Alexschi - White.wine

Photographing the Milky Way Over Greece

Alexandros Maragos is an Athens based filmmaker and photographer best known for his landscape photography, astrophotography and timelapse imagery. In his own words:

The Milky Way is the name of the spiral galaxy in which our solar system is located. It is our home in space. The Earth orbits the Sun in the Solar System, and the Solar System is embedded within this vast galaxy of stars. In the northern hemisphere, the Milky Way is visible in the southern half of the sky. This makes Greece one of the best places in the world to see and photograph the galaxy because of the country’s geographic location in Southern Europe at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. 

As a filmmaker and photographer I feel very fortunate to live here. Every time I want to shoot the night sky, all I do is to pick a new spot on the map and just go there and take the shot. Greece is a heaven for astrophotography. Whether you choose a mountain, a beach, a peninsula or any of the 6,000 islands, the Milky Way is always visible in the southern sky.

To see more of his work visit his website or follow him on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

Images and text via

Fractals are amazing. They are in our very veins, and if we look hard enough, we will begin to see for ourselves that they exist all around us.

Aluminum House in Madrid

Casa de Aluminio (Aluminum House) by Fran Silvestre Arquitectos sits on a site surrounded by gardens and tall trees within the city of Madrid, Spain. The metallic finish and horizontal proportions help minimize the scale of the house which sits like a jewel in a site bound by nature.

You can also see previous features of Fran Silvestre Arquitectos work following the links:

Casa del Acantilado 

Casa del Atrio

Casa Balint

Casa en la Ladera de un Castillo 

Retro Optical on We Heart It.

Sunday Dalí: The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, 1933. Collage.

From Ego Is A Rat On A Sinking Ship:

The woman sought by the Surrealist, then, was not conceived of as one who would avoid exploitation at all. It was just that Surrealism offered what it thought was an alternative exploitation to that of bourgeois society. One expression of this alternative can be seen in Salvador Dalí’s Phénomène de l’extase, a collage showing various enraptured female faces, many of which were taken from Charcot’s photographs. The image originally followed a text by Dalí on the apparently irrational component of art nouveau architecture, parts of which alluded to sculptural details of girls and angels in rhapsodic abandon on the buildings of Antoni Gaudí. “Continuous erotic ecstasy,” wrote the artist, leads to “contractions and attitudes without precedent in the history of statuary.” He continued in a subsection also entitled “Phénomène de l’extase” that “the repugnant can be transformed into the beautiful” through such ecstasy.1 The transformation of the perception of art, architecture, and most other forms of modern life was thus dependent upon the continuous excitation of ecstasy. The sexual abandon of the female hysterics in the collage was one way of accommodating such a desire.2

Salvador Dalí, “De la beauté terrifiante et comestible de l’architecture Modern’ style,” Minotaure 3-4 (12 December 1933), 69-76. ↩

Robert James Belton, The Beribboned Bomb: The Image of Woman in Male Surrealist Art, 249. ↩

May Day – a potted history

In addition to the spring equinox (which is around 20 March in the northern hemisphere), 1 May was a traditional date for marking the arrival of spring. Across Europe there have been – and still are – many rich traditions representing fertility and (hopefully!) warmer weather.

The month of May is named after the Greek goddess Maia, depicted here with flower garlands and wreaths.

The Romans marked the start of May with the Floralia. They held a five-day festival to honour Flora, the Roman goddess of flowers, which was declared a holiday by Julius Caesar. People would dance, gather flowers and celebrate with public games, theatre and merrymaking to mark the arrival of longer days and the start of the farming season.

The Romans also used the Greek myth of Persephone (Roman: Proserpina) and Demeter (Roman: Ceres) to explain the changing seasons. 

In the UK, May Day has long been celebrated with a mix of Anglo-Saxon and Celtic traditions. The Celtic festival of Beltane takes place on 1 May. In Celtic tradition, the sun was held prisoner during winter months and was released each spring to rule the summer sky. Celtic peoples celebrated this with a huge feast, with great fires and dancing. You can find out more about Celtic festivals here.

Other UK May Day traditions include dancing round a maypole, as seen in this 19th-century print imagining life in Elizabethan England. Although maypole dancing clearly goes back centuries, and is prevalent in many European countries, there is no agreement on when it began, or why!

The eve of 1 May (the night of 30 April) has also been celebrated for centuries in Germanic countries as Walpurgisnacht. The 8th-century abbess St Walpurga is credited with bringing Christianity to Germany. In Germanic folklore Walpurgisnacht, also called Hexennacht (literally ‘Witches’ Night’), is believed to be the night of a witches’ meeting as they await the coming of spring. As Walpurga’s feast was held on 1 May, she became associated with this May Day folk tradition. The eve of May Day, traditionally celebrated with dancing, came to be known as Walpurgisnacht. 

In the late 19th century, a group of socialists and communists chose May Day as the date for International Workers’ Day. Although they fall on the same day, International Workers’ Day and the traditional May Day are essentially different celebrations.

‘May Day’ by Walter Crane. Watercolour and gold, 1874.

‘Maia. Mayus’, the goddess Maya on a cloud at centre, holding flower garlands and wreaths; the zodiacal sign of Gemini beyond. Print made by Jacobus Harrewyn. Engraving, 1698.

‘Flora, Goddess of Flowers’.  Mezzotint with some etching, 1800.

‘May day in the reign of Queen Elizabeth’ by James Henry Watt. Etching and engraving on chine collé, 1836.

‘The Triumph of Labour’ by Walter Crane. Inscribed in capitals along the lower border: ’ Designed to commemorate the International Labour Day May 1 1891 / and dedicated to the wage workers of all countries’. Woodcut, 1891.

Haari Tesla, illuminated (2013) 

"Macrocosm and microcosm is an ancient Greek Neo-Platonic schema of seeing the same patterns reproduced in all levels of the cosmos, from the largest scale (macrocosm or universe-level) all the way down to the smallest scale (microcosm or sub-sub-atomic or even metaphysical-level). In the system the midpoint is Man, who summarizes thecosmos."

" I was doing some researches  and I found experiment with miniatures of space so I decided to try my own. The result has been nebulae, galaxies and supernovae  transformed into microorganism.” - Artist’s Statement”

Lost Landscape

Brazilian architect Luiz Eduardo Lupatini created a visual musing about the nature of human use of building materials.

He placed his conceptual design “Lost Landscape” at the heart of a quarry which would inspire individuals to confront their preconceived ideas about consumption. There is a notable interplay with positive and negative space as well as the presence of both industrial and natural textures. Monolithic concrete walls and entrances would allow people to navigate the extraction site as if it were a system of naturally occurring caves. See more on the winning Carrara Thermal Baths Competition project here.

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alô!!!

a very z post