LAGUNA BEACH, CA — In Laguna Beach, beautiful views are always just around the corner.
Laguna Beach photographer Susana Cruciana snapped this dreamy shot of the coast this week. Can you name this scenic Laguna location?
Thank you for sharing your photo with Patch, Susana!
If you have an awesome photo of nature, breath-taking scenery, kids caught being kids, a pet doing something funny, or something unusual you happen to catch with your camera, we’d love to feature it on Patch.
We’re looking for high-resolution images that reflect the beauty and fun that is Laguna Beach, and that show off your unique talents.
An installation view of Chalmers’s “Builders of Greatness.”Art work by Catherine Chalmers / Courtesy The Drawing Center: Photograph by Daniel Terna
On her first trek through the rain forest, in 2000, the artist Catherine Chalmers noticed movement on the ground near her feet. It was a parade of thousands of leaf-cutter ants. “There’s these perfectly cleaned pathways that the ants make and maintain, and they carry bright-green leaves,” Chalmers told me recently. “And so you saw this ribbon, almost like a drawing. Green, flickering, because light shimmers on them. I didn’t know they existed. And it was really, really beautiful.”
Chalmers wanted to work with the ants, but didn’t know how. “I’m interested in that place where nature meets culture,” she said. The more complicated the interface, the better: around this time, she was exploring humans’ relationship with cockroaches. But, by comparison, the ants seemed almost too natural to work with artistically. “They’re of the forest,” she said. “We think of them as the other.” What would it mean to make art about our relationship with such creatures?
Chalmers mulled over the idea for years, steeping herself in the science of leaf-cutters. The more she learned, the more connections she saw between them and us. While the ants may be of the forest, they’re also intensely social—urban, even, in their extensive underground lairs. In a 2011 book, “The Leafcutter Ants: Civilization by Instinct,” the biologists Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson suggest that “if visitors from another star system had visited Earth a million years ago, before the rise of humanity, they might have concluded that leafcutter colonies were the most advanced societies this planet would ever be able to produce.” For two decades, Chalmers followed this trail of thought. Last month, we stood inside a culmination of that work—a solo exhibit at the Drawing Center, in SoHo, titled “Catherine Chalmers: We Rule,” which comprised twenty-four drawings, a twenty-foot photo print, four videos, and an installation, which together evoked how much both humans and ants have busied themselves dominating and altering their environments. (It ran through January 15th.)
Chalmers, who is sixty-five and has an athlete’s poise—in addition to being an artist, she’s an accomplished figure skater—led me through the gallery. On one wall, sixteen drawings depicted ants in chambers and tunnels that formed a larger colony. There are around fifty species of leaf-cutter ant, and nests differ among them, but a nest can span five hundred square feet—“As big as this gallery here,” Chalmers noted—sometimes reaching twenty feet below the ground and containing thousands of chambers the size of a cabbage. Inside, there can be millions of ants supporting a queen who survives for more than a decade.
Human agriculture has shaped the planet for millennia, but leaf-cutters began cultivating food at scale millions of years earlier. The ants are responsible for a quarter of all plant consumption in their ecosystems; worker ants might travel two hundred yards to collect leaf clippings, cutting tons of plant material a year. Back home, adults drink the leaf sap while feeding the clippings to a fungus that they grow in their nests. They then harvest the fungus, feeding it to their larvae. To prevent a different fungus from taking over their “fields,” some leaf-cutters cultivate bacteria that produces antibiotics which the ants spread around their garden—a form of pest control.
The ants demonstrate a “chemical mastery” over their environment, Chalmers said. But, at the same time, they are enmeshed in a symbiotic system. “We think the ants are calling the shots, just as we think that we are deciding, when we go to a restaurant, what we want to eat,” she told me. “But the more that I’ve read about the microbiome”—the bacteria and viruses inside us that keep us alive and sometimes make us sick—“the more it seems that microorganisms are greatly influencing the choices that we make.” There’s a sense in which the bacteria in our guts “want” sugar, and so we order ice cream. It’s possible that the ants’ fungal gardens act like their microbiomes, influencing which plants a colony forages. Perhaps it’s not the ants that “rule” the rain forest but the fungus. “I’m not a scientist,” Chalmers said. “So I can speculate on these things and just observe and wonder.”
At the heart of “We Rule” is a set of four videos about ants that evoke core aspects of human culture: language, ritual, war, and art. The filmmaking began in 2007, when an art collector who had seen Chalmers’s earlier work invited her to his private island off the coast of Panama, where he also hosts scientists. Chalmers accepted the offer once she learned that the island had leaf-cutters. Working outside the studio was daunting: to set up a shoot, she’d clear brush to avoid bites from snakes and scorpions, then dig a hole to view the ants at their level.
The language-themed film that emerged from the trip is a four-minute piece called “We Rule.” Up close, amid a cacophony of bird and insect sounds, we see ants munching through green leaves and pink petals. Then, somehow, they’re munching the leaves into perfectly trimmed capital letters; by the film’s end, the ants march along, conveying the titular message, while a chorus of howler monkeys cheers them on. (The film is not computer-animated; the ants really did carry tiny letters made by Chalmers.) Ants are always “sharing data,” Chalmers said—sending signals about threats, food location, and leaf quality through pheromones and vibrations called stridulations, which they create by rubbing parts of their bodies together. “Somehow, in this exchange, they go to war, they decide what they’re going to harvest, how many tunnels, how many chambers. And without central command.” The film gives the ants a chance to boast about their inhuman coördination.
The roots of “We Rule” go back to the nineteen-eighties. Chalmers was earning an M.F.A. at the Royal College of Art, in London; she’d come to admire cuneiform-inscribed neo-Assyrian tablets at the British Museum and elsewhere. She tracked down a translation of the cuneiform text. Essentially, it says, “with little variation, ‘We rule, we conquer, you suck,’ ” she told me. Working with the leaf-cutters, she thought back to the tablets’ imperialistic message. “They’re a little bit a stand-in for us,” she said, of the ants. Making the film, she’d hoped to induce them to carry ten passages from the tablets, but it took her two days just to get six letters in the right order.
Chalmers grew up in San Mateo, California, the daughter of an electrical engineer and a landscape painter. She wasn’t into bugs as a kid, but the family liked animals; she had a bird, and brought it to breakfast and sleepovers. At Stanford, she declared her major, engineering, before classes even started, so that she could secure a spot in a popular course on visual thinking. She took almost enough studio courses to qualify as an art major and, after college, got a job at Mattel, designing toys. Her engineering background has helped her solve the puzzles of art production. How do you build a set that induces insects to behave a certain way? How do you film and light it?
Her work with insects began when she moved to New York, after her M.F.A. As an experiment, she started putting dead leaves and flies on her canvases; when she ran out of flies, she started raising them. The flies swarming in her terrarium entranced her, so she asked her neighbor to teach her photography. He lent her equipment, which she used to make her first book, “Food Chain.” At first, she was a little sickened by the idea behind the project: “I was going to raise animals to feed to another animal,” she said. “But, the more I thought about it, and the more horrified I was, the more it made sense, because one of the drivers of civilization is to remove ourselves or to have control over the food chain.”
Chalmers started with a red tomato. She applied turquoise tobacco hornworms, which burrowed their way through the fruit’s juicy flesh; she then fed the hornworms to a praying mantis, which she fed to a frog. She also raised mice, feeding pink babies to a snake and a second frog. “Baby mice are like nature’s Cheerios,” she said. “I mean, everything eats them.” Starting in the early nineties, the photos were presented at shows around the country. “Boy, did I get hate mail,” Chalmers recalled. Viewers who could tolerate a photograph of a praying mantis shredding a larva drew the line at seeing a snake swallow a mouse whole. “Predation is essentially what keeps the ecosystem going,” Chalmers said. “There’s no way around it.”
She leaned into her own queasiness. “I would see a cockroach and I would lose it,” she said, so, interested in “our adversarial relationship with nature,” she began making films and photographs in which cockroaches are disguised as more palatable creatures, or living in tiny houses, or being executed in a gas chamber or electric chair. One film, “Safari,” depicting the domestic bugs exploring a jungle, was called “perversely entertaining” and “deeply Darwinian” by Time Out and the Times, respectively, and won the 2008 Jury Award for Best Experimental Short at the South by Southwest Film Festival. The work encourages us to empathize with bugs. One reason they disgust us, Chalmers believes, is that they seem immoral, or at least differently moral. “We see ourselves as individuals,” she said. “And we see insects as being this uniform, formless mass that will sacrifice themselves and do all these sorts of things.” Some of her photos capture a praying mantis eating the head of her mate. “Civilization is a march for greater and greater and greater control over the world,” she said. But nature doesn’t play by our rules.
Another of Chalmers’s admirers owned many acres on the Osa Peninsula of Costa Rica, which contained multiple leaf-cutter colonies. The other three ant films were made there. “The dynamics between the colonies—it was a little bit like ‘Game of Thrones,’ where the same species in the same habitat had markedly different personalities,” Chalmers said. To make “The Chosen,” a film about ritual, in which ants carry flowers to a large golden idol of an ant, she collected flowers and presented them to all the large colonies within range of her lights. She coaxed certain ants into climbing over the idol, which scented it with their pheromones and would entice other ants to traverse it, before she placed it in a set depicting an underground chamber. The ants sometimes drop their flowers when they hit impediments. “And so they started burying the idol,” Chalmers said. “I thought it was perfect, because in a way it’s something that we wouldn’t do. It’s as if they’re burying their idol with nature, as if somehow nature trumps religion.” As the ritual proceeds, we hear the sounds of a Himalayan bell.
For her third film, “War,” Chalmers found a large colony that sent ants out each night. A smaller, neighboring colony had arrived at the opposite strategy, sending its ants out during the day and getting them home before nightfall. At night, some ants from the two colonies crossed paths; at the spot where they’d meet, she set out a white sheet and lights, then recorded the ants as they fought. As moody music plays, the film shows hordes of small ants ganging up on lumbering soldiers many times their size. The ants mince each other until only scattered piles of bodies and limbs remain. “You had this David-and-Goliath situation,” Chalmers said. The film is less than four minutes long, but the battles she watched would last for hours.
Chalmers sees the ants as her collaborators. In “Antworks”—the fourth film, which focusses on art—“their idea was much better than mine,” she said. Originally, in “War,” she’d planned to use time-lapse footage of ants stripping a branch, because “oftentimes the degradation of nature or the environment in a place leads to civil conflict,” but couldn’t get the ants to do it. Eventually, though, she noticed a colony near the beach stripping a colorful plant she’d thought was toxic to them. She used a machete to hack a branch off the plant and brought it back to her filming area. In “Antworks,” the ants lift the pieces, which are abstract and colorful in appearance, and then affix them to a flat rock wall. By the end, they’ve put nine striped and spotted leaf cuttings on the wall in a row, as if in an art gallery.
“The desire to capture a moment in time has endured to the present. Ultimately, I think that photography has changed the way we look at the world.”
That’s Rachel Smith’s profound assessment of the lessons found in “From Portraits to Polaroids,” a new exhibit on show through July 8 at the Rogers Historical Museum.
“The theme ‘From Portraits to Polaroids’ was specifically inspired by an article I came across about how the ‘snapshot’ changed how we view the world,” says Smith, who is assistant director of the museum and curator of collections. “I found the idea fascinating that the evolution of photography mirrored an evolution in how we viewed the world.
“The exhibit describes how early forms of photography were difficult and expensive, remaining the territory of professional photographers well into the 1880s,” Smith says. “As photography became easier and more affordable, it changed the nature of photography. People started taking photographs of all kinds of things — people riding bicycles, children playing, and pets.
“The introduction of the first Kodak camera in 1888 marked a shift into the modern era of personal cameras and snapshot photography,” she adds. “Photographs were no longer limited to stiff formal portraits in the studio, but could capture candid moments and memories.”
Like all of the museum’s exhibits, this one was also inspired by its collections — which once again impressed Smith with their size, their scope and the history they revealed.
“I was surprised by the sheer number of professional photographers that operated in this area,” she says. “Even if they only stayed for a year or two, there are more than 40 professional photographers represented in the collections of the Rogers Historical Museum. They operated in Rogers, Bentonville, Gravette, Siloam Springs, Sulphur Springs and more, from the late 19th century on into the modern era.
“[And] after looking through our collection of cameras and photographic equipment, staff were also surprised at the number and variety of cameras we had,” Smith goes on. “Our collections manager, Jen Kick, conducted research on the various camera models and their features. We were then able to select a variety of cameras that represented the evolution of personal cameras, from the first Kodaks to modern Polaroids and more.”
Asked about the “coolest” artifacts in the exhibit, Smith has a ready answer. One of them, she says, is certainly a Graflex Speed Graphic camera with flash attachment.
“The Speed Graphic is considered the iconic press camera of the 1930s through the 1960s, used by award-winning photojournalists of the era,” she explains. “It was sturdy, relatively lightweight, and could capture action shots, making it ideal for newspaper photography. While this camera was not used by any newspaperman, it was owned by Gravette resident Guy Jones, who may have used it in his work for General Electric. The camera is one of the largest in the collection and is featured in its own case in the gallery.”
The exhibit also includes a number of cameras made by the Eastman Kodak Company, among them a No. 2 Bullseye box camera, likely the oldest in the museum’s collection, Smith says. Manufactured by Kodak from 1895 to 1913, it represents the first generation of Kodak personal cameras. Other interesting items include a Minox miniature “spy” camera from the 1970s, “photo booth” strips from the 1910s, and a camera with an attached stylus for writing notes on the film.
“The exhibit explores not only the world of professional photographers and early photographic processes, but also how everyday people embraced photography and used it to record their lives and photograph people and places around Benton County,” Smith concludes. “I hope that visitors can walk away with an understanding of the importance of photography and an appreciation for how it has changed over time.”
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FAQ
‘From Portraits to Polaroids’
WHEN — Through July 8; hours are 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday
WHERE — Rogers Historical Museum, corner of Second and Cherry in the Rogers Historic District
COST — Free
INFO — rogershistoricalmuseum.org or 621-1154
A selection of Kodak cameras featured in the exhibit includes a Kodak No. 2 Bullseye box camera from the early 20th century and a Brownie folding camera used by local author Lois Snelling. (Courtesy Photo)
The Graflex Speed Graphic camera, circa 1940, is displayed with flash attachment, film and camera accessories. A news photographer is pictured operating the camera. (Courtesy Photo)
This cabinet card of an unknown woman was taken by Eva Lewallen Beaton in Rogers around 1900. Unusual because it was taken by a woman, it is also unusual in its view of a private space and candid pose. The exhibit features information on women photographers of Benton County, where photography was considered an acceptable line of work for women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. (Courtesy Photo)
The Canarian Photo Awards is an international photography contest based in Lanzarote, one of the Canary Islands. And the competition has just concluded its first-ever edition, announcing its inaugural winners for 2023.
The Canaries are situated in the Atlantic Ocean, and are at the southernmost of Spanish autonomous communities, with a population of approximately 2.2 million people. While the competition may be based in the Canary Islands, though, images entered can showcase any location from all around the world.
• These are the best lenses for travel photography (opens in new tab)
The Canarian Photo Awards (opens in new tab) (CPA) 2023 crowned Santiago Leonardo Rodriguez as the Absolut winner of the first edition of the contest, with his beautiful and eruptive image of a lightning strike next to a volcano (above), titled La Hoz y el Martillo – which translates to “The Hammer and Sickle”.
Rodriguez will take home approximately $4,320 / £3,493 / AU$6,265 in cash, as well as a week’s stay for two at the Mynd Hotel in Lanzarote, plus a large-sized reproduction of his winning photograph in Chromalux, produced by L’Art Singular.
Like Heaven The Long Wait Paid Off(Image credit: Luka Vunduk / Canarian Photo Awards)
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The competition has five categories in which photographers can submit images from across the globe, with the exception of the Canary World category in which images must reflect any type of photography that has been taken in the Canary Islands and its surroundings.
Landscape category gold winner was Luka Vunduk, with an image titled Like Heaven The Long Wait Paid Off, and depicts a beautiful purple fog encapsulating what looks like a small village in the mountains at sunset (above).
Coming joint second in the Landscape category was Medem Ignacio for his tree of life-like Insolidarity That Generates Beauty (above), and Antonio Valente’s sumptuous composition, Three Friends On The Snowy Hills (below).
The CPA was created with the ambition to establish itself as one of the leading references in nature photography contests around the world. And, in its own words, its main target is, “to promote ecology, respect for nature, and sustainability”.
Three Friends On The Snowy Hills(Image credit: Antonio Valente / Canarian Photo Awards)
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The contest was intended to coincide with Canarian Photo Week (opens in new tab), a weeklong photographic event taking place from February 07-12 in Lanzarote, in the hope of offering workshops to gathered photographers and the competition jury to share and learn techniques, improve their captures, and attend presentations by world-recognized professionals.
Heart Of The Sea(Image credit: Phuoc Hoai Nguyen / Canarian Photo Awards)
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The winning shot in the Aerial / Drone category depicts a magnificent Heart Of The Sea, as the image is titled. Phuoc Hoai Nguyen’s beautiful shot (above) depicts a heart shape created in the sea, presumably using some sort of fishing line or net attached to the boat. Silver was awarded to Azim Khan Ronnie for his stunning shot, Incense Workers (below).
Incense Workers(Image credit: Azim Khan Ronnie / Canarian Photo Awards)
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Each category gold winner receives approximately $1,080 / £873 / AU$1,566 in cash, as well as a 3-day stay at the Mynd Hotel. All other honorable mentions and winners (opens in new tab)for each category can be viewed on the contest website.
Trepador Azul(Image credit: Mario Cea Sánchez / Canarian Photo Awards)
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A light trail image of a Eurasian nuthatch in flight (above) snatches the top spot in the Wildlife category, photographed by Mario Cea Sánchez, and is titled Trepador Azul (another name for the bird).
Second place in this category was awarded to Pepe Badia Marrero with their amazing image (below) of a praying mantis-looking creature titled Enmarcada Por La Luz (translating to “Framed By Light”).
Enmarcada Por La Luz(Image credit: Pepe Badia Marrero / Canarian Photo Awards)
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The Canary World category winner was Wilmer Valdez Hinojosa in first place, with their image of ashes falling to the ground (below) titled Fuego Cruzado, which translates to “Crossfire”.
The image is pretty striking to look at with the fiery smoke and forest in the background of the image, though it is not specified where in the Canary Islands this image was captured by the photographer.
Second place in this category was Obed García Martínez with their image Primavera Encendida (“Spring Ignited”), which depicts a stunning meadow of sorts with the bright orange sun blasting down onto daisies in the foreground. Again, there is no mention of where in the Canary Islands this image was taken.
Corazon De Invierno(Image credit: Juan Carlos Peguero Baeta / Canarian Photo Awards)
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Some truly phenomenal images from the CPA 2023 appear in the Night Photography and Astrophotography category where, in my opinion, the selected images and honorable mentions might even put the James Webb Space Telescope (opens in new tab) photographs to shame.
Gold has been awarded to Juan Carlos Peguero Baeta for a mesmerizing image (above) that I wouldn’t hesitate to use as my desktop background, titled Corazon De Invierno (“Winter Heart”).
Ic 1396 – The Elephant Trunk Nebula(Image credit: Massimo Di Fusco / Canarian Photo Awards)
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Another tie for silver was held by Massimo Di Fusco, with a stellar image of a nebula titled Ic 1396 – The Elephant Trunk Nebula (above). Equally marvelous is the image by Takuma Kimura, titled Trajectory Of Life (below), which is super abstract but looks to be incorporating yellow light trails into a sci-fi blue pond.
I strongly suggest taking a look at the honorable mentions from the Night Photography and Astrophotography category, as they are absolutely glorious and feature astro elements with lighthouses, bendy roads, lightning strikes and tall trees, creating epic works of art.
Trajectory Of Life(Image credit: Takuma Kimura / Canarian Photo Awards)
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The inaugural Canarian Photo Awards has clearly been a success, with more than 2,500 photographs submitted by photographers from more than 40 countries. Keep up to date with the competition website (opens in new tab) if you are interested in entering the 2024 edition – and if this year is anything to go by, expect some stiff competition!
• You may also be interested in the best travel cameras (opens in new tab), as well as the best camera drones (opens in new tab), not forgetting the best lenses for landscapes (opens in new tab) and the best lenses for astrophotography (opens in new tab) to capture out-of-this-world images.
Max Cullipher jumped almost three feet in the air at the sound of his name being called for a first-place prize in a visual arts contest.
The North Augusta Arts and Heritage Center held an open contest for photos of nature at its Brick Pond Park. Featuring a youth division for 8-15 year olds and an additional adult category, the Aiken Elementary third-grader took home the prize with a photo of a blue heron.
Lee Josey, Cullipher’s grandfather, helped introduce his grandson to photography and bird watching.
“I kind of gave him all the basics and taught him how to handle the camera and some of the settings he could use and he really went with it and I thought that he was certainly excelling for someone at his age,” Josey said. “I am very close to him and we had a lot of fun and we have been all over the place taking pictures of birds.”
Over the past year, the two have taken day trips to several Georgia and South Carolina nature reserves to identify birds and bond over photography. They were clued into the contest through a fellow church member who helped organize Cullipher’s entry.
Mary Anne Bigger, executive director for the Arts and Heritage Center, was thrilled to see youth involvement in the arts.
“We love to have the youth involved in any of our activities but this was especially important because the Brick Ponds are so popular and so important to North Augusta,” Bigger said.
“Oh gosh when they called his name, he jumped three feet high with his arms up and he was so excited,” Josey recalled. “They called the first place last and when they called his name, he got so excited and it was a wonderful moment for me as well as for him.”
Garland Gooden, a volunteer curator for the Arts and Heritage Center, welcomes the influx of talent. He said they plan to expand the competition exhibition next year.
“I am so pleased that the kids have responded to the show and I am hoping next year we are going to have an even greater response,” Gooden said.
“Those things are things that I love and I wanted to get him interested in something that I knew a good bit about and since we are so close, it really thrilled me that he was taking interest in something that I enjoyed,” Josey said. “It’s something that will build a closer bond between the two of us and I just love taking him out and taking pictures and enjoying the time with him and having that kind of influence on me.”
The Brick Pond Park photography contest artwork is open to the public through Feb. 2 on the second floor balcony in the Arts and Heritage Center. In addition, the Eyes Wide Open art gallery will be on display through Feb. 2.
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Samantha Winn covers the cities of North Augusta and Augusta, with a focus on community oriented business and events. Follow her on Twitter: @samanthamwinn and on Facebook and Instagram: @swinnnews.
Even though a strong composition is not colour dependent, sometimes the power of the photo is its colour.
Colour photography depicts reality and is more realistic. Thus, black and white photography is viewed as a rendition of reality – or how you interpret what you see.
From a landscape photographer’s viewpoint, things are different. Where’s the drama in the light? Where’s the mood? Where’s the color? Since cloudy or severe, clear blue sky days are more the norm, I welcome days of fog, mood, haunting skies and drama with open arms.
SAN LEANDRO, CA — Paul Svec snapped this photo of a beautiful calla lily in the Estudillo Estates area of San Leandro. He muses that this might be a sign of spring. Following three straight weeks of rain, many people would welcome spring right now.
Thank you for sharing your photo, Paul.
If you have an awesome photo of nature, breath-taking scenery, kids caught being kids, a pet doing something funny, or something unusual you happen to catch with your camera, we’d love to feature it on Patch.
We’re looking for high-resolution images that reflect the beauty and fun that is Northern California, and that show off your unique talents.
Microsoft is unveiling a few key new features in beta builds of Windows 11 that it released today, though they’re not all in a single release.
Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel may see new “treatments” of the personalized Windows Spotlight imagery, along with an updated Settings menu that zeros in on improving the PC graphics settings, as part of the Windows Insider Preview Build 25281. Microsoft also released Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22621.1180 and 22623.1180 to the Beta Channel, which tweaks Widgets and the OneDrive dashboard.
Microsoft separately released an updated version of Notepad, which adds the tabbed user interface, to the Dev Channel.
Recall that Microsoft uses the Beta Channel as a means to test code that it plans to eventually release, while the Dev Channel is labeled as experimental code. Therefore, it’s much more likely that you’ll see those two new improvements roll out to the Windows 11 stable code base eventually, even if you don’t want to test them out yourselves. (The two builds for the Beta Channel determine whether the new features are actually on: 22621 is off, 22623 is on.)
The two improvements here are minimal: Microsoft has added an updated dashboard to the Accounts page within the Settings menu, which will list your available OneDrive storage quota, break it down between Outlook attachments and general storage, and offer an opportunity to add more storage, as well. The second update is also minor, but somewhat startling: The Widgets dashboard doesn’t require you to sign in with a Microsoft account to use it. Normally, Microsoft leans heavily on forcing you to use a Microsoft account — even requiring one to set up Windows 11 Home — so freeing users from an account requirement is unusual.
The updated Settings page in Windows 11, focusing on the user’s OneDrive cloud storage.
Microsoft
Windows 11 Insider Build 25281 is being released for the Dev Channel, with two key features. First up is a new “treatment” of Windows Spotlight, a key personalization feature of the Windows 11 2022 Update that you can see at the top of this page. Spotlight takes one of the often-breathtaking shots of nature photography in Microsoft’s archives and uses it as your home screen. Sometimes, though, you’re left wanting to know more about the image. Microsoft currently adds a small camera icon to your desktop as a link to an explanatory page. The update, however, will add either previews, pop-outs, or a full-screen experience that offers more detail.
Microsoft is also improving the UI within the Settings > Display > Graphics portion of the Windows 11 Settings menu “to help you get to graphics configurations such as ‘GPU preference’ and ‘Auto HDR’ with greater ease,” Microsoft said in a blog post.
The updated Windows 11 Settings menu, focusing on graphics.
Microsoft
Finally, Microsoft is releasing a tabbed version of Notepad to the Dev Channel, as well. There aren’t any surprises here; the tabbed layout looks much like a browser or like Windows 11’s new File Explorer. Still, if you’re used to opening multiple text documents at once, this will likely help keep your desktop more neatly organized.
An out-of-this-world haven, accessible only by boat, the Fondation Carmignac on the picturesque Porquerolles island sits on a 37-acre estate where a farm once stood. Upon setting foot on this Mediterranean island between Marseille and Saint-Tropez, you’ll never want to leave. A village looms ahead, but the temptation to follow the sign reading “Fondation d’art contemporain 0,6 km” is too strong. The ascending road on the left takes you up to this contemporary art space, once the setting for Jean-Luc Godard’s 1965 movie Pierrot le Fou.
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In the 1980s, French architect Henri Vidal turned this quaint farm into a villa, which he had built on a small artificial hill, overlooking the sea. Shortly after, Édouard Carmignac, one of the world’s top art collectors, fell in love with the estate while attending his daughter’s wedding there and made Vidal an offer on the spot, thinking he’d turn the villa into a cultural venue. It took 30 years for Vidal’s daughter to get back to Carmignac.
Carmignac created his namesake family foundation in 2000 to steward his collection, and in 2009, he added the Carmignac Photojournalism Award to the “production of an investigative photo reportage on human rights violations, geostrategic issues in the world,” according to the foundation’s website. (The 2023 edition focuses on electronic waste in Ghana.)
Carmignac acquired the Domaine de la Courtade vineyard in 2013, and the retrofitting of the Villa, under the aegis of the studios Barani and GMAA, began the following year. Because the site is part of a nature reserve, called Natura 2000, erecting any new buildings on the site was out of the question. To create the 16,500 square feet of art galleries needed to transform the villa into a contemporary art space, they had to dig under the existing building.
“I had finished touring with my band, Moriarty, and was already bombing my father with ideas,” said Charles Carmignac, who joined the venture in 2016. “My first contribution was musical, I wrote with bass player Stephan Zimmerli a score for all the actors of the project, designers, architects, artists—in hopes that it would help them work in harmony.”
Open from April to September, Villa Carmignac is now part of the Port-Cros National Park, a state-owned reserve on a nearby island that was extended to include the larger Porquerolles island in 2012. The villa now officially carries the label “Esprit parc national,” an official designation for France’s protected parks—a sign of how committed the Carmignacs are to protecting the island’s natural environment. To help lower the villa’s carbon emissions, their team no longer flies from Paris to Toulon Hyères Airport when heading to the villa, and all visitors are highly encouraged to do the same.
“As a seasoned swimmer—in the summer he practically lives in water,” Charles said of Édouard. “My father is concerned about preserving the seas, which he has seen changing over the past 20 years. My connection to nature is somewhat more spiritual,” said Charles Carmignac.
Before entering the villa, you are greeted by around 20 outdoor art installations that dot the “non-garden,” designed by landscape architect Louis Benech and filled with olive trees and other endemic species of flora. Among them are Jaume Plensa’s The Three Alchemists, Wang Keping’s Lolo, and Ugo Rondinone’s Four Seasons.
“My father is drawn to accessible art, which speaks to everyone, including children, whereas I can easily be seduced by works with a conceptual component, such as Benoît Pype’s Millennium Hourglass, which I purchased from Alice Vidal in 2020. We are complementary in that sense.”
Since 2018, the foundation has commissioned several site-specific installations for the “non-garden,” a feat when taking into account the island’s protected status. “We are talking about a protected park, driving through wild flowerbeds was forbidden,” dealer Claire Gastaud said of getting Nils-Udo’s 2018 sculpture La Couvée (The Clutch) onto the grounds. “We had to find another way. We decided to fly the five monumental Carrare marble eggs in a helicopter.”
An imposing skull-like sculpture by Spanish artist Miquel Barceló has been guarding the villa’s entrance since 2018; its title, Alycastre, refers to a mythological creature known for haunting Porquerolles and its inhabitants. Past the gift shop are lockers for visitors’ shoes, as the rest of the trip continues barefoot.
“It was my father’s idea,” Charles explained. “He takes off his shoes every chance he gets. It brings a kind of silence and peace to the galleries. The point was to make people feel more at ease before the art on display, relaxed, almost as if they were at home.”
Ciclotrama 50 (wind), 2018, by Brazilian artist Janaina Mello Landini paves the way to the underground spaces. This site-specific artwork in blue mooring rope blossoms into 4,000 nylon threads with 4,000 nails, graceful branches that lead to Bruce Nauman’s 2005 fountain sculpture depicting an imaginary sea of a hundred suspended fish.
The luminosity of the underground galleries is all the more exceptional, as it draws both from artificial and natural light. The most impressive installation, at the center of this cross-shaped lower level, turns out to be the “aquatic ceiling” which waters down the impact of the Mediterranean sun and covers the white walls below with wavy shadows.
Further along is Ed Ruscha’s billboard-size Sea of Desire, which lent its name to the inaugural exhibition in 2018. The vast painting on metal conveys a feeling of freedom—what better place than these secluded woods on a remote island to unleash our deepest desires? The work is often a backdrop to the foundation’s summer activities, like movie nights on Thursdays and yoga classes on Saturday mornings.
Since its opening five years ago, the Villa Carmignac established a residency and a prize of its own to commission artists and designers to create additional fixtures for the space, including Agents M (interior furniture), Samy Rio (outdoor benches), Benoît Maire (cinema seats for movie night), and Edgar Jayet (an open-air lounge). “The challenge was to intervene as discreetly as possible in this gorgeous garden,” said Jayet, whose six ladder-shaped chairs totally blend into the landscape as a symbol of “frugality.” (The most recent winners are Madeleine Oltra and Angelo de Taisne, who will unveil their project later this year.)
The Villa Carmignac may be closed for the season, but it is far from sleeping. From January 28 to June 25, Les Franciscaines, a former convent that was recently converted into a cultural center in Deauville, Normandy, will present “Esprit Pop es-tu là ?” (Pop Spirit Are You There?), an exhibition drawing in part from the foundation’s collection.
Next spring patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital will receive a trunk filled with art. This “suitcase-museum” is a portable extension of the show “La mer imaginaire” (The Imaginary Sea), which took place in 2021. Inside are photographs of that display and a white sheet on which to project a film by Jean Painlevé. A new residency for writers should be launched soon, and possibly even partnerships with local hotels to allow visitors to stay overnight.
When the Villa Carmignac reopens on April 29, it will do so with an exhibition by French art historian Jean-Marie Gallais, the curator of the Pinault Collection. The show is conceived as “an island within the island,” with around 80 works by artists like Peter Doig, Ali Cherri, Agnieszka Kurant, and Harold Ancart. The artworks are all united by the notion that creativity is an apt method to explore our most interior thoughts and inner worlds. Gallais named the upcoming display after Charles Carmignac’s initial score for the island: “L’île intérieure” (The Inner Island), bringing the concept full circle.
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