River of words

We live in a society of cut-up words; I’m interested in the aesthetics of data visualization and what we can make of fragments…made even more interesting when combined with social networking and powerful databases. Check out:

WeFeelFine. Pretty? Useless? Pretty useless? Read more about it at Museum 2.0.

Moveable Type. An installation located in the lobby of The New York Times building. A cool way to regurgitate words.

Black Balloons

I’m sure everyone is ‘over’ winter, working and the daily grind. Take time out, sit back and watch William Lamson. I found this link to his videos on Rocketboom. I didn’t know balloons could be so amusing.

The Danube Exodus – Film by Peter Forgacs on Vimeo

The Hungarian filmmaker Péter Forgács is one of the most prominent so-called found footage filmmakers. In particular home movies and amateur films serve as the basis of stories he reveals and compose by using recovered personal and historical events.

He is primarily interested in the way in which these films seem to depict only happy moments, but on closer consideration they also appear to tell a hidden history, which can be brought back to the surface by the recycling filmmaker.

In the travelogue The Danube Exodus, he documents the Jewish exodus from Slovakia just before the beginning of World War II. In two boats, a group of nine hundred Slovak, Austrian Jews tried to reach the Black Sea via the river Danube, in order to get to Palestine from there. Forgács based his film on the amateur films of Captain Nándor Andrásovits, the captain of one of the boats.
He filmed his passengers while they prayed, slept and even got married. At the end of this journey, it is clear that the boat will not return empty: a reverse exodus takes place, this time of repatriating Bessarabian Germans, fleeing to the Third Reich because of the Soviet invasion of Bessarabia.

more about "The Danube Exodus – Film by Peter For…", posted with vodpod

Peter Forgacs

more about "Peter Forgacs", posted with vodpod

The first episode of the Private Hungary series tells the Bartos family Saga: a talented amateur filmmaker Zoltán Bartos, a chanson composer and lumber businessman made more than five hours of 9,5mm amateur film from the late twenties until the mid sixties. In 1944 the Hungarian “Quisling government” plundered the half Jewish Bartos family. Following the Nazi period, surviving the war in a Forced Jewish Labor unite, Zoltán divorced and remarry. Later the Communists rage the Hungarian citizen’s life; in 1949 his plant was nationalized and lost everything again, except his humor.