Moses und Aron
Oper in drei Akten Arnold Schoenberg
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Jean-Marie Straub
homage
R.I.P
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Moses und Aron, known in English as Moses and Aaron, is a 1975 film by the French filmmaking duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet based on the unfinished opera of the same title by c. During its 1975 run at US festivals, it was also known as Aaron and Moses, and was frequently reviewed as such.
It is one of three films based on Schoenberg works Straub and Huillet directed, the other two being Einleitung zu Arnold Schoenbergs Begleitmusik zu einer Lichtspielscene , a short film made directly before Moses und Aron, and, over two decades later, an adaptation of the one-act comic opera Von heute auf morgen. The film retains the unfinished nature of the original opera, with the third act consisting of a single shot with no music as Moses delivers a monologue based on Schoenberg’s notes.The film was shot on location in Italy and Egypt. It utilized the same team of cinematographers as Straub and Huillet’s Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach. The soundtrack and cast of the film is the same as the 1974 recording conducted by Michael Gielen (Philips 6700 084).The original German version of the film was dedicated to Holger Meins, a former cinematography student who joined the Red Army Faction in the early 1970s and died on hunger strike in prison. This dedication was censored by German broadcasters for the film’s first transmission in 1975. The English subtitles of Schoenberg’s dense German libretto were prepared by assistant Gregory Woods, who is credited on the DVD.The film was shown at the 1975 Cannes Film Festival, but was not entered into the main competition.

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ORB
The shape of the piece alludes to the ‘pi’ number concealed in the geometry of the Pyramids, found when dividing the perimeter of a Pyramid by twice its height. The sphere is an invisible part of the resulting geometry, since a sphere with a radius as high as the Pyramid would have a circumference very close in length to the Pyramid’s perimeter. The surface of the artwork captures the Pyramids, the sky, the surroundings and the viewers in a multiple fragmented reflection. It references the role of the circular mirror in historical Egyptian symbolism, where it was linked to the sun and conveyed notions of creation and rebirth.

Replica
We begin with a tour of a virtual 3D model of the London house-cum-museum built by 19th-century architect Sir John Soane. The journey traverses the five floors of the museum’s meticulously restored rooms, each filled with original and duplicate fragments of antiquity. Sir John Soane (1753-1837) was one of the foremost British architects of the Regency era, a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy, and a dedicated collector of paintings, sculpture, architectural fragments and models, books, drawings and furniture. Soane was awarded the Royal Academy’s prestigious Gold Medal for Architecture, as a result receiving a bursary (funded by King George III) to undertake a Grand Tour of Europe. His travels to the ruins of Ancient Rome, Paestum and Pompeii would inspire his lifelong interest in Classical art and architecture. As an enthusiastic collector, later in life he began to repurpose his home at Lincoln’s Inn Fields as a Museum for students of architecture. With a collection containing thousands of objects ranging from Ancient Egyptian antiquities and Roman sculpture to models of contemporary buildings, Soane’s house had become a Museum by the time of his death.

Throne
This work attempts to express that premonition as an immense “floating vacant throne”. If instances of power and authority have ruled since ancient times, and the pyramids provide one example—we must ask what the future will hold. Created with reference to the forms of festival floats and portable shrines that appear in the rituals and festivities of the East, the sculpture fuses today’s 3D modeling techniques with gold leaf applications that date back to ancient Egypt. In the frontal center is an empty room, space enough for a 2 to 3-year-old child to sit, suggesting that the new intelligence is still in a young state. Shining, spherical mirrors placed at the center in front and back. Made of platinum foil, they represent “the eyes overlooking the world”, where the frontal one faces the future and the back reflects into the past.

Akhnaten
Portrait Trilogy:Einstein; Akhnaten; Gandhi
According to the composer, this work is the culmination of his two other biographical operas, Einstein on the Beach (about Albert Einstein) and Satyagraha (about Mahatma Gandhi). These three people – Akhenaten, Einstein and Gandhi – were all driven by an inner vision which altered the age in which they lived, in particular Akhenaten in religion, Einstein in science, and Gandhi in politics.
The text, taken from original sources, is sung in the original languages, linked together with the commentary of a narrator in a modern language, such as English or German. Egyptian texts of the period are taken from a poem of Akhenaten himself, from the Book of the Dead, and from extracts of decrees and letters from the Amarna period, the seventeen-year period of Akhenaten’s rule. Other portions are in Akkadian and Biblical Hebrew. Akhnaten’s Hymn to the Sun is sung in the language of the audience.
OPERA

“This is the Berlin Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection’s full-color, 6.4 million-triangle 3D scan of the Bust of Nefertiti. I was able to obtain this data after a three-year freedom of information effort directed at the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which oversees Berlin State Museums.” Cosmo Wenman

Years ago, a scandalous “art heist” at the Neues Museum in Berlin—involving illegally made 3D scans of the bust of Nefertiti—turned out to be a different kind of crime. The two Egyptian artists who released the scans claimed they had made the images with a hidden “hacked Kinect Sensor,” reports Annalee Newitz at Ars Technica. But digital artist and designer Cosmo Wenman discovered these were scans made by the Neues Museum itself, which had been stolen by the artists or perhaps a museum employee.

Roland Emmerich
In 1994, Egyptologist and linguist Daniel Jackson, Ph.D., is invited by Catherine Langford to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs on cover stones, also known as casing stones, that her father had unearthed in Giza, Egypt, in 1928. Jackson is taken to a U.S. Air Force installation and told by its commander, Special Operations Colonel Jack O’Neil, that the project is classified information. Jackson determines that the hieroglyphs refer to a “stargate” which uses constellations as spatial coordinates. On this revelation, Jackson is shown that the base has this Stargate, also discovered by Langford’s father. They use Jackson’s coordinates to align the Stargate’s metal ring with markings along its outside, and once all seven are locked in, a wormhole opens, connecting the Stargate with a distant planet. Jackson joins O’Neil and his team, consisting of Reilly, Porro, Freeman, Brown, Ferretti, and Kawalsky, as they pass through the wormhole.
CINEMA

Endangered Species
Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, Camille Henrot’s work blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her, such as King Kong and Frankenstein. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. In the series of sculptures Endangered Species, for example, the artist has created objects inspired by African art by using pieces from car engines; placed on tall pedestals, these slender silhouettes with zoomorphic allure make reference to the migration of symbols and forms as well as to the economic circulation of objects. This survival of the past, full of misunderstandings, shifts and projections (as shown in the slideshow Egyptomania, the film Cynopolis, drawings of the Sphinx, and even in the photographs of prehistoric flints) troubles cultural codes and conventions. In this way, Camille Henrot’s work questions mental resistances and the past’s resonance, whether it be drawn from myth or from reality.

The Ruins of Detroit

“Detroit, industrial capital of the XXth Century, played a fundamental role shaping the modern world. The logic that created the city also destroyed it. Nowadays, unlike anywhere else, the city’s ruins are not isolated details in the urban environment. They have become a natural component of the landscape. Detroit presents all archetypal buildings of an American city in a state of mummification. Its splendid decaying monuments are, no less than the Pyramids of Egypt, the Coliseum of Rome, or the Acropolis in Athens, remnants of the passing of a great Empire.” Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre