Brain Pickings

Film Spotlight: GLASS

What roller coasters have to do with German opera and Martin Scorsese.

Philip Glass is easily our greatest living composer. His operas — like Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and The Voyage — have gotten a multitude of standing ovations throughout the world’s leading houses. Sometimes controversial, often revolutionary, and always extraordinary, he has collaborated with cultural legends like Woody Allen and David Bowie and scored critic darlings like Notes on a Scandal, The Hours, The Truman Show and Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, influencing the musical and intellectual currents of our time.

In 2005, filmmaker Scott Hicks (Shine) began shooting a documentary in honor of Glass’ 70th birthday in 2007. So, over the next 18 months, he followed the iconic composer across 3 continents, with unprecedented access to every corner of his life.

The result, GLASS: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts, is a fascinating film revealing the most intimate and complex layers of the man’s remarkable character. From his annual ride on the Coney Island Cyclone roller coaster to the grand premiere of his new opera in Germany, the film treks the intricate intersection between the personal and the professional, an inextricable parallel of passions so fundamental to genius.

The film is structured in 12 chapters, each exploring a different facet of Glass’ life and work. It offers a portal into his history and past, the elements that shaped his work, all filtered through the present-day experience.

What makes GLASS so powerful is precisely this intimacy of perspective that captures who Glass is in everyday life — it’s as close as we can get to understanding genius, the mosaic of character and personal passions and quirks and eccentricities that shapes the creative output of an exceptional artist.

See the brilliant film on DVD or, for the budget-impeded, on YouTube video of questionable quality. [UPDATE: The video is no longer available and now links to something completely different. Boo.]

HT @baseworld

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Book Spotlight: Design Revolution

What soccer balls have to do with blind children and water transportation in Africa.

In 2008, in the midst of the “going green” craze, San-Francisco-based product designer and activist Emily Pilloton came to the restless realization that design can be so much more than pure aesthetics, and certainly more than a mere fad — it could, with a completely nonpageantry sentiment, really change the world.

So she launched, with $1,000 from her desk at Architecture for Humanity, Project H Design — a radical nonprofit supporting initiatives for “Humanity, Habitats, Health and Happiness.”

With hundreds of international volunteer designers and 9 global chapters, Project H crusades for industrial design as a potent solution for social issues. From education in Uganda to homelessness in L.A., the project’s global-to-local model offers a tangible, truly transformational implementation of design as a change agent.

This fall, Project H is releasing Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People — a fascinating anthology of 100 contemporary design products and systems that change lives in brilliantly elegant ways.

From a high-tech waterless washing machine, to low-cost prosthetics for landmine victims, to Braille-based Lego-style building blocks for blind children, to a DIY soccer ball, the book reads like a manual, thinks like a manifesto, and feels like a powerful jolt of fire-in-your-belly inspiration.

Pilloton was recently awarded a $15,000 Adobe Foundation grant to support work on the book. Here, she talks — passionately and candidly — about the Project H mission and the very real, practical ways in which design matters.

Get yourself a copy of Design Revolution: 100 Products That Empower People — we couldn’t recommend it more.

via TrackerNews

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Found, Photographed, Imagined: Habitat Machines

Digital deconstruction, or what our past, our future, and a waffle iron have in common.

Books like Evidence really catapulted found-object art into the mainstream a few years ago. But they have nothing on artist David Trautrimas, whose Habitat Machines series transforms everyday objects into eerie, fantastical, neo-industrial buildings.

Trautrimas collects old gadgets, from waffle irons to electric razors to oil cans, photographs them, then de- and re-constructs them digitally into retro-futuristic landscapes that bridge what is and what could be in a surreal, haunting way.

Pencil sharpeners become restaurants, coffee cups become bird feeders, post boxes become townhouses.

Habitat Machines is currently exhibited at Toronto’s LE Gallery, with limited-edition prints available for purchase.

via Inhabitat

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