Month: February 2017

Ryoichi Kurokawa

Ryoichi Kurokawa, “Octfalls”, One of Eight Displays in the Installation

“Octfalls” was an eight hour audiovisual installation by Ryoichi Kurokawa involving eight HD displays of waterfalls with eight channel multi sound. It was presented at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011.

Ryoichi Kurokawa is a Japanese artist, born in 1978, who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Kurokawa’s works take on multiple forms such as installation works, recordings, and concert pieces. He composes the time sculpture with the field recordings and the digital generated structures, and reconstructs architecturally the audiovisual phenomenon.

In recent years, his works are shown at international festivals and museums including Tate Modern[UK], Venice Biennale[IT], Transmediale[DE], EMPAC[US], YCAM[JP] and Sonar[ES]. In 2010, he was awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in the Digital Musics & Sound Art category.

Natural Swimming Pools

Photographers Unknown, Natural Swimming Pools

Natural swimming pools use plants or a combination of plants and sand filters to keep the water clean and clear without chemicals. They were developed in Austria and Germany in the 1980s and have since grown in popularity worldwide. They can be designed in a multitude of ways: Some look like natural ponds; others may be disguised as standard tiled pools.

The Twisted Path to Heaven

Photographer Unknown, (The Twisted Path to Heaven)

“You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Nero’s shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, ‘Appear by all means.’ And when Florus inquired, ‘But why do not you appear?’ he answered, ‘Because I do not even consider the question.’ For the man who has once stooped to consider such questions, and to reckon up the value of external things, is not far from forgetting what manner of man he is.”
― Epictetus

 

The Attentive Eye

Photographer Unknown, (The Attentive Eye)

“It would have been hard for Fat Charlie to say exactly when the accumulation of birds on the wire mesh moved from interesting to terrifying. It was somewhere in the first hundred or so, anyway. And it was in the way they didn’t coo, or caw, or trill, or song. They simply landed on the wire, and they watched him.”

― Neil Gaiman, Anansi Boys

Oswaldo Guayasamin

Two Paintings by Oswaldo Guayasamin

Oswaldo Guayasamin was an Ecuadorian eminent painter and sculptor whose heritage traces back to Quechua and Mestizo indigenous populations. Guayasamin dedicated his entire life to art and he was also a passionate supporter of the communist Cuban Revolution and Fidel Castro.

Guayasamin was given a prize for an entire life of work for peace by the United Nations because his humanist work reflects the pain and misery of mankind and speaks against the omnipresent  twentieth century violence, marked by world wars, civil wars , genocides, dictatorships and torture.

French Encryption Machine

French Encryption Machine, !6th Century, Court of Henry the Second

This is in collection of the Musée National de la Renaissance in Paris.

Essentially all ciphers remained vulnerable to cryptanalysis using the frequency analysis technique until the development of the polyalphabetic cipher, most clearly by Leon Battista Alberti around the year 1467, though there is some indication that it was already known to Al-Kindi.

Alberti’s innovation was to use different ciphers (i.e., substitution alphabets) for various parts of a message (perhaps for each successive plaintext letter at the limit). He also invented what was probably the first automatic cipher device, a wheel which implemented a partial realization of his invention.

In the polyalphabetic Vigenère cipher, encryption uses a key word, which controls letter substitution depending on which letter of the key word is used. In the mid-19th century Charles Babbage showed that the Vigenère cipher was vulnerable to Kasiski examination, but this was first published about ten years later by Friedrich Kasiski.