of cartoons. An other musical band who can be considered the Cartoons’s rival were Aqua.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres: Impefect/Perfect Art

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was a french painter. During his life,he realized a lot of work,but heconcentrated his attention on the portraits of women,in which he usually deformed a body part. For example,he realized ”The Great Odalisque” and ”The Valpincon baither”. In both of them,the back of women is not regular.

 

Christian Faur: The New Horizon of Pixel Art

What is pixel art? The pixel art is a form of digital art. It is a technique for constructing images that follows in the footsteps of the current divisionism (pointillism), whose greatest representative was Georges Seurat.
Nowadays there is a men,or better an artist who make pixel art but using crayons.
Here there is the source in which there are some images of Christian Faur ‘s works.


Kim Foster Gallery

 

Isabel Wilkerson: “I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect”

Isabel Wilkerson is an american writer who was born in 1961 and who won a Pulitzer Price,a journalism’s price. She is famous thanks to his books,in particular thanks to “The Warmth of the other suns:The epic story of America’s Great Migration”. She spent 15 years to reporting and writing this book. The book’s purpose is to tell to readers the chronicles of the migration of 6 million black Americans out of the South and into the North and the West from 1915 to the 1970s. The book intertwines a general history and statistical analysis of the entire period, and the biographies of three persons: a sharecropper’s wife who left Mississippi in the 1930s for Chicago, named Ida Mae Brandon Gladney; an agricultural worker, George Swanson Starling, who left Florida for New York City in the 1940s; and Robert Joseph Pershing Foster, a doctor who left Louisiana in the early 1950s, for Los Angeles.
During a conference to present the book,she said that the the hardest thing to do for her was choose the characters. As far as the characters’emotions she said: ” These people wanted their stories told. They were the ones who spurred me on in the end. They wanted people to know what they had endured. They had lived with this for so long, that they were in some ways unburdening themselves”. About their characters,she said: “I wanted people who were beautifully imperfect. Perfection is not real, and readers cannot identify with people presented as perfect. I wanted to find people who were at peace with their mistakes and with the things they had done not particularly well. I wanted people who were willing to be who they really, truly were.”

Source:http://www.niemanstoryboard.org/2012/08/03/i-wanted-people-who-were-beautifully-imperfect-isabel-wilkerson-on-finding-characters-mayborn-2012-vol-3/

Elisabeth of Austria: Perfection make imperfection

Elisabeth of Austria or simply Sissi, was born in 1837 and in her life a lot of things happened. When she was sixteen,she married his cousin,the Emperor Of Austria,Franz Joseph 1°. She is an historical icon. During her life,she had a lot of problems.
Elisabeth had a lot of passions,including horses,that she loved.
But the Empress of Austria can be considered an imperfect beauty. In fact, the real woman wanted to be perfect and so she took care of her hair,but she was a thinness maniac: she was very thin. Elisabeth’s thinness was due to his research of perfection,but actually, she was not perfect. In addition his thinness caused her a depression that increased when in January,30th, 1889,the son,Rudolph committed suicide to Mayerling afetr murdering the lover,Maria Vetsera.
In the end,Elisabeth is a symbol to how the research of perfection provoke imperfection,not only to the body,but also to the soul of a person.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empress_Elisabeth_of_Austria

Wabi-sabi: the beautiful imperferction in Japan

Wabi-sabi is a visual of Japanese world,based on the transience of the things. Wabi-sabi is also described as ”beautiful imperfect”,and it is close to Buddhism and to his anitya.
Wabi today identified the rustic simplicity, freshness or silence, and can be applied to both natural and artificial objects, or understated elegance.
Sabi is beauty or serenity that accompanies advancing age, when the life of the object and its impermanence are highlighted by patina and wear, or any visible repairs.

Fonte:   http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi
This source in in italian.

Simona Atzori: an (im)perfect dancer and painter

Simona Atzori was born without hands but she has a lot of fortitude and wilpower so now she is a dancer and a painter and she was also present during the last edition on Sanremo’s festival.

Here there is a Simona’s performance as dancer

Here there is her performance during Sanremo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuUWI44tJLE

and here there is a video in which she paints. This last video is in Italian.

Imperfection make news

In a lot of cases, there is imperfection in chronicle’ s news. Sometimes a video can be usefull to understand something and also as a document. If a video is made by an ”amateur reporter”, it is imperfect but above all it make news.
We have a lot of videos made by people who are not journalists.
Here there are some examples:

http://youtu.be/381n5MY0gAI

Educationally imperfect

Nowadays, part of the modern culture promotes some imperfections and leads people to show their “imperfections” and feel not ashamed by them. The main character of this sort of revolution is Lady Gaga who writes and sings lots of songs about this theme. The most representative song is “Born this way”.

I’m beautiful in my way
‘Cause God makes no mistakes
I’m on the right track, baby
I was born this way (chorus)

That’s why we have chosen an episode of the fiction “Glee”, which is about a group of  students who belong to a Music Club (called Glee) in an American high school. In this video they sing “Born this way” and everybody of them is wearing a T-Shirt where is written a sentence about their imperfections. Some examples are the soloist (who is an omsexual boy) wears  the sentence “Likes boys”, and another (who is a fat black girl) wears the sentence “No weave”.

An emblematic example in cinema

“Brian de Palma’s Redacted (2007) explores the ‘truth not truth’ of video and cinematic images. The film’s long opening scene is paradigmatic: the classic cinematic move of a smooth ‘coming down’ from the sky is overlapped by the classic handycam image of the date of the shooting. Following this is a title in a semi-professional graphic, while the colloquial voice-over of a soldier (who is also the film’s protagonist) states that he is the author of the recording itself; after which a highly amateurish tracking shot ends with the protagonists looking collectively into the camera, and finally with a freeze-frame. As a whole, De Palma’s film feels like a mix of reality and fiction: Hollywood DV footage, YouTube clips, wannabe documentaries and parodies of independent cinema. Here, the director of Scarface has captured a phenomenon that has radically changed the aesthetic perception of the cinema viewer, alternating and superimposing classic cinema aesthetics with the booming DIY digital aesthetic. In addition, the film’s subject is the war in Iraq, and this aesthetic seems equal to a situation in which ‘embedded’ journalists give the public the ‘truth’ in ostensibly unofficial shots attained by ‘brave’ reporters risking their lives. Low-resolution images of the Iraq war are usually considered true, especially those taken by mobile phone cameras or otherwise tiny hidden cameras.”
Web Aesthetics, p. 162-163.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0937237/

http://images.movieplayer.it/2008/11/27/la-copertina-di-redacted-dvd-98192.jpg