Posts tagged as "art" - Chris Hardie

I work in a world with a lot of artificially constructed structures and images, and those structures and images have a lot of straight lines, right angles and cold, industrial, unfeeling surfaces.  Computer monitors, e-mail composition windows, 8 1/2 x 11 paper with black lines on it, rectangular desks, rectangular parking spaces in dark grey rectangular parking garages, and so on. It's also the case that I try to do creative work: building interactive and engaging websites, collaborating with...

I'm retroactively (for 2009) and proactively (for 2010) spreading the word about the Phantoscope Film Festival that just concluded its third year here in Richmond at the Art Museum.  It's an event that is just absolutely phenomenal to be happening right here in town, but that is sadly under-promoted and under-appreciated locally. Every year, high school students around Indiana are encouraged to submit their films for judging and showing at the festival.  The top ten or so films are selected...

This is a triple header movie review post, hold on tight.  No overt spoilers, but if you like going into movies without any preconceived notions, I hope you'll stop now and come back later when you've seen them for yourself. The Reader is one of those films that haunts my thoughts and dreams for some time after I've seen it - in part because of the subject matter, and in part because of how beautifully and authentically it was rendered.  Director Stephen Daldry rightly relied heavily on the amazing...

I haven't had the chance to blog lately, but here are some bits and pieces to chew on. First, some links: Friday's episode of On the Media was excellent as usual, but did an especially good job of covering the strange way the 11 PM Eastern network television calling of the election works, cognitive dissonance around the world about electing Barack Obama, and difference between real grassroots organizing and just another marketing campaign. Great stuff. Clearing Up Basic Misunderstandings...

Flash mobs are large groups of people who assemble suddenly in a public place to perform an unexpected action, and then quickly disperse. For example, here's a mob hitting New York City: Flash mobs are interesting to me for a few reasons: They're usually groups of strangers who don't necessarily have anything else in common, coming together to do something out of the ordinary for just a few moments. They tend not to be activists protesting anything, and generally aren't trying to make...

My friend and college roommate Matthew Young just had his music featured on NPR's "Open Mic" program. Congratulations!! I've seen Matt's studio in Austin and I'm so impressed with the "handmade" nature of so much of what he does - music, carpentry and beyond. He's quite a guy. You can check out his website (which I designed) at dancingcarpenter.com; you can order a copy of his album Imaginary Muses from there as well.

I attended my first film festival ever this past weekend in Madison, Wisconsin. As someone who generally enjoys movies and sees the art as an important cultural phenomenon (not to mention being interested in writing and making them myself), it was a real treat to participate in an event that is shaped entirely around that phenomenon and the people who love movies. Though I'm sure we didn't take on as much of a hard-core schedule as many others there, we got to see a nice mix of films: from feature-length...