Post: #1

This is quite an old video by now but not seen so much:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbU3eV4ZpQ

This man must see the world very differently to us. It's a humbling watch.

Post: #2

(04-18-2015 11:09 AM)Retinend Wrote:  This is quite an old video by now but not seen so much:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWbU3eV4ZpQ[/youtube]

This man must see the world very differently to us. It's a humbling watch.

A bit more of an explanation would help us. Is he an artist? What kind of artist? A description of the video, eg: Jansen is interviewed by Takeshi.

And embed the video like this:
The standards required for posting threads are quite high here but it is worth the trouble.

Post: #3

"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." - Rudyard Kipling

Post: #4

Nah, this amiable Dutch geezer is no da Vinci. da Vinci was attempting to create fundamentally new technologies that were far ahead of his time, and was a great artistic genius to boot. This dude is just constructing more or less ingenuous toys but he has the sense of self-importance to call them "new forms of life", LOL, which is enough to ensure that they will be looked upon by enough suckers with entirely unwarranted slack-jawed veneration. People are so starved for the least degree of novelty and difference in the expressive realm that they are all too willing to take the least simulacrum for the real thing; and I can't blame them too much.

The funny thing about the video is that the guy doing the interviewing -- Takeshi Kitano, aka "Beat" Takeshi -- is, in fact, a truly brilliant and original film director and actor; he directed and starred in two films, "Fireworks" and "Sonatine", that are great films, nothing less; and a third one, "Zatoichi", which while not a great film is an excellent one. For anyone who has not seen these extraordinary and exceptionally memorable movies, please check them out.

But this just goes to show that the brilliant artistic types like Takeshi don't necessarily have any particular judgment or insight when they're outside their immediate domain of inspiration; he is just as taken in, in his charmingly exaggerated Japanese childlike awe, as any other piker by these fundamentally uninteresting Jansen creations. It's alright, let these geezers have their fun, such as it is; but no need to overrate it or throw the "da Vinci" designations around all too lightly.

Post: #5

Thanks I will check out this director. However I don´t think you´re talking quite on the level, nor that any reasonable person will overlook this, when you insinuate that this man is an amiable dutch cuckoo clock-maker. having fun making "fundamentally uninteresting" albeit "ingenious toys."

It´s only to guide members of the public to the biological questions being posed that Jansen calls them forms of life (and you never know whether this phrase takes on pretentious airs on account of being directly translated - Jansen doesn´t seem to take himself too seriously in this clip). If, as it is, true that he has not achieved what da Vinci had, it still seems pointless to doubt that the man´s mind is one of the best living examples of the same type. Besides, who are we even to be weighing up the minds of da Vinci and Jansen? Doing so does imply that you´re up there with them. Many many hours in the workshop, turning shapes into motion and numbers into gears separate us from them, and that´s the point of the comparison.