Chris’ brother Mike told us about this great series of music videos produced by a French music blog called La Blogotheque. They produce wonderfully casual videos like this one of Andrew Bird walking through Montmartre.
You might have to sit through a 15 second long commercial to see the embedded video. Here’s a link if you don’t want to wait.
Artists Sarah Cockings and Laurence Symonds created this whimsical balloon they call Is Land. They presented it at a UK art and music festival and had intended to show it off at this year’s Burning Man, but some dudes had another idea for it.
Witnesses saw a small group of malicious festival goers, two in a dingy, cut all five tether ropes holding the helium structure at 3am on the Sunday morning of the Secret Garden festival allowing it to float away. The daring £9000, six month project by RCA graduates Sarah Cockings and Laurence Symonds simply floated off into the atmosphere, leaving them completely deflated.”
The good news is, a replacement balloon has been sponsored, but I can’t help but wish that that one gets let go as well. But maybe version two will have a GPS beacon?
On a related note we’re still running out of helium.
I wasn’t able to see it when it was performed a few weeks ago, but Retta sent me a video of her Puppet Lab performance at St. Ann’s Warehouse in New York. Check it out in the video below.
Retta says of the Puppet Lab workshops, “It was incredible to spend nine months working on the development of an idea, with no pressure and all sorts of feedback and encouragement and amazing mentors.”
Previously she’s studied with Dan Hurlin, one of the artists who sat on the excellent panel I saw last January where he warned against people building puppets and “wiggling them around.”
When I mentioned that to Retta she said, “That’s funny. The other puppet builders we talk to all say “everyone does it their own way—just build a mock up and start playing, learn what it can do, and then adjust it.”
