President Obama’s appearance on “Between Two Ferns” made tens of millions of people laugh (and saved lives in the process). In a culture flooded with too much partisan information, comedy is the last great refuge of truth and access.
Brad Jenkins is the Managing Director and Executive Producer of Funny Or Die DC. For the last four years, Jenkins served as President Obama’s liaison and director of engagement to the creative and advocacy communities, bringing together creative executives, advocacy leaders, and some of the world’s biggest stars to advance the President’s agenda — including his Emmy-award winning “Between Two Ferns”
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There are over 285 million visually impaired people in the world, and some of these lives are about to get a lot better. South Korean developer Dot has produced the world’s first Braille smartwatch, and its features are just what you’d expect from a 21st century device.
The Dot displays information using 4 active dynamic Braille cells, and its users can select the speed at which the characters update. The Dot connects to a smartphone via Bluetooth (just like any other smartwatch) and can receive any text from any app or service (think Messenger, directions from Google Maps, etc.). Users can also send simple messages using its buttons on the side. The Dot also supports Open API, which means that anyone can develop or adapt apps for it.
Various digital devices for the blind have been around for some time now, but the vast majority of them use sound. This creates problems, because either a user has to plug in headphones and detach from surrounding sounds (that are vital to blind people), or make their information public. Also, existing digital Braille reading devices are mostly bulky and expensive – only about 5% of visually impaired people own one.
The Dot smartwatch has been in development for 3 years, and the company will finally start delivering its devices to some 140,000 backers (they also claim that Stevie Wonder is one of them). They plan to ship 100,000 watches in 2017, starting March, and the rest 40,000 next year. 1,000 units will be sold on retail in London for $320 too.
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Article recommended by Karla Castillo from Mexico, collaborator of Arttextum’s Replicación
LONDON — Artistic director, star ballerina, lobbyist, wrangler, psychologist, spokeswoman. Tamara Rojo, the artistic director of English National Ballet, is one busy woman.
Ms. Rojo, 42, a Spanish-born former Royal Ballet principal dancer, has been in her current job for four years, and she has made a startling difference to English National Ballet — a London touring company of 67 dancers that has no home theater and has struggled for a long time to establish its identity in the shadow of the Royal. On Tuesday, her company began a sold-out run of Akram Khan’s critically praised “Giselle” at Sadler’s Wells. Ms. Rojo commissioned the piece last year, part of her risk-taking approach.
She is also the company’s marquee ballerina (along with a fellow Royal Ballet alum, Alina Cojocaru), somehow managing to keep up her technical form and artistry while acting as a one-woman visionary, manager, cheerleader and glamorous high-profile ad for her organization.
Does she sleep? “As a dancer, you learn focus,” Ms. Rojo said.
Looking pale and slightly drawn, Ms. Rojo, even so, appeared full of energy in an interview earlier this month at the company’s headquarters near Royal Albert Hall. Every day, she said, involves a juggling act between dancing and directorial duties, with her attention constantly pulled among the needs of her dancers, administrative meetings and performing.
There are few female ballet company directors, but Ms. Rojo knew it was a job she wanted. “You can have a much wider impact on society as a director, than a dancer,” she said. “I think ballet can be so much more ambitious, do so much more, than it does now.” Since succeeding Wayne Eagling in 2012, she has worked that ambition, commissioning works from three relatively unknown female choreographers, and a war-themed program from Mr. Khan, Liam Scarlett and Russell Maliphant. She has also programmed challenging works by William Forsythe and Pina Bausch.
And last year, she formed an association with Sadler’s Wells that has given English National Ballet a London base to showcase its contemporary work. That is “the kind of risk-taking that a touring ballet company can’t otherwise do in this climate,” Debra Craine, the chief dance critic for The London Times, said in an email, referring to Britain’s recent cuts in arts financing.
Ms. Rojo has a narrow path to walk between popular appeal and artistic innovation. English National Ballet (called London Festival Ballet until 1989) was founded in 1950 by the British ballet stars Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin with the aim of taking ballet to the provinces. The troupe still has a touring obligation, and with subsidies at a much lower level than those of Royal Ballet, it depends on box-office certainties like “Swan Lake,” “Sleeping Beauty” and an annual “Nutcracker.” (The company’s annual budget is about $19 million, with $7.5 million coming from Arts Council England, a government body.)
“I’ve seen so many directors come through E.N.B. over the years — some of them with visionary ideas,” Judith Mackrell, a dance critic for The Guardian, said in an email. “All were defeated by cautiousness of the board and by the company’s remit from Arts Council England to deliver ballet to the regions.”
Ms. Rojo, who danced with English National Ballet for three years before joining Royal Ballet in 2000, doesn’t mean to lose. “I actually saw advantages in most of the things people thought of as problems,” she said. “Touring means you can really build young artists by giving them proper time onstage. And the beauty of rivaling the Royal is that we can really create an identity of our own. How should we look at the classical repertory and perform it today?”
Ballet has been her passion since she was 5, Ms. Rojo said, when she first glimpsed a class (“it was a revelation”) after school in Madrid, where she grew up. Her parents were not well off and made sacrifices to send her to an excellent ballet school, run by Victor Ullate, whose company she joined at 16. After winning the Paris International Dance Competition in 1994, she left Madrid to join Scottish National Ballet, where she spent just six months before being approached by Derek Deane, then the director of English National Ballet.
She didn’t think about directing a company, she said, until Spain’s government approached her in 2006, when she was with Royal Ballet. “The president wanted something like an English National Ballet for Spain, a touring company, and he wanted to know what it would cost, what infrastructure would it need, would I take on?” Ms. Rojo said. “I felt it was too early for me, but I began to do the research, and I realized that I wanted to know as much as possible about how to run a company.” (The Spanish government did not go ahead with the project.)
Ms. Rojo later participated in training for future artistic directors, shadowing Karen Kain at the National Ballet of Canada. When the Royal Ballet directorship opened in 2011, she was a front-runner, although the job ultimately went to Kevin O’Hare. Ms. Rojo said she was relieved. “A few years later, this position became available,” she said, “and I knew what I could achieve here.”
Ms. Rojo is a leader, said Alistair Spalding, the artistic director of Sadler’s Wells. “She is out there, looking for ideas, making things happen, looking for connections, a brilliant networker,” he said. “Despite the financial restrictions, she has been able to be more fleet of foot than she would have been at the Royal. The challenges for her are to raise enough money, and keep audience numbers up.”
Ms. Rojo’s big challenge will be raising money for the company’s planned 2018 move from its current cramped location to new headquarters it will share with English National Ballet School in Canning Town, East London. It will cost about $30 million, she said. As well as doubling studio capacity, the new building will have a production studio with a stage and full lighting and sound capability. (The stage is big enough for run-throughs, but the theater has a capacity of just 170.)
“Today, a ballet company will invest on average 1.8 million pounds” — $2.25 million — “on a new production, then give themselves two days onstage because it’s just too expensive,” Ms. Rojo said. “Compare that, again, with theater and its weeks of previews. But it’s the same audience. Right now, we are asking them to somehow bear with us, and I don’t want that. I want you to be moved and impressed and intrigued and overwhelmed. I want audiences to have the highest expectations.”
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Dr. Robert J. Lang has revolutionized the wonderful world of origami to be able to make anything that enters his imagination.
Origami is pleasantly nostalgic. One remembers, perhaps, when one was a child and made their first bird that looked like a crane but had few features in common with the real bird. It could be described as one of the first meditative activities that we carried out voluntarily and full of expectation. The minute concentrations we put into each fold of paper blocked out anything else that happened around us. And that, for a child, is no small feat. But the obsession with the possibilities of a sheet of paper have gone far beyond a healthy and aesthetic educational entertainment; to begin with, they led one scientist to leave his job and dedicate himself full-time to folding paper and, in doing so, he revolutionized the world and the limits of origami.
That man is Dr. Robert J. Lang, an electronic engineer who, while he worked for a fiber optic company (JDS Uniphase) in the 1970s, invented the origami Jimmy Carter, Darth Vader, a monk and an inflatable rabbit, but whose real passion were insects (albeit in those days, together with crustaceans, they were impossible to create in origami as nobody had solved the problem as to how to fold paper into figures with robust bodies and thin limbs).
Dr. Lang’s obsession and talent were such that he began to investigate mathematical equations that would allow him to create figures beyond thirty folds, at the time the maximum number of folds that the Japanese art of origami had reached. By the end of the 1970s origami had changed so much thanks to Lang (insects were now possible as well as all kinds of complex figures) that he gave up his job to carry on experimenting with its possibilities.
The Japanese could not believe that a Western man could be an origami expert, and those who knew him as a scientist were amazed to find out that their colleague was one of the world’s most famous origami artists. But Lang, who had received his first book of origami at the age of six, was so infatuated with the possibility of creating three-dimensional creatures, almost magically, that he could do nothing else but dedicate himself to that.
In Japan, the art of origami has been practiced as a recreation for at least 400 years under one beautiful and simple principle: the sheet of paper is the essence, no matter what it becomes, there is never more or less paper; the same paper remains. What Dr. Lang added to that world of figures, and always respecting the rule of not cutting the paper, were mathematical equations. More precisely, the elegance of mathematical equations. And thanks to that, naturalism found its most beautiful three-dimensional accompaniment.
In 2003 Lang published the book Origami Design Secrets and now, as well as designing sets for films and commercials, Lang has various jobs as a scientific designer. He has designed medical instruments and space telescopes and he made it possible for a cellular antenna to fit inside a mobile telephone.
Lang believes there is still much to be done with origami. And while his main activity is refining his beloved insects, its scientific application knows no limits in practice. Origami is no longer just an art, but is also mathematics, geometry, physics, philosophy and religion, all folded into a beautiful figure.
Autor: Yeray S. Iborra
Vía El Diario | Octubre 24, 2015
La conversación se atropella y no por falta de interés: los tempos los marca el bocado exagerado y soberano a un croissant glasé (el azúcar le ribetea los morros) que coge finamente con servilleta y dos dedos. No es el único contraste: su pelo blanco-atómico deslumbra entre la americana, las gafas, el fular y la chaquetilla, todo de negro impoluto.
Franco Berardi, Bifo, así le empezaron a llamar sus compañeros del colegio cuando jugaban a los espías (“necesitaba un mote”), pronuncia con lentitud y marcado acento italiano; paladea las palabras, hasta que, de golpe, se excita y se avalancha sobre su discurso, alzando la voz. Hasta el punto que, cuando se levanta para la sesión de fotos, el turista de la mesa de al lado –manosea un mapa de Barcelona– me susurra al oído: “Oye, ¿y este quién es? He escuchado que era de Boloña, y no lo conozco…”.
La casualidad habrá querido que el discurso de Berardi no haya llegado a sus dominios, pues el filósofo de 66 años ha tocado casi todos los temas: marxismo, psicoanálisis, análisis sociológico, teorías de la comunicación. Siempre con especial interés en el capitalismo post-industrial. Autor de una veintena de libros, desde su etapa de comunista raso en la Italia de los 70 pasando por el ciberpunk de los 80, el último trata sobre las sociedades liberales y las enfermedades mentales: Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso).
Bifo forma parte de The Influencers, festival que, en su undécima edición, programa del 22 al 24 de octubre charlas, debates y performances entorno a la red y que contará con The Yes Men, ¡Mediengruppe Bitnik o METAHAVEN.
Cómo se define a sí mismo alguien a quien han catalogado de pensador, activista, escritor, agitador, filósofo…
Antes, mi definición favorita era la de agitador cultural. Agitador en la comunicación, la investigación filosófica… El problema es que hoy en día esta definición puede acabar siendo sólo retórica. Prefiero hablar simplemente de filosofía: alguien que está buscando algo.
¿De qué habla un filósofo hoy en día?
¿Conoces Heroes? [Libro publicado por el autor en 2015] Lo que más me interesa es la relación entre sufrimiento psíquico y el contenido de la mente colectiva. El punto de conexión entre sufrimiento y potencialidad.
¿Psicoanálisis colectiva?
Mmm… Podría ser. O neuroplasticidad. O podría ser una ciencia que tenemos que inventar: la ciencia de lo posible. No del futuro, sino de la futurabilidad.
Me he perdido.
Todo lo que es posible en el cerebro humano, pero que, si no sale, si no se expresa, se convierte en sufrimiento. En otras palabras, lo que más me interesa es desarrollar la herencia del psicoanálisis para hallar las potencialidades humanas.
Si hablamos de sufrimiento, tú que has trabajado de forma interdisciplinar el marxismo… Pienso en una fábrica. Aunque con el tipo de trabajo de hoy en día… [Miro mi móvil, rebosante de mails por contestar]
La cuestión del trabajo es más complicada y rica hoy de lo que era el siglo pasado y, por tanto, es más complicada y rica para el movimiento obrero. La actividad laboral hoy es cada vez más cognitiva. En el trabajo industrial, la alienación se producía en las horas de trabajo: implicaba una separación, lo que se hacía con el cuerpo y la actividad mental, suspendida, en aquel espacio. Hoy en día la alienación tiene un carácter muy diferente, la actividad mental no puede elegir, está continuamente explotada.
La palabra alienación se revaloriza, veo.
Sigue siendo muy utilizable. Tenemos que redefinirla, pero el fenómeno de la alienación se presenta seguro como una hiperexplotación y una expropiación de lo que es más humano entre los humanos: su emocionalidad. La relación entre precariedad y trabajo cognitivo produce un efecto: angustia.
¿Cómo es ese tipo de trabajo cognitivo?
Precario. El trabajo cognitivo se da esencialmente en condiciones precarias. Ah, la precariedad no sólo es la indefinición jurídica entre trabajador y patrón, también entra en la subjetividad de la gente. Es una despersonalización.
¿Nos aturde la mentalidad productivista?
La fusión del trabajo con las nuevas formas de comunicación hace que todo el tiempo de vida esté involucrado con la productividad. Y lo que es peor, con la competitividad y con la percepción de peligro en la relación con los otros: todo el mundo es peligroso porque el trabajo no se limita a las ocho horas.
Antes estaba claro contra quién había que luchar: el patrón. Ahora no está tan claro: ¿Cómo lo combatimos?
Combatir no es la mejor palabra.
¿No se puede combatir?
¡No! Sí, sí. [Ríe] Simplemente la palabra… No es buena. La idea de que hay un frente, contra otro frente. [Frunce el ceño, se arruga de cejas para arriba] El lugar del poder, que era tan claro en el pasado, como lugar físico y político, pienso en el Palacio de Invierno, ahora es totalmente indefinible. El poder no es un lugar, es una relación que cada vez se insinúa hacia uno mismo. El trabajo cognitivo no logra que nos reconozcamos como un cuerpo solidario: no logramos una condición de solidaridad en el interior del trabajo.
¿Y lo podemos combatir, o no?
Perdón, sí: hay que abstraerse de esta lógica a través de redes de solidaridad. De solidaridad… O de amistad. La amistad es la manera de salir de la condición de explotación actual. Pero amistad, es sólo una palabra… La política del tiempo que viene es la de la amistad; no es siquiera una política, es un psicoanálisis, es una terapia.
Pues va a haber faena que hacer con una terapia tal…
¿Cómo hacemos para desarrollar esta terapia? Mi trabajo está dedicado esencialmente a eso: ¿Cómo se desarrolla una terapia que no es individual? Una terapia que no se mueve en el cuadro topológico descrito por Freud: consciente e inconsciente. El inconsciente ha explotado hoy en día. [Ríe]
Hay otro universo paralelo, otra consciencia colectiva: el mundo en red.
L’uomo senza inconscio [el hombre sin inconsciente], del psicoanalista italiano Massimo Recalcati, habla de eso, del hecho de que nuestra vida cotidiana y comunicativa, nuestra relación con el universo comunicacional, es el inconsciente contemporáneo, que ya no está en el interior del individuo.
En Europa hemos visto muchos mecanismos entusiastas que han tenido traducción política: Grecia, sin ir más lejos. Tú has apoyado fervientemente a Tsipras.
La cuestión europea es un polo de concentración de las nuevas formas que no logramos expresar de manera política. Hablar sobre política y Europa es hablar de impotencia, como Tsipras ha demostrado muy bien. El intento de salir de la situación de crisis y explotación financiera de Europa no puede funcionar porque no se trata de una cuestión política. El concepto de política que manejamos no puede captar ya la esencia de Europa. ¿Sabes cómo se hace política ahora desde Europa?
No…
¿Te suena la abuela de Schäuble? Ahora en setiembre sacaré un libro que se llamará La abuela de Sch ä uble. Este señor dice: “Mi abuela decía que la benevolencia es el preludio del libertinaje” . La palabra desregulación es propia del neoliberalismo. Cuando hablamos de Europa, ¿qué significa reglas? La definición de regla es política: significaba una negociación racional…
Hasta que llegó Thatcher.
Ella dijo que tenemos que vivir sin reglas: en el sentido neoliberal. [Ríe] Las reglas han dejado de ser resultado de una decisión racional, política, lingüística. Las reglas son un automatismo… Un automatismo financiero.
Como han comprobado los griegos.
Cuando Varufakis se encuentra con los miembros del Eurogrupo, el problema no es decidir cuestiones políticas: ¡Si las autoridades políticas no deciden nada! Sólo aplican reglas que no pertenecen a su campo de decisión. Hay que enfrentarse a una condición que ya no es la del combate político. La palabra para definir a Tsipras es: impotencia.
Impotencia, dos veces ya.
Es la realidad de nuestro tiempo. Yo pienso: ¡Obama! El hombre que mejor explicita la crisis de la voluntad política. Este tipo, que es el hombre más poderoso del país más poderoso de todos los tiempos, se presentó a la opinión pública diciendo: “Sí podemos”. Podemos, la palabra más embarazosa para la política…
Me suena lo de podemos.
Sí, lo sé… [Ríe] Y la palabra es embarazosa porque, tautológicamente, es una obviedad: ‘Si eres el hombre del país más poderoso: puedes’. Pero no: no podemos. Esa es la verdad. La experiencia de Obama nos enseña que no podemos cerrar Guantánamo, acabar con la venta de armas, ¡ni salir de la guerra de Irak!
Y entonces…
Lo que tenemos que hacer no es confrontar la potencia política contra el automatismo financiero. Lo que podemos, como trabajadores cognitivos, es desprogramar la máquina que nos ha llevado al actual estado. Como trabajadores cognitivos lo podremos todo si somos capaces de reconstruir una dinámica de amistad, de solidaridad. Lo hemos construido entre todos: ingenieros, informáticos… Podemos reconstruir lo que Marx llamó el general intellect.
…
El problema está en las condiciones de competencia en las que trabajan los ingenieros y los poetas. Los ingenieros y los poetas no pueden trabajar juntos porque se considera que son universos separados y enemigos. Si logramos construir una condición de amistad en el trabajo cognitivo, lo podemos todo.
¿Pueden esas mismas redes de que hablábamos ayudar a esta sublevación?
¡Claro! Si hay una máquina hipercompleja que es el mecanismo de mi actividad, de tu actividad, de su actividad… Esa es Internet. El efecto del trabajo de millones de trabajadores cognitivos en el mundo, eso es Internet. Respondiendo a tu pregunta: claro que sí, la dimensión reticular es la dimensión donde el trabajo cognitivo puede desarrollarse. Internet es una condición comunicacional, no es sólo una tecnología: nos permite conectarnos y nos impide conectarnos.
La vida a través de una pantalla…
La amistad es el placer de la relación con el cuerpo del otro. ¿Cómo podemos re-erotizar la comunicación social? Hemos de re-erotizar la comunicación social. Ese es el problema político que enfrentamos hoy.
¿Hablarás sobre todo esto en tu charla? ¡Te faltará tiempo!
Generalmente no elijo de qué hablar antes de ver a quién tengo delante, en qué ambiente y espacio. Pero bueno, yo creo que voy a hablar sobre la futurabilidad: no hay futuro. No hay un futuro. Hay una dimensión imperiosamente automática del futuro, pero hay una pluralidad de futuros posibles. Tenemos que reactivar nuestra imaginación partiendo de la pregunta: ¿Cuáles son los futuros posibles? Me temo que voy a hablar de la guerra… y también del podemos real. [Ríe]
Imágenes: Sandra Lázaro
Creemos en tu trabajo y opinión, por eso lo difundimos con créditos; si no estás de acuerdo, por favor contáctanos.
Recommended by Sandra Gael from Mexico, collaborator of Arttextum’s Replicación
I don’t know what that dream is that you have. I don’t care how disappointing it might’ve been as you’ve been working toward that dream, but that dream that you’re holding in your mind, that it’s possible!
That some of you already know. That it’s hard, it’s not easy. It’s hard changing your life. That in the process, of working on your dreams, you are going to incur in a lot of disappointment, a lot of failure, a lot of pain. There are moments when you’re gonna doubt yourself. You said God, why, why is this happening to me? I’m just trying to take care of my children and my mother, I’m not trying to steal or rob from anybody. How does this have to happen to me? For those of you that have experience some hardships, don’t give up on your dream. The rough times are gonna come, but they have not come to stay, they have come to pass.
Greatness, is not this wonderful, esoteric, illusive, god-like feature that only the special among us will ever taste. It’s something that truly exists, in all of us.
It’s very important for you to believe, that you are the one. Most people, they raise a family, they earn a living and then they die. They stop growing, they stop working on themselves, they stop stretching, they stop pushing themselves. Then a lot of people like to complain but they don’t wanna do anything about their situation. And most people don’t work on their dreams, why? One is because of fear, the fear of failure, “what if things don’t work out”? And the fear of success, “what if they do and I can’t handle it”? These are not risk takers.
You spent so much time with other people, you spent some much time trying to get people to like you, you know other people more than you know yourself, you studied them, you know about them, you want hang out like them, you want to be just like them. And you know what? You’ve invested so much time on them, you don’t know who you are. I challenge you to spend time by yourself.
It’s necessary, that get the losers out of your life, if you want to live your dream. But people who are running towards their dreams, life have a special kind of meaning.
If you want to be more successful, if you want have and do stuff you never done before, I’m asking you, to invest in you! To invest in you!
Someone’s opinion of you, does not have to become your reality. That you don’t have to go through life, being a victim. And even though you face disappointments, you have to know within yourself. . . that I can do this, even if no one see it for me, I must see it for myself.
This is what I believe and I’m willing to die for it. Period.
No matter how bad it is or how bad it gets, I’m going to make it!
I wanna represent an idea. I wanna represent possibilities.
There’s some of you right now, you want to go to next level. ‘I want a council, I want to be a engineer, I want to be a doctor.” Listen to me. You can’t get to that level. You can’t get to that level economically where you want to be, until you start invest in your mind. You are not reading books. I challenge you all to go to the conference. I dare you to invest time! I dare you to be alone! I dare you to spent an hour to get to know yourself. When you become who you are, when you become the person that you are created to be, designed to be who you were designed to be. When you become an individual. What you do is: take yourself and you start separating yourself from other people. I’m challenging you, to get to the place where people do not like you or do not even bother you no more. Why? Cause you are not concerned to make them happy. Because you try to blow up, you try to the next level. I need you to invest in your mind. Invest in your mind.
If you still taking about your dream. If you still taking about your goals. But you have not done anything: JUST TAKE THE FIRST STEP! You can make your parent proud, you can make your school proud, you can touch millions of people lives and the word will never be the same again, because you came this way. Don’t let nobody steal your dream! After we face a rejection and a “NO” or we have a meeting and no one shows up, or somebody said, you can count on me, and they don’t come through what if we had that kind of attitude that cause reposes, nobody believes in you, you’ve lost again, and again, and again! The lights are cut off but you’re still looking at your dream, reviewing it every day and saying to yourself: IT’S NOT OVER, UNTIL I WIN!
You can live your dream!
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