Xie xie everyone for coming out under Shanghai's grim weather for urban animal mapping and talking

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project: Walk, Workshop, Talk in Shanghai

My Dirt is Matter Out of Place project presented in Montreal's Articule gallery last year, is about to have Shanghai edition: The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is a walk, mapping workshop and artist-talk that focuses on mapping the sparrow, the pigeon and the dog of the Chinese megapolis to uncover some of the city's governing ideologies. The event hopes to be a platform to address Shanghai's everyday and current modernization as well as think about present and past urban policies and social paradigms. From Mao's Four Pest Campaign, to the destruction of Shikumen lanes and the 'modernizing' urban plan each animal has its place in this ideological urbanscape.

The Shanghai Urban Fauna Mapping Project is part of K11's public program "Mapping Shanghai," and will occur on April 13th 2014.

3:30pm we will meet at at K11's entrance dome to start the walk. The walk will be semi-guided and last one hour. Maps will be distributed but participants are invited to bring cameras and pencils to map their own animal landmarks.

5pm artist-talk and workshop will be given on B1 of K11. Drinks and sweets will be served!

More info here for Mandarin speakers here: http://www.douban.com/event/21273718/

Animals and Humans: What is Art, What is Beauty?

The topic and works of the Grand Palais' current exhibition seem worth a visit. Displayed slightly lower for the child in all of us, the exhibit goes over the European art scene's take on animals. In the words of the curator Emmanuelle Héran, it gathers all art depicting animals and touches upon a variety of ideas -- the cultural norms of beauty (why is a toad ugly and a horse honorable?), or the role human historical developments since the 16th c. had on our relationship to animals (for instance if during the colonial years the endless discovery of new species meant animals were symbols of bountiful imagination, today the predicament of their extinction is underlying all of their artistic portrayals). There's art, aesthetic theory, human and natural history to produce this:

Beauté animale : présentation de l'exposition by Rmn-Grand_Palais

And my favorite little creatures - birds - are represented by the iconic Dodo, whose myth is complexified here:

La véritable histoire du Dodo by Rmn-Grand_Palais

Vitalic's Dogs in Slow-Motion + The 'Cats & Dogs 2's Narrative = A House Music Blockbuster

Vitalic is a pretty awesome electro musician. His song Poney Part 1's video with jumping dogs in slow motion gained a bit of fame back in the day - I think it would qualify as an indie success - and has had 2,131,300 views on youtube since its upload in January 2006. Swedish House Mafia's recent Save the World has gotten 29,755,208 views since May 20th, and qualifies - I think - as a Summer hit and house music phenomenon. Both videos abuse the incredibleness of dogs in slow motion although the latter has a little too much cheese in its visual (and musical?) mix for me.