You are currently browsing heitoralvelos's articles.
I am currently curating Nomadic.0910 – meetings between art and science. And I am working on its image, and decided to base it on photos of people eating soup – a metaphor for the transdisciplinary melting pot, a mix of ingredients.
So… I need your help: please send me images of people eating soup – hi-res, lo-res…. all can be used for posters, programs, e-flyers. You will obviously be credited. Please make sure the soup-eaters don´t mind being turned into metaphors.
The email address:
nomadic . meetings @ gmail . com
And by the way… join us Sept 17 in Porto for the opening conference: Stories of Art and Science. It promises to be outstanding.
Yesterday in Lisbon, Parque das Nações:
Mark your calendars:
September 12
Lisbon, Teatro Maria Matos
Official Inauguration of KREV Consulate
As part of the Creating Music and Designing Interactive Music workshop by Bruce Pennycook, I will be performing a DJ set at Maus Hábitos in Porto, Portugal. The theme: FuturePlaces. Some weird shit, I assure you.
Friday 17 July
9pm-midnight
Yowza!
When I read the news on that day, at 10h30pm local time, I had the chance to follow the unfolding of events in real time on the web, as, one by one, news outlets confirmed his death. I must confess I didn´t feel much emotion – MJ is an icon, and the actual person behind the icon we will never actually know, however much we keep forgetting this – but, interested in media studies as I am, it was fascinating to follow the huge storm unfolding exponentially in sites, forums, fan communities.
Then I said to myself: “here´s a subject I will not write about, except possibly on an academic paper, referring to the media phenomenon”. Sounds terribly snobbish, but I´m being honest – I was immediately aware that we would be endlessly bombarded with viewpoints, tributes, poems, essays, opinions. I felt like I had nothing to add about MJ, the persona.
I still think I have nothing to say. But this evening I came across the best words I´ve ever read about him. Really, it´s a short yet monumental essay.
The comments aren´t bad either.
Spotted on an online banner advertising higher degrees at a Portuguese University:
The future looks shaky!…
Here is a picture taken at sunset in Porto, Portugal, at the longest day of the year. Every year I celebrate the Summer solstice in a different manner; this year I celebrated it amongst my closest friends, wrapping up a historical Ph.D thesis. This is the view from his living room, 32 minutes after we had placed the last period on the Word document.
This is only the beginning, folks!
… you get the drift, it´s only a vowel at the very end, anyway. Weird, creepy, fringe, spooky, exciting… you name it: advertising has been hunting it down for decades. So you know it must be good – before processing, that is. Eno used to run a label under this flag. Pretty run-of-the mill stuff these days, but back then it must have been the epitome of anti-establishment intellectualism. I still enjoy Eastley, Budd and Adams on occasion. And Nyman – his only work of genius was here, everything else afterwards was just too overbloated and impossible to digest.
So………… Obscura.
Someone at UTA-P tipped me to this: Atlas Obscura.
Come on, guys… you know Portugal. It is the epitome of weird – in a subtle, pseudo-conservative, not-always-fun kind of way. Let´s turn the tables then……..
Please contribute to Atlas Obscura and help acknowledge Portugal as the Official Worldwide Capital of Weird it has been all along. I mean, this is what is going on in Austin… what have we got to lose?
IMHO, this has to be the best piece of news coming out of the European elections:
Sweden’s Pirate Party has won a seat in the European Parliament.
Read all about it here.
I am not praising rampant piracy – I am simply hoping an actual debate concerning the deep, inevitable changes in cultural consumption can finally begin to be taken seriously. I mean, not that long ago the powers that be were arguing that piracy was ruining the lives of corn growers… Which could be translated as something like: “Have you done your good deed of the day and bought your megasize bucket of salty popcorn at your local multiplex, baby?”
On another note… why do kids insist on consuming Britney´s latest, anyway? There are huge wells of outstanding, copyright-free music and movies being made as we speak. So dig into those, will ya?
For a deeper perspective into it all, this is the one to go for. Do your homework.
I have been one of the latest victims of a silent plague: the hard drive crash. It all happened in a second – the USB lead was tangled, and the external disk fell while hard at work. Hundreds of gigabytes suddenly evaporated into thin air – or more accurately, shut themselves inside a bolted box.
After a fairly brief moment of vertigo, where my digital life paraded in front of my eyes, I regathered myself and began working out what to do: Option one – contact the pros. I did right away, and they said they could not do a thing. Option two – rescue information from a prior partial backup I had erased. I did and the software rescued 23,000 files – unnamed and randomly organised!
So this is where I am: I recovered a significant part of what I had lost, but what are the odds of finding the time and determination to clean up and identify 23,000 files? Close to none, I´d say, given my current state of work overflow. I bravely decided to soldier on without a digital past.
A hard drive crash has an element of mourning: there is a life that is suddenly left without a memory, there are documents and matters and commitments that are simply extinguished, and one is left in a strange vacuum of sorts, faced with the need to reconstruct a narrative from scratch. Yet once the shock fades, we realise life goes on, and we actually have the opportunity to be more selective in regards to our references and priorities. I certainly would not call this a blessing in disguise, but optimism makes me see the good that comes out of the accidental.
Maybe there should be a social network dedicated to this digital tragedy, one where volunteers would help rebuild one another´s archives. Maybe there already is such a thing, I shall find out.
To all of you out there… I only have one piece of advice, one I had been given but ignored under the assumption that these are the kinds of things that happen to others:
Back up your stuff!!! Now!!!
Here are the recently conceived radio jingles for Future Places 2009. Thanx to autodigest for the soundtrack, and Vicki for the sexxyvoxx. Do add them to your podcast, we love and support cc to the best of our abilities!
Portuguese version (an exercise in phonetics)
Dear J.: listen and reminisce.
