HOKUSAI (1760-1849), From the series "Eight famous views from Edo" (Edo hakkei):
Evening rain in Yoshiwara - early 1800s

pictures of the floating world

According to Wikipedia (which in turn references the Oxford English Dictionary on the matter), the etymology of the word honeymoon is unclear. The American Heritage Dictionary (via answers.com) suggests it's "perhaps from a comparison of the moon, which wanes as soon as it is full, to the affections of a newly married couple, which are most tender right after marriage", which doesn't sound all that positive. Returning to the Wikipedia entry, honeymoon may have been used in Babylonian times to describe the bride and groom consuming honey (in the form of mead, a beverage) before the next moon. via kottke

 The Scandinavian word for honeymoon is derived, in part, from an ancient Northern European custom in which newlyweds, for the first month of their married life, drank a daily cup of honeyed wine called mead. The ancient practices of kidnaping of bride and drinking the honeyed wine date back to the history of Atilla, king of the Asiatic Huns from A.D. 433 to A.D. 453.

So that leaves us with the question of where the "moon" in the word "honeymoon" originates. One piece of folklore relates that the origin of the word moon comes from a cynical inference. To the Northern Europeans the terms referred to the body's monthly cycle and, its combination with honey, suggested that not all moon's of married life were as sweet as the first. British prose writers and poets, in the 16th and 17th centuries, often made use of the Nordic interpretation of honeymoon as a waxing and waning of marital affection.

 There are various explanantions for the origin of the tradition and also the name of honeymoon. The word honeymoon has its roots in Norse word "hjunottsmanathr" which was anything but blissful. The Northern European history describes it as the abduction of a bride from the neighboring village. It was imperative, that the abductor, who is husband to be, take his bride to be into hiding for period of time. His friends assured his and her safe keeping and kept their whereabouts unknown. Once the bride's family gave up their search, the bridegroom returns to his people. This folkloric explanation presumably is the origin of today's 'honeymoon', for its original meaning meant 'hiding'.

The Scandinavian word for honeymoon is derived, in part, from an ancient Northern European custom in which the newlyweds drank a daily cup of honeyed wine called 'mead' for the first month of their married life.

In Irish, the word honey is from "meala". The word for honeymoon is "mi na meala", meaning the "month of honey" and refers to how the bride and groom would spend that period of time. Irish monks first produced the fermented honey brew called mead for mead for medicinal purposes; then found it could make well people feel even better. Following the wedding a sufficient amount of mead was given to the bride and groom, along with special goblets, so they could share the unique brew for one full moon after the wedding--and thus the term honeymoon was coined. It was believed that this delicate yet potent drink was the best way to ensure a good beginning for a new marriage and it was also believe to endow powers of virility and fertility.

With so many explanations for the origin of the name and tradition of honeymoon, the most likely source is the medieval custom of couple consuming the mead for the first month of their marriage to ease them into married life and traditionally to increase their fertility. Honeymoons were a way to encourage conjugal bliss and the creation of children, a month of sanctioned sex.

Honeymoons are traditionally fraught with sexual innuendo coming from the time when most people didn't have sex until their wedding night. The wedding night and the following ones, became embued with a special sexual aura that everyone, including family and friends, would take advantage of. At one time, it was customary for all the female members of a bride's family to prepare her for bed on the wedding night and personally taking her to her new groom's bedroom, whispering instructions to the bride along the way. More recently, friends and well-wishers have been known to stand outside the bridal suite and make as much noise as possible. The idea being calling more attention to the fact that carnal relations are taking place in the bridal chamber.

Nowadays, when very few brides and grooms are virgins, wedding night and honeymoon has somewhat lost its appeal. Honeymoon is taken more as vacations. It is a kind of holiday from long lasting wedding planning, a chance for the newly wed couple to decompress after months of stress and tension of huge wedding. Some couples even put off their honeymoon until they have some money to spend. But they forget that two years after getting married, it won't be a honeymoon but just a holiday.

A honeymoon is not just getting away from people and not just a vacation. It helps in establishing the new marriage. Honeymoon is casting off of your old life and the beginning of the new one. A honeymoon literally means going away, symbolically and physically, from everybody one knows to a place where no one knows them and where the newly wed could stay together and know more about each other and establish long lasting bond.

Wedding brings two people together physically but honeymoon confirms it and sets the tone for how intimate and passionate the rest of years together will be.

The word first appears in the 16th century. The honey is a reference to the sweetness of a new marriage. And the moon is not a reference to the lunar-based month, but rather a bitter acknowledgement that this sweetness, like a full moon, would quickly fade. via http://www.datingmatchmakers.com/wedding/honeymoon.aspx

Tony Oursler Eyes, détail, 1996

Eye in the Sky features a fiberglass sphere onto which is projected a single eye watching television. Although the rest of the body is not visible, we can hear the sounds of compulsive channel surfing. Without the emotive clues of facial expressions or gestures, we focus on the eye as an orifice, twitching as it gulps weather forecasts, commercials, sitcoms and game shows. For Oursler, the fragmentary nature of the piece -- the disembodied eye, the reflected television screen and the rapidly changing channels -- parallels features of mental illnesses that signal the disintegration of the personality and the inability of the individual to identify with and function in the real world.

Oursler breaks down the traditional boundaries between media by creating a freestanding video sculpture. Eye in the Sky was facilitated by the recent development of miniature LCD projectors that free the image from the cumbersome boundaries of the video monitor, the conventional film screen or the picture frame. Like some strange creature from a science fiction film or surrealist dream sequence, Oursler's eye is a metaphor for the human condition in a media-saturated age.

Tony Oursler Eyes, 1996

Tony Oursler
The Sum of Its Parts, 1997
Fiberglass sphere, Sony CPJ200,
VCR, videotape, and tripod
18 inches diameter (sphere) plus equipment (45.7 cm)

"One of the issues that inspired this project is the contemporary paradox of feeling both invisible and overly visible: the ever-increasing anonymity of an individual meets the ever-increasing exposure of his or her life in environments affected by high-technology tracking, surveillance, and profiling. The more information that an organization has about an individual, the more likely it is that he or she will be reinvented and renamed as a number in a database. Government agencies and businesses have developed ways to categorize and classify an individual based on data collected from a variety of sources.

From an aesthetic perspective one may consider the movement lines on the maps as representing large-scale process drawings made unconsciously by the body of each person as he or she moves through a local environment. These drawings, arguably made by people everywhere as they move through space, remain unrealized unless monitored and documented. I use a book of transparencies to compare movement patterns to one another and also to create a new pattern consisting of all the participants movements.

The issue of tracking movements has taken on new implications in the era of "The War on Terrorism." The recent increase in surveillance and the new powers given to the government to monitor citizens lives create questions about the limits of freedom and privacy. In news debates and private life, people commonly worry that their lives may be "invaded." During the creation of this work, in fact, several participants expressed discomfort, saying that the collection of data about their movements felt intrusive."

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During the last weekend of Marchs the first session of the 'Hot Summer of Psychogeography' (2002) took place in Amsterdam. Socialfiction, the organisers, sent participants on their way from Dam Square with an algorithmic description of the route. The same experiment was repeated later in the day in the Bijlmer district.

 Dérive through Utrecht last year

read this as well

Situationist Guy Debord devised the notion of psychogeography in the 1950s. It deals with the study of the exact laws and specific effects of our geographic environment. Psychogeography describes the sudden change in atmosphere a few metres further along a street, and the different characteristics of city districts. It reveals the path of least resistance a person subconsciously takes when wandering aimlessly and points out the attraction or repulsion of particular places. One of Situationism's practices is the dérive (literally: wandering or drifting), a technique of rapid passage through varied environments. Involving playful-constructive behaviour, dérive examines psychogeographical effects and is thus quite different from the classic notions of journey and routing. Dérives weren't random; they challenged the psychogeographer to use his powers of imagination to experience the urban environment anew - for example, by following scents or negotiating a route through Paris armed with a map of London. What propelled these strollers was not so much curiosity but political and theoretical motivations.>>>

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 Imagine if you were walking in an unfamiliar area of town and suddenly you realized that it was very dark and the shadows looked distinctly unfriendly. But what if you had a map, a map that clearly marked out entire sections of the city as safe, or peaceful or even scary.

Such a map would be dramatically different from normal maps, in that the data being presented is no longer merely objective, but also subjective. Welcome to the new world of psychogeography.

Psychogeography is an umbrella term used to refer to a number of different ways to explore cities and towns. This new field is still emerging and like any new genre there is still a sense of uncertainty. Most definitions hover around the issues of maps and people’s responses to urban spaces and surroundings. The most accessible one is as follows: Psychogeography is the hidden landscape of atmospheres, histories, actions and characters which charge environments.
But there is a basic thread running through all the various versions of psychogeography, and that is the generation of maps. These are maps that challenge all preconceived notions about maps. Psychogeographic maps presenting maps that may or may not be objective.

A case in point is 'mental mapping'. These are maps generated by individuals walking along areas in the city and recording emotions. The resulting map is more than a physical record of distances travelled, it is also a record of the internal state of mind of the map maker. Other kinds of mental maps include maps made from memory alone. Some maps even overlay several such mental maps and the final result is a unique perspective of hitherto familiar areas.

The newness of this field also leads to widely differing methods of map making. By far the most commonly used method is something known as "Generative algorithms". This involves the establishing of a predetermined method of walking, and the psychogeographers follow such algorithms in order to explore the city in new ways. Typically, the rules for walking would involve just a series of instructions such as turn right, and then the second left, etc etc, and soon the participants would end up in places they would never have consciously chosen to go to.

Another example of this new way of walking is using a map of, say, City A, and follow it in City B. Or by randomly following a person on the street and observing the route he/ she takes.

While these projects seem to push the boundaries of maps further, one is tempted to ask what use is it all? For this we have to wait and see. But for sure, the city will no longer be something that lies in-between their houses and offices, instead there is likely to be a renewed interest in the concept of being an urban dweller.

Dinesh Rao

via thingsmagazine

KIKI SMITH

 
MOON 1997
lead paint on 83 Opal Remi glass panes, 16' x 13' x 3.5" overall

 
Tidal, 1998
Photogravure, phtolithography, and silkscreen
10 1/4 x 9 11/16” boxed, 19 1/2” x 126 1/4” open

St George Hall, Liverpool, Designed by Harvey Lonsdale Elmes at the age of 23 is one of the finest neo-classical building in Europe:

The project consists in fully covering the St. Georges Hall with the projection of ascii rendering of the same surface that it's being projected on.

 
photographs by Candida Höfer. Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek Wien X, 2003 (via thenonist)

Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.>>>

Natalie Czech, uses vertical aerial photographs that are freely available on the Internet and combines them by multiple superimposition. she concentrates on industrial and railway facilities whose linearity lends itself to suchlike montage.

From the serie: Blattschnitte
 
Blattschnitte 28, 2005
80 x 60 cm

 
Blattschnitte 30, 2005
146 x 108 cm

 Spacetime - Created by nicolai_g. No digital horseplay other than basic curve corrections and resizing.