In June 2008 Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin travelled to Afghanistan to be embedded with British Army units on the frontline in Helmand Province. In place of their cameras they took a roll of photographic paper 50 metres long and 76.2 cm wide contained in a simple, lightproof cardboard box.

They arrived during the deadliest month of the war. On the first day of their visit a BBC fixer was dragged from his car and executed and nine Afghan soldiers were killed in a suicide attack. The following day, three British soldiers died, pushing the number of British combat fatalities to 100. Casualties continued until the fifth day when nobody died.

In response to each of these events, and also to a series of more mundane moments, such as a visit to the troops by the Duke of York and a press conference, all events a photographer would record, Broomberg and Chanarin instead unrolled a seven-metre section of the paper and exposed it to the sun for 20 seconds. The results – strange abstract passages and patterns of black, white and variegated hues, all modulated by the heat and the light – deny the viewer the cathartic effect offered up by the conventional language of photographic responses to conflict and suffering. Instead viewers are, by default, invited to question their relationship with images of violence and the true nature of the relations between culture, politics and morality.

Working in tandem with this deliberate evacuation of content are the circumstances of the work’s production, which amount to an absurd performance in which the British Army were, unsuspectingly, playing the lead role by transporting the box of photographic paper from one military base to another, on Hercules and Chinooks, on buses, tanks and jeeps. The box became an absurd, subversive object, its non-functionality sitting in quietly amused contrast to the system that for a time served as its host, revealing its quotidian details, from the logistics of war to the collusion between the media and the military.

Broomberg and Chanarin’s work is in opposition to the traditional role of the photographer as a professional witness who serves as a moral proxy for the spectator back home. “The Day Nobody Died” takes this position to an extreme point – its series of radically non-figurative, unique action-photographs comprising a profound critique of conflict photography in the age of embedded journalism and the current crisis in the concept of the engaged, professional witness.

Here, the camera is a prosthetic devise. It serves as a witness to events that make us want to turn away. We begin with images rejected or repressed in the consciousness of Riley Sharbonno, an Iraq War combat veteran.

Riley has pictures that he doesn’t remember taking, nor does he remember the event itself. Riley looks at these images upon his return home, as if for the first time. He looks at them for the first time along side us, other U.S. citizens; how does that implicate us as witnesses?

Digital data storage holds evidence of the past for possible future recognition. Here we are now. What stories do we tell ourselves, our families, our friends?

The digital archive picturing the Iraq War is ever expanding. Official network media and user generated websites are “refreshed” daily. The ever-expanding archive is ubiquitous and ephemeral. It is also evasive; massive amounts of unedited digital information make it hard to access. Pause to make meaning. Confront this archive, your archive. Manage a narrative that makes sense.

This project is about what a book is, what reading is, what interacting with images is. How a book is deployed, disseminated, and staged all change the way it is used. Evolving technologies, or redeploying of old technologies, changes the way information is received.

What does it mean to offer this digital archive between the two covers of a book? Will the reader focus? Turn off her cell phone? Pay close attention? How does a stable, physical object both limit and liberate actual human experience?

Can such a book mobilize a reader? Can that reader move another reader?

Here is the artist statement written on the front of the book as well as some text and images from the book:

The young people meet in car parks, shopping centres, service stations, or building entrances, which they transform into social places only through their presence. Even though people are the focus of the pictures, the architecture of the given localities also plays an important role. They shape Zielony’s pictures just as much as the social relations between the people living there: the urban surroundings intensify the sense of boredom and tristesse. They are places you feel you have seen before. At the same time, the chosen scenes seem surreal, as if they were abandoned film sets. Now they function as stages on which the young people present themselves.

Thanks to global advertising, music videos, films, and Internet portals like MySpace, their postures, facial expressions, clothing, and accessories speak the same language whether they live in Marseilles, Bristol, or Halle Neustadt. They move with great self-assurance before the camera, always intent on projecting a certain image of themselves. As if the promise the future holds is to be discovered so that life can finally begin. Until then they are in a state of wait-and-see. It is this transitional situation that Zielony’s pictures capture at various levels: adolescents in puberty, between childhood and adulthood; between stagnation and hope; intensified by the mixed light of dawn and dusk when many of the photos were shot.

Zielony works only with the light available, without flash or artificial light. Street lights, the sidelights of parked cars, or lighted windows create a singular atmosphere that characterises the place just as much as the architecture. His photos are in the tradition of the picture story, something between intimate proximity and observing distance. His intention is not to moralise or instruct; he is interested in this “completely casual form of social life” that is apparent in the young people’s hanging about. In contrast to classical documentations, his pictures exceed the boundaries of artistic work. He juxtaposes various genres, such as individual portraits, group pictures, detailed views, landscape and architectural pictures, and action photos, developing a form of narration similar to that found in films.

The book is made up of thirteen chapters documenting young people in various locations around the globe. Usually photographed at night, the teens are invariably drawn to generic locales like car parks, gas stations and other public spaces. As the book’s title suggests, their is no story. But this, in fact, is the story of so many young people around the world. They gather at night and wait for something to happen. In an interview included in the book, Zielony quotes one girl he photographed who said, “We’re not bored. Boredom is just a word for what we do anyway.”

There’s a latent narrative,” Zielony says in the book’s interview, “It’s in the situations, in the youth’s imaginations. You can’t say that nothing is happening. My photo series disclose this potential narrative.

The exhibition at The Modern Institute includes Merkaba, a large new sculpture comprising of thirty-six neon tubes connected together and controlled by the audience through a snare drum and a unique computer game. The aim of the computer game when it was included in Made in Germany was to maintain balance while collecting ‘love’ and ‘freedom’ objects; when successfully collected the Merkaba achieved enlightenment and radiated light. Now created as a large-scale sculpture in this new exhibition, Merkaba will both create and reflect an atmosphere throughout the gallery. Alongside Merkaba, Bell will show a number of sculptures, drawings and paintings.

Upstairs at The Modern Institute, Bell has invited Berlin based philosopher, Marcus Steinweg to present Diagrams a series of diagrammatic drawings. Of these works, Steinweg has said; “The diagrams are philosophical visualizations of thoughts and concepts. It is not the aesthetic result that matters but the clearness of the idea from which it emerges.” At 8pm during the preview Steinweg will give a talk about the experience of art.

50 Gallon oil drum

Angle Grinder¾ -1″ Cold Chisel.

Metal file

Stout leather gloves

A bucket of sand

Matches

Make sure the oil drum is empty of all liquid before working with it. It helps to set a fire in the oil drum to burn off any waste but this is very smoky, smelly and generally unhealthy and should only be done well aware from residential areas!

Preparing the top

· The base of the oil drum will become the top of the charcoal kiln
· Use the angle grinder to cut off the base of the oil drum. Cut from the top and inside of the metal rim. You need to leave two protruding shelves on the rim. Later these will be used to support the lid.
· Wearing the leather gloves use the file to remove all the ragged edge left from the angle grinding on the drum and the cut section.

Preparing the base

· On the underside of the drum (ie the former top) use the cold chisel to punch five or so holes as shown in addition to the oil drum outlet hole.

Making Charcoal

· Stand the drum on three bricks and seal the base with soil and turf except for an air inlet of 6-9inches diameter.
· Stand a post up the middle of the oil drum and then tightly pack round with 2-5cm thick wood.

· Pull out the vertical post and drop down a lighted firelighter, cover with more sticks and let the wood catch fire.
· Once the fire is established put the cut-off section on as a lid supported by the two shelves left on the oil drum.

· Seal the rim with sand, yes it has to be as this forms a good seal. You will notice that there are two holes left. These are the chimneys to allow the smoke to get out.
· Thick white smoke will appear first but as the water and other material is steamed off the smoke after about three hours will change to a blue haze, which is the charcoal beginning to burn. At this point close all the air inlet/outlets and leave to stand overnight.

Problems to watch out for

More ash than charcoal: Too much air got in during the burn so the wood burnt rather than heated up. Reduce the air inlet next time and pack the turfs around the base more tightly. Did you use sand? If not use it!

Mainly inadequately charred wood (Brown ends) rather than charcoal: The burn did not get hot enough. Make sure the fire has really got established at the start before putting the lid on. Also may be not enough air got in and the air inlet at the base may need to be made larger. Sometime the wood gets suspended in the kiln and gets out of contact with the burn. A few taps on the side helps to avoid this. Save the brown ends for starting the next burn.

Historically, production of wood charcoal in districts where there is an abundance of wood dates back to a very ancient period, and generally consists of piling billets of wood on their ends so as to form a conical pile, openings being left at the bottom to admit air, with a central shaft to serve as a flue. The whole pile is covered with turf or moistened clay. The firing is begun at the bottom of the flue, and gradually spreads outwards and upwards. The success of the operation depends upon the rate of the combustion. Under average conditions, 100 parts of wood yield about 60 parts by volume, or 25 parts by weight, of charcoal; small scale production on the spot often yields only about 50%, large scale was efficient to about 90% even by the seventeenth century. The operation is so delicate that it was generally left to colliers (professional charcoal burners).

Much of Derges’s recent work has been made at night in the open air; using the natural world as her darkroom she has quite literally invented a new way of making pictures. In her newest series, Derges has tracked the night sky with a camera and returned to the darkroom to combine camera based and camera-less techniques that result in images that are at once recognisable, and yet not quite what they seem.

Susan Derges has work in museums and public collections all over the world, including the Hara Art Museum, Tokyo, MOMA in New York. She will also take part in the project Coast at the Zuiderzee Museum in the Netherlands in 2010/11. In October 2010 Susan Derges will be one of five artists taking part in Shadow Catchers, a major survey of camera-less photography at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. A Little Bit of Magic Realised;is an exhibition at Ingleby Gallery (26 November 2010 – 29 January 2011) running parallel to Shadow Catchers, which will focus on the wider career of Susan Derges and Garry Fabian Miller in the context of early historical photographic experiments.

Susan makes photograms drawn directly from the landscape, creating a conversation between light, photographic materials and  materials found in the landscape.

i think that these are stunning, yet then she ‘makes’ something like this:

i guess you cant score all the time. click here to watch a short video of her work.

had to reexamine almost every aspect of Geology. Plate tectonics has proven to be so useful that it can predict geologic events and explain almost all aspects of what we see on the Earth. Although we have discussed plate tectonics throughout the course, in this chapter and lecture we look at how the theory came to be discovered and some of the implications for the evolution of the Earth.

Alfred Wegner was a German Meteorologist who studied ancient climates in the early 1900s. Like most people the jigsaw puzzle appearance of the Atlantic continental margins, caught his attention. He put together the evidence of ancient glaciations and the distribution of fossil to formulate a theory wherein the continents moved over the surface of the Earth, sometimes forming large supercontinents and other times forming separate continental masses. He proposed that prior to about 200 million years ago all of the continents formed one large land mass that he called Pangea .
The weakness of Wegner’s theory, and the reason it was not readily accepted by geologists was that he proposed that the continents slide over ocean floor. Geophysicists disagreed, stating the ocean floor did not have enough strength to hold the continents and too much frictional resistance would be encountered.
In 1950s and 1960s, studies of the Earth’s magnetic field and how it varied through time (paleomagnetism) provided new evidence that would prove that the continents do indeed drift. In order to understand these developments, we must first discuss the Earth’s magnetic field and the study of Paleomagnetism.

The Earth has a magnetic field that causes a compass needle to always point toward the North magnetic pole, currently located near the rotation pole. The Earth’s magnetic field is what would be expected if there were a large bar magnet located at the center of the Earth (we now know that this is not what causes the magnetic field, but the analogy is still good). The magnetic field is composed of lines of force as shown in the diagram here. A compass needle or a magnetic weight suspended from a string, points along these lines of force. Note that the lines of force intersect the surface of the Earth at various angles that depend on position on the Earth’s surface. This angle is called the magnetic inclination. The inclination is 0o at the magnetic equator and 90o at the magnetic poles. Thus, by measuring the inclination and the angle to the magnetic pole, one can tell position on the Earth relative to the magnetic poles.

In the 1950s it was discovered that when magnetic minerals cool below a temperature called the Curie Temperature domains within the magnetic mineral take on an orientation parallel to any external magnetic field present at the time they cool below this temperature.At temperatures above the Curie Temperature, permanent magnetization of materials is not possible. Since the magnetic minerals take on the orientation of the magnetic field present during cooling, we can determine the orientation of the magnetic field present at the time the rock containing the mineral cooled below the Curie Temperature, and thus, be able to determine the position of the magnetic pole at that time. This made possible the study of Paleomagnetism (the history of the Earth’s magnetic field). Magnetite is the most common magnetic mineral in the Earth’s crust and has a Curie Temperature of 580oC