Black humour

This is really stupid, but it just came to my mind from somewhere and makes me laugh...

Nebra Sky Disk

I'm still feeling quite high after the excursion I made to the countryside today. To be more precise, I visited Nebra and the place, where they found the Nebra Sky Disk in 1999. I only realised how close the place is from here when I moved to Weimar, and knew right away that I _must_ visit the place. (There is nowadays a big visitor centrum.)

Rock paintings excluded, the Nebra Sky Disk is one of the oldest depiction of the heavenly phenomena we know of. It was buried in the ground some 3600 years ago, but at the time it had already been in use for an unknown time period. The disk itself is nowadays in a museum in Halle (I have to visit that, too), but its history is very well explained in Arche Nebra, where I was today.

There are not too many things that make me feel sentimental or cry. Nebra Sky Disk is one of them. Maybe it has to do with my astronomy interest, an ongoing saga for the last 25 years or so. Still, when I think of the disk, I feel connection with those people thousands of years ago. They also looked up to the sky in awe, trying to fathom what that all meant. I think of all those years the disk spent under the soil before it was found - straight to our time. Its shape and symbols are so unique for that time period, that one can only wonder if the smith was a genius or a lunatic. But talking about design, Nebra Sky Disk really is one of a kind. Whoever the smith was, I bet he didn't count his design being fresh almost 4000 years later...


Arche Nebra visitor centrum

Confinement

Confinement from West468 on Vimeo.

Here is a still photo video I made for a competition in the summer. It didn't prevail, but I find it beautiful in its "under the skin" soreness. Now that the school has truly started, I hope I'll get inspiration to do more short films/animations. :)

Kraftwerking

A couple of days ago I was in Kraftwerk concert in Munich. It was quite of an experience, interesting personally as well as professionally. My first encounter with Kraftwerk's music is from when I was 7 years old. I was in the first class of primary school and I still remember how our teacher asked us to draw an image that comes to our minds from the music she played to us. The piece was Kraftwerk's "The Robots" and even if I wasn't supposed to understand English, I drew three robots with triangle heads (thank the Tripods for that) walking in a long grass. I didn't know what the song was or who Kraftwerk was, but the song played in my head long time after and sometime later I recognised it somewhere else and found out whose song it was. :) I've always liked Kraftwerk, even if I'm not as hardcore fan as some others. I just find the music lovingly industrial and sometimes hum the songs in my head or listen to them.

So, all in all, it was great to see them live. I was very happy also because I was there with a guest status and got a small peek behind the scenes, too. The show itself was quite fabulous. It was 3D, so you needed to have special glasses to get the best of it. That made me think about the future and how the shows will evolve. It will definitely be quite different in about 10-15 years! Some of the animations were rather... animated, I guess I would have made them differently. But specially the most famous songs had pretty decent effects and the show was very enjoyable. It lasted exactly 2 hours, so people definitely got a good ride.

The equipment you need to do a full set 3D animated show was quite powerful. The work for only three shows must have been pretty extensive, I'm interested to see if they are going to make a full tour next year... On the trip I also visited the Kling Klang Studio near Düsseldorf. Neat place, I must say, but rather undecorated. I would have expected to see at least few bicycles laying around... ;)