Miscellaneous Pics

Louis Wain (5 August 1860 – 4 July 1939)

2012-01-21T16:57:00.000-08:00

The British artist Louis Wain was a highly successful illustrator whose reputation was made on his singular and gently humorous pictures of cats. A cat-lover himself and sometime President of The National Cat Club, Wain claimed in an interview in 1896 that his "fanciful cat creations" were first suggested to him by Peter, his black & white cat. Demand for Wain's work diminished in the decade after the outbreak of the First World War, leaving him progressively impoverished. He began to show signs of mental disorder, including becoming aggressive,babusive and sometimes violent.
In 1924 he was certified insane and placed in the paupers' ward of Springfield Hospital at Tooting. Despite his delusional state, Wain continued to draw and paint, which led a year later to him being recognised by one of the hospital guardians and transferred to a private roomat the Royal Bethlem Hospital in Southwark, with money raised through public appeal.
In Bethlem he was allowed to draw as much as he liked, and it was here that he produced the first of his facinating series of "kaleidoscope" cats. These ranged from relatively straightforward renderings of the cat itself, though painted in intense, non-naturalistic colour and surrounded by intricate geometric patterns which deny any illusion of spatial depth, to images in which the figure of the cat is exploded in a burst of geometric fragments, the like of which are not to be found in any of Wain's work before his illness. In 1930he was moved to Napsbury in Hertfordshire, where he continued to work sporadically until his death in 1939.

Found Here: http://www.outsiderart.co.uk/wain.htm

From this point, Wain's popularity began to decline. He returned from New York broke, and his mother had died of Spanish Influenza while he was abroad. His mental instability also began around this time, and increased gradually over the years. He had always been considered quite charming, but odd, and often had difficulty in distinguishing between fact and fantasy. Others frequently found him incomprehensible, due to his way of speaking tangentially. His behaviour and personality changed, and he began to suffer from delusions, with the onset of schizophrenia. Whereas he had been a mild-mannered and trusting man, he became hostile and suspicious, particularly towards his sisters. He claimed that the flickering of the cinema screen had robbed the electricity from their brains. He began wandering the streets at night, rearranging furniture within the house, and spent long periods locked in his room, writing incoherently.
Some speculate that the onset of Wain's schizophrenia was precipitated by toxoplasmosis, a parasitic infection that can be contracted from cats. The theory that toxoplasmosis can trigger schizophrenia is the subject of ongoing research, though the origins of the theory can be traced back as early as 1953.[3][4][5][6]
When his sisters could no longer cope with his erratic and occasionally violent behavior, he was finally committed, in 1924, to a pauper ward of Springfield Mental Hospital in Tooting. A year later, he was discovered there and his circumstances were widely publicized, leading to appeals from such figures as H. G. Wells and the personal intervention of the Prime Minister. Wain was transferred to the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Southwark, and again in 1930 to Napsbury Hospital near St Albans in Hertfordshire, north of London. This hospital was relatively pleasant, with a garden and colony of cats, and he spent his final 15 years there in peace. While he became increasingly deluded, his erratic mood swings subsided, and he continued drawing for pleasure. His work from this period is marked by bright colours, flowers, and intricate and abstract patterns, though his primary subject remained the same.

Dr. Michael Fitzgerald disputes the claim of schizophrenia, indicating Wain more than likely had Asperger's Syndrome (AS). Of particular note, Fitzgerald indicates that while Wain's art took on a more abstract nature as he grew older, his technique and skill as a painter did not diminish, as one would expect from a schizophrenic.[7] Moreover, elements of visual agnosia are demonstrated in his painting, a key element in some cases of AS. If Wain had visual agnosia, it might have manifested itself merely as an extreme attention to detail.[8]
A series of five of his paintings is commonly used as an example in psychology textbooks to putatively show the change in his style as his psychological condition deteriorated. However, it is not known if these works were created in the order usually presented, as Wain did not date them. Rodney Dale, author of Louis Wain: The Man Who Drew Cats, has criticised the belief that the five paintings can be used as an example of Wain's deteriorating mental health, writing: "Wain experimented with patterns and cats, and even quite late in life was still producing conventional cat pictures, perhaps 10 years after his [supposedly] 'later' productions which are patterns rather than cats."[9]
H. G. Wells said of him, "He has made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. English cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves."
His work is now highly collectible but care is needed as forgeries are common.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain

Louis Wain was born in the Clerkenwell district in London and became an artist, selling his sketches of dog shows to the Illustrated Sporting News. He married his youngest sister's governess, Emily Richardson, which caused quite a scandal. Unfortunately, his wife fell ill with breast cancer and died three years later. To entertain her on her sickbed, Louis Wain started drawing their cat, Peter.

Emily encouraged him to send these drawings to newspapers and magazines, and soon the Louis Wain cat was a household name, not only in Britain but also in America, where his comics and drawings of cats appeared in several newspapers. Louis Wain was elected as President of the National Cat Club and wrote the book 'In Animal Land with Louis Wain' in 1904.

After the First World War, the public's interest in cats diminished, and Wain reached a personal crisis, falling into poverty and being affected by schizophrenia when he was 57 years old. In 1924, he was certified insane and admitted to the pauper's wing of a mental hospital in Tooting.

Years later, he was recognized and a fund was set up for him (by prominents such as H.G. Wells), enabling Louis Wain to spent his last years, until his death in 1939, in comfortable asylums in Southwark and Napsbury, where he continued to draw and paint cats.

Found Here: http://lambiek.net/artists/w/wain_louis.htm

Among other things, the British artist Louis Wain (1860-1939) painted cats. Although he had formally studied at the West London School of Art and specialized in animal paintings and nature scenes, the cat paintings which would eventually define him began to spring from his brush soon after his marriage in 1883 – his wife was diagnosed with cancer soon after their nuptials, and during the period of illness, she being much comforted by cats, he began to paint cats for her in a comic and anthropomorphic style, until the time of her death, only three years after their marriage.

He continued painting cats after her death, but as the years progressed, his “style” began to change, even as his normally gentle personality transformed into a hostile and paranoid one. This was around the year 1907, and given his age at this time (47), as well as the fact that he seemed to have become profoundly mentally ill at this time, it is widely supposed that he must have been the victim of an atypical, late-onset schizophrenia (schizophrenia usually develops in the late teens and early twenties). Due his close association with cats and a probable infection with toxoplasmosis, which can be acquired from cat feces, a link between toxoplasmosis and schizophrenia has been suggested, but no definitive link has been established, to date. Other authorities have disputed that he had schizophrenia at all, because a diminishment of style often results in artists who develop the disease, and Wain’s art, while increasingly bizarre in appearance, retained its technically competent character.

Asperger’s Syndrome – a form of autism – has been suggested, and this would help explain a certain “eccentricity” and oddness of manner and speech he had possessed much of his life.

Whatever the case, as Wain’s “illness” progressed, his paintings became increasingly bizarre and abstracted in appearance, to the point where they were almost frightening, and often not even recognizable as cats. His work is commonly shown as a progression, to illustrate the changes, as I have done below.

Found Here: http://rodscuriosityshop.wordpress.com/2011/05/13/the-curious-cats-of-louis-wain/

Keret House by Jakub Szczesny / Centrala

2012-01-15T19:05:00.000-08:00

Polish architect Jakub Szczesny (Centrala) has designed an extremely narrow — but still liveable — house in Warsaw, Poland. Located in an alleyway between two buildings, the house will have ladders instead of stairs to walk up and down its four floors.

The house upon completion shall become the narrowest house in Warsaw, measuring an interior that will vary between 122 centimeters and 72 centimeters in its narrowest spot.

Mr. Szczesny built the house for Israeli writer, Etgar Keret, the symbolic patron of the project. Although Mr. Keret is Israeli, his parents met in Warsaw, which is why Mr. Szczesny wanted to build the house there.

Mr Keret will receive a key to the house and move in for the month of February, before deciding who will occupy the house next. The house will be completed by February 2012 and includes a kitchen, a bedroom, a lounge and a bathroom.

Architects: Centrala

Location: Wola, Poland

Designer: Jakub Szczęsny

Project Area: 14,5 sqm

Project Year: December 2011

Project Curators: Sarmen Beglarian, Sylwia Szymaniak

Project Announcement: Wola Art Festival “CityProjectWola“

Organizers: Modern Polish Art Foundation, President Piotr Nowicki, Wola District Office of the Capital City of Warsaw; Coordinator Anna Fiszer-Nowacka; Gmina Wyznaniowa Żydowska w Warszawie, Coordinator Judyta Nekanda-Trepka

Found Here: http://www.sinbadesign.com/architecture/keret-house-by-jakub-szczesny-centrala/

Maps - Heights of Mountains, Lengths of Rivers

2011-12-16T23:28:00.000-08:00

For over 100 years, atlas and map publishers in the United States and Europe published a style of map that was a visualization of the heights and lengths of the world's mountains and rivers. Some of the earliest examples appeared in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. In the United States, the form was popular throughout the 19th century and the early part of the 20th. These maps appeared in atlases, as wall maps, and as pocket maps. One of the most elegant examples was engraved originally on copper by map publisher Henry Tanner in Philadelphia in 1836 and then continued by S. Augustus Mitchell, also of Philadelphia, in lithographic versions into the 1850's.

The Mountains and Rivers maps appeared in several styles and formats. One of the earliest styles was to show just mountains, piled up in a landscape, with a key of mountain heights on the left and right sides of the illustration. Also listed on the side would be the highest flights of the Condor, limits of plants and trees, elevations of lakes, elevation of certain high altitude cites, and climate zones. An early example in the Rumsey collection is Charles Smith's Comparative View of the Heights of the Principal Mountains &c. In The World, published in London in 1816.

Another popular style combined heights of mountains and lengths of rivers in one view. The rivers are stretched out in single lines, with the longest on the left combining with the shortest mountains, while the shortest rivers combine with the highest mountains on the right. The visual result is very compelling. One of the earliest examples was W.R. Gardner's Comparative Heights of the Principal Mountains and Lengths of the Principal Rivers, published by William Darton in London in 1823.

A third variation of the mountain and rivers designs was putting the mountains in the center of the view with the rivers extending downward on each side. One of the earliest examples of this type was published by Henry Tanner in 1836, Heights of the Principal Mountains in the World.

John Dower and Henry Teasdale published another version in London in 1844 titled Principal Mountains and Rivers of the World. It is possible that there was an earlier version of this London map that Tanner copied from - a common practice of American mapmakers in the first half of the 19th century - but Tanner's map is centered on information important to American readers and the Dower/Teasdale map is oriented to England and Europe.

Gray's new map of the World in hemispheres, with comparative views of the heights of the principal mountains and lengths of the principal rivers on the globe, of 1885, provided a simplified view of the mountains and rivers. It appeared in George N. Colby's Atlas of the State of Maine, 1885.

Found Here: http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2009/9/5/heights-of-mountains-lengths-of-rivers

earliest known map is a matter of some debate, both because the definition of "map" is not sharp and because some artifacts speculated to be maps might actually be something else. A wall painting, which may depict the ancient Anatolian city of Çatalhöyük (previously known as Catal Huyuk or Çatal Hüyük), has been dated to the late 7th millennium BCE.[1][2] Other known maps of the ancient world include the Minoan "House of the Admiral" wall painting from c. 1600 BCE, showing a seaside community in an oblique perspective and an engraved map of the holy Babylonian city of Nippur, from the Kassite period (14th – 12th centuries BCE).[3] The oldest surviving world maps are the Babylonian world maps from the 9th century BCE.[4] One shows Babylon on the Euphrates, surrounded by a circular landmass showing Assyria, Urartu[5] and several cities, in turn surrounded by a "bitter river" (Oceanus), with seven islands arranged around it.[6] Another depicts Babylon as being further north from the center of the world.[4]

The ancient Greeks and Romans created maps, beginning at latest with Anaximander in the 6th century BC.[7] In the 2nd century AD, Ptolemy produced his treatise on cartography, Geographia.[8] This contained Ptolemy's world map - the world then known to Western society (Ecumene). As early as the 8th century, Arab scholars were translating the works of the Greek geographers into Arabic.[9]

In ancient China, geographical literature spans back to the 5th century BC. The oldest extant Chinese maps come from the State of Qin, dated back to the 4th century BC, during the Warring States Period. In the book of the Xin Yi Xiang Fa Yao, published in 1092 by the Chinese scientist Su Song, a star map on the equidistant cylindrical projection.[10][11] Although this method of charting seems to have existed in China even prior to this publication and scientist, the greatest significance of the star maps by Su Song is that they represent the oldest existent star maps in printed form.

Early forms of cartography of India included the locations of the Pole star and other constellations of use.[12] These charts may have been in use by the beginning of the Common Era for purposes of navigation.[12]Mappa mundi is the general term used to describe Medieval European maps of the world. Approximately 1,100 mappae mundi are known to have survived from the Middle Ages. Of these, some 900 are found illustrating manuscripts and the remainder exist as stand-alone documents.[13]

The Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi produced his medieval atlas Tabula Rogeriana in 1154. He incorporated the knowledge of Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Far East, gathered by Arab merchants and explorers with the information inherited from the classical geographers to create the most accurate map of the world up until his time. It remained the most accurate world map for the next three centuries.[14]

In the Age of Exploration, from the 15th century to the 17th century, European cartographers both copied earlier maps (some of which had been passed down for centuries) and drew their own based on explorers' observations and new surveying techniques. The invention of the magnetic compass, telescope and sextant enabled increasing accuracy. In 1492, Martin Behaim, a German cartographer, made the oldest extant globe of the Earth.[15]

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography

MVRDV designs The Cloud for Seoul’s Yongsan Dreamhub

2011-12-09T18:34:00.000-08:00

And here's another Dutch firm that just designed an unusual residential tower for a booming Asian metropolis: Yongsan Dreamhub corporation presented the MVRDV-designed residential development of the Yongsan Business district in Seoul, South Korea: two connected luxury residential high-rises. A 260 meter tall tower and a 300 meter tall tower are connected in the center by a pixelated cloud of additional program offering amenities and outside spaces with wide views. The towers with a total surface of 128,000m2 are expected to be completed in 2015.

Project Description from the Architects:

The two towers are positioned at the entrance of the Yongsan Dreamhub project, a master plan designed by Studio Libeskind, extending the business district of the South Korean capital Seoul. The southern tower reaches a height of 260 meters with 54 floors, the northern tower 300 meters with 60 floors. Halfway, at the level of the 27th floor the cloud is positioned, a 10 floor tall pixelated volume, connecting the two towers. The cloud differentiates the project from other luxury developments, it moves the plinth upwards and makes space on ground floor level for public gardens, designed by Martha Schwartz.

Usually a high-rise adds little to the immediate surrounding city life, by integrating public program to the cloud the typology adds in a more social way to the city. Inside the cloud, besides the residential function, 14,357m2 of amenities are located: the sky lounge - a large connecting atrium, a wellness centre, conference centre, fitness studio, various pools, restaurants and cafes. On top of the cloud are a series of public and private outside spaces, patios, decks, gardens and pools. To allow fast access the cloud is accessible by special express elevators.

The luxurious apartments range from 80m2 to 260m2 of which some offer double height ceilings , patios or gardens. The towers with a perfect square floor plan contain four corner apartments per floor offering each fine daylight conditions and cross ventilation. Each tower is accessed via a grand lobby at ground level; the rest of the ground floor is divided into town houses. In addition to the amenities the Cloud furthermore contains 9,000m2 of Officetel (Office-Hotel) a typical Korean typology and 25,000m2 panoramic apartments with specific lay-outs. The top floors of both towers are reserved for penthouse apartments of 1200m2 with private roof gardens.

Found Here: http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/mvrdv_designs_the_cloud_for_seouls_yongsan_dreamhub/

Albert Dorne

2011-12-06T14:53:00.000-08:00

Albert Dorne’s success as an illustrator, and later as a businessman, is a resounding testament
to good old-fashioned hard work and perseverance. Born into the slums of New York’s East Side in 1904, Dorne’s childhood was marred by severe poverty and illness. Overcoming tuberculosis, a heart condition, as well as a thoroughly inadequate education, Albert Dorne never lost sight of the artistic ambitions of his childhood.

Dorne was forced to quit school at the age of thirteen, managing four newsstands in order
to support his mother and family. Over the next fewyears he would work as an office boy,
salesman, shipping clerk and for a brief period–an amateur boxer. Taking a job as an unpaid
artist’s assistant, Dorne would rise through the ranks of the illustration world, to become one of the highest-paid advertising artists of his day. His work would appear regularly in magazines
such as Life, Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post.

In 1948, Albert Dorne would turn his attention to education, starting the Famous Artists School correspondence course, enlisting twelve of the most successful current illustrators as instructors– including Norman Rockwell, Al Parker andRobert Fawcett. The inspiration for this business venture was born out of the continuous stream of young artists beseeching Dorne for advice, as well as his great personal desire to share his knowledge and valuable experience. He would later start the Famous Writers School and Famous Photographers School in the early 1950′s, which, combined with the artists course, would reach over 50,000 students worldwide.

Dorne was also instrumental in founding the Code of Ethics and Fair Practices of the Profession of Commercial Art and Illustration, and also served as the President of the Society of Illustrators from 1947-1948. Dorne received an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts in 1958, from Adelphi College and later in 1963, he was awarded the Horatio Alger Award for Achievement by the American Schools and Colleges Association. Albert Dorne passed away on December 15, 1965 at the University Hospital in New York.

Found Here: http://illostribute.com/

Laura Laine

2011-11-02T23:02:00.001-07:00

Laura Laine is a Helsinki based illustrator.
She has studied fashion design at University of Art and Design Helsinki, but during her studies focused on fashion illustration. After completing her studies she has been working full-time as a freelance illustrator and is also teaching fashion illustration at the university.

Her recent clients include Vogue Nippon, GAP, I.T. store, Elle, Zara, Telegraph, Rad Hourani, The New York Times T magazine, Tommy Hilfiger, Muse magazine, The Guardian, I.T. Post magazine, Iben Hoej, and Daniel Palillo. She has also exhibited in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Found Here: http://www.lauralaine.net/

Stan Mott

2011-09-01T22:53:00.000-07:00

Mind-bending images and ideas from a fabulous cartoonist and a superb illustrator If you ever wondered what a steam locomotive racing might look like, or fantasized about driving the biggest baddest vehicle across the desert with its own supply of sharks and waterplanes, look no further - the eccentric imagination of Stan Mott might prove simply unmatched. We'll start with the (probably) the most outrageous picture we've seen this month: "The Supertanker Chopper"! - It's hard to summarize Stan Mott's interests in a few words. The man is brilliant and has done some really amazing things ... like ride a go-cart around the world!! Here is an info that appeared in the "Road & Track" Magazine, June 1979: "It's impossible to type the zany, crazy Mott (who lives on a yacht - sometimes), one of our readers' favorite cartoonists / writers and co-founder of Automobili Cyclops, the firm that rocketed to fame in its first appearance in R&T in 1957. When we asked Stan to tell us about his life, he said, "Well, I escaped Flint, Michigan at an early age, owned 50-percent interest in a Cragar flathead A-bone roadster at 12, ran at El Mirage at 15, had first automotive cartoons published in Rosetta Timing Association's program in 1948. Went to Art Center College, developed sense of humor working in World's Greatest Rolling Clown Show (GM Styling Section). Then worked as fry cook, mercenary, airline pilot, art director of R&T, farmer, Wall Street broker, poet. Drove go kart around the world, became an Alpine guide, did freelance art work and smuggled. Helped found Automobili Cyclops SpA and hold position of propaganda minister in perpetuity. Now working philantropically to solve moral situations in Southern Mediterranian waters for the U.N." Stan refuses to talk about his CIA work, arctic exploration or his stint as a human cannon ball." From "The History of Tanks" (Racing Tanks, that is) When asked by our DRB team for an update on his life, Stan adds: "Since '79 I learned to fly gliders in Cyprus, did a "Captain Stan Show" in 1983-4 for Radio 103.2 in Mallorca, Spain, sailed the first Turkish caique across the Atlantic, roamed the Caribbean for seven years, settled here in Neuss, Germany. Also, I'm working on a 76-page graphic novel.". According to the Top Gear Magazine (Dec 2001): "The Captain Stan Show was a Pythonesque consciousness weird-out which must have left baffled tourists wondering if their Watney Red Barrel had been spiked." All images and artwork are copyright Stan Mott, used by permission. You can see more at S. Berliner's wonderful archive site of Stan's artwork - click here. Fantasy Steam Racing Locomotives "Les 24 Heures de Choo-Choo" ("The 24 Hours of Choo-Choo" - as in Le Mans): Other Wicked Fantasy Vehicles Here is the personal aircraft carrier for the impossibly wealthy Oil Sheik. The Sheik is sea-sick, so the carrier rolls on the dry ground, while the seaplanes land on its deck filled with water. Some sharks were provided to keep the waters free of Russian scuba diving spies. Of course, some may remember Stan Mott as the creator of "Cyclops" series of cartoons (a few "Cyclops" mini-cars were even manufactured by Automobili Cyclops SpA), which blessed the John Bond's great Road & Track Magazine with much fun and colour in the 60s. S. Berliner, III again provides an extensive coverage of this series - click here. Don't miss Stan's tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Soviet aircraft designer Igor Sokerov. It's brimming with radical aircraft technology ideas and is a lot of fun. And here is the man himself, surveying the terrain outside Quarzazate, Morrocco:

Ben Grasso

2011-08-24T06:58:00.000-07:00

Brooklyn-based Ben Grasso paints these wonderful suspended architectural structures frozen somewhere between construction and deconstruction. It’s rare that I encounter oil paintings and have a strong reaction, Grasso’s work is definitely an exception. Via his web site:

Grasso’s paintings are feats of engineering. His is an architecture of the apocalypse, but one whose seams thread shapes we can as yet not fully determine. Excitement and surprise are as much part of this wildly imagined landscape as is a more measured, even nightmarish, uncertainty. Here the whacky, the sublime, and the catastrophic converge upon us unremittingly, but not without grace.

There’s much, much more to see on his site. (via hard feelings)

Found Here: http://thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/ben-grassos-exploded-structures/

Ben Grasso is a New York based artist who creates paintings that are absolutely beautiful and carry a strong attraction power. It is really difficult to differentiate whether they are photographed or really painted. The details in each painting is very fine and one can quickly fall in love with his creations.

The theme of the paintings are abstract but the deeper look you give to them, the more you will find them beautiful. They are truly surreal!

Well, I have become a great fan of his paintings that led me to contact him for an interview. He has been so kind to accept the offer. Catch his interview and some beautiful painting by him below:

Ben, please introduce yourself to E-junkies.

I am a painter working in Brooklyn, NY.

Your paintings look amazing!! What motivates or influences the artist within you?

If there is an artist inside me he's probably motivated by the desire to see the outside world. Is there anyone whom you idolize?

Charles Burchfield. I've loved his work forever. There was recently a fantastic show curated by Robert Gober at the Whitney museum. He's one of a small number of painters whose work really took off towards the end of his career.

When did you start painting? Do you remember your first painting?

I started drawing and painting as a kid. I remember my first painting; I think it started off as a man and a car and then turned brown. And I had a hard time deciding what to do with the oil and the turpentine and all the colors. I remember drawing with paint and the process feeling clumsy. It was really difficult and I decided to stick to drawing with pencils and sculpting things with modeling clay until I was much older. Most of your paintings have abstract theme that appear visually attractive and very realistic. How do you manage to give them so unique look?

I have no idea. I intend to make things that are personal and unique but invariably someone annoyingly says "this looks like such and such." I'm glad to hear they seem unique. Mostly I work from images I take when I'm visiting cleveland, where i grew up. A lot of the city is slowly disappearing and evolving into something else. I find this endlessly fascinating. Which is your favourite painting; a piece of your work that you will always cherish?

I don't really cherish my own work. But I remember a drawing I made of my dad when I was six and my parents kept it. I really like this drawing. What are the other things that interests you?

I'm building a bicycle frame as a hobby. I've been building and riding bikes forever. I think my bike is like a part of me or something. I anyways love fixing bikes. I've been building bikes and wheels for friends, mostly out of things other people throw away. I decided to learn how to gas weld and am in the process of putting the frame together. I love making things; its learning how to work with a new material and how to deal with having only a few tools that I really enjoy.

Many other artists would draw inspiration from you. What message do you have for them?

My favorite bit of advice came from an undergraduate teacher and of course I forgot the actual quote and only remember the message; its was something like "go through life like a duck on water; appear to glide across the surface while treading like hell underneath."

Ben, that's a wonderful advice given by you. Thanks for sparing time to us. It was a pleasure to have you with us. All the very best!

Visit Ben's website and catch up some really cool paintings. Found Here: http://www.e-junkie.info/2011/05/interview-with-ben-grasso-artist-who.html

Tim Hawkinson

2011-08-21T01:31:00.000-07:00

Tim Hawkinson in front of "Wall Chart of World History from Ancient Times to the Present," 1997

By Michele Leight

In ancient times, Tim Hawkinson might have rubbed shoulders with alchemists, artists, monks, magicians and flute and lute players. Merlin might be called a scientist today instead of a magician or alchemist, but the word 'scientist' had not been culled for contemporary usage in medieval times.

When the Director of the Whitney Museum of Art in New York called Hawkinson a "modern medievalist," not a mad scientist, it struck the right chord. The artist's first major retrospective is a wildly imaginative rollercoaster ride of emotions, artistry, mechanics, materials, self-examination and a beguiling blend of ancient and modern references and inspirations, grounded in solid classical traditions.

"Divan," pastel and paper on foam core on panel, 1997, collection Tony and Gail Ganz

Fine artistry is always close at hand in Tim Hawkinson's work despite the deliberately distracting wizardry, mechanical dexterity and complexity of some of the constructions, not to mention the sheer wealth and variety of materials, both found and fashioned, that make up the majority of the pieces. There is one work that might be called a "painting," a gorgeously subdued, fantastical work featuring multiple shrinking Tinkerbells - fairies - in monochromatic colors: "Divan" (1997) in the hands of Hawkinson, becomes a sofa extraordinaire. Now in the collection of Tony and Gail Ganz, it is one of the most straightforward pieces in the show in terms of materials, created from pastel and paper on board mounted on wood.

Fascinated by cartoon and Hollywood magicians, I have always relished the way a person or thing becomes humongous or miniscule with a simple wave of technology, often disguised as the 'magic wand': Tim Hawkinson's works generate the same sense of wonder as they veer from gargantuan and humongous to minutely detailed and tiny. For example, the drop in scale from the colossal "Pentecost" in the opening gallery of the show to the tiniest "Feather" (1997), created from a strand of the artists own hair - or a eensy "Bird," (1997), artfully constructed from the artist's own superglued nail clippings.

"Emoter," altered ink-jet print, monitor, stepladder and mechanical components, Andrea Nasher Collection, 2002

It is just not possible to walk past a work by Tim Hawkinson without reacting. Familiar with his mechanical face, "Emoter," 2002, (included in this show), from The Whitney Biennial in 2002 (see The City Review article), I was even more drawn in by "Uberorgan" in the Atrium of the IBM Building on Madison Avenue in New York.

"Uberorgan," (following three images) in the IBM Building Atrium, Madison Avenue and 56th Street, New York, woven polythylene baloons, nylon, cardboard tubing, mechanical components and air.Andrea Nasher Collection, commissioned for exhibition at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2000.

I was on my way to an event but stopped dead in my tracks, smitten by the huge multi-armed aerial octopus, or tree-branch - or whatever the gigantic construction reminds you of on a particular day - with inflated organs trailing entrails, anchored by pipes which invoke Tibetan horns if your imagination is ignited. The sound this modernist organ makes in one musical segment is just like the Tibetan horns I heard in Ghoom Monastary not far from Kurseong, clinging to the mountainside on the dizzy ride up to Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalayas. There are no monks, or mountain mists, here in the heart of Manhattan's vertical columns of commerce and enterprise, but the sounds generated by this work are eerily similar. "Uberorgan" unlocks different memories and associations for different situations.

If, like some, you are more perplexed than impressed by the aerial construction in the IBM Atrium, you will still probably stop and look at the massive contemporary art organ mated with a wind instrument for a giant, if for no other reason than fascination that it is constructed of all kinds of wonderful media - found, man-made and deftly fashioned. I connected the name of the artist on the description of the piece in the IBM Atrium to an upcoming press preview at The Whitney. The "Uberorgan" made me mark my calendar in bold script - go see this show. I wondered what else this witty Merlin of contemporary art had to offer.

I was not disappointed; the show at the Whitney appeared at first to be about many wildly imaginative things, including "Uberorgan" installed down the avenue at IBMs headquarters, but the more I looked at, smiled at and absorbed Tim Hawkinson's work the more seriousness I found. The playfulness is winsome, especially when you are all grown up now, and the unselfconscious approach of the works - mirrored in the artist himself - makes it okay to have fun, to be young again, but the seriousness comes later.

Smart, playful, witty and original, Hawkinson's multi-disciplinary approach belies a keen intelligence. While it is easy to be taken in by the playfulness and leave it at that, spending more than just superficial time with some of the constructions at the show recalls life- preserving and life-threatening equipment, all under the innocent guise of a mechanical face, or musical instrument, or weird contraptions that blip water via a computer simultaneously into several steel buckets with the pulsating accuracy of a plasma drip.

Detail of Wall Chart of World History From Earliest Times to the Present," 1997. Ink and colored pencil on paper. Private collection, courtesy Ace Gallery

Speaking with Tim Hawkinson was effortless and he was good-humored about having his picture taken in front of "Wall Chart of World History From Earliest Times to the Present," (1997), a gorgeous and obsessively detailed pink, red and gray scroll, reminiscent of the ancient Chinese variety, of enormous length - 51 inches wide by 420 inches long.

"Let's take the photograph here, so the red shows up," he said, ever aware of the impact of color. The result is the photo at the top of the story. The artist smiled when I said his work was both playful and serious. "Yes," he replied, eyes gleaming.

Hawkinson has a keen sense of humor, and our conversation somehow turned to children: I said how wonderful it must be for his daughter - Claire, just 16 months old - to have a father who makes such fantastical constructions and artworks.

"Balloon Self-Portrait," 72 by 48 by 33 incyhes, 1993, refabricated 2005, Ace Gallery

"Actually, that one scared her," said Hawkinson, indicating "Balloon Self-Portrait," (1993), an inflated latex human form suspended from the ceiling above our heads.

"I had covered myself in latex and was waiting for it to dry and she walked in on me in the bathroom," he explained, revealing the process of the aerial baloon man above us. Little Claire did not go for "Balloon Self-Portrait" - but the other works in the show do not involve her father becoming smothered in grungy fluids that must have looked pretty strange to a toddler - so they must delight.

Through the centuries serious issues and messages have lurked behind humorous and playful facades - Shakespeare's buffoons and clowns for example. They get to say what Shakespeare himself wanted to say about many things: they were safe to hide behind. The bard knew only too well how the public could be. Hawkinson's work has the same banter and buffoonery.

"H.M.S.O.," wood, fabric and string, 90 inches diameter, 1995, collection Dean Valentine and Amy Adelson

Imbedding seriousness in humor makes it infinitely more palatable. That takes a lot of savviness these days, with all of us so bored and over stimulated by everything. We are in perpetual visual surround-sound, and therfore in danger of over-dosing. Most of us would rather have fun, then - if we absolutely must - deal with reality. We know cod liver oil is good for us, but we can't see the good it is doing and who really likes to ingest that awful tasting stuff anyway? My son used to ask in his blunt childlike way:

"How do I know it is good for me? I can't see it. Show me."

Confronted with this ingenius form of kid logic I ended up promising my son chocolate cake in return for taking the foul tasting mixture (without spitting it out) which worked far better than the "it's good for you" approach. I have not drifted away from the subject: the "chocolate for ikky tasting vitamin or medicine" trade is just how I felt about the approach Hawkinson takes to engage the viewer - humorously, gently, cleverly - and then the seriousness, the idea or underlying message emerges, by which time it is far easier to deal with.

The following three photographs show Hawkinson's "Uberorgan" with tentacles outstretched in the IBM Atrium on Madison Avenue and 56th street in New York City. Here is how the artist describes his creation:

Detail of "Uberorgan" Another view of Uberorgan

"Several bus-size biomorphic baloons, each with its horn tuned to a different in the octave, make up a walk-in self-playing organ. A 200 foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encodes a musical score of old hymns, pop classics, and improvisional ditties. This score is deciphered by the organ's brain - a bank of light sensitive switches - and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into non-repeating vairations of the score."

Uberorgan, 2000, is constructed of woven polythylene balloons, nylon, cardboard tubing, mechanical components, and air. Andrea Nasher Collection, commissioned for exhibition at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts, 2000.

There were a couple of dazed and confused looking ladies with grey hair peering up at the gigantic "Uberorgan" octopus in the Atrium of the IBM Building the first evening I saw it. No doubt the cost of the piece was running through their minds, and what is the point of it? what does it mean? has the world gone mad if this is art? But they stopped and reacted - they did not just walk on by. They even smiled after a while.

Great and good art should produce a reaction; anger and outrage is better than no reaction at all. Worst of all is catatonic acceptance and boredom. Anyone who goes to "Tim Hawkinson" at the Whitney will react and not be bored or disappointed, even if they don't 'get' the art. That might come later. The kids will love it too - that is a certainty. For one who has been to many contemporary art and sculpture shows, I was pleased to discover that I could still be altered by a show. I am frequently moved and exalted by art, but to be altered even in a small way is challenging these days. Changing the way one thinks, even slightly, is something. I found the show opened up whole areas of thought that had lain fallow after years of neglect - I became connected to my art school days. Happy times.

Tim Hawkinson explores the ins and outs of the world, emotions, bodies, perceptions and the inner self with quixotic grace and intelligence - then sews or knits his discoveries into the wider fabric of our existence, revealing the magic and madness, beauty and barbarism that is the 21st century. The seeming innocence of much of his works makes the viewer long for that state of innocence, now gone from ourselves and our vision. But the latent seriousness in many of the pieces is a reminder that seriousness has after all preserved civilizations - and our acknowledgement of the need for a "classical order" is historically proven.

Above all, the devotion and often myopic diligence required of many of Tim Hawkinson's works recalls the excellence and discipline required of artists, goldsmiths and sculptors in medieval and ancient times. The artisans guilds or monastaries that were a hot-bed of fully funded patronage and support; the inter-action between artist and the "work" is reminiscent of the Zen monks of olden times who painted the most awesome calligraphic artworks with their own hair and squid ink; a time when apprenticeship as an artist entailed back-breaking attention to detail and surface preparation - often as many as 24 coats of gesso, fine sanded between each layer, for a Renaissance master's gilded triptych. As we explore a Hawkinson work in front of us we understand the exactitude and focus beneath the playfulness. Our role changes - viewing and having fun is not enough and we start to engage in the rigour of "making" and the mental gymnastics required in the process of understanding.

"Pentecost," polyurethane foam, sonotubes, solenoids, found computer program and mechanical components. Dimensions variable. Andrea Nasher Collection, 1999

Works like Uberorgan and the fantastical "Pentecost," 1999,(Andrea Nasher Collection) in the opening gallery at The Whitney make us by their sheer size step back, as well as engage, as one does when confronted by a sight as awe-inspiring as The Grand Canyon or The Eiffel Tower. The huge works push the viewer away, yet they are strangely cosy and accessible. The minute "Bird," 1997, (fingernail pairings and superglue, Andrea Nasher Collection), seems innocent enough: it's tiny scale is inviting - then close inspection reveals it is made of clipped finger nails, and we are momentarily startled, taken unawares and off-guard. Fingernail clippings? Eek!

"Life-Size Mirror Self-Portrait," Synthetic polymer and aluminium foil on polyester. Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Los Angeles, 2000

Hawkinson knows the power of positive/negative: attract/repel. But he pulls back just in time so that things don't get too disturbing. A strange tune emerges from an even stranger looking construction that suddenly emits a well known and comforting passage by Bach, or a recognizable pop song!

Background, "Volume Control," paper, aluminium foil and glue on panel, 1992, private Collection, courtesy Ace Gallery; Foreground, "Armor Ooze," aluminium foil, synthetic ploymer on urethane foam, and brass brads, 1996, collection of Eileen-Harris Norton and Peter Norton

History is important to Hawkinson, as well as our place in it; in the process of engaging our focus with a simulated CD made of luscious aluminium foil, (in front of which lies what looks like a latter day fallen knight in shining armor), or "Drip," with its fine, vein-like tubes of blipping fluid, we accept that there is a steady, consistent flow, a stabilizing physical, emotional and mental "classical order," that has been passed on through the centuries.

Preserving the past while making his mark in the present and moving into the future is a constant theme in Hawkinson's work; continuity is cleverly packaged in startling 21st century objects fashioned from found and ready made materials that are non-threatening, often strangely familiar and therefore re-assuring. It can also be eerie, surreal, disquieting - like all great art.

"Drip," 2002, polythene, mechanical component, and water. Dimensions variable. Collection Steven Neu.

When one of the constructions abrubtly stops working for instance, we are uneasy: the voice inside says:

"It has stopped." Like a heart beat, a pulse.

What if everything we have come to rely upon stopped working? How reliable is what we know, feel , see and touch - everything that is our world? How permanent is all this? Hawkinson's constructions make you stop and stare, no matter how busy or preoccupied your mind is.

One of my favorite exchanges about his work took place between two thirty-something businessmen, intent in conversation, striding purposefully through the IBM Atrium, thankfully right past my alert ears.

As if to exert its magic over two diligent souls too busy to notice its presence, "Uberorgan" began its whizzing, gas-emitting, soft-strangulation, sublimely sonorous and extra-terrestrial sounds, accompanied by ever-so subtle bumps and mechanical grinds.

"What's that?" asked one businessman, amazed, momentarily rooted to the ground.

That's art," his colleague replied seriously.

"Really," he said, looking up in wonder at "Uberorgan," suspended like some extra-terrestrial above the bamboo trees.

Found Here: http://www.thecityreview.com/thawkins.html

PHILIP GUSTON EXHIBITED AT THE SAATCHI GALLERY

2011-08-21T01:20:00.000-07:00

A Day's Work 1970 Oil on canvas 198 x 279 cm 78 x 109¾"

Painter in Bed 1973 Oil on canvas 152.4 x 264.2 cm 60 x 104"

The Magnet 1975 Oil on canvas 171.5 x 204.5 cm 67½ x 80½"

Friend - to M. F. 1978 Oil on canvas 172.7 x 223.5 cm 68 x 88"

Edge 1976 Oil on canvas 203.3 x 316.9 cm 80 × 124¾"

Frame 1976 Oil on canvas 188 x 294.6 cm 74 x 116"

Rug III 1976 Oil on canvas 175.3 x 280.7 cm 69 x 110½"

Head, Bottle, Light 1969 Oil on canvas 50.8 x 55.9 cm 20 x 22"

Found Here: http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/aipe/philip_guston.htm

Flying Planes Skyscraper in Paris by Kevin Hemeryck

2011-08-15T12:58:00.001-07:00

The city of Paris is recognized worldwide for its beauty, architecture, and urban planning. Unfortunately the lack of green areas has been a constant problem for decades. The Flying Planame (paname refers to Paris in French slang) is an utopist project that proposes multiple layers of green planes throughout the city. The main concept is to maximize the outdoors areas while making use of the structure for commerce and housing. Similar to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the rice growing terraces of Yunnan, China, this project proposes equilibrium between the natural and built environments.

Found Here: http://www.evolo.us/architecture/flying-planes-skyscraper-in-paris/

Mexico City Earthscraper by Bunker BNKR

2011-08-15T12:17:00.000-07:00

The Earthscraper, designed by BNKR Arquitectura, is the Skyscraper’s antagonist in the historic urban landscape of Mexico City where the latter is condemned and the preservation of the built environment is the paramount ambition. It preserves the iconic presence of the city square and the existing hierarchy of the buildings that surround it. More images and architects’ description after the break.

The Historic Center of Mexico City is composed of different layers of cities superimposed on top of each other. When the Aztecs first came into the Valley of Mexico they built their pyramids on the lake they found there. When a new and bigger pyramid was conceived and the Aztec Empire grew in size and power, they did not search for a new site, they just built on it and around the existing one. In this manner, the pyramids are composed of different layers of historical periods.

When the Spanish arrived in America and ultimately conquered the Aztecs, they erected their Christian temples atop their pyramids. Eventually their whole colonial city was built on top of the Aztec one. In the 20th century, many colonial buildings were demolished and modern structures raised on the existing historic foundations. So in a way, Mexico City is like a massive layered cake: a modern metropolis built on the foundations of a colonial city that was erected on top of the ancient pyramids that were constructed on the lake.

The main square of Mexico City, known as the “Zocalo”, is 57,600 m2 (240m x 240m), making it one of the largest in the world. It is bordered by the Cathedral, the National Palace and the City Government buildings. A flagpole stands at its center with an enormous Mexican flag ceremoniously raised and lowered each day. This proved as the ideal site for the Earthscraper: an inverted skyscraper that digs down through the layers of cities to uncover our roots.

The design is an inverted pyramid with a central void to allow all habitable spaces to enjoy natural lighting and ventilation. To conserve the numerous activities that take place on the city square year round (concerts, political manifestations, open-air exhibitions, cultural gatherings, military parades.), the massive hole will be covered with a glass floor that allows the life of the Earthscraper to blend with everything happening on top.

Architect: BNKR Arquitectura
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Partners: Esteban Suárez (Founding Partner), Sebastián Suárez
Project Leader: Arief Budiman
Project Team: Arief Budiman, Diego Eumir, Guillermo Bastian, Adrian Aguilar
Collaborators: Jorge Arteaga, Zaida Montañana, Santiago Becerra
Area: 775,000 m2
Status: Competition
Photography: Sebastian Suárez

Found Here: http://www.archdaily.com/156357/the-earthscraper-bnkr-arquitectura/

The Mexico City Earthscraper was inspired by the historic growth and development of the city, with each new layer built on top of another. Rather than a skyscraper, this earthscraper dives 35 stories deep into the earth in order to preserve the top layer of historic buildings in the main plaza, which cannot be altered due to federal law. The central courtyard would be converted to glass, which would filter light down through a central void to bring in natural light and ventilation.

Sietch Nevada by MATSYS

2011-08-09T03:49:00.000-07:00

[Sectional perspective of underground city - click images for larger view]

An underground Venice in the US Southwest? My ninjas, please. This was my second reaction to this project – after my inner sci-fi / dystopian fiction geek and Frank Herbert fan thought, “yeah, this is pretty dope – and I’d probably be down to live there”.

My peculiar willingness to live in a dystopian, water-starved future aside, the Sietch Nevada – designed by MATSYS for “Out of Water: Innovative technologies in arid climates”, exhibited earlier in ’09 at the University of Toronto – attempts to address the very real issue of the future of the increasingly arid American Southwest.

Lured by cheap land and the promise of endless water via the powerful Colorado River, millions have made this area their home. However, the Colorado River has been desiccated by both heavy agricultural use and global warming to the point that it now ends in an intermittent trickle in Baja California. Towns that once relied on the river for water have increasingly begun to create underground water banks for use in emergency drought conditions. However, as droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, these water banks will become more than simply emergency precautions.

…

Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community. A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation. The caverns brim with dense, urban life: an underground Venice.

[View of the urban life among the water bank canals]

MATSYS has rooted the concept of this proposal, quite seriously, in the world created in the Dune novels. This fictional universe focuses on an arid planet, where the indigenous people live in ‘sietch‘ communities in the desert – conserving, recycling, and worshiping their water. Applying this concept to the American Southwest, MATSYS has created a subterranean city – taking the idea of waterbanking one step further, creating an underground canal system that both provides water to the inhabitants and allows for necessary irrigation of the proposed garden spaces in the center of each of the sietch’s cells.

This cellular structure, in plan, allows for the large underground structures seen in the rendering above – while creating large open spaces that open both to the sky or to the newly-formed cavernous world below. Those cells that open to the desert are terraced to allow for urban agricultural project, while those below open to create large civic spaces for public use – much like any other city.

[Plan above ground (left) and below ground (right)]

The grim idea that we will need to retreat below-ground due to catastrophe aside, the concept of a subterranean metropolis carries fascinating implications. Would this be ‘greener’ than our current development? Could people really live like this, below ground, without being pushed to do so by some kind of devastating disaster?

Pretty sick, I think – no matter how you look at it.

.:Sietch Nevada via-> MATSYS

Found Here: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=2530

Sietch – Cave warren inhabited by a Fremen tribal community; in the Fremen language, "Place of assembly in time of danger."^[3]

Leo Petroglyph

2011-08-04T04:18:00.000-07:00

Leo Petroglyph is located in Jackson County near Leo, Ohio. It is actually a series of petroglyphs, or rock carvings, ancient Indians chiseled into an outcropping of sandstone in southeastern Ohio.

The precise age of these carvings is unknown. Based on the symbolism and the amount of weathering of the generally soft sandstone, they probably are less than one thousand years old and so likely are the work of the Late Prehistoric period Fort Ancient culture, or the early Historic Indians.

There are between thirty and forty different designs carved on the rock, including human figures, birds, a snake, a fish, human footprints, and bear paw prints.

The most arresting image on the petroglyph panel is a human head with horns or antlers and small bird's feet. The image may represent a shaman, or medicine man, transformed into a supernatural being.

David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary, described symbols painted on trees by Ohio's Delaware Indians as "hieroglyphics" that are "understood by the Indians who know how to read their meaning." Unfortunately, we do know the full meaning of the inscriptions at Leo Petroglyph.

Leo Petroglyph is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Found Here: http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/entry.php?rec=2751

The Leo Petroglyph is a sandstone petroglyph containing 37 images of humans and animals as well as footprints of each. The petroglyph is located near the small village of Leo, Ohio (in Jackson County, Ohio) and is thought to have been created by the Fort Ancient peoples (possibly AD 1000-1650). The area in which the sandstone petroglyph was found is on the edge of an unglaciated Mississippian sandstone cliff 20–65 feet high. To this day, the meanings of the drawings are unknown. On November 10, 1970, it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. The site is maintained by the Ohio Historical Society.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Petroglyph

Dogon Circumcision Cave Painting

2011-08-02T23:38:00.000-07:00

In Dogon thought, male and females are thought to be born with both sexual components. The foreskin is considered female, while the clitoris is considered to be male.^[9] Rites of circumcision thus allow each sex to assume its proper physical identity. Boys are circumcised in age groups of three years, counting for example all boys between 9 and 12 years old. This marks the end of their youth, and they are now initiated. The blacksmith performs the circumcision. Afterwards, they stay for a few days in a hut separated from the rest of the village people, until the wound has healed. The circumcision is a reason for celebration and the initiated boys go around and receive presents. They make music on a special instrument that is made of a rod of wood and calabashes that makes the sound of a rattle. The village of Songho has a circumcision cave ornamented with red and white rock paintings of animals and plants. Nearby is a cave where music instruments are stored. The newly circumcised men must walk around naked for a month after the procedure so that their achievement in age can be admired by the citizens of the tribe. This practice has been passed down for generations and is always followed, even during winter.

They are one of several African ethnic groups which practice female genital cutting. According to Sékou Ogobara Dolo, at least in the Sangha region, the milder form is practiced. This means that only the clitoral hood is removed, which is similar to male circumcision. The majority of the Dogon women practice a Class 2 circumcision, meaning that both the clitoris and the labia minora are removed. Girls are circumcised around the age of 7 or 8 years, sometimes younger. Circumcision for both male and female is seen as necessary for the individual to gain gender. Before circumcision they are seen as 'neuter'.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogon_people

Dogon social and religious organizations are closely interlinked and out of this arose principal cults, which accounts for the richness and diversity of Dogon culture and art. The clans are subdivided onto lineages, overseen by the patriarch, guardian of the clan’s ancestral shrine and officiant at the totemic animal cult. Beside this hierarchical system of consanguinity, male and female associations are entrusted with the initiations that take place by age group, corresponding to groups of newly circumcised or excised boys or girls. The Dogon believe these operations remove the female element from males and vice versa. Circumcision thus creates a wholly male or female person prepared to assume an adult role. The members of an age group owe one another assistance until the day they die. Initiation of boys begins after their circumcision, with the teaching of the myths annotated by drawings and paintings. The young boys will learn the place of humans in nature, society, and the universe. In the Dogon pantheon Amma appears as the original creator of all the forces of the universe and of his descendant Lebe, the god of plant rebirth. The first Dogon primordial ancestors, called Nommo, were bisexual water gods. They were created in heaven by the creator god Amma and descended from heaven to earth in an ark. The Nommo founded the eight Dogon lineages and introduced weaving, smithing, and agriculture to their human descendants.

Found Here: http://www.zyama.com/dogon/pics..htm

Melencolia I (1514) by Albrecht Dürer

2011-06-29T11:42:00.000-07:00

Conjectures and theories about Dürer’s solid: an overview

The copper engraving “Melencolia I” (1514) by the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471 – 1528) remains one of the most enigmatic works in the history of Art. At first view, the composition seems as a jumble of apparently unrelated objects, some of which cannot even be recognized or named. Behind the first layer of perception, that the eye catches immediately, a closer inspection reveals smaller objects, chaotically scattered or even half hidden.

The picture is dominated by a sitting angel, presumably feminine but muscular, whose glance is fixed somewhere in the distance. With her right hand she holds a seemingly idle pair of compasses, while with her left hand she supports her head, gloomy faced, as if dried up of inspiration. At her feet, and half hidden underneath her long garment, lay several carpenter’s tools: a plane, a pair of pliers, a saw and some nails. On her right, a putto sits on a round millstone or grindstone, occupied with scribbling something on a small board fixed on his knees, hiding his work from the viewer with his left hand. Remarkably, the millstone seems to have an axle socket slightly off – centered. Diametrically of the angel stands a large geometric solid, which we will refer to as “the Dürer solid” in this essay. Only four faces of the solid can be seen from the viewer’s point of view. In front of the solid, a dog is calmly rolled up before a sphere. In the background of all these stands what seems to be part of a building, two walls meeting seemingly perpendicularly and fixed on them appear a balance, a hourglass and a bell. A magic square is inscribed on the wall facing the viewer: a square arrangement of the numbers 1 to 16 such as the sum of each row, column and diagonal is equal to 34. A ladder leans on the wall behind the structure while far in the horizon, through the only part of the composition which is not crammed with objects, providing thus an unobstructed view, some sea or lake can be seen and even the houses of some village on its shores. A luminous celestial object on the night sky, possibly a comet, sheds light over the landscape, which is covered by a bright arc, resembling a lunar rainbow. And against the sky, over the whole composition of objects, earthly and heavenly, hovers an imaginary bat – like creature, having only two clawed front legs and the tail of a lizard. The creature stretches its body and its wings to reveal, as if tattooed on its own skin, the inscription “Melencolia§I”.

The conundrum presented by the engraving has been studied extensively in the past by many researchers, and several different interpretations have been offered. Most of these are attempts to guess Dürer’s own intentions, while some could even be described as wild guesses or long shots. Sometimes the interpretations given are not very different from the interpretations of a rather abstract poem: it seems that none of them is more or less “correct” than the others. Dürer has left for us a riddle whose answer is highly susceptible to subjectivity, without leaving any instructions on how this enigmatic work should be read after all. Only a few features of the picture are rather clear, such as the year 1514 appearing in the base row of the magic square. Dürer signed his work AD1514, giving himself the solution to this minor puzzle (note that AD stands for “Anno Domini” and “Albrecht Dürer” at the same time). The inverted 5 of the magic square is generally agreed that represents the month of the year 1514 in which Duerer’s mother died, an event undoubtedly linked to melancholy. It has been suggested that the magic square itself is borrowed from a talisman of the German occultist Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netteshime (1486 – 1535). Cornelius Agrippa intended the talisman, or “Jupiter’s square”, as a shield from the bad influence of planet Saturn, which could cause melancholy (in medieval times, scholars associated Saturn with melancholy, one of the four humors of ancient medicine). This explanation is at least possible and reasonable, and is supported by the fact that Agrippa had visited Nurnberg, Dürer’s city, in 1510. Little else, if anything, about the picture has been resolved satisfactorily, let alone undoubtedly.

The comet, the bat – like creature, the landscape, the lunar rainbow, the building, the ladder, the scales, the hourglass, the bell, the putto, the millstone, the angel, the tools, the sphere have all been, and still are, subjects of guessing. Even the title of the work, “Melencolia I”, remains largely unresolved, partly due to the misspelled “melancholia” (in latin) and partly due to the mysterious “I”. Of special interest in this essay is the Dürer’s solid, the geometric object dominating the left part of the engraving. The proposed theories or conjectures about the solid can be distinguished in two categories. The first is comprised of theories about the exact geometric nature of the solid. The second collects all theories about the possible message the solid conveys or about what the solid stands for in the general context of “Melencolia I”.

Examining the first category, these are some of the proposed solutions of the riddle:

1. The truncated rhombohedron hypothesis: Most researchers agree that the solid is probably what in Solid Geometry is called a “truncated rhombohedron”. The name of it may seem somewhat repelling, however it is a rather simple solid with six faces, all of which are rhombi. A rhombus is a quadrilateral with all of its sides having the same length (by school Geometry it can be proved that it is also a parallelogram). The rhombohedron is a solid constructed by repeating a rhombus six times and looks like a dice whose angles are not right. A “truncated rhombohedron” is a rhombohedron with its two facing vertices cut off. It must be stressed that the assertion that the Dürer solid is a truncated rhombohedron is simply a conjecture and is not supported by any of Durer’s writings or by any other data. The only reason leading to a general agreement on the truncated rhombohedron hypothesis is that the Dürer’s solid simply looks like a truncated rhombohedron.

2. The truncated rhombohedron – 72° hypothesis: Some researchers have even made a step further, to assume that the angles of each face of the rhombohedron are 72 and 108 degrees (i.e. 1/5 and 3/10 of the full turn). Mathematically, these values are of special importance and link the Dürer’s solid to the notorious number φ, the ancient “golden ratio” or “golden mean”. Indeed, the above angles refer to a special kind of polygon, called a regular convex pentagon, which is a shape with five equal sides and five equal angles (all of them equal to 108 degrees). It can be proved that the chords of such a shape are in golden ratio to its sides.

3. The scaling hypothesis: It has also been argued that a vertical compression of the engraving by a factor sqrt(φ) turns the picture into a square and the solid into a truncated cube, providing thus another link to the golden ratio.

4. The truncated rhombohedron – 80° hypothesis: According to another point of view, resulting from measurements based on quantitative assumptions, the angle of the rhombohedron is approximately 80 degrees, which by mathematical standards is a rather humble number with no miraculous properties as the ones mentioned above.

5. The heptagon hypothesis: Despite the apparent humbleness of the number 80 mentioned above, it has been observed that it is suspiciously close to the number 77,2, which would be the value of an angle of the irregular pentagon produced if five of the seven vertices of a regular convex heptagon were joined.

6. The truncated rhombohedron – circumscribed sphere hypothesis: According to this theory, Dürer observed that while six of his rhombohedron vertices lie on the same sphere, the other two, those at the bottom and the top, stick out of it. In order to make his solid beautiful, the artist cut of the two protruding vertices in a way that the resulting truncated solid is circumscribed in a sphere. The theory is supported by the familiarity of the artist to the so called “plan and elevation” method, i.e. the using of projections of solids on planes, which would have been of great assistance in the process of the truncation.

7. The rectangular slab hypothesis: Apart from the rhombohedron conjecture, the Dürer’s solid has also been viewed as a nearly rectangular slab, or parallelepiped (a matchbox), with two opposite corners cut off.

8. The ambivalence hypothesis: This can be summarized in physicist David Finkelstein’s phrase “I propose that Dürer designed the Octahedron [meaning the solid] to be ambivalent, irresistibly construed as a truncated rhomboid in one orientation, as a truncated slab in another, and as something else from yet another”.

Number 1 of the above hypotheses may be traced to Erwin Panofsky (“The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer”, 1943), a standard reference on Dürer. Numbers 2 and 6 have been proposed by Peter Schreiber (Historia Mathematica 26, 1999, 369 – 377). Numbers 5 and 7 are found in works by David Finkelstein, who attributes number 7 to personal communication with Dr. Basimah Khulusi, apparently a medical doctor. Number 4 has been proposed by C. MacGillavry (Mac Gillavry C., Nederl. Akad. Wetenschap. Proc. Series B 84, 1981, 287).

A number of explanations have been proposed about some meaning conveyed by the solid, or why Dürer included it in “Melencolia I”, putting it in such a prominent position. Some of these are:

1. The philosopher’s stone hypothesis: According to a point of view, the Dürer’s solid is a symbol, or image, of the medieval philosopher’s stone or the “stone of Saturn” (this is the same stone that, in ancient Greek mythology, Saturn swallowed instead of Jupiter). Such alchemic positions can be found in www.alchemylab.com.

2. The star of David hypothesis: David Finkelstein sees a Jewish star (a hexagram) of David on the projection of the solid on the ground. In his opinion the “circumcised rhomboid” is a sign of Hebraicism from Dürer’s part.

3. The human skull hypothesis: Many see a rather deformed human skull in the strange stain on the front face of the Dürer’s solid, with unclear meaning.

4. The four ghosts (or hidden faces) hypothesis: David Finkelstein again noticed in 2004 that “anyone who steps back several paces from a good print and focuses on the shading of the front face of the polyhedron patiently for a minute or so, will soon find or construct a face” which, by some sort of Necker’s cube illusion, could be at the same time either a man’s or a woman’s face. After mentioning that these faces may represent Dürer’s mother and father, Finkelstein denotes that “I am less certain of a third hidden face”. By 2008 Finkelstein had discovered two more faces on the solid which he claims first to have inferred and then found. His overall theory about “Melencolia I” is a medley of subliminal images, gematria, rebuses and anagrams, to arrive, as far as the solid is concerned, to the conclusion that it is a puzzle “unsolvable in principle but appears to solve itself in some views. It declares that the Intellectual World may have a mathematical design but, if so, that design is inaccessible to us”.

I must say that some of the above theories and explanations seem to be, to me at least, too farfetched and perhaps many of them did not cross Dürer’s mind, not even as a distant possibility. It must be taken into account that Dürer was an artist of the Renaissance era and, a genius as he might be and a master of the burin, his capabilities were certainly within the boundaries of human ability. It is rather doubtful whether, apart from some basic principles of perspective, Dürer could have rendered his solid with such precision and mastery to deliberately create such a subtle illusion as the ambivalence hypothesis requires. As pointed out in a previous essay (Albrecht Dürer’s eyer lini), the bell of the upper right corner of the picture is after all inaccurately drawn. The 72 degrees hypothesis is plausible and rather tempting to adopt, however there is nothing specific in the engraving to support it. I have more respect to the 80 degree hypothesis, as it is the result of a calculation with data taken directly from the picture, be it so under certain assumptions. The scaling hypothesis is simply wrong: it takes some imagination to link the dimensions of the picture to number φ, and the solid does not look like a cube under the scaling by a factor sqrt(φ). The circumscribed sphere hypothesis is the only one providing a reasonable explanation of why and how Dürer arrived to his solid. The heptagon hypothesis is supported by a newly found sketch of Dürer, showing an irregular pentagon inscribed in a circle with an apex angle approximately equal to 80 degrees (Weitzel, Hans. A further hypothesis on the polyhedron of A. Dürer, Historia Mathematica 31 ,2004, 11). If this is accepted as a rough sketch of the solid, then MacGivallry’s result is confirmed. The rectangular slab hypothesis is plausible but unsupported.

I have several times ventured to discover for myself the ghosts that allegedly haunt Dürer’s solid and I have indeed found several figures that might be taken for human faces. I have also found other figures that might be taken for the head of a rat, the head of an alien and the head of a lamb. It seems to me that there might be still other such figures that remain undetected, which however are of not very different nature than the face on Mars.

Instead of trying to explore Dürer’s mind, by sometimes wild guesswork, in order to understand what he could possibly have intended to depict with this enigmatic solid of his, I find much more interesting the problem of understanding what he actually did depict. And the only way to achieve this, in my opinion, is to build up solid arguments based on direct measurements and calculations.

Denderah Zodiac from the Temple of Hathor

2011-06-28T13:03:00.000-07:00

The temple to Hathor at Denderah, Egypt was constructed as a monument and a learning venue for Motherhood. The design of the monument carries the celestial theme throughout its grand architecture. Within each chamber and hall are magnificent and profound works of art which glorify the qualities of benevolent motherhood. In the entrance areas are fully inscribed columns with the Nile Lotus replaced by the head of Hathor wearing her traditional wig over cow ears. The temple is the product of the Hellenistic Period after the conquests of Alexander the Great during the Ptolemaic Dynasties, just prior to, and overlapping the initiation of the Christian era.. The Nile Lotus and the Wig of Hathor are both symbols of the object held in the hand of the constellation Virgo. Modern astronomers recognize the wig as Coma Berenices; the wig of Berenices. However it should be self evident that the stars at the top of the axis of the galactic sphere can be connected to look like a sprig of wheat, an ear of corn, a Red Pandanus, a Nile Lotus, an Indus Lotus, or any fertile flower. The essence of a fertile flower is the theme of the temple to Hathor, and the essence of benevolent motherhood. This essence is drawn directly from the positions of the stars at the top axis of the galactic plane of the Milky Way, perceived from earth.

In the ceiling of the Osiris chamber the architects installed a cosmic story about the deflowering of motherhood. The story was told as a prophecy, and an example teleology; the belief that design and purpose are apparent in nature. It is derived from the Egyptian record of the experiences of life, and their recorded knowledge of the most ancient traditions of the whole world. It is the quintessential document which relates to the conversation between the Egyptian priest and Solon in Plato's dialogue by Critias. For the monument reads like a history book, in which the clock of the heavens defines the space-time frame, and the rhythm of Plato's Dance of the Gods. Besides a history of the ancient world, the monument tells a story about the maturation cycle of human souls in the whole of Western Civilization for an additional 8600 years to come. The solar eclipse of August 1999 demonstrates that the great accuracy of the celestial knowledge of the temple architects included dramatic teleological aspects. Within the presentation of their material science, the spiritual message of the Egyptian priests and priestesses is clearly visible. It is a story about love and reason, arrogance and wisdom, banishment and salvation. Most of all, it is a story about a man child (Horus) and his mother (Hathor), and the dialog of mankind with the Creator.

This is the Greatest Story Ever Told. It has been told around the world. In Polynesian traditions it is the legend of the Land Under the Land, where a disenchanted wife meets a stranger and goes to the Land of Shadows to have her husband's child before returning to the top of the world with peace in her heart, and a Red Pandanus in her hand. In Mesoamerica it is the legend of Hanahpu and his brother Xbalanque. In Mesopotamia it is the legend of Gilgamesh and Enkidu, among many others. In India it is the dance of Shiva. In China and east Asia, it is the dance of the Sun Dragon. The Bible tells the same story with many different players, including Adam and Eve, Isaac and Ishmael, Aaron and Moses, John and Jesus, and the Child of the Madonna. On August 11, 1999, the sun winked as it entered into the Kingdom of Heaven. To let this incredibly important moment pass without recognition of its historical value would be a sacrilege against all that has been sacred since the beginning of the dialogue between man and Creator. For, to be silent is repression. Thus, this story is being told in the hopes that a modern world is not so cosmically deaf that it has lost all value in its ancient sacred meaning.

COMMON SENSE IS INTUITIVE

The reason why so many of the world's sacred myths have a familiar ring to them is the fact that they were all taken from the same patterns in the stars. To say that the stars contain Plato's Lost Island of Atlantis would not be an exaggeration, for the stars contain all the lost legends of our past. The legends are all testaments to the observational brilliance that accumulated at the predawn and early dawn of civilization. They are the foundations of our modern Jungian archetypes. Within these great legends is an unmistakable common belief in the benevolence of Mother Nature. It is the trust and faith that humans gave to Mother Nature that caused her to be deflowered as Western Civilization became a domain of the rule of law. Civilization is not to blame for her being deflowered. It is a process which humanity must pass through. Mother Nature deflowered herself so that the man child could grow to full maturity. The stranger she had come to know was the rationalizing husband and the immature son that she loved so dearly. They had forgotten her value as the vessel of life. In her own words, as spoken through her son, we find the echo of all the great legends.

John 14:1-3
1 Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.
2 In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you.
I go to prepare a place for you.
3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself;
that where I am, there ye may be also.

The deflowering of motherhood is the essential path which all children must follow, sooner or later. For you see, it is not the mother's body that is deflowered, it is the ideal of the goddess she represented when we were young. Our rational mind searches for scientific truth, in the hope that one day we can be independent of the myths we learned within the mothering bonds that we hold in the memories of our youth. When we finally reach the end of our adolescent umbilical cord, it breaks, and we search for the mothering bonds to find out what went wrong. As we turn back, we can become a "pillar of salt" and lose all emotional bondage, or we can shed the tears of our temporal identity and be grateful that the Cosmos was willing to give us mothering when it was needed. After the bond is broken, it can be restored again by the simple grace of gratitude. Then we become wise and are capable of passing on to those who follow us, the stories we once believed to be the material and maternal facts of life. At the end of our mother's cord we learn that she had prepared us to break the bondage of the rational umbilical cord, which was our dream of her divine nature. A few years wandering in the wilderness is all that any rational person needs to recognize that we do not live in a world dominated by the rational ideas of men, we live in a world bound to the breast of Mother Nature. We cannot break that bondage by death. We can only stress and distort it by denial during life.

Hidden behind the logic of this microscopic maturation cycle of a single human soul is the macroscopic maturation cycle of civilizations. Like individuals, civilizations strive to break the umbilical bondage. And like individuals, health is restored when a civilization recognizes that Mother Nature knows only Tough Love. She gives us a scepter of flint as proof that we are capable of self inspiration when we walk in the pits of our emotions. She gives us a flail as proof that we can overcome physical stress. She gives us a crook as proof that we can lead others to the Promised Land. And last, she gives us a door through which we can pass a material record of our lives on to her children who come after us. In Egypt the door was Rostau, where Osiris ascended to Orion, and the Great Pyramids promised his return. It is through that door that the present essay will lead. The metaphor of the way of the door has been fabricated many times and in many ways. The ceiling monument in the chapel to Osiris is a detail of Mother Nature's passages through the cosmic door into the mystery of the heavens.|

Read More Here: http://www.siloam.net/cornwall/cornwal4.htm
Denderah Zodiac
S. Battaglia, G. Miglietta and Opera Laboratori Fiorentini

Full scale reproduction of the Zodiac from the Temple of Hathor in Denderah, the first depiction of the heavens in which use is made of stereographic projection. The outermost circle shows 36 decans, each scanning a 10-day interval; the first decan is level with Sirius, the star that heralds the beginning of the year and the arrival of the Nile flood. The second circle shows the constellations in the southern hemisphere. The third circle shows the constellations in the northern hemisphere. The figures of the Zodiac are aligned along the eccentric circle of the ecliptic. The axis joining Cancer to Capricorn (the solstices) points in a north-south direction. The temple's transverse axis is perfectly oriented towards the heliacal rising of Sirius, which rose at 18o east-southeast. Sirius, portrayed as a squatting cow, is correctly shown at the point of maximum culmination on the celestial meridian of the southern hemisphere.

Found Here: http://brunelleschi.imss.fi.it/galileopalazzostrozzi/object/DenderahZodiac.html
History

During the Napoleonic campaign in Egypt, Vivant Denon drew the circular zodiac, the more widely known one, and the rectangular zodiacs. In 1802, after the Napoleonic expedition, Denon published engravings of the temple ceiling in his Voyage dans la Basse et la Haute Egypte.^[4] These elicited a controversy as to the age of the zodiac representation, ranging from tens of thousands to a thousand years to a few hundred, and whether the zodiac was a planisphere or an astrological chart.^[5] Louis Charles Antoine Desaix, a member of the expedition, decided to remove the relief to France and so, in 1820, the antiquities dealer Sébastien-Louis Saulnier commissioned Jean Baptiste Leloraine, a master mason, to remove the circular zodiac with saws, jacks, and scissors constructed for the job. The zodiac ceiling was moved in 1821 to Restoration Paris and, by 1822, was installed by Louis XVIII in the Royal Library. In 1964, the zodiac moved from the Bibliothèque Nationale to the Louvre.

The controversy around the zodiac, called the "Dendera Affair", involved people of the likes of Joseph Fourier (who estimated that the age was 2500 BC^[6]), Thomas Young, Jean-François Champollion, and Jean-Baptiste Biot.^[7] Johann Karl Burckhardt and Jean-Baptiste Coraboeuf held, after analysis of the zodiac, that the ancient Egyptians understood the precession of the equinoxes. Champollion, among others, believed that it was a religious zodiac. Champollion deciphered the names of Tiberius, Claudius, Nero and Domitian on the ceiling of Dendera's temple, and placed the zodiac in the era of Roman rule over Egypt.^[8] Baron Georges Cuvier placed the date 123 AD to 147 AD.^[9] His discussion of the dating question is an interesting summary of the reasoning as he understood it in the 1820s.

Over the last 10 years, I have been presented with a star-code science called cosmogenesis. From 2000 July 17th to 2007 July 17th a pattern of psycho-physical reference points to astronomical events were presented over and over again to engage and synchronize my attention to the placement the Egyptian’s called Heaven’s Gate: The Cancer-Leo Boundary. The code cosmogenesis uses to construct meaning is based on an epistemology designed by the Egyptian Cosmologists. For the sky-priests who closed the Egyptian Empire’s Old World Order, they designed an ingenious calendar wheel at the Temple to Hathor was called the Denderah Zodiac. I made it my concern to follow the on-line study of this remarkable cosmology with the help of Rush E. Allen an engineer and astro-archaeologist whose mentorship provided me the firing-pins for walking the path of the True Priest.

To present the revelation of the Little Lion, we will walk through the basics of Egyptian Cosmology. The modus operandi for their vision of reality is not unlike that of the modern sages like Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen who argued that a quantum state corresponds not to reality but to the information we have about a subsystem of the universe. The quantum state for The Egyptian sky-priests who authored the science accepted two fundamental bodies of knowledge. One was called the Horus of the Two Horizons and the other was Coming Forth By Day, or the study of the First Fire Ceremony. Between these two pillars of science did the Egyptian cosmologists attempt to construct based on information gathering how the planets, milky way and stars were set to the house of creation that made room for one very unique ally in creation: man and his perception of self within a living system. The D.Z. concretized all these aspects with one important axiom. To acquire the experience of Truth one must suffer the burden of cosmic responsibility once he has put his ‘feelings straight’.

A scientific paper was presented during the time of Seti I to define the ability to understand the science of predicting outcome. The Hunefer Papyrus was the Occam’s Razor of the 17th Dynasty.

Found Here: http://www.cyberspaceorbit.com/Lion/Lions_Gate_July_17.htm

The Hidden Geometry of the Zodiac in the Temple of Hathor, Denderah
1. The eight Horus figures holding the circle of the heavens define a pair of crossed axes by the lines defined by knees and elbows. 2. A hexagram may be drawn in by joining the points where the Isis figures hands meet on the circumference of the circle. 3. A pair of horizontal lines are drawn as shown by connecting the "shoulders" of the Horus figures, then point where their headresses terminate. These lines occur at the correct location to each form one side of the regular pentagram which can be inscribed in the circle. Thus two pentagrams are formed; one upright and one inverted. 4. With the remaining lines of the pentagrams drawn in, confirming proof that these constructions represent the intent of the designers is provided by the placement of the straight lines which connect the two fishes of Pisces. Note how one of these two lines not only forms a small section of the side of the pentagram itself, but occurs at the point where this line is intersected by the horizontal diameter of the circle.

Etheric technology of ancient Egypt: The Temple of Hathor at Denderah

Original Article Found Here: http://www.russwill.com/experiments/astro/Denderah/hidden_geo/geo_zodiac.htm

Azoth of the Philosophers

2011-05-19T10:59:00.000-07:00

“Visita Interiora Terra Rectificanto Inveniens Occultum Lapidem”

L’Azoth des Philosophes, Basil Valentine, Paris, 1659.

For more than 350 years, this image of the Azoth has been used by alchemists as a meditative mandala because it is believed to contain all the essential components of the Great Work.

Over the next eight weeks we are going to explore the elements of this alchemical mandala to discover a personal and powerful meditative process for using it to acquire an in depth understanding of the the seven key processes for creating the Philosopher’s Stone as well as participating in an initiation into a hermetic perspective that will enrich your life in ways that you have not yet imagined.

There are many explanations of the Azoth available on web sites and in numerous writings. However, I suggest you establish your own relationship with the Azoth before reading the interpretations of others. Spend personal time with the image during the next week identifying the messages it holds for you and developing your unique and special understanding of its symbols before listening to what I and others have to say about this eternal hermetic symbol.

Then each week for seven weeks we will examine in depth through a variety of methods the steps revealed in the Azoth for creating the Stone.

I look forward with excitement and expectation for participating with you in this ancient alchemical practice that will have a lasting impact on your life.

Found Here: http://ouroboroscycle.com/blog/?p=473

Interpretation of Azoth of the Philosophers (by Dennis William Hauck)

This meditative emblem first published in 1659 as an illustration for the book Azoth of the Philosophers by the legendary German alchemist Basil Valentine. The word "Azoth" in the title is one of the more arcane names for the One Thing. The "A" and "Z" in the word relate to the Greek alpha and omega, the beginning and end of all things. The word is meant to embrace the full meaning of the One Thing, which is both the chaotic First Matter at the beginning of the Work and the perfected Stone at its conclusion.

At the center of this striking drawing is the face of a bearded alchemist at the beginning of the Work. Like looking into a mirror, this is where the adept fixes his or her attention to meditate on the mandala. Within the downward-pointing triangle superimposed over the face of the alchemist is the goal of the Work, the divine man in which the forces from Above and Below have come together. Each of the sequentially numbered points on the star emanating from the alchemist stands for an operation in the Emerald Formula (Calcination, Dissolution, Separation, Conjunction, Fermentation, Distillation, and Coagulation) and contains the cipher for the corresponding metal. To see an explanation of these operations, click on the appropriate point on the star.

The alchemist’s schematized body is the offspring of the marriage between Sol, the archetypal Sun King seated on a lion on a hill to his right, and Luna, the archetypal Moon Queen seated on a great fish to his left. "Its father is the Sun," says the tablet, "its mother the Moon." The laughing, extroverted Sun King holds a scepter and a shield indicating his authority and strength over the rational, visible world, but the fiery dragon of his rejected unconscious waits in a cave beneath him ready to attack should he grow too arrogant. The melancholy, introverted Moon Queen holds the reins to a great fish, symbolizing her control of those same hidden forces that threaten the King, and behind her is a chaff of wheat, which stands for her connection to fertility and growth. The bow and arrow she cradles in her left arm symbolize the wounds of the heart and body she accepts as part of her existence. In simplest terms, the King and Queen represent the raw materials of our experience -- our thoughts and feelings -- with which the alchemist works.

The King symbolizes the power of thought, ultimately the One Mind of the highest spirit. The Queen stands for the influence of feelings and emotions, which are ultimately the chaotic One Thing of the greater soul. The much anticipated Marriage of the King and Queen produces a state of consciousness best described as a feeling intellect, which can be raised and purified to produce a state of perfect intuition, a direct gnosis of reality. "All Obscurity will be clear to you," says the tablet of this state of mind; it is "the Glory of the Whole Universe." The goal of alchemy is to make this golden moment permanent in a state of consciousness called the Philosopher’s Stone, and it all starts with the marriage of opposites within us.

In our drawing, the body of the alchemist is composed of the Four Elements. His feet protrude from behind the central emblem; one is on Earth and the other in Water. In his right hand is a torch of Fire and in his left a feather, symbolizing Air. Between his legs dangles the Cubic Stone labeled with the word Corpus, meaning body. The five stars surrounding it indicate that it also contains the hidden Fifth Element, the invisible Quintessence whose "inherent strength is perfected if it is turned into Earth." Where the head of the alchemist should be, there is a strange winged caricature that is variously interpreted as a heart, a helmet, or even the pineal gland at the center of the brain. The symbol evolved from the Winged Disk of Akhenaten and became the top of the Caduceus, the magical wand of Hermes where opposing energies merge to produce miracles. This knob represents the Ascended Essence, the essence of our souls raised to the highest level in the body, to the brain, where it becomes a mobile center of consciousness able to leave the body and travel to other dimensions.

Touching the wings of the caduceus are a salamander engulfed in flames on the left side of the drawing and a standing bird on the right. Below the salamander is the inscription Anima (Soul); below the bird is the inscription Spiritus (Spirit). The salamander, as a symbol of soul, is attracted to and exposed in the blazing fire of the Sun. Likewise, the bird of spirit is attracted to the coolness of the Moon and is reflected in it. This is a subtle statement of the fundamental bipolar energies that drive the alchemy of transformation. Spiritus, Anima, and Corpus form a large inverted triangle that stands behind the central emblem. Together they symbolize the three archetypal celestial forces that the alchemists termed Sulfur, Mercury, and Salt. Again, these chemicals are not chemicals at all, but our feelings, thoughts, and body.

- from THE EMERALD TABLET (Penguin 1999) by Dennis William Hauck

Found Here: http://www.alchemylab.com/azoth.htm

The Nuremberg Battle, 1561

2011-05-12T13:13:00.000-07:00

The citizens of Nuremberg, Germany behold what appears to be a large scale aerial battle followed by the appearance of a large black triangular object and a large crash (with smoke) outside the city. A news notice (early form of newspaper) was printed 10 days later (April 14, 1561) describing the event.

At sunrise on the 14th April 1561, the citizens of Nuremberg beheld “A very frightful spectacle.” The sky appeared to fill with cylindrical objects from which red, black, orange and blue white disks and globes emerged. Crosses and tubes resembling cannon barrels also appeared whereupon the objects promptly “began to fight one another.” This event is depicted in a famous 16th century woodcut above by Hans Glaser.

Here is the local news eyewitness report of 1561 :
At dawn of April 4, in the sky of Nuremberg (Germany), a lot of men and women saw a very alarming spectacle where various objects were involved, including balls “approximately 3 in the length, from time to time, four in a square, much remained insulated, and between these balls, one saw a number of crosses with the color of blood. Then one saw two large pipes, in which small and large pipes, were 3 balls, also four or more. All these elements started to fight one against the other.” (Gazette of the town of Nuremberg).

What is really amazing is that 5 years after this incident on August 7th 1566, the same black spheres were seen fighting again, this time over Basel Germany this time the balls would either vanish or appeared to be “consumed” by the other. Below is another woodcut from that event.

Found Here: http://mysteryhistory.tv/2011/04/april-4-1561-ufos-battle-over-nuremberg-germany/

One of the most astounding of documented sightings of aerial phenomena took place on April 4, 1561 at dawn over Nuremberg, Germany. What was described could only be called a war in the heavens, with a wide variety of craft ranging from spheres to spear-like cylinders to crosses and “plates”. The sky was apparently filled with the machines, clashing in battle for well over an hour. The battle was such that a winner was perceived as well. Spheroid UFOs were seen emerging from cylindrical ‘motherships‘. At the conclusion of the battle, it seems a magnificent, black, spear-like super-ship of some kind came upon the scene. An ancient woodcut was created by Hans Glaser to document the event.

Found Here: http://jasonsalyers.com/articles/theories/nazi-ufos/

Futuristic Yugoslavian Monuments

2011-04-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković...), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their "patriotic education." After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

From 2006 to 2009, Kempenaers toured around the ex-Yugoslavia region (now Croatia, Serbia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, etc.) with the help of a 1975 map of memorials, bringing before our eyes a series of melancholy yet striking images. His photos raise a question: can these former monuments continue to exist as pure sculptures? On one hand, their physical dilapidated condition and institutional neglect reflect a more general social historical fracturing. And on the other hand, they are still of stunning beauty without any symbolic significances.

Found Here: http://www.cracktwo.com/2011/04/25-abandoned-soviet-monuments-that-look.html

Kazutaka Miyatake

2011-04-06T20:20:00.000-07:00

Without paying close attention to the talented artists who worked on Space Battleship Yamato from the beginning, it's easy to overlook the fact that Leiji Matsumoto was not the only veteran who participated in the Playstation games. But one glance at the intricate mechanical designs quickly corrects that oversight. They are the work of Kazutake Miyatake, one of the most respected superstars of anime mecha.

As a charter member of Japan's famous Studio Nue (the design powerhouse behind such anime classics as Crusher Joe, Macross, Gunbuster, and countless others), Miyatake was at ground zero in 1974 when the first TV series went into production and was one of just three artists who designed Yamato herself inside and out. His role expanded in 1978 on Farewell to Yamato when he almost single-handedly designed all the spaceships for the Earth and Comet Empire fleets. If you need one more credential, here it is: the Andromeda was largely his idea.

When the time came to adapt the mecha into the Playstation environment, there was no one more qualified than Miyatake to do the job. He went far beyond what anyone expected, upgrading and refining everything into sleek new forms that retained their original core. Even Yamato was re-imagined to such a degree that Miyatake's new version later became the basis of Bandai's massive 1/350 model kit, released in 2007.

And he didn't stop there---he was front and center for the Playstation 2 games as well, taking things in ever bolder directions. Here are highlights of a lengthy interview with Miyatake that was published in the Fixed Data book for the second Playstation game (DNA Media Books, January 2001) in which he recounts what it was like to create anime's greatest spaceships for both old times and new.

Yamato Must be as Good as the Old Days

Interviewer: What is the goal of a Yamato game for Playstation?

Miyatake: It must be as good for the fans as it was in the old days. The atmosphere is certainly different. The original should be unspoiled, but I wanted to improve some of the roughness of it. Because polygons make a three-dimensional object look different than normal freehand drawing, I thought it could bring a new sensibility to Yamato.

Specifically, it should show modern technology. So I added things like controls for electronic warfare and sensor countermeasures. To begin with, it is a projection of Matsumoto mecha. The sharper feel originates from Soviet fighter design. Matsumoto mecha inherits the coolness of that style.

Interviewer: In a way, it's sad that people of the 20-year old 'robot generation' don't understand things like that.

Miyatake: Indeed, the old Yamato designs may not suit the younger generation today. I thought about ways to adjust the focus of the image and imply more detail.

Interviewer: Your refinement of the Cosmo Tiger II from Farewell to Yamato is considerably stronger.

Miyatake: Yes. New technologies came to pass since the mid-70s, so the Cosmo Tiger II is now decidedely a stealth fighter. Even if the original design is somewhat changed, it is not unreasonable. Someone said I put a little Macross in it. (Laughs)

The economic life of a weapon is long, so some things last for 20 or 30 years, but a fighter needs to keep up with technology to be a state of the art machine. So I wanted to modernize it. The angles on it suppress the reflection of radar waves.

Because a game is drawn with polygons, the polyhedral design of stealth technology is very suitable; it's difficult to express curved surfaces. We could keep the volume of data down while preserving the punch, so I took a bold plunge into stealth! I thought it would be effective, particularly in the case of a fast-moving fighter.

The Cosmo Zero design for Playstation also has a sense of stealth, and it's especially apparent in the Black Tiger. We wanted to use triangles as much as possible to keep the number of polygons low. When I did the original design for animation, the stripes were often drawn incorrectly, but now it's a texture attached to the surface of a polygon, so we no longer have that problem. That's one of the ways it looks different.

Interviewer: What was the design point of the spaceships in Farewell to Yamato?

Miyatake: The balance of the main EDF battleship hasn't changed much from the time of the movie, but the carrier changed considerably. It was adjusted a little for the Yamato 2 TV series, but I wasn't involved with that. Originally, Matsumoto aircraft carriers were designed in a slab-like style, but this is more like the Minsk.

Interviewer: The Soviet Carrier? That was strangely gaudy.

Miyatake: But at the same time the bridge design was fairly simple. That was the first warship to use stealth technology. Bringing that to the Yamato PS game would give it the sense of a living thing. Sorry, I'm going back to the old days...

Interviewer: I think I understand. When a stealth machine like the B2 was drawn in SF anime, it looked like a parody in the time before the real thing appeared. Isn't it hard to surpass both reality and the viewer's imagination?

Miyatake: Yes. Yamato's original image had World War II as its base, so we didn't mind reproducing scenes from old movies. A remake needs to be tailored for its time, but I couldn't take away the nucleus of the original image when I modernized it. The curving, feminine silhouette of Yamato still has a strong visual impression, so it needs to keep that lineage even if the details are quite different.

If it has the Yamato name, it has to look like Yamato. If that's still the case, then I have no problem if the game differs from the anime.

Interviewer: As long as the basic elements are the same...

Miyatake: ...that's why I summarized the design the way I did. However, I couldn't help making a chart to compare the original proportions with the new ones, and use it to pursuade others. Some said it didn't change at all, other had the opposite reaction. It's like the wind. (Laughs)

Interviewer: Were both reactions fair?

Miyatake: Both sides depend on the person's point of view. The comparison was persuasive to both. My designer friends described the PS version as normal evolution. They said if you continued drawing Yamato for ten years or more, isn't this what it would have become? I think that was a natural answer. Even though I changed it, it stayed the same, isn't that how the saying goes?

I thought I would change the Andromeda, too, but I didn't need to, other than making it slightly bigger and adding volume. Because anime is a 2-dimensional picture, it doesn't have to be solid. The form of the ship can change without being incorrect. But a polygon has no choice but to be solid. 3-D animation can never be cheated, or the pieces don't connect.

Honestly, nothing about the Andromeda changed much. It was not necessary. For the original, Mr. Matsumoto left 99% of the Andromeda to me, which means it's done in the Matsumoto style and slightly in my style.

Interviewer: Did it take a lot of thought?

Miyatake: I regretted the EDF battleship (A). My first design didn't have the punch it needed to emulate Yamato. I didn't have enough technical knowledge at the time, and the drawing lacked personality. I felt this most keenly about the bridge. I asked Mr. Matsumoto about it, and he understood.

Interviewer: The Andromeda's bridge was redone many times back then, wasn't it?

Miyatake: No, just once. Mr. Matsumoto drew a rough and I expanded on it. I added all the antennae.

Interviewer: How were the smaller EDF ships designed?

Miyatake: There was not a demand for them at first. In the beginning, there was only Kodai's escort ship (B) [at the beginning of Farewell to Yamato]. The tubular body had only one ring-step around the engine. That basic form was scaled up and given two steps for the patrol cruiser (C). I thought it would need a lot of antennae, so I added more of them. I also used the escort ship as a base for the destroyer (D), decreased the armament and made the bridge lower.

I thought I would want to change them for the PS version of Farewell, but there was no need.

The Comet Empire city was James Blish's New York

Interviewer: You also designed the enemy warships, didn't you?

Miyatake: I did. I discussed them with Mr. Matsumoto to determine their function. We wanted to give a 'compound eye' look to their sensors and use a disc form that would clearly indicate a 'space person' made it. And I added a little more technology.

Instead of designing a clear top and bottom, I thought it would be a better idea to emphasize the technical differences by alternating the panels to build them up. That gave a chain structure to the ships of the Comet Empire.

Interviewer: That different approach to the enemy ships is similar to Macross. Is that how you approach such design?

Miyatake: When you determine the basic form of mecha, the details on the periphery become easier. So we start with a drawing that is like the shape of a car, a ship, or an aircraft. The process is very similar, but we draw it entirely on paper where they make mockups. In the case of automobiles, a full-scale wooden model was often made in the old days.

When you're making something out of physical materials, the core of the idea increasingly changes over time. In the case of our EDF ships, the Andromeda, the escort ships, and all the others were developed to fill each other's gaps. The details fit the needs of the soldiers inside the ships. But it is all based around the fundamental form.

Interviewer: Why does the new version of the Comet Empire City have channels in the lower hemisphere?

Miyatake: This was an order from the producer. He wanted to have trench warfare against heavy armaments. It would also give Kodai a clear direction into the mouth of the aircraft port.

The Comet Empire City was originally inspired by James Blish's New York in the Cities in Flight series; it was built on a hemisphere of exposed rock. If you want to show another way of life, you add a different flavor.

There's also the Battleship Medaluza, which didn't appear in Farewell to Yamato, it was in the Yamato 2 TV series. The [Magna] flame guns are a big, showy highlight. But I didn't work on Yamato 2.

Interviewer: So you refined it this time?

Miyatake: The Medaluza comes from the Comet Empire, so their design is from a different worldview. I couldn't change the parts that define the characteristics of the ship, so I just concentrated on the common areas.

But it was the Dreadnaught that took the most effort. They said the original design would suffice, and there wasn't enough time to do more than a single pass. The amount of linework on it is insane. (Laughs) It all has to be there to show how big it is. Even so, I doubled the number of guns and made it half again as long. In fact, the basic form was quite different from Mr. Matsumoto's original rough. Plus, there was no model sheet of the underside in the old days.

Interviewer: Yamato is only about the size of its stern segment.

Miyatake: That's right. But its bridge tower is about the same size as Yamato's. If you do things like that, the ship looks even bigger. I wanted to do more with it, but the deadline came. (Laughs)

Interviewer: If you have permission from the producer, an artist is cool with even fine detail.

Miyatake: Originally, Mr. Matsumoto came to me near the end of production on the movie. He was running out of time to design the Dreadnaught, and the animators couldn't finish their work without it. Everyone was screaming and tearing their hair out. That was often the situation in those days. So I was glad to have the chance to redo the design.

Interviewer: Even if it took over 20 years to accomplish.

Miyatake: Yes. But I have to offer my apologies to the game director. My first major task for the Farewell game was to rough out the Dreadnaught, even though it doesn't appear until the end. To only draw a front view was too limiting, we had to have the underside and rear as well. I finished them only after the schedule was extended first by three months and then four. It was a tough nut to crack.

I participated in Space Battleship Yamato in 1974!

Interviewer: The first work of yours I ever saw was an internal drawing of Mazinger Z when I was a student.

Miyatake: That wasn't my first professional illustration; I did Kamen Rider's Hurricane Bike before that.

Interviewer: What was your participation in the first Yamato series?

Miyatake: I heard about it when it was still called Asteroid Ship, before it became Yamato. Takeshi Matsuzaki from Studio Nue was working on it as a scenario writer, so he took the lead.

Interviewer: Was he drawing for it, too?

Miyatake: Yes, as a designer. It was the two of us and also Naoyuki Katou and Haruka Takachiho. Previously we had made doujinshis of SF illustration as a group with Takeshi Matsuzaki as our chairman.

I was in graduate school at the time, so I didn't work on it from the start, but I poked my head in and heard about how it was going. Matsuzaki spent all his time in the studio working on it.

Interviewer: What did you draw for it?

Miyatake: I only drew Yamato itself. Naoyuki Kato did, too. The model sheet of the stern view was his.

Interviewer: When I saw the TV series again recently, I was surprised at the impression of weight in the Yamato design.

Miyatake: The director, Noboru Ishiguro, was particularly conscious of that and I stuck to it. But it became more slender in the hands of some animators as the series went on. We had to take the bad with the good; it was a TV series, and all the pictures were drawn by many hands, so it was hard to preserve the sense of weight. But it is thoroughly reflected in the Playstation game. I think the width of the ship has broadened, too.

Interviewer: After all, Yamato really is big and heavy. It's not just in the mind of the viewer.

Miyatake: Speaking of the old TV series...Part 1 and Farewell used different animation studios, so even the cel paint was different and the colors of Yamato were different.

Interviewer: It became more blue.

Miyatake: And lighter. With the old Yamato, the first color we tried was a heavy black, and some said it looked dirty. (Laughs) It looked dark and gloomy. It wasn't a color for normal animation.

Interviewer: It was also framed differently in Leiji Matsumoto's storyboards, with the pulse lasers and the glowing energy.

Miyatake: Those were done by Mr. Ishiguro. He had been making animation since his university days and he'd done research in effects animation at the time. He developed the space explosion that extended in all directions. Almost all the Yamato effects were by Mr. Ishiguro. He says now that he enjoyed it. However, because nobody else could do that kind of work, he kept pulling all-nighters and had to repair a lot of the animation by himself.

Interviewer: A supervisor did animation revision?

Miyatake: Yes. It was the only TV series where someone like him did so much mecha-related drawing.

Interviewer: Anyway, we have that heavy impression in the first TV series. It also had long scenes of space battles with no cutting back and forth. That sort of thing also made a strong impression.

Miyatake: Yamato was exceptional in those days of TV animation. The policy was "no recycling." The voice from the top didn't mind going over budget. There was no restriction on the cel count, although there wasn't much time, either. The idea was to keep the stock footage down so every episode would look new.

Interviewer: There's a famous story from back then about the 'G' cel.

[Editor's note: on animation exposure sheets, the different cel layers are labeled by letter: A, B, C, etc. It is customary not to go deeper than a C layer, but some scenes in Yamato went all the way to an unheard-of G layer: 7 cels in a single exposure.]

Miyatake: Yes. The top layer was badly scratched. The cel material was bad in those days, and it wasn't handled very carefully. The more cel layers they used, the less transparent and the more scratchy they became.

Also, the oil shock made things considerably painful.

Interviewer: Because a cel is a petroleum product.

Miyatake: There is a small amount in it. So even with a big budget you might not get enough cels. Between those shortages and the schedule, Yamato wasn't easy to make.

Interviewer: By the end, even the top supervisor was in the trenches.

Miyatake: That's how it was. I remember people saying Mr. Ishiguro should try to escape.

We had other problems, like the number of windows on Yamato's bridge. It really became a problem. The number often decreased. If you see it from an angle, there are a lot of lines to draw; the outer edges, the glass line, the inner edges. This was the reason the number sometimes dropped from five windows to four. It's a little thing, but it piles up.

Interviewer: What about all those designs that covered several pieces of paper?

Miyatake: I tried to keep a design neatly on a single sheet, but when drawing something in perspective I often had to go off the edge somewhere; there's a limit. I had to add an extension to find a point, otherwise the drawing might lose its power and realism. So I did it without worrying about using up paper.

But there was a problem in those days---copy machines didn't have a reduction function. I had to draw large, it was unavoidable. Mr. Matsumoto didn't understand this at the time either; some of his drawings took up 6 or 7 pages. (Laughs) I remember having a hard time cleaning up his roughs.

Now reduction is really simple, but in the old days there were few machines capable of it, so we had to find a blueprint machine.

Interviewer: In closing, I'd like to ask you about your future hopes. What do you want to do?

Miyatake: A sense of realism is the basis of our work. I was born in Yokosuka, and I grew up looking at military warships. American aircraft carriers made it their port of call...those provided the basics of my work so far.

But now I want to do exactly the opposite, and completely remove the realism. Take a plane, a battleship, or a spaceship--something from the Comet Empire or Gamilas, for example. The aim is to translate technology into a design, to give it a reality and a presence. That's the sort of work that got me here and that's what clients will ask of me from now on.

But I want to try and break that, to find something appealing in the opposite meaning. But I have no idea what kind of work it would lead to.

Interviewer: You want to break out of your shell.

Miyatake: That's right. To create something fundamentally new, that's the dream. Yamato has been that for over 20 years.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.

(Interview conducted in Yokosuka, June 10, 2000)

Found Here: http://www.starblazers.com/html.php?page_id=341

Yoshitaka Amano

2011-03-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

Yoshitaka Amano (天野喜孝 (formerly 天野嘉孝) Amano Yoshitaka^?) (born July 28, 1952) is a Japanese artist. He began his career as an animator and has become known for his illustrations for Vampire Hunter D and for his character designs, image illustrations and title logo designs for the Final Fantasy video game series developed by Square Enix (formerly Square).^[1] His influences include Western comic books, art nouveau, and Japanese woodblock prints. He has won awards for his work, including the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Dream Hunters.^[2] In early 2010, he established Studio Devaloka, a film production company.

Amano was born in Shizuoka, Japan. As a young adolescent, he was fascinated with drawing. In 1967, he began working in the animation department of Tatsunoko Productions, where he was introduced to the early Japanese anime movement.^[4]^[5] His first paid project was for the Speed Racer anime franchise. He was a character designer for anime shows such as Time Bokan, Gatchaman, Tekkaman, and Honey Bee.^[6]

In the 1960s, Amano was exposed to Western art styles through comic books, which he claims among his artistic roots. He has cited Neal Adams as his favorite comic book artist, noting that he would often purchase used comics based on Adams's cover artwork, only to be disappointed that the interior artist was different.^[7] Amano was also fascinated by the art styles of psychedelic art and pop art of the West, particularly the work of American Pop artist Peter Max.^[8] In the 1970s, Amano studied the artworks of the late 19th century and early 20th century European movement of Art Nouveau, as well as the ancient Japanese hand woodblock printing work of Ukiyo-e.^[8]

Amano remained at Tatsunoko Productions until 1982.

In the early 1980s, Amano concentrated on illustrations for science fiction and fantasy works. Combined with the influence of his prior experience in animation, this focus resulted in a personal style influenced by both modern surrealism and realism.^[6]

In 1983, he illustrated the novel Demon City Shinjuku and the first in Hideyuki Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D novel series.^[6] He also worked as a character designer on the 1985 movie adaptation of Vampire Hunter D, which was one of the first anime movies to be released outside of Japan. In interviews, however, Amano has stated that he was not pleased with the final product of the movie.^{[citation needed]}

His illustrations begin to be published in collections such as Maten in 1984.

In 1987, Amano joined Square (now known as Square Enix) to work on a role-playing video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System: Final Fantasy. Amano produced conceptual design pieces for the game in both traditional and computer designed artwork.^[10] At this time, he also worked for another video game company, Kure Software Koubou, producing box cover illustrations as well as some character designs. This work included designs for Kure's First Queen series.^[11]

Following Final Fantasy VI in 1994, he stepped down as the main character, image, and graphic designer of the series. He continued to provide promotional and character artwork for the following games and to design their title logos.^[12]

In 2006, Hironobu Sakaguchi, the former designer and creator of the Final Fantasy series, recruited Amano and composer Nobuo Uematsu to work on video games at Mistwalker.^[1]

[edit] Branching out

Amano's first exhibition, called "Hiten", was held in 1989 at Yurakucho Mullion in Tokyo, Japan.^[13] In 1990, he began to work as an artist and set designer for stage theater. His first work for theater was Tamasaburo Bando's Nayotake.^[8] He also held further exhibitions and became well-known for his printing works.^{[citation needed]}

Beginning in 1995 with his work at the Biennale d'Orléans in France, he received increased recognition outside of Japan. Further international exhibitions followed, including the 1996 "Hero" at the Angel Orensanz Foundation and the 1997 workshop and exhibition "Think Like Amano".^[14]^[15]

In 1998, Amano appeared as Hiroshi in the 1998 movie New Rose Hotel, loosely based on the William Gibson short story of the same name.

In 2000, Amano illustrated Neil Gaiman's Sandman: The Dream Hunters,^[17] which won several awards and was nominated for a Hugo Award.^[2] In 2001, Greg Rucka and Amano collaborated on another comic book tale, Elektra and Wolverine: The Redeemer.^[18] His character designs were used in another Vampire Hunter D movie entitled Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. In 2006, the first volume of his HERO series was released by Boom! Studios.

He illustrated three album covers for the Japanese power metal band Galneryus: The Flag of Punishment (2003), Advance to the Fall (2005), and Beyond the End of Despair (2006).^[19]

In 2008, Amano created an illustrated adaptation of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's The Magic Flute, published by Radical Comics.^[20] He also collaborated with Christopher "mink" Morrison Quentin Tarantino's A Band Apart production company, providing illustrations for the novel Shinjuku and two other projects that have yet to be announced.^[21] He was the character designer for the 2009 Jungle Emperor (Kimba the White Lion) TV special, directed by Gorō Taniguchi, to commemorate both the 50th anniversary of Fuji Television and the 80th anniversary of Osamu Tezuka's birth.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshitaka_Amano

Ctesiphon, the Arch - Baghdad Battery

2011-03-08T20:00:00.000-08:00

The Arch of Ctesiphon

Mud brick was the most common building material in Mesopotamia, until the advent of modern concrete. Baked bricks were only used for major projects such as the arch at Ctesiphon, just outside Baghdad, part of a palace built by Sasanian kings in the sixth century AD.

The Sasanians were an Iranian dynasty, but they used traditional Mesopotamian building techniques. The arch, a huge open audience hall 30m (98ft) high and some 43m (141ft) long, should have required massive scaffolding, but the Mesopotamians leant the courses of brickwork back at an angle, so that each course was built against its predecessor, and only a mobile tower for the builders was necessary. The arch was flanked by façades decorated with blank arcading and pilasters, but the one on the right collapsed a century ago.

Found Here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/cultures/mesopotamia_gallery_12.shtml

Ctesiphon, the imperial capital of the Parthian Arsacids and of the Persian Sassanids, was one of the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia. In the 6th century, Ctesiphon was the largest city in the world.^[1]

The ruins of the city are located on the east bank of the Tigris, across the river from the Hellenistic city of Seleucia. Today, the remains of both cities lie in Iraq, approximately 35 km south of the city of Baghdad

The Latin name Ctesiphon or Ctesifon (pronounced /ˈtɛsɨfɒn/) derives from Greek KtēsiphōnΚτησιφῶν), a Hellenized form of a local name that has been reconstructed as Tosfōn or Tosbōn.^[2] In Iranian sources of the Sassanid period it is attested in Manichean Parthian, in Sassanid Middle Persian and in Christian Sogdian as Pahlavi tyspwn, continuing in New PersianTisfun (تيسفون). In medieval Arabic texts the name is usually Ṭaysafūn (طيسفون) or Qaṭaysfūnal-Mada'in (المدائن). "According to Yāqūt [...], quoting Ḥamza, the original form was Ṭūsfūn or Tūsfūn, which was arabicized as Ṭaysafūn."^[3] The Armenian name of the city was Tizbon (Տիզբոն). Ctesiphon is first mentioned in the Book of Ezra of the Old Testament as Kasfia/Casphia (a derivative of the ethnic name, Cas, and a cognate of Caspian and Qazvin).

Ctesiphon rose to prominence during the Parthian Empire in the 1st century BC, and was the seat of government for most of its rulers. The city was located near Seleucia, the Hellenistic capital. Strabo abundantly describes its foundation:

In ancient times Babylon was the metropolis of Assyria; but now Seleuceia is the metropolis, I mean the Seleuceia on the Tigris, as it is called. Near by is situated a village called Ctesiphon, a large village. This village the kings of the Parthians were wont to make their winter residence, thus sparing the Seleuceians, in order that the Seleuceians might not be oppressed by having the Scythian folk or soldiery quartered amongst them. Because of the Parthian power, therefore, Ctesiphon is a city rather than a village; its size is such that it lodges a great number of people, and it has been equipped with buildings by the Parthians themselves; and it has been provided by the Parthians with wares for sale and with the arts that are pleasing to the Parthians; for the Parthian kings are accustomed to spend the winter there because of the salubrity of the air, but they summer at Ecbatana and in Hyrcania because of the prevalence of their ancient renown.^[4]

( as (قطيسفون), in Modern Arabic

Because of its importance, Ctesiphon was a major military objective for the leaders of the Roman Empire in its eastern wars. The city was captured by Rome or by its successor state, the Byzantine Empire, five times in its history, three times in the 2nd century alone. The emperor Trajan captured Ctesiphon in 116, but his successor, Hadrian, decided to willingly return Ctesiphon, in 117, as part of a peace settlement. The Roman general Avidius Cassius captured Ctesiphon during another Parthian war in 164, but abandoned it when peace was concluded. In 197, the emperor Septimius Severus sacked Ctesiphon and carried off thousands of its inhabitants, whom he sold into slavery.

Late in the 3rd century, after the Parthians had been supplanted by the Sassanids, the city again became a source of conflict with Rome. In 283, emperor Carus sacked the city uncontested during a period of civil upheaval. In 295, emperor Galerius was defeated outside the city. However, he returned a year later with a vengeance and won a tremendous victory which ended in the fifth and final capture of the city by the Romans in 299. He returned it to the Persian king Narses in exchange for Armenia and western Mesopotamia. In c.325 and again in 410, the city, or the Greek colony directly across the river, was the site of church councils for the Church of the East.

Emperor Julian was killed following a battle outside of the city walls, in 363, during his war against Shapur II. Finally, in 627, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius surrounded the city, the capital of the Sassanid Empire, leaving it after the Persians accepted his peace terms.

Ctesiphon fell to the Muslims during the Islamic conquest of Persia in 637 under the military command of Sa'ad ibn Abi Waqqas during the caliphate of Umar. However, the general population was not harmed but the palaces and their archives were burned. Still, as political and economic fortune had passed elsewhere, the city went into a rapid decline, especially after the founding of the Abbasid capital at Baghdad in the 8th century, and soon became a ghost town. It is believed to be the basis for the city of Isbanir in the Thousand and One Nights.

The ruins of Ctesiphon were the site of a major battle of World War I in November 1915. The Ottoman Empire defeated troops of Britain attempting to capture Baghdad, and drove them back some 40 miles (64 km) before trapping the British force and compelling it to surrender.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctesiphon

The Baghdad Battery

These strange artefacts were originally discovered in 1936 during an archaeological dig at village of Khuyut Rabbou'a which is located approximately 20 miles south east of the city centre of modern Baghdad and close to the Arch of Ctesiphon. Described as 13 – 14cm in height they contained a copper cylinder and within this was suspended an iron rod. In December 1939, shortly after the start of World War II a German archaeologist by the name of Wilhelm Konig came across the item in the basement of the National Museum of Iraq. He immediately recognised their similarity to galvanic batteries and published a paper that suggested that these ancient electrical devices may have been used for electroplating precious gold onto silver. It is around this time that Adolf Hitler began a serious, if eccentric, programme to study the technology of the ancients. Relatively modern films such as “Raiders of the Lost Ark” are based on this obscure reality. There is no easy explanation for the Baghdad Battery and naturally this has created controversy, debate and disagreement in the scientific community. Reconstructions of this device have proved that it could generate an electrical current of between 0.4 and 1.9 volts. Naturally, some scientists dispute these claims and argue that the reconstructions are inaccurate. (Those scientist just love a good dispute – it’s the scientific equivalent of arguing with you history teacher to make sure that everyone else notices that you’re still in the class.)

Found Here: http://www.jimsrandomwebpage.com/The%20Bagdad%20Battery.html

Some of the greatest mysteries are those that surround ancient gadgets. Because of their antiquity, we may never truly know how they were built or what their purpose was. Such is the case with the Baghdad Battery, a device unearthed in Khujut Rabu, just outside of Baghdad, in 1936. It consisted of a small clay jar containing an iron rod suspended inside ofÃ‚Â a copper cylinder. The copper cylinder was soldered shut and sealed with asphalt. Wilhelm Konig, a German archaeologist working at the National Museum of Iraq, examined the device two years after its discovery and came to the conclusion that it was an ancient battery.

Indeed, when replicas were built they were able to generate small amounts of electricity. But if the device was a battery, it would pre-date other batteries by at least a thousand years. And what, exactly, would an ancient civilization have use batteries for? For many years, experts contended that the Baghdad Battery would have been used to electroplate thin layers of gold onto silver items. That theory has fallen out of favor due to lack of evidence.

In fact, many archaeologists now believe that the Baghdad Battery had no electrical purpose at all. The usability of the ancient batteries has been proven in various scientific and entertainment arenas, but so far all that can be said is that it was possible to produce electricity with these primitive cells. Whether they were ever used for that purpose – and what, exactly, they may have powered – may never be known. Like the Antikythera Mechanism and so many other ancient gadgets, its function may be forever lost to time.

Found Here: http://gajitz.com/battery-of-mysteries-why-did-worlds-first-battery-exist/

Gobekli Tepe - World's Oldest Known Temple

2011-02-15T23:27:00.000-08:00

Göbekli Tepe (Turkish for "Potbelly hill") is a hilltop sanctuary erected on the highest point of an elongated mountain ridge some 15 km northeast of the town of Şanlıurfa (formerly Urfa / Edessa) in southeastern Turkey. The site, currently undergoing excavation by German and Turkish archaeologists, was erected by hunter-gatherers in the 10th millennium BC (c. 11,500 years ago), before the advent of sedentism. Together with Nevalı Çori, it has revolutionized understanding of the Eurasian Neolithic.

Göbekli Tepe is located in southeastern Turkey. It had already been noted in an American survey German Archaeological Institute (Istanbul branch) and Şanlıurfa Museum, under the direction of the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt (1995–2000: University of Heidelberg; since 2001: German Archaeological Institute). Schmidt says that the stone fragments on the surface made him aware immediately that the site was prehistoric. Before then, the hill had been under agricultural cultivation; generations of local inhabitants had frequently moved rocks and placed them in clearance piles; much archaeological evidence may have been destroyed in the process. Scholars from the Hochschule Karlsruhe began documenting the architectural remains. They soon discovered T-shaped pillars, some of which had apparently undergone attempts at smashing.

in 1964, which recognized that the hill could not entirely be a natural feature, but assumed that a Byzantine cemetery lay beneath. Since 1994 excavations have been conducted by the

Göbekli Tepe is the oldest human-made place of worship yet discovered.^[2] Until excavations began, a complex on this scale was not thought possible for a community so ancient. The massive sequence of stratification layers suggests several millennia of activity, perhaps reaching back to the Mesolithic. The oldest occupation layer (stratum III) contains monolithic pillars linked by coarsely built walls to form circular or oval structures. So far, four such buildings, with diameters between 10 and 30m have been uncovered. Geophysical surveys indicate the existence of 16 additional structures.

Stratum II, dated to Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) (7500–6000 BC), has revealed several adjacent rectangular rooms with floors of polished lime, reminiscent of Roman terrazzo floors. The most recent layer consists of sediment deposited as the result of agricultural activity.

The monoliths are decorated with carved reliefs of animals and of abstract pictograms. The pictograms may represent commonly understood sacred symbols, as known from Neolithic cave paintings elsewhere. The carefully carved figurative reliefs depict lions, bulls, boars, foxes, gazelles, asses, snakes and other reptiles, insects, arachnids, and birds, particularly vultures and water fowl. At the time the shrine was constructed the surrounding country was much lusher and capable of sustaining this variety of wildlife, before millennia of settlement and cultivation resulted in the near–Dust Bowl conditions prevailing today.^[3]

Vultures also feature in the iconography of the Neolithic sites of Çatalhöyük and Jericho; it is believed that in the early Neolithic culture of Anatolia and the Near East the deceased were deliberately exposed in order to be excarnated by vultures and other birds of prey. (The head of the deceased was sometimes removed and preserved—possibly a sign of ancestor worship.)^[4]sky burial, as practiced today by Tibetan Buddhists and Zoroastrians in India.^[5] This, then, would represent an early form of

Few humanoid forms have surfaced at Göbekli Tepe, but include a relief of a naked woman, posed frontally in a crouched position, that Schmidt likens to the Venus accueillante figures found in Neolithic north Africa; and of at least one decapitated corpse surrounded by vultures. Some of the pillars, namely the T-shaped ones, have carved arms, which may indicate that they represent stylized humans (or anthropomorphic gods). Another example is decorated with human hands in what could be interpreted as a prayer gesture, with a simple stole or surplice engraved above; this may be intended to represent a temple priest.

The houses or temples are round megalithic buildings. The walls are made of unworked dry stone and include numerous T-shaped monolithic pillars of limestone that are up to 3 m high. Another, bigger pair of pillars is placed in the centre of the structures. There is evidence that the structures were roofed; the central pair of pillars may have supported the roof. The floors are made of terrazzo (burnt lime), and there is a low bench running along the whole of the exterior wall.

The reliefs on the pillars include foxes, lions, cattle, wild boars, wild asses, herons, ducks, scorpions, ants, spiders, many snakes, and a very few anthropomorphic figures. Some of the reliefs have been deliberately erased, maybe in preparation for new designs. There are freestanding sculptures as well that may represent wild boars or foxes. As they are heavily encrusted with lime, it is sometimes difficult to tell. Comparable statues have been discovered at Nevalı Çori and Nahal Hemar.

The quarries for the statues are located on the plateau itself; some unfinished pillars have been found there in situ. The biggest unfinished pillar is still 6.9 m long; a length of 9m has been reconstructed. This is much larger than any of the finished pillars found so far. The stone was quarried with stone picks. Bowl-like depressions in the limestone rocks may already have served as mortars or fire-starting bowls in the epipalaeolithic. There are some phalloi and geometric patterns cut into the rock as well; their dating is uncertain.

While the structures are primarily temples, more recently smaller domestic buildings have been uncovered. Despite this, it is clear that the primary use of the site was cultic and not domestic. Schmidt believes this "cathedral on a hill" was a pilgrimage destination attracting worshipers up to a hundred miles distant. Butchered bones found in large numbers from local game such as deer, gazelle, pigs, and geese have been identified as refuse derived from hunting and food prepared for the congregants.^[8]

The site was deliberately backfilled sometime after 8000 BC: the buildings are covered with settlement refuse that must have been brought from elsewhere. These deposits include flint tools like scrapers and arrowheads and animal bones. The lithic inventory is characterised by Byblos points and numerous Nemrik-points. There are Helwan-points and Aswad-points as well.

While the site formally belongs to the earliest Neolithic (PPN A), up to now no traces of domesticated plants or animals have been found. The inhabitants were hunters and gatherers^[9] Schmidt speculates that the site played a key function in the transition to agriculture; he assumes that the necessary social organization needed for the creation of these structures went hand-in-hand with the organized exploitation of wild crops. For sustenance, wild cereals may have been used more intensively than before; perhaps they were even deliberately cultivated. Recent DNA analysis of modern domesticated wheat compared with wild wheat has shown that its DNA is closest in structure to wild wheat found on Mount Karaca Dağ 20 miles away from the site, leading one to believe that this is where modern wheat was first domesticated.^[10] who nevertheless lived in villages for at least part of the year.

Schmidt considers Göbekli Tepe a central location for a cult of the dead. He suggests that the carved animals are there to protect the dead. Though no tombs or graves have been found so far, Schmidt believes they remain to be discovered beneath the sacred circles' floors.^[11] Schmidt also interprets it in connection with the initial stages of an incipient Neolithic. It is one of several neolithic sites in the vicinity of Mount Karaca Dağ, an area where geneticists suspect the origins of at least some of our cultivated grains (see Einkorn). Such scholars suggest that the Neolithic revolution, i.e., the beginnings of grain cultivation, took place here. Schmidt and others believe that mobile groups in the area were forced to cooperate with each other to protect early concentrations of wild cereals from wild animals (herds of gazelles and wild donkeys). This would have led to an early social organization of various groups in the area of Göbekli Tepe. Thus, according to Schmidt, the Neolithic did not begin on a small scale in the form of individual instances of garden cultivation, but started immediately as a large-scale social organisation ("a full-scale revolution"^[12]).

All statements about the site must be considered preliminary, as only about 5% of the site's total area has been excavated as yet; floor levels have been reached in only the second complex (complex B), which also contained a terrazzo-like floor. Schmidt believes that the dig could well continue for another fifty years, "and barely scratch the surface."^[11] So far excavations have revealed very little evidence for residential use. Through the radiocarbon method, the end of stratum III can be fixed at c. 9000 BC (see above); its beginnings are estimated to 11,000 BC or earlier. Stratum II dates to about 8000 BC.

Thus, the structures not only predate pottery, metallurgy, and the invention of writing or the wheel; they were built before the so-called Neolithic Revolution, i.e., the beginning of agriculture animal husbandry around 9000 BC. But the construction of Göbekli Tepe implies organisation of an order of complexity not hitherto associated with pre-Neolithic societies. The archaeologists estimate that up to 500 persons were required to extract the 10–20 ton pillars (in fact, some weigh up to 50 tons) from local quarries and move them 100 to 500m to the site.^[13]Which came first, monumental building projects or farming? Archaeo News 14 December 2008 [1] It is generally believed that an elite class of religious leaders supervised the work and later controlled whatever ceremonies took place here. If so, this would be the oldest known evidence for a priestly caste—much earlier than such social distinctions developed elsewhere in the Near East.^[11] and

Around the beginning of the 8th millennium BC "Potbelly Hill" lost its importance. The advent of agriculture and animal husbandry brought new realities to human life in the area, and the "stone-age zoo" (as Schmidt calls it) depicted on the pillars apparently lost whatever significance it had had for the region's older, foraging, communities. But the complex was not simply abandoned and forgotten, to be gradually destroyed by the elements. Instead, it was deliberately buried under 300 to 500 cubic metres of soil.^[14] Why this was done is unknown, but it preserved the monuments for posterity.

Göbekli Tepe is regarded as an archaeological discovery of the greatest importance since it profoundly changes our understanding of a crucial stage in the development of human societies. It seems that the erection of monumental complexes was within the capacities of hunter-gatherers and not only of sedentary farming communities as had been previously assumed. In other words, as excavator Klaus Schmidt puts it: "First came the temple, then the city."^[15] This revolutionary hypothesis will have to be supported or modified by future research.

Not only its large dimensions, but the side-by-side existence of multiple pillar shrines makes the location unique. There are no comparable monumental complexes from its time. Nevalı Çori, a well-known Neolithic settlement also excavated by the German Archaeological Institute, and submerged by the Atatürk Dam since 1992, is 500 years later, its T-shaped pillars are considerably smaller, and its shrine was located inside a village; the roughly contemporary architecture at Jericho is devoid of artistic merit or large-scale sculpture; and Çatalhöyük, perhaps the most famous of all Anatolian Neolithic villages, is 2,000 years younger.

Schmidt has engaged in some speculation regarding the belief systems of the groups that created Göbekli Tepe, based on comparisons with other shrines and settlements. He assumes shamanic ancestors, whereas he sees a fully articulated belief in gods only developing later in Mesopotamia, associated with extensive temples and palaces. This corresponds well with an ancient Sumerian belief that agriculture, animal husbandry and weaving had been brought to mankind from the sacred mountain Du-Ku, which was inhabited by Annuna—deities, very ancient gods without individual names. Klaus Schmidt identifies this story as an oriental primeval myth that preserves a partial memory of the Neolithic.^[16] It is also apparent that the animal and other images give no indication of organized violence, i.e., there are no depictions of hunting raids or wounded animals, and the pillar carvings ignore game on which the society mainly subsisted, like deer, in favor of formidable creatures such as lions, snakes, spiders and scorpions.^[17]^[18]^[19] practices and suggests that the T-shaped pillars may represent mythical creatures, perhaps

At present, Göbekli Tepe raises more questions for archaeology and prehistory than it answers. We do not know how a force large enough to construct, augment, and maintain such a substantial complex was mobilized and paid or fed in the conditions of pre-Neolithic society. We cannot "read" the pictograms, and do not know for certain what meaning the animal reliefs had for visitors to the site; the variety of fauna depicted, from lions and boars to birds and insects, makes any single explanation problematic. As there seems to be little or no evidence of habitation, and the animals depicted on the stones are mainly predators, the stones may have been intended to stave off evils through some form of magic representation; it is also possible that they served as totems.^[20] It is not known why more and more walls were added to the interiors while the sanctuary was in use, with the result that some of the engraved pillars were obscured from view. Burial may or may not have occurred at the site. The reason the complex was eventually buried remains unexplained. Until more evidence is gathered, it is difficult to deduce anything certain about the originating culture.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6bekli_Tepe

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it's the site of the world's oldest temple.

"Guten Morgen," he says at 5:20 a.m. when his van picks me up at my hotel in Urfa. Thirty minutes later, the van reaches the foot of a grassy hill and parks next to strands of barbed wire. We follow a knot of workmen up the hill to rectangular pits shaded by a corrugated steel roof—the main excavation site. In the pits, standing stones, or pillars, are arranged in circles. Beyond, on the hillside, are four other rings of partially excavated pillars. Each ring has a roughly similar layout: in the center are two large stone T-shaped pillars encircled by slightly smaller stones facing inward. The tallest pillars tower 16 feet and, Schmidt says, weigh between seven and ten tons. As we walk among them, I see that some are blank, while others are elaborately carved: foxes, lions, scorpions and vultures abound, twisting and crawling on the pillars' broad sides.

Schmidt points to the great stone rings, one of them 65 feet across. "This is the first human-built holy place," he says.

From this perch 1,000 feet above the valley, we can see to the horizon in nearly every direction. Schmidt, 53, asks me to imagine what the landscape would have looked like 11,000 years ago, before centuries of intensive farming and settlement turned it into the nearly featureless brown expanse it is today.

Prehistoric people would have gazed upon herds of gazelle and other wild animals; gently flowing rivers, which attracted migrating geese and ducks; fruit and nut trees; and rippling fields of wild barley and wild wheat varieties such as emmer and einkorn. "This area was like a paradise," says Schmidt, a member of the German Archaeological Institute. Indeed, Gobekli Tepe sits at the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent—an arc of mild climate and arable land from the Persian Gulf to present-day Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and Egypt—and would have attracted hunter-gatherers from Africa and the Levant. And partly because Schmidt has found no evidence that people permanently resided on the summit of Gobekli Tepe itself, he believes this was a place of worship on an unprecedented scale—humanity's first "cathedral on a hill."

With the sun higher in the sky, Schmidt ties a white scarf around his balding head, turban-style, and deftly picks his way down the hill among the relics. In rapid-fire German he explains that he has mapped the entire summit using ground-penetrating radar and geomagnetic surveys, charting where at least 16 other megalith rings remain buried across 22 acres. The one-acre excavation covers less than 5 percent of the site. He says archaeologists could dig here for another 50 years and barely scratch the surface.

Gobekli Tepe was first examined—and dismissed—by University of Chicago and Istanbul University anthropologists in the 1960s. As part of a sweeping survey of the region, they visited the hill, saw some broken slabs of limestone and assumed the mound was nothing more than an abandoned medieval cemetery. In 1994, Schmidt was working on his own survey of prehistoric sites in the region. After reading a brief mention of the stone-littered hilltop in the University of Chicago researchers' report, he decided to go there himself. From the moment he first saw it, he knew the place was extraordinary.

Unlike the stark plateaus nearby, Gobekli Tepe (the name means "belly hill" in Turkish) has a gently rounded top that rises 50 feet above the surrounding landscape. To Schmidt's eye, the shape stood out. "Only man could have created something like this," he says. "It was clear right away this was a gigantic Stone Age site." The broken pieces of limestone that earlier surveyors had mistaken for gravestones suddenly took on a different meaning.

Found Here: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/gobekli-tepe.html

As a child, Klaus Schmidt used to grub around in caves in his native Germany in the hope of finding prehistoric paintings. Thirty years later, representing the German Archaeological Institute, he found something infinitely more important -- a temple complex almost twice as old as anything comparable on the planet.

"This place is a supernova", says Schmidt, standing under a lone tree on a windswept hilltop 35 miles north of Turkey's border with Syria. "Within a minute of first seeing it I knew I had two choices: go away and tell nobody, or spend the rest of my life working here."

Behind him are the first folds of the Anatolian plateau. Ahead, the Mesopotamian plain, like a dust-colored sea, stretches south hundreds of miles to Baghdad and beyond. The stone circles of Gobekli Tepe are just in front, hidden under the brow of the hill.

Compared to Stonehenge, Britain's most famous prehistoric site, they are humble affairs. None of the circles excavated (four out of an estimated 20) are more than 30 meters across. What makes the discovery remarkable are the carvings of boars, foxes, lions, birds, snakes and scorpions, and their age. Dated at around 9,500 BC, these stones are 5,500 years older than the first cities of Mesopotamia, and 7,000 years older than Stonehenge.

Never mind circular patterns or the stone-etchings, the people who erected this site did not even have pottery or cultivate wheat. They lived in villages. But they were hunters, not farmers.

"Everybody used to think only complex, hierarchical civilizations could build such monumental sites, and that they only came about with the invention of agriculture", says Ian Hodder, a Stanford University Professor of Anthropology, who, since 1993, has directed digs at Catalhoyuk, Turkey's most famous Neolithic site. "Gobekli changes everything. It's elaborate, it's complex and it is pre-agricultural. That fact alone makes the site one of the most important archaeological finds in a very long time."

With only a fraction of the site opened up after a decade of excavations, Gobekli Tepe's significance to the people who built it remains unclear. Some think the site was the center of a fertility rite, with the two tall stones at the center of each circle representing a man and woman.

It's a theory the tourist board in the nearby city of Urfa has taken up with alacrity. Visit the Garden of Eden, its brochures trumpet, see Adam and Eve.

Schmidt is skeptical about the fertility theory. He agrees Gobekli Tepe may well be "the last flowering of a semi-nomadic world that farming was just about to destroy," and points out that if it is in near perfect condition today, it is because those who built it buried it soon after under tons of soil, as though its wild animal-rich world had lost all meaning.

But the site is devoid of the fertility symbols that have been found at other Neolithic sites, and the T-shaped columns, while clearly semi-human, are sexless. "I think here we are face to face with the earliest representation of gods", says Schmidt, patting one of the biggest stones. "They have no eyes, no mouths, no faces. But they have arms and they have hands. They are makers."

"In my opinion, the people who carved them were asking themselves the biggest questions of all," Schmidt continued. "What is this universe? Why are we here?"

With no evidence of houses or graves near the stones, Schmidt believes the hill top was a site of pilgrimage for communities within a radius of roughly a hundred miles. He notes how the tallest stones all face southeast, as if scanning plains that are scattered with archeological sites in many ways no less remarkable than Gobekli Tepe.

Last year, for instance, French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara in northern Syria uncovered the oldest mural ever found. "Two square meters of geometric shapes, in red, black and white - a bit like a Paul Klee painting," explains Eric Coqueugniot, the University of Lyon archaeologist who is leading the excavation.

Coqueugniot describes Schmidt's hypothesis that Gobekli Tepe was meeting point for feasts, rituals and sharing ideas as "tempting," given the site's spectacular position. But he emphasizes that surveys of the region are still in their infancy. "Tomorrow, somebody might find somewhere even more dramatic."

Director of a dig at Korpiktepe, on the Tigris River about 120 miles east of Urfa, Vecihi Ozkaya doubts the thousands of stone pots he has found since 2001 in hundreds of 11,500 year-old graves quite qualify as that. But his excitement fills his austere office at Dicle University in Diyarbakir.

"Look at this", he says, pointing at a photo of an exquisitely carved sculpture showing an animal, half-human, half-lion. "It's a sphinx, thousands of years before Egypt. Southeastern Turkey, northern Syria - this region saw the wedding night of our civilization."

Found Here: http://www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav041708a.shtml

Marcus Wills - The Paul Juraszek Monolith

2011-02-14T23:06:00.000-08:00

Portrait of the artist as a holed man wins the day

Most people paint one good portrait to win Australia's most famous art award, the Archibald Prize. This year Marcus Wills churned out more than 200 to claim a surprise victory.

The 34-year-old Melbourne artist was yesterday crowned the 2006 winner of the $35,000 prize for his surreal work The Paul Juraszek Monolith (after Marcus Gheeraerts), which depicts more than 200 figures crawling over a giant stone head.

It is Wills's first entry.

The work, inspired by an etching by the Flemish engraver Marcus Gheeraerts, features 29 individual portraits in various positions of the Melbourne sculptor Paul Juraszek.

Painting the same face that many times could get tiring for someone less tenacious, but Juraszek's shiny pate was an endless source of inspiration for Wills. "I quite like painting bald heads. Hair can be annoying to paint," he said yesterday.

Wills, 34, spent more than two years on the work and confessed he struggled to finish.

"It just went on and on," he said. "I got so sick of painting rocks, but I don't think I'll ever get sick of painting people."

Among the faces he has portrayed, tucked away in the right-hand corner, is a sly little portrait of Wills himself, holding a Paul Juraszek puppet.

Wills's edged out well-known artists such as Ben Quilty, Jenny Sages and Adam Cullen to win, but was one of many Archibald entries to take a fellow artist as a subject.

The director of the Art Gallery of NSW, Edmund Capon, called the painting "very different, very original".

"In every sense it is a most unexpected choice."

Especially so for the gallery's packing room worker Peter Tsangarides, who bet $30 on Wills's work in Sportingbet Australia's first ever Archibald tipping competition. At odds of 41:1 his long shot paid off.

"About $1200 has come in," he said yesterday, adding that he was drawn to the intricate painting. "You stand back and you just see a skull or whatever, but you look closer and it's full of all these people. I didn't think it would win because it's not the style they usually go for."

Asked if he would be buying a round for his packing room workmates, Mr Tsangarides pointed to the Archibald Prize celebratory function in the next room.

"Yeah, but the best time to win money is when there's free drinks at the bar," he laughed.

The 2006 Photographic Portrait Prize went to Vanila Netto for The Magnanimous Beige Wrap - Part 1 (Contraption). The Sulman Prize was won by Jiawei Shen for Peking Treaty 1901, and the Wynne Prize went to John Beard for The Gap.

The Archibald Prize is open to the public from today.

Found Here: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2006/03/24/1143083960340.html

Hueco Tanks Pictographs & Petroglyphs

2011-02-13T23:13:00.000-08:00

In the desert basins and mountain ranges of the Southwest and northern Mexico, you will discover, on the surfaces of boulders and rock exposures, galaxies of enigmatic figures chiseled or scribed or painted by human hands hundreds to thousands of years ago. These images on stone, says preeminent authority Polly Schaafsma in Indian Rock Art of the Southwest, are “probably man’s most enduring art form.” They also rank high among man’s most beguiling and mysterious expressions of worldviews, belief systems and spirituality.

On stony surfaces across our arid land, you may find, for instance, strangely abstracted and haunting graphic expressions of a mind apparently untethered from reality, presumably the work of a hallucinating shaman reaching for the spirit world. You may find figures, awash in symbolism, of prehistoric deities, rituals, masks, dance, ceremonies and pilgrimages. You can see portrayals of warriors with shields, each covered with the symbols of the owner’s magic. You may find representational, stylized or even whimsical depictions of men, women and children; mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and insects; and agricultural plants, especially corn. You will often see images of human faces, eyes, handprints, footprints and animal and bird tracks. Always, you will find geometric designs – for instance, spirals, concentric circles, zigzags, parallel lines and step-fret shapes – visual odes to a long-forgotten purpose.

Frequently, as you may see, the artists produced their images – called “rock art” by archaeologists – at sites in distinctive geographic settings, for example, canyons, arroyos, streams, ridges, escarpments and mountain foothills, and typically, they chiseled, pecked, scraped, scored and painted on the walls and ceilings of alcoves and rock shelters, the faces of prominent rock exposures, and the surfaces of large boulders. (Images carved into the surface are called “petroglyphs,” those painted onto the surface are called “pictographs.”)

Interpretations

Should you explore the rock art of our deserts, you may become ensnared in one of the great mysteries of Southwestern archaeology: What do the images signify? What do they mean? Puzzling over the images, you may soon recall Winston Churchill’s famous phrase “an enigma wrapped in a mystery” (which he used to describe the impenetrable Soviet Union).

Anthropologists, archaeologists, art historians and other scholars have a difficult time addressing the question. Oftentimes, they cannot look beyond an image to see the abstract notions and beliefs that inspired an artist to produce it. They have few tools for dating most rock art. Sometimes, they cannot correlate rock art with other archaeological records such as structures, fire hearths, potshards, stone tools and bones. Still, they have offered speculations about the meanings, sometimes generating considerable disagreement and controversy.

Anthropologist and investigator Kay Sutherland once suggested to me that prehistoric shamans, who most likely used hallucinogenic plants such as the Sacred Datura to induce an “otherworldly” state, may have produced rock art for use as portals through which they could enter the spirit world. Speaking to the importance of shamans in their book Tapamveni, Patricia McCreery and Ekkehart Malotki said, “The role of the shaman is to benefit and regulate the well-being of his people. He (or she) is capable of soul flight to the upper world or travel to nether realms to mediate with spirits and gods. The shaman combats evil, cures illness, promotes fertility, controls weather, and with the help of animal spirit helpers, ensures success of the hunt.” Shamans probably produced a high percentage of our rock art.

Moreover, as F. A. Barnes said in his Canyon Country Prehistoric Rock Art, “…it is fairly certain that a lot of Anasazi [the Puebloan tradition of the Four Corners region] and Fremont [the Puebloan tradition of southern Utah] rock art was created for ceremonial purposes, whatever its figures depict. Other high probability meanings and uses are sympathetic magic (as depicted by innumerable hunting scenes), territorial claims (such as clan or dwelling area boundary markers), fertility symbols (coition, pregnancy and birth), special individuals (highly decorated or unusual anthropomorphs), supernatural beings (definitely non-real figures, probably for ceremonial use), weather control (clouds, lightning, whirlwinds and rain), record keeping (counting marks), astronomical events (depictions of supernova and solar calendars), cultural intrusions (macaws) and a variety of other minor uses.” Other authorities suggest that rock art figures may depict historic events, migrations, cultural relationships, trade expeditions, maps, traders and trade routes.

In his controversial The Rocks Begin to Speak, La Van Martineau contends that artists produced images as a form of “rock writing.” In one example, he suggests that figures on a vertical rock wall at western Texas’ Hueco Tanks State Historic Site symbolize the story of an 1839 battle between Mexican militia from El Paso and Kiowa raiders from the Southern Plains. He points, for once instance, to an upside-down figure that represents, in his view, a dead Kiowa.

“…of surpassing interest to most general readers,” said Schaafsma, “are the questions: What does it mean? Are these rock drawings a language awaiting interpretation? Interpreting rock art designs is intriguing yet difficult, often impossible.”

In their rock art, the prehistoric and early historic peoples of the Southwest left us with a compelling, if often bewildering, view into their religious and material lives.

Recurrent Symbols

You may find that some of the most fascinating images include those that recur frequently, sometimes in different forms, over a wide range through long time periods. These may hint at cultural contacts, development, affiliations and ranges. Among the most prominent are figures such as Kokopelli (possibly a god of well-being and fertility), Quetzalcoatal (a deity of agriculture, water and fire), Tlaloc (a deity of storms and rain), a Blacktail Rabbit (a symbol of the moon and fertility) and the Storyteller (presumably a keeper of tribal history and mythology).

Kokopelli, often called the “humpbacked flute player,” appears in many forms, possibly spanning a wider area than any other single representational rock-art figure. At least one authority, Michael Claypool, who has taught short courses on Kokopelli (a Hopi word) at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, suggested the possibility that the figure had origins in Peru more than 1000 years ago. A widely experienced archaeologist friend has told me that Kokopelli-like figures turn up, not only across the Southwest and northern Mexico, but also in southern Mexico and Central America. Typically distinguished by an arched back and a clarinet-like flute, Kokopelli appears in Southwestern rock art in many forms, for instance, as a kilt- and sash-clad human, a humpbacked rabbit, a mountain sheep or a locust. A charismatic figure, he appears to take the role of an impregnator of women, a leader of a migration, the choreographer of ceremonial dance, or the guarantor of hunting and farming success. He may be portrayed as dancing, sitting, lying or walking. Historically rooted or mythical, Kokopelli apparently had a pivotal role in ancient rituals and the history of the prehistoric Southwest.

Quetzalcoatal, with origins in the great city-states of southern Mexico, or Mesoamerica, first appeared as a plumed serpent—a snake with a plume of feathers above its head. He gave humankind corn, domesticated animals, irrigation technology and fire. In some Puebloan societies, he commands underground water sources, and, if displeased, he can cause earthquakes and floods, according to Schaafsma. Borne northward into the greater Southwest, possibly by traders and religious proselytizers, Quetzalcoatal apparently evolved from a serpent with a feathered plume into a serpent with a feathered plume and a forward-pointing horn then into a serpent with only a forward-pointing horn and finally into a serpent with a backward-pointing horn. His progression may have been attributable to the influence of pre-Puebloan hunting cultures, which often used animal horns in their symbolism, suggested Sutherland in her “Spirits from the South,” The Artifact, El Paso Archaeological Society. He seems, according to a variety of sources, to be associated with a portfolio of other symbols, for instance, a bearded and helmeted man, a collared jaguar, the spiral, and an outlined cross or star symbol.

Tlaloc, usually signified by goggle eyes, a snarling mouth and bared teeth, also originated in Mesoamerica. Conveyed northward into the Southwest, presumably by Mesoamerican traders and proselytizers, he seems to have ascended in importance in parallel with emergent Puebloan traditions. Closely associated with agriculture and rain, Tlaloc, like Quetzalcoatal, seems to have evolved in his Southwestern manifestations, possibly because of the influence of hunting cultures. From elaborate and stylized faces in Mesoamerica, Tlaloc morphed, for one example, into a figure with a trapezoidal head and trapezoidal body, said Sutherland. “The head has goggle eyes and an ornate head dress; the body is decorated with Mesoamerican design motifs.” Although the connection is uncertain, Tlaloc-like goggle eyes and snarls appear in numerous other types of figures across the Southwest. Often, perhaps in a kind of shorthand recognition of Tlaloc’s omnipresence, only goggle eyes or a snarl appear in rock art galleries.

The rabbit, as an icon of the moon, conceivably had transoceanic origins that pre-date Mesoamerica. In “The Mesoamerican Rabbit in the Moon: An Influence from Han China?” Archaeoastronomy, Charles R. Wicke said, “Representations of a hare or rabbit on the moon are found in the art of ancient China and in Pre-Columbian Mexico. Mythologies of both areas also place a rabbit on the moon. Although such linkage might appear to be arbitrary, a comparison of the visible surface of the full moon with the silhouette of a rabbit does reveal a degree of congruence. Not only the distinctive ears of the rabbit but also other features appear to be delineated on the moon’s surface.” As you might expect, Wicke’s assertion generated considerable controversy. The rabbit, rather than a man’s face, has been seen through time on the surface of the moon by many cultures worldwide. Once it arrived in the Southwest, it took on the features of the native Blacktail Jackrabbit, appearing both on rock art and ceramics.

Storyteller – a name suggested to me by a tenuous source – ranks as one of the more animated human figures in the rock art of the Southwest. Wearing a fanciful headdress and waving arms, Storyteller sits with the left leg folded up beneath him (or her), turning to address presumably rapt listeners. From uncertain origins, Storyteller makes occasional theatrical appearances in rock art panels from western Texas across southern New Mexico and probably beyond.

Found Here: http://www.desertusa.com/mag07/jan/imagesinstone.html

Near the northwestern tip of the Texas Trans-Pecos, some 30 miles east of El Paso,four massive hills of jumbled boulders rise above the desert floor. No doubt this prominent and oddly compelling landmark has had many different names through time. Today it is known as Hueco Tanks. Characterized as an island in the desert, a natural oasis, a spiritual sanctuary, the site has meant many things to many people.

For thousands of years, Native peoples camped here among the hills, drawing on the site's diverse plant and animal resources. Some stayed longer than others, finding a way to eke out a living in the arid Chihuahuan desert. Roughly 900 years ago, people of the Jornada Mogollon culture built a small village and grew corn and other crops in the soils that accumulated at the base of the rocks. More recently, the site was operated as a cattle ranch, among the first and largest in the region. Following several recreational developments, the property became a county park, and finally a state park. The site today still remains a special place for many Native American peoples who find a spiritual connection here.

What attracted people to this place through time was the critical resource needed for sustaining life on the desert—water. The huge red rocks and boulders are cracked and pocked with fissures and holes—huecos—that trap and hold rainwater for months at a time. The location of these natural tanks was known and, in some cases, marked with special symbols and inscriptions on the rocks. For Native peoples, water in the desert must have seemed a special gift, and there is little doubt that this gift was commemorated in ritual expression through time.

Hundreds of paintings—from large panels to small mask-like faces—adorn the canyon walls, overhangs, ceilings of shelters, and small, hard to find places at the site. Unlike the massive displays at rock art sites along the Texas Lower Pecos or in the greater American Southwest, many of the Hueco Tanks pictographs seem to have been deliberately hidden from view. This puzzling aspect, along with the unusual motifs, has provoked substantial debate over the meaning and derivation of the symbols. Researchers also have discovered that there are many more images at the park than meet the eye. Using new computer techniques, photographers have been able to identify and recapture hundreds of faded or previously unknown pictographs. The inventory of masks now numbers more than 200, constituting the largest assemblage of painted masks in North America.

For archeologists, Hueco Tanks State Park is not one but many archeological sites. Encompassed under the rubric 41EP2—the official site designation—are 29 archeological "localities" and more than 270 rock imagery panels bearing evidence of the many different cultures who made the area their home. Some traces amount to little more than scatters of stone toolmaking debris, where hunters may have stopped to resharpen tools and weapons. Others are the remains of campsites with hearths or "ovens" where ancient cooks roasted desert plants. At the small village site, archeologists found traces of small pithouse structures containing hearths and burials. The first structures of their time period in the Hueco Bolson to be excavated, they have provided important evidence about the architectural transition from simple huts to the multi-room pueblos characteristic of later times.

Archeologists, historians, artists, and photographers have tracked and painstakingly documented the often ephemeral cultural remains at this 860-acre park. Part of their challenge, and that of the Hueco Tanks staff, has been to preserve and protect the fragile cultural remains and remarkable rock art imagery while allowing visitors to explore and enjoy the park.

Through the years, visitors and vandals have left their marks on the walls at some of the park's most significant locales. Some painted graffiti over ancient rock art; others inscribed their names and date of their visit, a tradition going back to the 1840s. Striking a balance between public access and preservation of the site's irreplaceable cultural treasures is an ongoing challenge, managed in recent years by capping the number of visitors at a time, showing every visitor an orientation video, and providing entry to certain areas only when accompanied by a trained guide.

In the following sections, we explore the many realms of Hueco Tanks and provide a virtual tour of some of its most unusual, and often most inaccessible, sites. In Natural Setting: A Rocky Oasis on the Desert, we describe the site's distinctive environment and diverse natural resources. Data from packrat middens and other evidence helps us reconstruct the environment of the past and is presented in the Paleoclimate section. In Explorations and Investigations, we trace early accounts of the site and the work that has been done to uncover the cultural history of Hueco Tanks. The Rock Art Imagery section provides a look at some of the most significant examples of Native expression in North America as well as the modern techniques being used to recapture art that has been destroyed by weathering or human activity. This section also includes a gallery of watercolor depictions of Hueco Tanks rock art painted by noted artist Forrest Kirkland in the 1930s. Weaving the Story: The People of Hueco Tanks chronicles the various peoples who have come to this place. Hueco Tanks Village: A Culture in Transition takes a more detailed look at the small agricultural settlement, as revealed through archeolgical excavations and recent research.

In the interactive Kids section, "Secrets of the Desert: The People of Hueco Tanks," Dr. Dirt, the Armadillo Archeologist, introduces K-12 audiences to Trans-Pecos geography, cultural history, and the whys and hows of living in the desert. Included are a timeline and guided tour of pictograph panels and other special places.

Crystal Caves - The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico

2011-02-06T22:55:00.000-08:00

It's "the Sistine Chapel of crystals," says Juan Manuel García- Ruiz. The geologist announced this week that he and a team of researchers have unlocked the mystery of just how the minerals in Mexico's Cueva de los Cristales (Cave of Crystals) achieved their monumental forms.

Buried a thousand feet (300 meters) below Naica mountain in the Chihuahuan Desert, the cave was discovered by two miners excavating a new tunnel for the Industrias Peñoles company in 2000.

The cave contains some of the largest natural crystals ever found: translucent gypsum beams measuring up to 36 feet (11 meters) long and weighing up to 55 tons.

"It's a natural marvel," said García-Ruiz, of the University of Granada in Spain.

To learn how the crystals grew to such gigantic sizes, García-Ruiz studied tiny pockets of fluid trapped inside.

The crystals, he said, thrived because they were submerged in mineral-rich water with a very narrow, stable temperature range—around 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius).

At this temperature the mineral anhydrite, which was abundant in the water, dissolved into gypsum, a soft mineral that can take the form of the crystals in the Naica cave.

The new findings appear in the April issue of the journal Geology.

(Related" "Photo in the News: Giant Crystal-Filled Cave Discovered in California" [September 26, 2006].)

Volcanic Activity

The mining complex in Naica contains some of the world's largest deposits of silver, zinc, and lead.

In 1910 miners discovered another spectacular cavern beneath Naica. Its walls studded with crystal "daggers," the Cave of Swords is closer to the surface, at a depth of nearly 400 feet (120 meters).

While there are more crystals in the upper cave, they are far smaller, typically about a yard (a meter) long.

Nearly the Size of a Basketball Court

The Cave of Crystals is a horseshoe-shaped cavity in limestone rock about 30 feet (10 meters) wide and 90 feet (30 meters) long.

Its floor is covered in crystalline, perfectly faceted blocks. The huge crystal beams jut out from both the blocks and the floor.

"There is no other place on the planet where the mineral world reveals itself in such beauty," García-Ruiz said.

Volcanic activity that began about 26 million years ago created Naica mountain and filled it with high-temperature anhydrite, which is the anhydrous—lacking water—form of gypsum.

Anhydrite is stable above 136 degrees Fahrenheit (58 degrees Celsius). Below that temperature gypsum is the stable form.

When magma underneath the mountain cooled and the temperature dropped below 58 degrees Celsius, the anhydrite began to dissolve. The anhydrite slowly enriched the waters with sulfate and calcium molecules, which for millions of years have been deposited in the caves in the form of huge selenite gypsum crystals.

"There is no limit to the size a crystal can reach," García-Ruiz said.

But, he said, for the Cave of Crystals to have grown such gigantic crystals, it must have been kept just below the anhydrite-gypsum transition temperature for many hundreds of thousands of years.

In the upper cave, by contrast, this transition temperature may have fallen much more rapidly, leading to the formation of smaller crystals.

To Reflood or Not to Reflood

While the chance of this set of conditions occurring on other places in the world is remote, García-Ruiz expects that there are other caves and caverns at Naica containing similarly large crystals.

"The caves containing larger crystals will be located in deeper levels with temperatures closer to, but no higher than, 58 degrees Celsius," he said.

He has recommended to the mining company that the caves should be preserved.

The only reason humans can get into the caves today, however, is because the mining company's pumping operations keep them clear of water. If the pumping is stopped, the caves will again be submerged and the crystals will start growing again, García-Ruiz said.

So what happens if—or when—the mine is closed?

"That's an interesting question," García-Ruiz said.

"Should we continue to pump water to keep the cave available so future generations may admire the crystals? Or should we stop pumping and return the scenario to the natural origin, allowing the crystals to regrow?"

Found Here: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070406-giant-crystals_2.html

Naica is a paradox.

Contrary to many underground natural wonders, Naica is a surprising find. 300 meters deep, it has no natural openings to the surface, so it would have never been found if there hadn’t been the Industrias Peñoles mining complex operating there. Some caves require days of expeditions to reach, and film crews have to live in tents and cook their own food. Naica is the opposite, an improbable “film studio” environment. The cave is accessed by simply driving directly from our production office down a tunnel. Down there, we have plenty of electricity and establish a base camp with lights, computers, food, drinks, miscellaneous equipment, etc. Once the day is over, we drive back up, debrief, drive back to our hotel, eat, shower and sleep in a modern room with wireless Internet access and cable TV. That’s the easy part.

There are two doors between the base camp and the giant crystals.

What lies beyond those doors is another story. The base camp is tropical-like, warm and humid, an uncomfortable set in a stone-carved 100-meter long corridor. The closest you get to the 1st door, the warmer it gets. Open the metal door and you instantly feel a draft of noticeably warmer air. Making your way through another corridor leading to two stone-carved steps, it gets much warmer. You go up the steps, not even three feet higher, but you suddenly feel even more oppressive heat and humidity, it’s hard to breathe and you sweat instantly. You can see the giant crystals stretch in all directions beyond the transparent plastic door. Standing there you tell yourself : “This isn’t too bad… Just like a sauna with obstacles.”

Then you open the plastic door…

A burning wall hits you and you are shocked. Until then you haven’t really experienced Naica. Now you are in a humid hell and your feel your entire body sending you messages: “Get out of there NOW! You are in mortal danger.”

No joke. From that moment on, you are.

But you’re safe for now because you just walked in, full of your precious bodily fluids and electrolytes. Climbing over big crystals, you make your way deeper in the cave, giving 100% of your attention to breathing slowly and not falling on the razor-sharp crystals, you then make a stop and raise your head.

You will remember this moment until your last breath.

The first sight of the giant crystals stretching in all directions is impossible to describe. You are in awe, and yet you have a lot of difficulty appreciating it because your entire body is fighting a losing battle against the elements. The Humidex factor of the combined heat and humidity of Los Cristales cave is double the death threshold. Unprotected you can stay 10 to 15 minutes, after that your body is essentially a walking time bomb ready to overheat and die.

But someone is watching over you.

A voice on the walkie-talkie tells you it’s time to go. You reply back and make your way to the exit. You were never really in danger, because the Naica Project team, who have been filming at Naica for almost 4 years know how to keep you safe.

Naica is one of the most remote, beautiful, dangerous place I’ve ever visited, yet it’s surprisingly easy to access, breathtakingly hard to appreciate and, if you don’t go too far in, it’s very safe.

Read more: http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/episode/into-the-lost-crystal-caves-4636/Overview#tab-mortal-danger#ixzz1DFopklf3

The Naica Mine of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a working mine that is known for its extraordinary crystals. Naica is a lead, zinc and silver mine in which large voids have been found, containing crystals of selenite (gypsum) as large as 4 feet in diameter and 50 feet long. The chamber holding these crystals is known as the Crystal Cave of Giants, and is approximately 1000 feet down in the limestone host rock of the mine.

The crystals were formed by hydrothermal fluids emanating from the magma chambers below. The cavern was discovered while the miners were drilling through the Naica fault, which they were worried would flood the mine. The Cave of Swords is another chamber in the Naica Mine, containing similar large crystals.

The Naica mine was first discovered by early prospectors in 1794 south of Chihuahua City. They struck a vein of silver at the base of a range of hills called Naica by the Tarahumara Indians. The origin in the Tarahumara language seems to mean "a shady place". Perhaps here in the small canyon there was a grove of trees tucked away by a small canyon spring.

From that discovery, until around 1900, the primary interest was silver and gold. Around 1900 large-scale mining began as zinc and lead became more valuable.

During the Mexican Revolution the mine was producing a great deal of wealth. Revolutionary troops entered the town and demanded money from the owners. One of them was assassinated when he refused to pay, causing the mine to shut down from 1911 to 1922.

Just before the mine was closed, the famous Cave of Swords was discovered at a depth of 400 feet. Due to the incredible crystals, it was decided to try to preserve this cave. While many of the crystals have been collected, this is still a fascinating cave to visit. In one part there are so many crystals on one of the walls, they appear to be like an underwater reef moving in a gentle undulating motion in an ocean current.

In April 2000, brothers Juan and Pedro Sanchez were drilling a new tunnel when they made a truly spectacular discovery. While Naica miners are accustomed to finding crystals, Juan and Pedro were absolutely amazed by the cavern that they found. The brothers immediately informed the engineer in charge, Roberto Gonzalez. Ing. Gonzalez realized that they had discovered a natural treasure and quickly rerouted the tunnel. During this phase some damage was done as several miners tried to remove pieces of the mega-crystals, so the mining company soon installed an iron door to protect the find. Later, one of the workers, with the intention of stealing crystals, managed to get in through a narrow hole. He tried to take some plastic bags filled with fresh air inside, but the strategy didn't work. He lost consciousness and later was found thoroughly baked.

When entering the cave our group is issued helmets, lanterns, rubber boots, and gloves. One must then be driven by truck into the main mining tunnel called Rampa Sn. Francisco. While the vertical drop is approximately 1000 feet, the drive is almost a half mile long. The heat steadily increases and women have been observed to begin "glowing". The truck stops in front of a concrete wall with a steel door. The intense heat can prevent brain functioning.

At the end of the tunnel there are three or four steps into the aperture of the cavern itself. It is in this short tunnel. In this short distance the temperature and humidity goes from being uncomfortably warm to literally a blast furnace.

Momentarily, the penetrating heat is forgotten as the crystals pop into view on the other side of the "Eye of the Queen". The entire panorama is now lighted and the cavern has a depth and impressive cathedral-like appearance that was not visible on earlier trips with just our headlamps.

When inside the great cathedral of crystals, the pressure of intense heat create a gamut of emotions and perhaps hallucinations. One can only remain for a short period of time.

Geologists report that these natural crystal formations are incredibly complex, yet so simple. They have a magical or metaphysical personality independent of their chemical structures. There is a magma chamber two to three miles below the mountain and that heat from this compressed lava travels through the faults up into the area of the mine. Super heated fluids carry the minerals the miners are seeking as well as form the crystals. The mine is ventilated; otherwise, it could not be worked. Some parts, however, are not air-conditioned, such as the Cave of the Crystals, and there you feel the heat from the magma deep below. The fluids travel along the Naica fault, enter voids in the bedrock, and then form entirely natural structures that are not easily explained scientifically.

In April 2000, the mining company became confident that the water table on the other side of the fault had been lowered sufficiently to drill.

When they did this, it is almost as if a magical veil of reality was breached and an entirely new world was discovered. Two caverns filled with the Earth's largest crystals were immediately revealed. More discoveries are expected to be made in this magical kingdom of intense natural beauty.

Selenite, the gypsum crystal, named after the Greek goddess of the moon, Selene, due to its soft white light, is said to have many metaphysical and healing benefits. Selenite powder has been used cosmetically for thousands of years to enhance one's natural beauty. It is believed that this crystal assists with mental focus, growth, luck, immunity, and soothes the emotions.

Found Here: http://www.crystalinks.com/mexicocrystals.html

Spirit :: Rear Hazcam :: Sol 2169

2011-01-10T15:20:00.000-08:00

Update: The latest from NASA on the Mars Rover Spirit:
‘No communication has been received from Spirit since Sol 2210 (March 22, 2010).’
NASA has removed two of the Spirit Sol 2169 images, ‘Spirit Front Hazcam 2169′.
The above image, a screenshot from NASA’s Mars Rover gallery. The reason why we captured the screenshot, it contains the Mars Exploration Rover Mission image labeled Spirit :: Rear Hazcam :: Sol 2169. Over at Youtube, the discovery of the UFO video UFO EXCLUSIVE! Breaking News Clear UFO Base Caught on Cam By Mars Rovers December 2010. The video posted by OnLifeMars. A video which highlights the NASA Mars Rover image. Our screenshot, verification the NASA image in the video, is the original image from NASA.
Watch the video and see what you think. Does the Mars Rover image contain what seems to be ‘structures’, a ‘UFO base’ on Mars? Extraterrestrial ‘type’ structures and what seems to be a ‘spaceship’?

YouTube - UFO EXCLUSIVE! Breaking News Clear UFO Base Caught on Cam By Mars Rovers December 2010

A comparison of the ‘structure’ in the Sol 2169 image to a photo of the Spiritlanding platform:

Mars Rover Spirit Platform
In February, NASA posted an image of the same ‘view’. With the following caption:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit recorded this fisheye view with its rear hazard-avoidance camera after completing a drive during the 2,169th Martian day, or sol, of Spirit’s mission on Mars (Feb. 8, 2010). Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

More info on Spirit from NASA in the February update:

NASA’s Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is now parked for the winter. The rover team is commanding Spirit this week to make additional preparations for the Mars southern hemisphere winter season. The team does not plan further motion of the wheels until spring comes to Spirit’s location beside the western edge of a low plateau called Home Plate.
On Sol 2169 (Feb. 8, 2010), the rover’s last drive before winter changed the angles of its suspension system, but it did not produce a hoped-for improvement to the overall tilt of the solar array for catching winter sunshine. Drives since Sol 2145 (Jan. 15, 2010) moved Spirit 34 centimeters (13 inches) south-southeastward. However, a counterclockwise yawing of the rover during the drives prevented it from reducing its southerly tilt.
Spirit will spend the coming winter tilted 9 degrees toward the south, an unfavorable attitude for the solar panels to catch rays from the sun in the northern sky. Spirit’s parking positions for its previous three Martian winters tilted northward. Engineers anticipate that, due to the unfavorable tilt for this fourth winter, Spirit will be out of communication with Earth for several months.
Spirit may enter a low-power hibernation mode within a few weeks, shutting down almost all functions except keeping a master clock running and checking its power status periodically until it has enough power to reawaken. It may go in and out of this mode a few times at the beginning and at the end of an extended hibernation period.

In December, NASA reported:

Spirit Remains Silent at Troy – sols 2471-2477, Dec. 15-Dec. 21, 2010:
No communication has been received from Spirit since Sol 2210 (March 22, 2010).
The project continues to listen with the Deep Space Network and Mars Odyssey orbiter for autonomous recovery communication from a low-power fault case. The project is also conducting a paging technique called “Sweep & Beep” to stimulate the rover in the case of a mission-clock fault. The period of maximum solar insolation (energy production) occurs around mid-March 2011.
Total odometry is unchanged at 7,730.50 meters (4.80 miles).

Currently at the NASA website Mars Rover photo gallery, two images, ‘Spirit Front Hazcam 2169‘ have been removed by NASA. The message: 404 Not Found.

Found Here: http://www.abadss.com/forum/1125-universe-space/156460-ufo-base-mars-bizarre-nasa-mars-exploration-rover-photo.html

Rongorongo Writing - Easter Island

2011-01-05T03:59:00.000-08:00

THE TABLET WRITING OF ANCIENT TIMES
The Deniart RongoRongo series contains 292 unique symbols based on the inscriptions found on ancient tablets from Easter Island.

Many attempts have been made to decipher the script and efforts are continuing to this day. Unlike many writing systems of ancient times, rongorongo is a mixed script, not an alphabet nor a syllabic script.

There are approximately 120 basic rongorongo glyphs and these basic glyphs (main signs) are then affixed (prefixed, infixed, and suffixed), fused (one glyph atop another), and compounded. A "normal rongorongo glyph" can be a mixture of any of these. Each affix, for example a basic glyph of a person in a given position, like a arm pointing in a given direction, adds a different meaning and may change given the context in which it is positioned. As such, it can be said that there may be an almost indefinite number of combinations which in turn may give an indefinite number of meanings and we are not able to provide a translation guide at this time due to these complexities.

Found Here: http://www.deniart.com/rongo.shtml

The famous Moai (big brooding stone statues) are amazing. An island population, which probably never exceeded 15000 people, carved over 1000 of them and erected them all round the coast on straight stone platforms overlooking the villages (their backs to the sea). With their huge red topknots and staring white coral and black obsidian eyes, the villagers can never have forgotten that their important ancestors were watching them! The biggest Moai is 21m tall and weighs about 250 tons but was probably too big to move without metals or animals and still lies in the quarry. Another, 10m tall and over 90 tons is amongst those which have recently been re-erected, but a huge modern crane was imported for the job. The ancient Rapa Nui people also developed a form of writing rongorongo) which has still not been deciphered as only a few examples carved on wooden tablets have survived. Alas, the moais got too many and too big; all the island trees were cut down for statue transport and the culture came to an abrupt end with civil war and the deliberate casting down of almost all the statues just before the first European visitors in 1722. Later, slavery and smallpox reduced the Rapa Nui people to just a few hundred but before that, in the 18th and 19th centuries, the "bird-man" cult flourished as the petroglyphs and reconstructed dwellings at Orongo bear witness.

Ed: The symbols on the Rongorongo include a fascinating multitude of little figures of men in a variety of positions, flying birds, animals, and what appear to be plant, celestial objects, and geometrical forms. They are complex in detail yet at the same time drawn with calligraphic flow. There are hundreds of different signs - far too many to suggest any sort of phonetic alphabet.

Found Here: http://www.zoro.co.uk/Page5/Sth%20Pacific4.html

Rongorongo (pronounced /ˈrɒŋɡoʊˈrɒŋɡoʊ/ in English, [ˈɾoŋoˈɾoŋo] in Rapa Nui) is a system of glyphs discovered in the 19th century on Easter Island that appears to be writing or proto-writing. It cannot be read despite numerous attempts at decipherment. Although some calendrical and what might prove to be genealogical information has been identified, not even these glyphs can actually be read. If rongorongo does prove to be writing, it could be one of as few as three or four independent inventions of writing in human history.^{[note 1]}

Two dozen wooden objects bearing rongorongo inscriptions, some heavily weathered, burned, or otherwise damaged, were collected in the late 19th century and are now scattered in museums and private collections. None remain on Easter Island. The objects are mostly tablets shaped from irregular pieces of wood, sometimes driftwood, but include a chieftain's staff, a bird-manreimiro ornaments. There are also a few petroglyphs which may include short rongorongo inscriptions. Oral history suggests that only a small elite was ever literate and that the tablets were sacred. statuette, and two

Authentic rongorongo texts are written in alternating directions, a system called reverse boustrophedon. In a third of the tablets, the lines of text are inscribed in shallow fluting carved into the wood. The glyphs themselves are outlines of human, animal, plant, artifact and geometric forms. Many of the human and animal figures, such as 200 and 280 , have characteristic protuberances on each side of the head, possibly representing ears or eyes.

Individual texts are conventionally known by a single uppercase letter and a name, such as Tablet C, the Mamari Tablet. The somewhat variable names may be descriptive or indicate where the object is kept, as in the Oar, the Snuffbox, the Small Santiago Tablet, and the Santiago Staff.

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rongorongo

Gigantic Storm With Huge Tail Erupts on Saturn

2010-12-28T00:26:00.000-08:00

An enormous storm has erupted in Saturn’s northern hemisphere.

Amateurs first sighted the storm earlier this month, but the Cassini spacecraft moved into a good position on Dec. 24 to photograph it from about 1.1 million miles away. Earth received the raw and unprocessed shots today.

The storm has a huge central funnel and a long tail that sweeps around Saturn’s northern hemisphere for tens of thousands of miles. A shot in blue light (left) reveals the extent of the tail, but infrared light (right) shows detail of the storm’s amorphous core. The photos were taken exactly a month after Cassini recovered from a solar-flare-induced error that temporarily silenced the spacecraft from Nov. 2 through Nov. 24.

Saturn’s weather is complex like Jupiter’s, but it’s often difficult to see such storms beneath Saturn’s hazy outer atmosphere, wrote Carolyn Porco, a planetary scientist and leader of Cassini’s imaging team, on Twitter.

Images: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Found Here: http://current.com/1f3gt4c

Romulus, Conqueror of Acron, 1812, Jean Auguste Dominque Ingres

2010-12-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

Jean Ingres’ “Romulus, Conqueror of Acron” of 1812. Ingres was born in Montauban in 1780 and at the age of sixteen he went to Paris to study under David. He won the Grand Prix in 1801. He went to Rome in 1807 having secured a following in the art world. He continued to mature and gather a greater gathering until his death in 1867. Romulus, Conqueror of Acron, was created as a large painting for the salon of Napoleon I. It recalls the earliest and mythological history of Rome and reflects the Napoleonic obsession with all things Roman and Classical. The original painting is in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

Found Here: http://finecanvas.com/finecanvasartblog/2010/12/romulus-conqueror-of-acron-1812-jean-auguste-dominque-ingres/

A few important commissions came to him; the French governor of Rome asked him to paint Virgil reading the Aeneid (1812) for his residence, and to paint two colossal works—Romulus's victory over Acron (1812) and The Dream of Ossian (1813)—for Monte Cavallo, a former Papal residence undergoing renovation to become Napoleon's Roman palace. These paintings epitomized, both in subject and scale, the type of painting with which Ingres was determined to make his reputation, but, as Philip Conisbee has pointed out, "for all the high ideals that had been drummed into Ingres at the academies in Toulouse, Paris, and Rome, such commissions were exceptions to the rule, for in reality there was little demand for history paintings in the grand manner, even in the city of Raphael and Michelangelo."^[18] Art collectors preferred "light-hearted mythologies, recognizable scenes of everyday life, landscapes, still lifes, or likenesses of men and women of their own class. This preference persisted throughout the nineteenth century, as academically oriented artists waited and hoped for the patronage of state or church to satisfy their more elevated ambitions."^{[19]

Found Here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Auguste_Dominique_Ingres}