Siberia and Mongolia: The Two Minutes of Eclipse
September 9th, 2008
“The Two Minutes of Eclipse”, a travel blog by Nenad Morača, Mario Janković-Romano, and me, about a 23 day eclipse chasing trip to Siberian and Mongolian never lands — is finished! All texts (unfortunately, still in Serbian) and 500+ photos, both geotagged on the interactive map, and more — could be found at:
So far (during last month and a half), blog had 20.000+ overall visits, or 350+ visits per day! Thank you all for reading!
Sibir i Mongolija: Koliko vrede dva minuta?
July 15th, 2008
Nenadov, Mario i moj putopisni blog o dvadesettrodnevnoj avanturi jurenja pomračenja Sunca po nedođijama Sibira i Mongolije je završen! Sve tekstove, više od 500 geotagovanih fotografija, interaktivnu mapu sa rutama i još svašta možete naći na:
Blog “Dva Minuta Pomračenja” je do sada (za oko mesec i po dana) imao preko 20.000 poseta, tj. preko 350 poseta po danu. Hvala vam svima na interesovanju!
A Pattern of Dust
July 3rd, 2008
So, the only thing left for me was to take out a book – Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino – and at least try to enjoy my bus ride. Feeling several different skins touching my skin, I managed to get lost in stories about cities and cities about stories, imaginably told to Kublai Khan by Marco Polo; one of those cities was Zora.
Marco (or Calvino) told Kublai (or me) that „beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city no one, having seen it, can forget. (…) Zora’s secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber’s striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer’s glass tower, the melon vendor’s kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the café at the corner, the alley that lead to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary infinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.”
A small eyelid-like pattern of dust on the bus window overlapped the stone eye of Dimitrije Tucović’s statue at the Slavija square, spontaneously forming a meaningful new portrait, and I realized that Zora was nothing but a semantic network, an upper ontology, with rigidly defined structure between concepts – just like an armature or a honeycomb; an objective formal representation of the world which could be processed by a machine (e.g. an intelligent agent on the Semantic Web) and which would make the programme understand the meaning, which would, in a way, make it think. In other words: Zora’s map is a gigantic RDF graph.
The dream held by AI researchers was similar to the one of Zora; by seeing what happened to this town (“Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.”) one can ponder, as I did: Could it be that Tim Berners-Lee’s dream is just another Kublai Khan’s empire, tempting, yet evasive, ambiguous, impossible to posses, doomed to be forgotten?..
The bus, then, stopped.
Let, lanci i lakoća
June 29th, 2008
Ako vas put navede u Berlin, ne tražite znamenitosti i ne gledajte u mapu. Za razliku od ostalih prestonica jasno omeđenih u vremenu i sa definisanim simbolima, prestonica koje možete zamisliti gledajući im razgledice, Berlin postoji isključivo između redova svoje istorije: u pauzama, prećutkivanjima, u neuglednim ćoškovima, u prljavim labudovima… Upravo zato, ovaj grad vas ne proziva, ne očekuje ništa, a postepeno vas osvaja cele – nalik na ružne i harizmatične ljude – svojom bezmernom lakoćom. Tri utiska:
(2) ljuljaške kod Mauer parka, dok ulični bend u mrklom mraku svira jezivo dobar Jazz a naokolo se puštaju zmajevi i skupljaju drangulije sa obližnje buvlje pijace;
(3) naši Couch Surfing domaćini, Claudia i Romina, koje su nas obe primile kao da smo stari prijatelji.
Miss Snow
March 6th, 2008
Every end of winter, my secret favorite season, brings me few shades of a reminiscence.
This winter’s most beautiful day was one of those when Sun is as hot as in late spring afternoons and snow is as white as in tales of our grandmothers. On that day, Srdjan, Vuk and me brought some fruits, vegetables, and cameras, and we played for many hours. On a big sparkling-white plane we sculptured a fragile yet handsome snowlady, with a wild hair and smooth round breasts. Sunset brought the cold and made us go…
Only few minutes passed. A pig-like boy showed up and destroyed our little goddess, pushing and kicking her snowbody in meaningless rage. And so, he learned a lesson or two about messing with other people’s artworks, while we learned a lesson or two about the necessity of loving the ephemeral.
End of the day: “Šaran” tavern, mulled wine, long talks, and a little beggar gypsy girl, approaching our table.
“Coin or two, please…” “Would you ever destroy a snowman, little one?” “Uhm.. no…” “Take this then… and good luck!”
(See more photos on Srdjan’s flickr page or visit my Facebook album.)
Menadžment i ja
February 28th, 2008
Mala filmska radionica, dva slobodna dana, jedan fotoaparat, mnogo nagomilanog studentskog gneva i – voila!
„aaahh“ je bio prikazan na decembarskom In Treš Festivalu u Pančevu, gde je dobio nagradu publike. (S’ obzirom da kao deo radionice film nije ni učestovao u konkurenciji, to je bila i jedina nagrada koju je uopšte mogao da dobije.)
Tehnika izrade je stop-motion animacija. Video slepljen od oko hiljadu fotografija. Dakle, drugari, čak vam ni kamera nije potrebna. Čekamo vas!
Ne odlazi cirkus
February 28th, 2008
„Il’ sve te maske kriju bol
i neki sasvim drugi lik?”
– Đorđe Balašević
Jelena, Mario i ja na Ivaninom masenbalu, tokom kojeg je Mario u svakoj rečenici morao spomenuti Kosovo, a ja Evropu.
„Jel taj fotoaparat sa Kosova? Ne, neću onda da se slikam.” „Jel slobodan WC, Evropa čeka!” „Idemo na donji sprat? Jel dole Kosovo?”
Album možete pogledati ovde, a sledi kolaž izabranih fotografija.
