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Temple of Hathor

“Her benevolent side represented music, dance, joy, love, sexuality, and maternal care, and she acted as the consort of several male deities and mother of their children. These two aspects of the goddess exemplified the Egyptian conception of femininity. She crossed the border between worlds, helping deceased souls in their transition to the afterlife.” Wikipedia

The serpent column

The serpent column. Brought by Constantine to “Constantinople” (Istanbul) as a symbol to mark the shift of the center of the world from Delphi to Constantinople… and the end of the Oracle of Delphi and the power of its priestesses. As if that weren’t enough, it was “buried” so that the other obelisks would stand out.🤦‍♂️😳🫣😢

Notes about Minoan civilization

Notes

From various readings and the videos below, I have taken the following notes:

  • Minoan priestesses led a religion that worshipped both a female deity, the Goddess of Serpents, and a male deity, the Bull.
  • The Goddess of Serpents could be the predecessor of Demeter and Persephone.
  • It is unclear whether it was a matriarchal society.
  • The palaces were centers of religion, trade, and work. Historians use them to establish the periods of their history.
  • Although there were kings and queens, neither their art depicts them nor do their documents mention names.
  • They had no army. They were invaded and rebuilt. Until approximately 1400 BC. Depending on the source, almost 1000 years without an army.
  • They traded with Egypt, Anatolia, and mainland Greece.
  • They produced wine, oil, and wheat.
  • Their autonomy (the name they used for their people) is unknown.
  • Deforestation in Crete may have begun with the construction of ships.

Hypotheses/ideas

  • It may seem that the research is about the Goddess, but I am more interested in the figure of the priestesses. Real women with a practice, techniques, a lineage, and a role in society.
  • Although the background is “known,” it is important to remember the balance between the feminine and the masculine in both men and women. This can be achieved with the techniques we know. The search is more oriented toward evoking these aspects, finding a language that helps us remember.
  • In one of Eva’s videos, she comments on the possibility of a balanced religious direction (feminine/masculine). In the readings I do at random, the aspect of the Goddess or the shamanic (iatromantes, for example) is often discussed, but I have not yet found any references to balance.
  • The Minoan priestesses could have taught the Maenads who maintained the cult of Dionysus, which was more politically correct after the fall of the Minoan civilization.
  • Both have a clear link to the figure of the Sibyl, who apparently did not officiate ceremonies but used the same techniques of altered states of consciousness. And to the tantric women.
  • They would also have a connection with my suspicion that the cult of the Sibyl in Mallorca has a prior link with some female deity who was not politically correct after the genocide of Jaume I.
  • The Minoans, like the Mallorcans, have lost their proper name over time.
  • When I see the fresco of the young man jumping over the bull and the two priestesses, I wonder why it is always said that they also jumped. It could be that they are accompanying him in taming his inner bull. In the fresco, the women are in front, grabbing the bull by the horns, and behind, waiting for the man. They seem to be in control of the situation.

Sources

Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_civilization

2024-11-28

I ask for clarity in explaining the process.

Tamara was nearby and told me that she saw a temple in Ireland (Newgrange) that she was able to visit during the winter solstice. I understand this as a possible clue.

2024-11-24

I ask for clarity regarding direction in all aspects.

During the conversation, I experience a lot of pain and cry deeply. It becomes clear that I need to let go of everything.
I see that many connections no longer exist. Simply put, the bond with some people is no longer there.
The disconnection became very evident on 20-11, upon returning from Rome.

When I “fall,” I break my glasses. Later in the day, I keep breaking things, tripping, and seeing objects fall from my hands…

Notes on: Gender, Ecstasy & the Revolution: Altered States in the Ancient Rites... and others.

The Ecology, Cosmos & Consciousness salon, The October Gallery, London, 23rd February 2016

Mad women running on top of the mountains without the supervision of their husbands, ingestion of mind-altering concoctions, ecstatic nocturnal dancing to the rhythm of the frame drum, ritual sexuality; men voluntarily practicing self-castration, these and more are the ingredients composing the compelling worship of two deities which turned the world upside down back in ancient Greece and Rome.

Maria Arnal and Marcel Bagés - Sibila

Today I cannot process, let alone write, the links I have discovered between the research on Sibila, music, art, artificial intelligence, and my personal history of the last year… but let the day and time remain.

Two points in time, November 20 and March 2, 2024.

The other reference of day and time is the CCCB, March 2, 2024.

“Cant de la Sibil·la” / “Quien Más Me Ama” | Maria Arnal | TED

Signature, Circle, Identity

The vision during the first conversation with the tree was of a woman lying in bed in intimacy, without a face.
The gaze focuses on the navel. I connected this to the Omphalos as a navel and represented by a circle with a dot inside.
That day, I later linked it to the Monad, Pau, and Ilaria.

On November 13, I also saw the connection with my signatures and logos. Both signatures have a main circle with a dot outside at the bottom right. The logos already include the dot at the center.

2024-11-11

I ask for clarity… my usual prayer. I inquire about the photographic expression of the place and see “the photo.” Even at that moment, I understand it is the only one needed.

I suggest to a friend that she ask questions for herself. In the responses, there is always physical pain. In mine, there is none.

During the photographic captures, I have a strong emotional outburst and break down crying and screaming. I interpret it as the moment of release from the previous problems caused by publishing Rosella’s photograph.

2024-11-10

I know from the video that I was exploring different ways to enter the tree’s field. I don’t remember any specific question.

chatGPT interprets drawings

Here is the first image… can you give me an interpretation?

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In this drawing, I see a play of fluid and curved lines that appear intertwined, suggesting a sense of continuous and organic movement. The simplicity in the use of strokes creates an abstract form that can be interpreted as a figure in transformation or a flow of energy. The shaded areas, although subtle, add a deeper dimension, suggesting a connection or contrast between areas of light and shadow, or perhaps between the conscious and the unconscious.

2024-10-12

Why have I come here?

I see the image on the cover of a craniosacral biodynamic book. Interpretation of the moment: God has brought me here to read about biodynamics.

How can I express this artistically?

I see the belly of an attractive woman with soft, white skin. I don’t see the woman, just the belly and the navel… it looks like a black-and-white photo taken in an intimate setting.

Resources to Explore Tantra

People often ask me about Tantra: what is it, where to start? Tantra is an experience that must be lived in the body. For those just starting, I like to recommend a “Tantra for Everyone”. Each facilitator has their own approach, but they are usually shorter, introductory meetings.

Here is a list of facilitators so you can explore what Tantra is for them:

Facilitators

A good place to have an initial contact with many of them is the Mallorca Tantra Fest.

New Festival in Alicante. Open Art Festival, Fifteen New Perspectives on Contemporary Art

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More than 15 professionals from the art sector will participate in nine events across different cultural centers in the city of Alicante. This is the core of ppt Open Art Festival, the first edition of a gathering aimed at presenting new visions of contemporary art.

NFTs for Artists

“NFTs for Artists” are talks we organize in collaboration with Casa Planas and with the help of several artists, curators, and galleries to open a debate and build a community to collectively approach NFT technology. All events in the series are free.

The first meeting will be on April 27 at 7:00 p.m.

It will be a guided class where I’ll introduce the basic concepts of blockchain technology while walking through practical steps so that by the end of the class you can publish an NFT and put it up for sale.

Exhibition: The Massacre of the Body

As part of City Screen at the Loop Festival in Barcelona, the Ideograma Foundation presents the video art exhibition: “The Massacre of the Body.”

This exhibition revolves around the construction of post-capitalist bodies, those that struggle to end the massacre imposed by systems of control and surplus value, inscribed within them.

The selection of videos by various artists explores ways to decongest corporeality and reclaim the intensities crushed by phallocentrism, the identity of the image, or the construction of a self that dances to the rhythm of production structures.

Ciutat de vacances - Metrópolis - RTVE

Throughout the episode, guided by its curator, we explore the projects of artists: Juan Aizpitarte, Ángela Bonadies, Domènech, Idensitat (Ramon Parramon and Gaspar Maza), Left Hand Rotation, Ángel Marcos, Neus Marroig, Marc Morell, Ana A. Ochoa, Irene Pittatore, Marina Planas and Arxiu Planas, and Miguel Trillo, complemented by insights from anthropologist Marc Morell.

Each selected project approaches the tourism phenomenon from different angles and perspectives, together forming a puzzle of diverse viewpoints.

Street photography with an iPhone

A camera is a set of capabilities and limitations. The most remarkable capability of smartphones is that they are “invisible” and always with us. For most people the fact that everything is automatic is also an advantage, but for street photography it is a limitation.

The first iPhones had fixed focus at the hyperfocal. Starting with version 4 they introduced autofocus, which was marketed as an advancement, but it complicates the shot. Waiting for the phone to be able to focus often means losing the photo.

New York, New York... the “memory” edition

I’ve been wanting to share a workflow I’m exploring. Usually I edit photos with a sequential system of several passes. In the case of my own photos I try to leave a long time between a pass, months or years.

The normal cycle is to do a review of all the material immediately after capture and let it sit for a year before doing the second pass (on all the material). From the combination comes the “draft” of my work, which I post on my photoblog. At this stage I already nominate some photographs as “ my-favs”, which are the ones I show when someone asks for a theme. To do something I consider meditated I leave it even longer.

A Personal Journey, Part Two

City of Shadows – © Alexey Titarenko

City of Shadows – © Alexey Titarenko

New Bond Street – © Matt Stuart

New Bond Street – © Matt Stuart

Since I had the book Street Photography Now in my hands I wonder how it is possible that under the title of street photography Alexey Titarenko and Matt Stuart can coexist? I like both, but I think the only thing they share is the setting. I know it is just a book, but asking questions is not bad. In the search for an answer I structured the problem into three parts: the documentary function, the experience and the aesthetics of street photography. It is in the experience where I find more certainty, especially in the phrase by Nick Turpin “It is a simple ‘Zen’-like experience…” It is precisely here that I see clearly where street starts and ends. A “streeter” must feel the street, breathe it, live it, must be passionate about the urban environment and the “casualities” it “encounters”. Some time ago I mixed in “Intuitive Photography” Cartier‑Bresson, Zen and archery to talk about the photographic experience and how we learn to “flow” shooting. Regardless of style, or possible documentary intention, I think all of us who do street share this:

Contact Sheets

As part of my Artificial Intelligence research, I created these contact sheets of the faces that the algorithm detects. You can read more about my research here.

You can also view the full contact sheets archive on contacts or Flickr. The archive is updated every time the system finds a sufficient number of new faces.

Note that every picture is credited. This is not the appropriation of images from the internet; it’s the re-use of freely distributed content interpreted by an AI algorithm.

Store fronts

2008-2012

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In my routine drifts, I always get caught by store fronts, even though I no longer publish my project, I still capture images.

A Personal Journey

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A few weeks ago, while selecting photos for the photo blog, I came across this pair of images. I thought it would be interesting to create a series of posts with them, exploring the doubts I have during the editing process. Although in the end I leave some certainty, most of them are questions.

Ubiquography a real-time world-wide mobile photography exhibition

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Ubiquography is an exhibition that aims to make people think about the traits that define mobile photography: ubiquity and immediacy.

http://ubiquography.com/

Participants capture, edit and publish their pictures using their phones and they are instantly displayed in the exhibition (inreal-time) emphasizing the immediacy aspect.

The exhibition will be simultaneously held in different cities around the world, in very diverse and distant locations, making the exhibition ubiquitous.

Influences: Alexey Titarenko

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Sooner or later, all of us who love street photography will receive a copy of Street Photography Now. The gift brought a smile to my face and sparked curiosity in the pages: Alexey Titarenko. His series “ City of Shadows” captivated me. It is certainly not what one would call classic street photography; in fact, the book often skirts the boundary of the classic, even quoting the famous line “reality can only be explained through fiction,” which I first heard from my most important influence, Krzysztof Kieślowski.

Fotografies: Street Photography

On February 24 at 21:45, Fotografies program on ‘channel 33’ showed a special on street photography for which I had the luck of getting interviewed. My adventure companions were incredible: Eugeni Forcano, Paco Elvira and Rafa Perez.

The 25 minute program can be seen here: http://www.ccma.cat/tv3/alacarta/fotografies/street-photography/video/3966610/

Some of my photographs can be viewed on Catalunya Television’s website in this online gallery.

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I recommend you check out Paco’s blog entry.

My book "22" as an eBook

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I love books as a channel to teach photography. Exhibitions are fine, but they confine us to a specific space/time. The multimedia mix, which always ends up as a video, is interesting but forces the viewer into a rhythm, and although I find it very appealing, it hasn’t fully convinced me. That’s why, since we started the Arrinconado project in Barcelona Photobloggers, I’ve been researching and testing print‑on‑demand systems and now eBooks.

The Traveling Salesman Problem, a Geo‑Referenced Heuristic, 1996‑1998

Reviewing the drawer of memories I found the final project I did for my degree of «University Analyst of Information Systems», an intermediate degree in the engineering program at the National Technological University.

It is a heuristic approach using geo‑referenced information for the classic « Traveling Salesman Problem». The intention is for it to be easy to implement in a business environment with standard SQL servers.

It has been available online for a long time and I have wanted to rescue it.

Calls for participative projects online for established cultural institutions: basic ideas

Last week a cultural center in Barcelona contacted me to get ideas regarding a project. We spoke for a few hours and I told them about my experience with Barcelona Photobloggers as far as organizing participative photographic projects. At the end, I had the feeling that this talk could help other centers so I decided to publish it, hoping that the quantity of calls for participative projects would increase, and above all, so would the quantity of participants.

My Very Special Photo, New York Essence

A black woman carries an Asian girl, both with umbrellas, crossing the anti‑terrorist protection barriers surrounding the building on Wall Street. Behind them a white man, dressed in business attire, asks for a hotdog. Another woman holds an umbrella with the American flag. In the background is Trinity Church, the founding entity of Columbia University, the first university in the state of New York. In its cemetery are buried some of the men who declared independence.

Photoblogging

In 2002, the lab where I used to have my film developed reduced the price of ‘developing to CD’ and I started asking for the digital medium. By the beginning of 2003 I’d already decided to give paper up.

The dematerialization of my photos implied that I didn’t have anything to take to work anymore to comment on in a café. A friend recommended some software that he was using for galleries. I ended up adapting the program. I wanted the last photos to be seen first; the photos had to be of large size, taking up the whole screen, unobstructed; and I wanted viewers to be able to leave comments.

Unforgettable Postcards, Memories in Code

At the age of 6 I asked for a bicycle for my birthday. At 7 I got a camera, a Kodak Brownie Fiesta. Now I ride a motorcycle and carry a digital SLR. The dream of traveling hasn’t changed either. The curious thing is that I’ve been traveling with a camera all my life and I still haven’t fully understood the experience, neither emotionally nor photographically.

Of all the photos I took between ages 7 and 15 I clearly remember four: two of them from trips and two from the backyard. This game of rescuing images from memory after a long time is very interesting. I now use it to edit my series. After letting them sit for a few months I ask myself, “Lisbon?” The first photo that comes to mind is Lisbon, and I usually work from that point.

Why?

Working reflections

Synchronized to the urban rhythm it is difficult to question oneself. We are pulled like the current of a river whose destination we do not know. When suddenly we become a drop detached from the whole and fall vertically, feeling the vertigo of the cascade, we acquire a different awareness of our own nature.

San Sebastián, Barceloneta

Last summer we traveled to New York. I thought, “Summer! New York! Coney Island!” I had a photo of Bruce Gilden stuck in my head. But it couldn’t happen; there wasn’t a single day without rain… and we went back home, back to the routine. Within the repetitive, unglamorous activities, unlike past water travels, were the Barcelona Photobloggers activities, among them, giving a black‑and‑white lab course; tidying the house and asking myself what to do with expired black‑and‑white rolls; going to work, going to the beach…

Talk: Online Marketing for Photographers

In the workshop Living from Photography in the 21st Century the need to expand talks related to online marketing and social networks was felt. We thought we could continue the topic with an informal talk bringing together professional photographers on one side and marketing and social network experts on the other.

I prepared a very basic script so that all speakers would know where to go. Unlike a course there would be no examples, nor recipes for how to create a profile on social network “a” or “b”. The intention was to convey a series of basic marketing ideas.

Henri Cartier-Bresson Trademark

Talk series “Icons, masters of photography in images”: Pepe Baeza talks about Henri Cartier-Bresson

On my way to the talk I was thinking “the Cartier‑Bresson drag again, is there no one else to talk about?” but since the speaker was Pepe Baeza I decided to go and it was worth it, the presentation was engaging and the topic made me review everything I think about photography. The fascination that everyone seems to have for Henri Cartier‑Bresson has made me tired. Is photography just an instant? William Klein said a photographer’s life is a few seconds, the sum of hundreds of moments at 1/125 s. How many photographs do you get to know from a photographer? I wondered how much you know about their life in 1 second, 2…?

Intuitive Photography

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“The simply curious doesn’t have the right… Zen, like all mysticism, will only be understood by a mystic who… won’t give into the temptation to obtain by a surreptitious way that which the mystical experience denies” (Translator’s note from ‘Zen in the Art of Archery’)

The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Decisive Moment by Henri Cartier-Bresson

There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive momentCardinal de Retz

I have always felt a passion for painting. As a child, I painted on Thursdays and Sundays, and on other days I dreamed of painting. I had a Brownie camera like many children, but I only used it occasionally to fill small albums with my holiday memories. It was much later that I began to learn to look through the device; my little world widened and holiday photographs contributed to that purpose.

Photographing the Natural by Henri Cartier-Bresson

Since its origins photography has not changed except in its technical aspects, which, in my opinion, are not of great importance.

Photography seems like an easy activity; it is a diverse and ambiguous operation in which the only common denominator among those who practice it is the tool used. What comes out of that camera is not alien to the economy of a world of wastefulness, where tensions are increasingly intense and where ecological consequences are already disproportionate.

flickrGrama 3030122090

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Rainy Day as flickrGrama.

This is a project I’m working on called flickrGramas.

This is a very early version, my first attempt. Future improvements include:

  1. Using only Creative Commons derivatives allowed images
  2. Creating flickrGramas by tags (e.g., a face formed by thousands of face images, a rainy day formed by thousands of rain-related images)
  3. Improving color indexing techniques

Higher resolution available here (1,800px)
Full resolution available here (18,000px, 106MB).

Exhibition "From the Network to the Wall II"

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Barcelona Photobloggers leaves the online world again to present its second group exhibition titled “From the Network to the Wall II” on January 17 at 8:30 p.m. A total of 34 photobloggers from the Barcelona area will display their photographs at the Fotonauta gallery until February 8.

Photography Principles at CampusMac 2007

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The organizers of CampusMac invited Barcelona Photobloggers to participate, and I was there explaining the four things I know about photography.

Here you can download the short script (9 MB) that I used in the presentation: “Photography Principles”. It can help you remember the class or serve as a guide to find more information online.

Update: I also had a great time at the presentation of the KBG album, in the Ableton Live 6.0 workshops led by Jordi Alemany of MI7, and in the Photoshop workshop run by the training classroom of Microgestió.

"Inside Out" by Fran Simó and Benjamín Julve

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The photographs of Inside Out expose two inner worlds. The paths chosen by the authors diverge when selecting the forms and elements of the photographic language. Outside, the search is made in the large structures. Inside, in the small everyday things. They come together in similar compositional lines that create contrasting pairs.