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Archive for November, 2008

Ashes and Snow (Film Review & Exhibition)

Posted in Film, tagged , , on November 25, 2008| Leave a Comment »

ashesandsnowAshes and Snow by Gregory Colbert at the Zócalo Nomadic Museum closed in Mexico City on April 27, 2008.

The Mexico City opening marked the fifth installation of Ashes and Snow, Gregory Colbert’s sixteen-year personal and artistic odyssey. Ashes and Snow is an ongoing project that weaves together photographic works, film, art installations and a novel in letters. The exhibition consists of more than 50 large-scale photographic artworks, a 60-minute feature film and two short film haikus. To date, more than nine and a half million people around the world have visited the exhibition.

Gregory Colbert originally conceived of the idea for a sustainable traveling museum in 1999. He envisioned a structure that could easily be assembled in ports of call around the world, providing a transitory environment for his work on its global journey. The first public installation of Ashes and Snow at the Arsenale in Venice, which opened in 2002, inspired the architectural concepts used in the Nomadic Museum.

The Zócalo Nomadic Museum, designed by Colombian architect Simón Vélez, occupied 5,130-square meters, and contained two galleries and three distinct theatres. For the first time, the Nomadic Museum incorporated water as a design element to recall the unique history of the Zócalo, which was once surrounded by canals. This architectural choice honored the symbolic significance of the Zócalo as the center of Mexico-Tenochtitlan, a city founded by the Aztecs on a small island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in 1325.

The show will open next in Brazil in 2009. Sponsored by The Rolex Institute

Source: Website , Bookstore and Gallery

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Miracle of the Human Body

Posted in Health & Wellness, tagged , on November 19, 2008| Leave a Comment »

By Deepak Chopra

Consider that the human body consists of approximately one hundred trillion cells, about one thousand cells for every bright star in the Milky Way. It takes only fifty replications, starting with the one-celled fertilized ovum, to produce those one hundred thousand billion cells.  The first replication gives you two cells. The second replication gives you four. The third replication gives you sixteen cells, and so on. By the fiftieth replication, you have one hundred thousand billion cells in your body, and that’s where the replication stops.

So all of the cells of your body start from just one cell. That one cell replicates and replicates, and somewhere along the line the cells differentiate. There are some 250 different  types of cells in the human body, from the spherical simple fat cell to the thin, branching nerve cell. Scientists still have no idea how that one cell ends up dividing into so many different kinds of cells, which then are able to organize themselves into a stomach, a brain, skin, teeth, and all the other highly specialized parts of the body.

In addition to doing its specific job in the body, each cell does a few million things per second just to keep functioning: creating proteins, adjusting the permeability of its membrane, and processing nutrients, to name just a few. Each cell also has to know what every other cell is doing otherwise your body would fall apart. The human body can function only if it is operating synchronistically, and all this can happen only through non-local correlation. How else could one hundred trillion cells each doing one millions things per second coordinate their activities so as to support a living, breathing human being? How else could a human body generate thoughts, remove toxins, and smile at a baby, or even make a baby, all at the same time?

In order to wiggle my toes, first I have the thought that I’d like to do so. The thought activates my brain cortex, which then sends a nerve impulse down through the spinal cord into my legs and moves my toes. That in itself is miraculous. Where did the thought come from? Before the thought, there was no energy, but as soon as I had the thought and the intention to wiggle my toes, it created a controlled electromagnetic storm in my brain, which transferred down the nerve, and caused it to discharge a certain chemical. Then my toes wiggled. That’s a very linear, mechanical, and local phenomenon – except for that very first part, the thought that started it all. How did the thought first create the electricity? Scientists understand the body’s mechanisms – action potential, neurotransmitters, and muscular contractions, all of it. But no one can show through experiment where the thought came from. The thought cannot be seen, but without it, we would be paralyzed. No thought, no toe-wiggling. Somehow your awareness becomes information and energy. Where does that happen?

The answer is that the thought originates in the virtual domain.

Source: The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Power of Coincidence by Deepak Chopra

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