japan – Parerga und Paralipomena http://www.michelepasin.org/blog At the core of all well-founded belief lies belief that is unfounded - Wittgenstein Thu, 31 Jan 2013 00:11:42 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.2.11 13825966 Getting lost in the world of Laputa http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2011/09/02/getting-lost-in-the-world-of-laputa/ Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:27:13 +0000 http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/?p=1063 I am certainly not an anime expert – but after being in Japan for a couple of months last year I started developing an appreciation for this form of art. In particular, I fell in love with the work of Studio Ghibli, the Tokyo-based animation film studio which includes award director Hayao Miyazaki.

The other day I watched for the first time “Laputa: Castle in the Sky” [wikipedia | imdb], the first film created and released by Studio Ghibli in 1986. I found the cartoon so inspirational and touching that I though I’d post something about it.

Laputa 3

The themes that emerge are not at all new in Studio Ghibli’s anime: the love for a primordial dimension where nature still remains untouched; the celebration of the human values of honesty and respect for others; the relationship between technology and ecology; the fascination with sci-fi, futuristic worlds. All of this conveyed in two hours of Indiana Jones-style adventure..

[check out this youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3AN0eDxE7E I couldn’t embed it due to copyright violation in some countries!]

Other information and reviews are available on this site, including:

  • Washington Post
    “Miyazaki’s world, so full of color and life, is always just across the borderline of imagination”
  • Stomp Tokyo’s Review
    “Although the basic storyline (intrepid young hero rescues princess) is as cliche as can be, the world Miyazaki has created here is unlike any you’ve seen in any animated film, especially one made by Disney. Vaguely post-apocalyptic, this (mostly) pre-industrial society has produced a mix of simple farm life and fabulously complex propeller-driven flying machines. Laputa itself is wondrous.”
  • Anime World
    This story is one of the best I have ever heard and it is what makes this film really stand out. Twisting and turning, never giving you any clues as to what will happen next and keeping you constantly surprised and engaged, Laputa is a magnificent tale, the likes of which only Miyazaki could create.

    • Laputa 1

    Laputa 2

    ]]>     2189     Japanese figurative paintings http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/03/09/japanese-figurative-paintings/ Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:41:05 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=619 I went to the National Museum of art in Osaka the other day, and saw a lot of inspiring stuff. The exhibition that was on was titled “Garden of Painting—Japanese Art of the 00s”:

    To commemorate the fifth anniversary of the National Museum of Art, Osaka’s relocation from Expo Park to Nakanoshima, in the heart of Osaka, we are pleased to present a special exhibition titled “Garden of Painting—Japanese Art of the 00s.” In this event, we focus on new figurative painting from the last decade to showcase the vibrant activities of a younger generation of Japanese artists.

    In this exhibition, we present some 200 works by 28 artists, including recent and new works, throughout the museum’s exhibition spaces in the second- and third-floor basements. Among these are the unforgettable O Jun with his witty portraits and iconography; Kobayashi Takanobu, who depicts landscapes and people shrouded in a distinctive kind of light; artists from the preceding generation such as Nara Yoshitomo, who is known for his pictures of young girls with incisive looks; up-and-coming artists like Goto Yasuka, Sakamoto Natsuko, and Atsuchi Tomoko, who were born in the 1980s; and Kusama Yayoi, who has in recent years been exploring new frontiers in painting through her use of line drawings.

    Here’s a list of the things I liked the most:

  • Goto Yasuka, ‘yosegaki’

    • Picture 1.png

  • Nara Yoshitomo, ‘the little judge’, ‘agent orange’, ‘after the acid rain’

    • Picture 4.png

  • Hanazawa Takeo, ‘winter garden’, ‘mikrokozmosz’

    • Picture 1.png

  • Ikeda Mitsuhiro, ‘untitled’

    • Picture 3.png

  • Kato Mika, ‘canaria’, ‘cloud’

    • Picture 1.png

  • Kobayashi Takanobu, ‘forest’, ‘sunbather 8’, ‘pillow’

    • Picture 4.png

  • Ozawa Sakae, ‘Zauber/magic’, ‘the secret of the world tastes like honey’, ‘i always wanted to cry’, ‘the world becomes dream, the dream becomes world’

    • Picture 6.png

  • Kusama Yayoi

    • Picture 7.png

  • Makishima Takeshi, ‘dragonfly’, ‘replay’, ‘in motion’, ‘helios’

    • Picture 8.png

  • Sugito Hiroshi, ‘quadII’
  • Machida Kumi, ‘gentle people’, ‘rocking horse’

    • Picture 9.png

  • Aida Makoto, ‘picture of waterfall’

    • Picture 11.png

  • Hoki Nobuya, ‘untitled’

    • braskartblog3.jpg

  • Sakamoto Natsuko, ’tiles’, ’tiles, shower’

    • Picture 12.png

    ]]>     619     Getting back to the ontological work.. http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/02/04/getting-back-to-the-ontological-work/ Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:00:58 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=523 I’ll be working in Osaka for three months on ontologizing a couple of datasets with the help of Riichiro Mizoguchi. This means that I’ll have enough time to revise various notions about ontology engineering during this period. Here’s a first and fundamental one, regarding the difference between ontologies and data models:

    The difference between ontologies and data models does not lie in the language being used: you can define an ontology in a basic ER language (although you will be hampered in what you can say); similarly, you can write a data model with OWL. Writing something in OWL does not make it an ontology! The key difference is not the language the intended use. A data model is a model of the information in some restricted well-delimited application domain, whereas an ontology is intended to provide a set of shared concepts for multiple users and applications. To put it simply: data models live in a relatively small closed world; ontologies are meant for an open, distributed world (hence their importance for the Web).

    Schreiber. Knowledge Engineering. Handbook of Knowledge Representation (2007) pp. 929-946

     

    OTHER SEMANTIC WEB LINKS THAT CAME UP TODAY:

  • Why use OWL? by Adam Pease (clear presentation of the advantages of OWL over XML)
  • Interdisciplinary Ontology Forum in Japan – InterOntology10
  • The research prototype of Europeana’s semantic search engine.
  • Hozo (a nice ontology editor) online ontology viewer
  • OWLSight – owl ontology browser (online)

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    ]]>     523     Japanese Terror in Sancasan http://www.michelepasin.org/blog/2010/01/05/japanese-terror-in-sancasan/ Tue, 05 Jan 2010 10:35:45 +0000 http://magicrebirth.wordpress.com/?p=488 Yesterday I finalized a song from last year.. it’s called Japanese Terror in Sancasan. Weird title I know, but if you happen to see me live I’d be happy to tell you the story behind it (it’s a bit personal).
    The song ‘s been originally made with Impromptu (the repetitive japanese sounding line in the background is randomly generated) , post-processed a bit with Audacity (added voices and so on), then passed on to my dear friend Andrea who added some nifty keyboards and re-processed the whole thing using Cakewalk. Thanks Andrea! I really love the end result.

    Japanese Terror in Sancasan by magicrebirth

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