Nouveau système planétaire

in broken English below

Découvert d'un nouveau système planétaire 

Créer des petites planètes n'est pas une chose très difficile, les classer est une autre paire de manches. Lors de ces dernières semaines j'ai passé quelques temps sélectionner, comparer, organiser les différentes planètes que j'avais devant moi.

Le résultat c'est cette sélection, une sorte de journal en images représentant presqu'un an de temps depuis ma dernière exposition à Berlin (Allemagne). On y trouve plusieurs continents, villes, fuseaux horaires, moments, allant de la France au Etats-Unis, l'Allemagne et l'Italie.

Et ce nouveau système planétaire a pour petit nom Little Planets 3 par ce que Little Planets 2 et Little Planets 1 étaient pris. Esprit cartésien quand tu nous tiens...

A post shared by jeremie Gerhardt (@mrbonsoir) on Oct 15, 2017 at 10:51am PDT

now in Google translate English

Discovery of a new planetary system

The making of little planet isn't so complicated, the sorting of them is another story. During the last few weeks I spent my time selecting, arranging, comparing the little planets I had in front of me.

The result of this selection, a kind of photo journal representing one year of time since my last exhibition in Berlin (Germany). You will find many continents, cities, time zones, moments, spanning location from France, USA, Germany and Italy.

And this new planetary system has for little name Little Planets 3 because Little Planets 1 and Little Planets 2 was already taken. Cartesian minds one day...

Studious Saturday

It all started with a cool workshop organised by the people behind wefactory where we had to build our own lamp made of concrete. My first concrete experience with concrete.

And it did continue with the - finally - uploading of the catalogue of my first solo exhibition of little planets. Exhibition that took place in Morlaix in Brittany June to August 2015. Ten of my images have been presented and the link below is re-showing them.


If you are interested by seeing more of my images, you can as well have a look to the catalogue of my latest exhibition that took place in Berlin September 2016.

CIC visiting Darmstadt

What is CIC you may ask yourself? It's stand for Color Imaging Conference, a conference about color and imaging. This year it took place in Darmstadt DE. The last 22 editions always took place in the US, last year it was in Boston MA, two years ago in Albuquerque NM, three years ago in Los Angeles CA, four years ago in San Antonio TX and that's it for my involvement. Next stop is San Diego CA in November 2016.

I'm a regular attendee, I joined this community already ten years ago alternating between CGIV, AIC, EI and CIC. Depending of the event you will meet a slightly different crowd or so to say different crowds will meet allowing to go deeper in the various fields represented. But for sure it's about imaging, color, perception, printing, archiving, image acquisition, color management, camera and display calibration, gamut mapping and more.

This year almost 200 persons were attending the event in Darmstadt. There is a kind of routine in such event and being part of the committee allows you to see the people interaction with a special look. It's very special to see the attendees - former colleagues, friends, known members of this community - arriving from everywhere almost - from North America, Europe, Asia, Australia... - and being all jet-lagged. Even if you are traveling in the same time zone you will end up jet-lagged. First of all the schedule is tide and you have to use the "free" time to talk with everybody. Sharing a meal or a beer is usually very appropriate. As a result you barely have time to rest, but the kind of adrenaline you get from meeting the crème de la crème of the color scientists keeps you awake.

Archiving conference 2014 in Berlin

This week I had the pleasure to attend the Archiving conference (AC) 2014 in Berlin. The event was hosted at the kino Arsenal in Potsdamer Platz in one of the cinema room with extremely comfortable red seats. This conference belongs to a group of conferences run by the Society for Imaging Science and Technology. I usually attend the Color Imaging Conference (CIC) or the Electronic Imaging conference (EIC), both in the US, so when I saw that the AC was taking place this year in Berlin I jumped at the chance and joined the event.

Comparing to CIC the topics of AC are much more applied and not only dedicated to imaging problems. The variety of represented fields makes this event very interesting. Starting from archiving itself, we can understand it by all problems related to collect documents, from papers, books, audio files, video files, electronic documents for e-government, art collections, website, internet. Once the databases are built you have to think of how to access the documents knowing that the amount of information grows without stopping, having documents digitized do not mean they don't need to be processed anymore (e.g. how to save scanned pages of an old book with its hand-written annotations). In relation to the scanning task, the one day industrial exhibition gives us the possibility to see different book scanners with special features to be able to manipulate fragile documents.

A never ending challenge in this domain is the continuous evolution of technology. If the tasks remain identical - to archive documents whatever they are - the people in charge of these tasks - working in library, museum, archive department - have to save the documents and keep alive the technology to actually store these documents. Archives being public they have to be accessible to the public. This also asks the question of the founding, the responsible people have to continuously argue with politicians to keep their founding at a reasonable level.

To be give a very simple image, in the past all documents were saved on solid media (ie stone, paper, film...), something physical with a long life duration. Then the time is speeding up, we accumulate more and more information, we need more space to archive it and we need to reduce the physical size of the archiving media. Data centers full of servers are available but the life duration they proposed is not as long as the physical media: you enter the configuration where these centers are continuously copying and migrating information from server to server to be faster than the archiving media life, therefore our global archives are always moving: a global power outage could mean the end of our archives.

Archiving film documents
An important parameter is the constant evolution of technology. This is something the movie industry is facing also continuously. In a way the challenges of restoring and archiving very old film material are very similar to those faced by during a movie production when different sources (ie contents from different cameras, different softwares) have to be combined: there are different workflow that need to be merged in order to produce the final document/film. There are discussions that propose to use the DCP film distribution format to store new films and old films. One advantage it is understood by many people but it brings the matter of DRM in the document. One problem is the projection system and the encryption are linked (if I'm correct), what happend when the projectin technology changes? All these aspects were tackled in the opening keynote given by a fellow from Fraunhofer IIS.

Crowd sourcing and database browsing
Crowd sourcing was to me a very interesting topic. It did appear in oral presentations and in posters. I joined together the database browsing because I think these two points are related. The amount of available information - as I mentioned above - is increasing and if you remember big data we have both feet inside. To process the documents the archiving departments have (eg in the conference program from the BNF in Paris, in the Netherland or in Germany) started campaigns where they ask the public to achieve tasks to validate digitization (I'm simplifying the problem here) where the task can't be perform fully automatically without errors. It follows the web 2.0 model where the user is also the one creating the content, except here he is helping/working on archive media which concerns everybody, it's our memory after all.

Graph database was mentioned and I could like to hear more about it. Especially how database query languages are developed to ease the access to the information in those databases. But this also implies to think how to build these databases. Pretty interesting in any cases.

First impressions
To be short there were mostly good. Different people, different backgrounds but similar challenges as archiving, digital preservation, curation are. Multidisciplinary as I like it.

Evening at the British Embassy

18:01 leaving work, aiming for the British embassy near Pariser Platz for the Max Planck Forum and a talk entitled "ALL A QUESTION OF AGE? HOW THE BRAIN AND BEHAVIOURS DEVELOP OVER TIME".

On the way taking a panorama picture in Tiergarten and arriving way to early at destination. At Brandenburg Tor the groups of tourists are well in place catching the last ray of light on the door. For tourists it is mostly group of teenagers in school trip abroad for the first time wandering like zombies. I will come back another time to shoot a spherical panorama of the place.

18:33 I'm exploring the Galeries Lafayette level -1 and searching for the French bookshop. First time in six years in Berlin. I enter the bookshop, the owner welcomed me in French, the walls are filled with "livre de poche", I'm in France. Where is the letter B? Ok still between A and C, found my Bukowsky and two books I haven't read yet.

19:01 still to early and a tiny bit hungry I'm giving a chance to a curry wurst place called Biers under S-Friedrichstraße. It was a mistake but now a souvenir engraved in my memory as the worst curry wurst ever: fatty, not cooked and shitty fries, the place should be closed, the owners put in jail or recycled in plastic bottle.

19:33 I enter the embassy, passed the words set in stone informing us about the former visit of the Queen some years ago, find a place to sit in the round conference room.  The talk starts and the walls around us are sliding to close the space, safe in the British shelter.

A complete different crowd as my last conference in Leipzig last week, more evenly distributed between women and men.

21:11 the talk ends, walls slides again and drinks are served. A sip of red wine and I stop. Evening was definitively not under the sign of good food and good drink but I managed to feed my brain with quality words.

Panic in sneak preview

Sneak preview is a nice concept, you pay a cheaper price for your cinema ticket and you don't know what you gonna see until you see it. If it's bad, then it's bad, but you just lost 5€ and you hope next time will be better. If it is good you can bother all your friends telling them you were the first, you discovered this director, you revealed these actresses and actors, you are the one with the gift, you can make star (you can send me your book, portfolio and other showreel I know people).

Despite pretending you love cinematography (remember this Uzbek underground film in last Cannes festival?) you are actually and secretly hoping for a big blockbuster or the last romantic comedy with that blond actress and other handsome hunk... Until the first picture frame you are still full of hope, ready to laugh out loud - so bad it is - you can't believe producers are still producing this and that you will never pay for this movie, even so you already paid and are ready to bother again your friends talking about this shitty but ok-ish movie (viral marketing for dummies). Wolverine actor fighting robots to regain the attention of his kid was very pleasant after all, robots, boxing, what else? yes no women in that film, but robots, boxing...

Yesterday was bad luck as they decide to show us a non funny movie: "12 years slave". You could feel all the audience getting deep back in their seat thinking "oh shit that will not be funny..." and it was not. Just one person try to laugh after two minutes, tension I guess, but nobody followed him and I may have heard people crying after. Sadly no phone connection in the room, meaning I could not check the film duration.

Let's go critical about the film: nothing to the say about the topic, it is just horrible like every transition in mankind when one group of men (here the whites) are slavering the other (here the blacks) and I do remember South Africa Apartheid happened after this transition, mankind is a slow process. Can you make a plastic film with stylistic images about people suffering (and I mean here people being killed at work slowly or slavery), Steve McQueen the director can... So you got the point (2 hours of horror) of the film after two minutes and I don't specially enjoy seeing people being whipped to death if they don't ask for it of course (spanking is another story for another post).

The editing is poor and follows this layout: slave at slavery duty, one random mistake made (it is the white master duty to find mistake in order the exercise himself whip to blood the slave but not to death because these things cost money, ahhh money), focus and de-focus of the camera on the open wounds bleeding, camera on the wind in the trees with sunset and next day. And sometimes whipping by night, this for twelve years. At least the question "can you produce beautiful images to horrible thing?" or "horrible and terrible thing have to be represented bluntly?" is asked.  Steve McQueen is not the first artists on this matter, but I always wonder what did the artist want to tell us: "look I can make beautiful images with anything, am I good? am I good?". And the music sucks, it was heard and used before thousand time in the movie and others.

Like many aspects in that movie subtlety was totally absent. At one point of the movie you think you will see the white woman starting to fight for her right and the slaves against her husband, but not, she is just an evil bitch in an american binary world: you are good or you are bad and only the view point of the good (the white here) matters. Hopefully Brad Pit the producer is here and manages to give himself the role of the good Samaritan open-minded-Canadian who can tell the landowner "you know these slaves are actually human as well".

As is was my first Steve McQueen experience I will give him another chance because I'm a good person.

Die Walküre - première in Leipzig Oper

Acte I
Three characters only on stage, I mean only three people talking loud and some dancers moving slowly around then. The idea of  falling asleep did cross my mind, but I'm strong. The music is fine (say the apprentice musician we can't decipher properly any musical partitions) but I'm not yet transported by the musical waves. And then, bammm, the brother and sister, Siegmund and Sieglinde, one after the other, are filling the opera room space with their voices, and that's impressive, very impressive.

First break is welcomed. Time to check how people are dressed.

Acte II
New characters are entering the stage. The parents, god and goddess are entering the debate. It is moving a bit more than during the first act and it helps to keep me awake. The orchestra is teasing us with glimpses of the famous melody.

I see coats lying on the stage, there are moving slowly... And because I'm not seeing any dancers on stage, my guess is our lovely Japanese dancer friend who found tickets for us tonight is under one of these coats.

Acte III
Finally here they come, the Walkyries or Die Walküre are all on stage. The new singer generation apparently because they don't look oversized, actually they look (in size) normal whatever normal is.

We were waiting three hours but now Herr Wagner puts all in, as if he was playing poker or StarCraft he gives us everything, the music, the lyrics, the volume and fire on stage to conclude.

It was the premiere tonight, so the applause session is a bit longer and each people involved in the opera gets some bravo... or some bouhhhh as well as some were thinking Richard Wagner was murdered tonight. The Wagner fans are intense, Bieber fans can put their pants again as they are only little players comparing to those tonight. Always funny (or scary) to see people in suits screaming like hooligans.

Biennale des bewegten Bild oder B3 - Thursday

This morning I woke up and went almost directly to the Max Planck institute where my hosts are working. This institute is freshly new and to have an idea of how it looks, think of the design a Scandinavian hotel in Stockholm, but instead of rooms for sleeping you will find labs, working rooms, über cool microscope, nice sofa, good cafeteria, good coffee, a lot of light and space, all what you need to do a good research job and probably any job.

The head full of cells images I left this place. More moving images were waiting for me down town. I took the U8 follow by the S2 (not sure) to join the main train station. There I went to the Kai Middendorff Galerie where I saw a film (it was "Out (Tse)" from artist Roee Rosen). It was question about Israel, sm, politic, exorcism, fetishism, eroticism and more. Type of video installation where you wonder "Am I looking at two women, one with clothes whipping the ass of the other, naked, the arms attached to the ceiling and screaming with an evil voice quotations from the a former Israeli minister? Yes I'm.", checked.

To continue I went again to the Weißfrauen Diakoniekirche located nearby the Willy Brandt place. Watch some films, played video game with four other players on the fulldome and left again.

I crossed the Main and enter the Deutsches Filmmuseum. There I only had 45min to attend the exhibition on Fassbinder. Very nice installations, mainly projections of film parts, shorts ones with explanation. Now I know I'm missing some german movie references (or in French "Maintenant je sais que je dois combler mes lacunes fassbinderienne").

Re-crossing the bridge, official opening of the fulldome in the church and short visit for another opening in the same street of the Basis place. Here as well a lot of videos. I remind to the readers that it is the topic of this Biennale.

Then again leaving and going home by feet. Frankfurt is pretty quiet for and an Halloween evening. I just saw 4 people dressed for the pumpkins event.

Time to sleep well thank you.

Two days in vfx world - animago 2013

Thursday and Friday took place in Babelsberg (near Berlin) the Animago 2013 event. Two days of talks and presentations about movie production and more specifically cgi/special effects and other VFX. The people giving talks were coming from different production houses. Companies involved in movie production of course but also production of commercials, tv shows, tv productions.

What was interesting? Two things. First you don't need much equipment to produce/create cgi of high quality. Some computers, one or two kinect, good software and most important talented people and you are ready. Secondly it was interesting to see how big movie production (e.g. from the US) are sending scenes to be produced oversea (e.g. in Europe). A few seconds of film or shots are sent to a company. And that company will finish the "job", add explosions, destroy buildings, remove people when necessary. They may not have the resources to produce a whole movie, but some seconds are completely doable. Also it gives a bit the feeling that everything is about producing the best explosion on screen (half true) in that field. Or that too much attention is put on very little details when you know which movie it is or how long is the scene to be processed.

There were also longer talks describing the work on full movie almost, you can call them making-offs. Once talk was great, a team from a company based in Stuttgart was telling the story of their work on the movie Oblivion. And it was fascinating how much effort was put in that movie (knowing it is reasonably average sci-fy with a non-sens ending). Not only effort, but quality work. A perfect example of old fashion studio work and up to date vfx. So if you have seen this movie, the house in the sky was built in real size but hooked to the ground and the simulation of viewing above the clouds was created by re-projecting (I call it immersive cinema in case you are not following...) in every directions various panorama movies (made from shooting in Hawaii with a camera cluster). Very cool I may say, a nice mix of creative work and proper scientific work (how to record panorama movie, how to project them, how to set-up such projection system..)

I hope to be able to attend this event next year.h

A night at the planetarium

September is over and October took over ten days ago. As usual the trees, but not only, some buildings in Berlin as well are getting new colors. For the trees it's easy, we call it Autumn, for the buildings it's the light festival or festival of light. 

Passed 9:00pm you may find a lot of night photographers in the streets of Berlin, all equipped with tripod and waiting on the side as fishermen with their fishing rod waiting for the chosen monument to change appearance. This year I'm following a bit more seriously the program who offers interesting combos: free shows outdoor with light and music and payed performances indoor with music and light.


Last Sunday we attended two shows: one outside the Elisabeth Kirche in Invalidestrasse and a second inside the church building. First show used the front side of the building as projection surface as well as its shape to create nice visuals. Therefore you had the impression that the whole building was changing color and not only simply colored with a laser pointer. Indoor only the back wall served as projection surface, a huge surface, the small baroque ensemble was a delight for ears and the visuals created could have been better. I mean technically it was superb, but the content was not really synchronized with the music.

Tonight it was the opposite, the projection outdoor on the Gross Planetarium roof in Prenzlauer Allee was fine but not exceptional, only a simple slide show and sadly rain. This event took place during the week.  Nice to see this place full of people during the evening and people of bit younger than the an average planetarium visitor.

But really tonight it is in the planetarium that the a full dome show is taking place. Live electronic music and projection on the whole indoor dome surface. The projection surface was ok, not a perfect blending but it did the job as some people may say. The rest was completely hypnotic :-) The visuals - rather simple - were completely matching with the electronic live performance creating a strange atmosphere, truly immersive experience, giving you the feeling to be in the center of the dome, floating in space and no I did not take drugs before.

First article for SpottedByLocals - Berlin

It is here Freiluft-kino Mitte and it's about open air cinema in Mitte.

Die Brücke

Berlin is wide and green, but sometimes you want more and feel the pressure to leave the S-Ring area and go into the wild. You also have visited all possible museums on the museuminsel and you are looking for more human size exhibition. Die Brücke (the bridge) Museum is your new destination.

Go to S-Hohenzollerndamm and change for a bus towards Grünewaldsee. Already the buildings are smaller and bigger houses are showing up, soon the trees from the Grunewald forest will appear on your right. You hop off the bus and still need to walk 500m in the forest, one of the last house has “Die Brücke” written on its wall. You need half a day for the whole excursion, if  you’re coming from Berlin-Mitte.

The large villa hosts the collection of Die Brücke painting movement. As the collection is larger than the available space, there is a regular turn over. It is a very nice one floor white house, with a flat roof, made of connected rectangle rooms with a garden in the middle. It was constructed in a way that the paintings can get natural light with almost no windows on the walls but opening gaps on the ceiling.

Link here museum die Brücke.

This article wasn't accepted for spotted by locals Berlin as it was outside the area of Berlin.

A day or two at school

And it was not a random school, but the HFF or school for movie and tv in Babelsberg. There we took part with a colleague to a workshop on 3D production. This last for 2 days and it was more than entertaining.

It is reductive to say we learn a lot, but it was. We could play with professional cameras, 3D cameras with different configurations: parallel lenses, mirror rig system with cameras at 90° from each other. And follow the whole production work-flow, the basis stages of the process starting with sweetening, then alignment and color matching and finally depth grading.

On the last day of the workshop I thought why not going back by bike, there is just 30km, so I did, I also lost my way which added some km to my way back home. But crossing Grünewald forest is a real pleasure, especially being the only one not in bike equipment, going fast and sweating like a sweating machine.

Some links:
-HFF

A day at the museum and more

First official day of the KUI event, a Culture and Computer conference hosted in the Pergamon museum in Berlin. Mixed feeling about the papers presented in contrast to the very interesting keynote given this morning by someone from the Israel museum in Jerusalem. The speaker did talk about their collaboration with Google Art, how to put your museum on-line or how do you make it existing on-line without loosing visitors.
 
Before the social event of the conference the possibility to have a guided tour in the museum was offered, I took it and it was amazing. The guide who was supposed to give a 30min talk was entertaining us for 1h30. We were all drinking his stories, jumping from country to country, time to time, history to mythology, mythology to politic. The highest point was the fight depicted from a 2m piece of facade where we could see parts of Athena and other bodies, the statues were moving and the swords flying, take that immersive 3D cinema.

I ask the question: what is a conference without his social event? An incomplete event.  This time it took place on the top of some federal building not fat form Alexanderplatz. And after a nice diner with a americano-franco-russian couple I left the place to join ma douce for a concert in Eschschloraque.

Eschschloraque, a bar name easy to misspell, a surviving alternative bar in Hackescher Markt close to the Kino Central. Comfortably installed in a sofa facing the stage we are waiting for the musicians. Here they come, Japanese singer, Russian piano player and a Greek guitarist. Songs in Japanese, Greek and more. Always nice to discover the musical touch of a band.

Today I did travel in time, in space, in language... and I'm not even confused. Take that narrow minded people.

Some link:
-KUI event
-the Israel museum
-Google Art Project
-eschschloraque