The first is one I have some experience with from my days in elementary school in Illinois. When I was in fifth grade, my bus driver, who was also an avid reenactor, came and talked to our class on the war, while dressed as a Confederate soldier. It was really something cool to see and got me interested in reenacting myself (unfortunately, I do not have enough cash to get started yet, but some day) and later into public history. I think reenactors should be encouraged to present to schools, as seeing someone dressed in period attire is a wonderful way to introduce the war to younger people. In addition, reenactors do not have to just be soldiers, as civilian reenactors could portray and talk about how the war affected the home front. Further, if looking for a presentation on slavery, what better way to illustrate the evil of it than by having reenactors talk about the Underground Railroad, slave life, and African American experiences. For example, several students, professors, the college chaplain, and I participated in a play when I attended Illinois College, where we acted in several skits dealing with different contributions of my alma mater to the Underground Railroad. I would like to think that it was a great educational tool for the local children in attendance. I hope to use reenacting in the classroom when I finally become a professor, as it is a unique way to present history.

The other idea involves war gaming as an educational tool. There are many good PC games on the war that involve unit level operations and tactics. Students could have a lesson on a particular battle, then take command and see how they would lead troops. In addition to PC games, students might have a great time learning about battles and tactics of the war through more traditional war gaming, including counters and miniature soldiers. Plus, the more traditional method may be easier than attempting to link several computers and providing the software. War gaming is a very unique and fun way to get students interested in the war, as it allows them to understand what it took to lead the armies in the war.

Recall the diorama fiasco in Texas, where high school students built a diorama of the war's last battle at Palmetto Ranch, Texas. Those students learned about the war through a unique lesson. I can only imagine how much greater appreciation those students have for history and the Civil War after building that diorama, however, when it was destroyed, I bet their enthusiasm was curtailed. This unfortunate incident does not mean that a diorama project is a great way to get students into history.

Overall, bringing reenactors into the classroom, using war games, and building dioramas are all great ways to learn about the war. There are many other great ideas to engage students, but I encourage educators to look at these ideas as potential teaching tools.

Charles Matton (and here)

Not easy to take in from just jpegs on the internet, so here's some key info: These are miniature spaces, not more than a few feet in any direction. Matton is apparently more known in Europe, not as much here. Not at all midwestern, just wanted to post it.  Maureen Mullarkey's a fan. More images after the jump.

In Deutschland ist das Konzept der cubicles (Bürowürfel?) zwar nicht so verbreitet, wie in den Staaten, aber auch der eine oder andere Schreibtisch hier könnte sicher eine fatalistische Tischverzierung vertragen.

Leider ist die Auswahl im Moment noch sehr stark eingeschränkt. Die bastelbaren Katastrophen beschränken sich im Moment noch auf den Absturz der Hindenburg oder das Sinken der Titanic, aber offensichtlich sind weitere Katastrophen in Vorbereitung. Warum 9/11 noch nicht als Diorama verfügbar ist, ist mir ein Rätsel.

Auch die jetzige Finanzkrise hätte eigentlich längst ein eigenes Diorama verdient. Aber was darstellen? Eine der zusammenbrechenden Investmentbanken? Eine Wallstreet mit angehängtem "Konkurs" Schild?

Ich bin seitdem natürlich ständig am überlegen, welche urdeutschen Katastrophen auf dieser Seite eigentlich fehlen.

Spontan fielen mir die olympischen Spiele 1972 in München ein. Allerdings bin ich mir nicht sicher, ob man sich bastelbogentechnisch auf das Attentat auf die israelischen Sportler oder doch den Auftritt der Goaslschnalzer während der Eröffnungsfeier konzentrieren sollte. ;)

Gerade zweites hat dafür gesorgt, dass Deutsche in amerikanischen Cartoons ständig in Lederhose herumlaufen.

Wie sieht es mit anderen Ideen für ein hübsches Diorama aus? Die große Koalition? Atomausstieg? 16 Jahre Helmut Kohl? Oder doch wieder in die alte Nazikiste greifen und so etwas wie den Brand des Reichstages oder die Machtergreifung Hitlers?

Kaum hatte ich jedenfalls die Dioramas verdaut, stolperte ich auf einmal über immer mehr aberwitzige Bastelseiten und entsprechende Bastelbögen.

Da wäre beispielsweise eine riesige Auswahl auf papercraft.net. Vor allem im Bereich Videospiele gibt es offenbar nichts, was man nicht basteln kann. Das man auch kleine Maschinen aus Papier basteln kann, beweist die Seite im Bereich Paper Automata.

In den gleichen Bereich fällt zum Beispiel diese Zugpfeife, welche man bei Ehrensenf in Aktion erleben kann. Unten auf der Seite findet sich ein Amazon-Link auf ein weiterführendes Buch, mit dem man bei Interesse tiefer in die Materie einsteigen kann.

Sollte euch nun eine bastelbare Idee gekommen sein und ihr außerdem einigermaßen erfahren im Umgang mit Blender sein, hier noch ein kleines Fundstück, das euch erklärt, wie ihr aus dem Programm heraus mit dem mitgeliefterten Unfold Skript und etwas Fleißarbeit aus einem 3D Objekt einen hübschen Bastelbogen erstellt.

Blenderkönner, die einen Bastelbogen für das oben auf der Seite abgebildete IQ-Atrophie Gehirn zustande bringen, dürfen das gerne in den Kommentaren kundtun. :)

Hätte ja nie gedacht, dass das Thema basteln so geeky sein kann. Ich dachte immer, der Wunsch zu basteln stirbt mit dem Austritt aus der Grundschule ab, und erwacht erst wieder, wenn man sich selbst in einem Seniorenkreis wiederfindet, um für den Weihnachtsbasar ein bisschen Weihnachtsschmuck herzustellen. :lol:

Ob ein Investment in die Klebestift- und Bastelscherenindustrie die Portfolioverluste durch Investments im Finanzsektor wieder wettmachen könnte?

Start the play 
Synthesize me 
Make me your 
Love and hate machine 
And I can serve you better 
Start the true 
Emotion scheme 
Till I'm no longer forced 
To keep my vital functions 
Synthesize me 
And reboot 
I need to start again 
I need to make it different 
All unguarded 
All without 
The will to play along 
benumb its futile feelings 
I'm half alive 
My skin's intact 
I am only staring at 
I'm half alive 
My skin's intact 
I am only staring at the blade 
[synthesize me lyrics on http://www.01lyrics.com ]
Synthesize me 
Wash away 
The trash I'm piling up 
To mesmerize the moments 
I'll drop the needle 
My settings work 
No stunted interactions 
No doubts no paranoia 
I'm half alive 
My skin's intact 
I am only staring at 
I'm half alive 
My skin's alive 
I am only staring at the blade 
The blade 
My skin's intact 
I am only staring at 
I am only staring at 
The blade 
The blade 
The blade

The process of achieving the diorama effect essentially works around shifting or reducing the depth of field in a shot. This can be done one of two ways; you can change the depth of field in the shot with a tilt-shift lens, or you can use Photoshop to do the same thing, with a lot more freedom.

Alcune sono veramente ben fatte.

È pure nato un sito ad hoc: CityShrinker.

For people who don't know its from an anime series called Gundam, specifically Mobile Suit Gundam: 0079, the original series. I've had this model for about a year now and haven't started so I guess its about time :/ The diorama will probably consist of a scene similar to the box art, when Char invades Jaburo, the undergound Federation base (Sorry, went fanboy there for a second). Also in relation to this I just bought a new airbrush, the Iwata HP-CS, it's double action and has a gravity feed, which is exciting. Anyways hopefully I'll have sketchs and maybe even some pictures soon. More to come

from a Japanese model show, pictures from some Russian photo-collection site

Porque si creíais que teníais buen pulso por llevar una taza de café de la cocina a la mesa del comedor sin derramar nada, estábais equivocados.

O por hacer una línea recta muy larga.

Nada, nada.

Tener buen pulso permite hacer cosas como las siguientes.

¡Y en papel!

We don't have access to a craft store.  We made most of the thing in the diorama from playdough and drew them using Paint Shop Pro7.  There is a little swamp/wetland in the background that you can't see in the picture with a lily and lily pads and water ferns.  We made cattail from Q-tips.  I tried to get Brian to be more neat and orderly, but I think he did really well. If he had had his way he would not have any homework or projects. Although it was fun to work on with Brian, I am so glad that it is finished.

the biosphere:

the dioramas:

all images are copyrighted by richard barnes and may not be reproduced in any way without permisssion.

Los desastres siempre son noticia económicamente lucrativos, si no lo creen preguntenle a los medios informativos. Esta ocasión Spitefuls lo hace de una manera divertida, presentando dioramas con los más famosos desastres de la historia, la colección se va apliando día a dia, por lo que no deben dejar de visitarlos.

Ir por los dioramas

I don't act sad anymore. I wear my new-found happiness like jewels.

So what. My bed is a warm cocoon.

To tell you the truth, I am all alone and wondering why I let him in my bed last week. I would rather not let him in at all then have these few impassioned nights that leave me emotionally and physically drained. I meant to say just physically. I don't let anyone know where I emotionally stand anymore. I try not to be stupid. I don't act sad anymore.

The last time I stood my ground emotionally, he walked. I walked, too. It all felt queerly symmetrical, the exit consistent, the blame escalating into a stalemate. But he walked first, you know?

It all leaves me, and I do mean leaves me, feeling frustrated and vacant.

Vacant -- that's a lie. The city is churning and heaving and masses of people spill out around you quick, like a middle school diorama of real life that's been dumped on you, little paper buildings and even smaller paper people fluttering through your fingers.

It's enough, I tell myself, to stay awake all night, hanging onto your pillow, breathing in the white noise hum alone.

On the other hand, I am planning on a hike sometime in the future.  Destination is Madame Sherri's Forest in West Chesterfield.  Story goes that a woman named Antoinette De Lilas was a silent film star that built a small "castle" in a large plot of land out in West Chesterfield.  She eventually was forced from the home due to age and it was left to crumble until a fire destroyed it in 1962.  Some ruins of the structure remain today.  Also, the site is rumored to be haunted.  Supposedly through sounds of old parlor music and the visual specter of Ms. De Lilas(she changed her name to Sherri during her life.  Hence the forest's name) on the bit of grand staircase left standing.  There are a few more trails in the area, I will have to pick one of those to walk along as well.

Photos to be taken on the hike.  I will post the best of them here.

I'm not sure how long it took to complete this next wonder, but just gaze at the beauty and detail of the LEGO Beijing Olympics. I love the fountain and the turned-over hurdles in the Birds Nest. The Water Cube is unbelievable.

Wood, plate glass, prop piano and black block, subject for Pepper illusion, black paint(no gloss), wallpaper swatch, something to mimic floor pattern(may use paint/stencil)

Went to Gundam Expo yesterday at Sunshine City, I was expecting to just stroll in like I did last time but what I find is a long queue at the entrance. You can see the previous coverage here.

Not much new things this time around except for a few big dioramas and the long awaited second season of Gundam 00. This photo article will be separated according to the event zones.

If you have problems loading all the images in this page, try my flickr account.

ZONE-1: Amuro vs. Char, Diorama and Giants

Wow, Japan really do like Amuro eh like Blade Runner of all sci-fi.

They have some really cool painted style poster too...

ZONE-2: Past Gundams

ZONE-3: Latest and others

ZONE-4: Gundam 00

ZONE 5-7

The rest is just that gaming area, stage shows and sales.

but what interested me more than the dioramas were the interplays between visitors to the museum and the displays.

I felt like a little kid- seeing dinosaurs, meteorites, clothing and objects from faraway cultures... excited and intrigued.

There is of course the picture frame, whose practical purpose seems to be to create handles with which to make a painting more readily portable. But conceptually it defines the boundaries of an interior space where the action is happening, so to speak. Frescoes and murals have no such borderlines. From the villas of Pompeii to the alleys of San Francisco's Mission District, the scene ends when you've run out of wall space. They superimpose an imagined landscape onto the architectural landscape whereas a picture frame evokes the sensation of peering through a window frame. The former is a shared experience, public. The latter is usually a more private experience and shares qualities with other constructions designed for private viewing. Restricting our scrutiny often has a compensatory basis. There are the mutoscopes of old. There is of course the peepshow. Duchamp famously borrowed this perspective to turn anyone viewing his work Etant donnés into an unintentional voyeur.

But I'm less interested in the why than the what. Obviously there are examples of contained presentation that are public viewing experiences, like puppet shows (which in turn gave way to children's toy theaters, private again). But I think there is a psychological shift that occurs when our focus is constrained, that allows a child to enlarge and inhabit the space of a doll house for example while their mind erases the contradictory Brobdingnagian world around them. Selective attention is the term for our mind's ability to filter out the auditory cacophony of a busy street so that we can focus on a friend's conversation. There is something similar going on when we scrutinize a triptych: we ignore the adjoining panels and wooden rim and get in the right "frame of mind" to view a single picture.

Summer Reading is an invitation to artists to provide a "conceptual response" to "stories, characters and texts." Books are of course another container of meaning. While they are literally "bound" at the spine, like a painting in a frame they also describe circumscribed territory. A story isn't just what it's about, it's also what it isn't about. The words enjoin the reader to manufacture the architecture that will define the world of a story and to reject what doesn't fit. You wouldn't expect a spaceship to land next to the Ramsays on their way to the lighthouse. Books and borders seem to require us to restrict our view to open it up.

Su Blackwell's contribution to the show is a series of black box dioramas mounted to the wall at eye-level. She uses the actual pages of books like The Secret Garden as her building material, constructing origami-like structures or two dimensional objects tatooed with text. An open book provides ground level: an ocean, a forest floor (which interestingly enough in an actual wood is referred to as the "understory"). Inside each a scene in miniature plays out. A sailboat on a sea of slitted paper departs from a moving carousel of boats. Tiny lights illuminate the steps to a circus stage where an elephant climbs a ladder of words while a woman dangles from a ring high above. In another a forest of letters sprouts from the open pages of the book. Like Jean Marais in the closing moments of Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast, a girl has seemingly leapt upright from her supine position affixed to the two dimensional confines of an illustration plate on the left hand page. Still attached to the page at her feet where the paper has folded her into a popup, she seems lost in this wood, immobilized in eternal flight like the characters in Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. But all is evidently not lost: in another she sits on the grass with a friend and the bristly limbed trees have been replaced with a friendlier looking lush canopy of type. It was Blackwell's pieces that really got me thinking about framing. I have always loved dioramas since I was a kid. Their appeal is strong enough that at the turn of the century they sat beside the mutoscopes in seaside arcades where the visitor could for some small change lose themselves in the mechanical perambulations of circus performers, farmers, and opium den habitues darting about within their glass boxes. Each is a tiny world of captured time.

Next up we have Jim Campbell's strange conceptual piece. A gutted, weather beaten copy of Webster's Dictionary (Unabridged) is affixed to the wall. A tail of wire slithers down the wall into a metal box where, I assume, the bulk of the electronic guts that make the work function are crammed. The metal box is inscribed "The Bible 3186313 characters." This is I Have Never Read the Bible and if you haven't read it yet either, this installation won't remedy that. Every second or so, a hidden speaker blurts out a letter pronounced in a whisper with an accompanying tone. The tones are similar to the kind you'd hear by pressing a digit on a child's plastic toy phone. The letters arrive in uneven spurts with a kind of whispered hush. This is a sequenced presentation of the Good Book which the gallery's website assures me is achieved by LED technology (as in his installation at BAM), but I have no idea how that could work. I'm also guessing that this is the King James Version as it is generally the most well known and well regarded because of its rich prose but this is complete speculation. If you're dying to make sense out of the galloping succession of consonants and vowels I wish you luck. For fun I spent a long while trying to transcribe and identify the specific passage being spoken. It ended up being tougher than it sounds because of the distracting electronic chime that complements each letter. My results were less than edifying:

SOSTHESEAINTOURHANTRETHEITLIVE

THEHANDOSMANATTHEHANDOSEVERYMANSBROTHER

I suspect Moses was, among other things, a really good listener.

Finally, an interesting "there and back again" exercise from Amy Hicks called Readaptation: The Book Series. This is a short video that takes clips from movie adaptations and superimposes them over copies of the source material. At times, a pair of eager hands is visible preparing the book for viewing, slyly sheathed in disposable rubber gloves for the science gone wrong future of Blade Runner and fondled by fingers with shockingly red nail polish for the horror domestic Stepford Wives. Achieved by stop motion, in each segment a book scoots about the frame before spilling open its content. As pages flip by at a furious pace, inside a black taped off space in the center we see film footage of Rachael smoking a cigarette and the owl at Tyrell Corporation springing from its perch into flight. This from the aforementioned Blade Runner which was adapted from Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The printed text of the original novels is visible outside the taped border, changing with a rapidity that would make Jim Campbell's piece blush. These days film has seemed to have superseded the printed word and you get the impression that the more juvenile medium has pushed to the front of the family portrait, obscuring her older sister and is mugging for all your attention. Dare I mention the word palimpsest? For many of us whose exposure to a work is from the cinema, our idea about the contents of a book is the equivalent of a film projection upon its pages.

Boxes, borders, boundaries: the Hosfelt's exploration into representations of books unpacks the contents of the printed word while simultaneously cramming them back into a frame. If stories offer escape, it is to a bounded space into which we project something of ourselves. The three artists I've discussed here (there were many more involved in the exhibit) impose a perspective onto printed works, each of which feels like an opening of a new space, a temporary room within the mind.

Okay, that's enough for tonight. I might get wordy about them another time.

Blogging off!

(too nerdy? um, yup. oh well. I'll do better next time)

(Cliccie for larger piccie, this wallpaper is 1600 x 1200)

Spartan-117 (SPARTAN-II)

NAME: Classified

SERVICE NUMBER: S-117

A tenacious, driven soldier known primarily by his rank, the Master Chief is the last of the Spartan II warriors - an elite group of genetically superior, highly trained super-soldiers.

Though much of his wartime record is still classified, it is known that Spartan-117 participated in over 200 battles, neutralized thousands of Covenant targets, and was awarded every UNSC decoration except the Prisoner of War Medallion.

The above quote + wallpaper can be found here.

I absolutely do not like this wallpaper . It looks like Master Chief took a shit and realised he is out of toilet paper, so he stood up in shock thinking ''Oooh noees''