Since April we’ve learned quite a bit about what makes an ideal scan and have spread that knowledge to our resident camera wizard, Bob Nardi, who I teamed up with for this project. We already had scans of the Lost Pleiad and the Double Pegasus, so we added them into the mix as the Queen and Knight, respectively. We also found the best candidates for the remaining pieces:

• Pawn (Egypt): Lion-Headed Gaming Piece
• Rook (New York): Rook [from a Wedgewood chess set]
• Bishop (Japan) : Emma – o, King and Judge of Hell
• King (Egypt): Senwosret III

We worked with our conservation staff to get access to the pieces which weren’t on view, including the roughly 3,000+ year-old Egyptian gaming piece Bob and I were a little nervous around. Using the same software combination of 123D Catch and Meshmixer, the scanned models were then generated and cleaned up and made watertight for printing.

Having the 3D models ready to print, I worked on resizing them as chess pieces, making sample prints with some unsightly lime-green PLA we had laying around. Chess pieces have been remixed a lot over it’s history, varying from the small magnetic sets you would find in travel stores to the more elaborate Frank Gehry set. By and large there’s no universal standard for the size and proportions, but the US Chess Federation has some guidelines on the proportions relative to the board which were [partially] adopted in the final design of the set.

In the past, we’ve only printed pieces on a one-by-one basis. Since there’s 16 individual pieces to a chess set, that method quickly became impractical. Using the software for our Cube printer, we were able to add multiple models onto the platform and have the software automatically space them out. Marveling at the efficiency of this plan I made a test run and walked into the room our 3D printer resides in only to find that I made glitch art.

The aforementioned room is generally great due to it being more or less soundproofed from the rest of the office, but due to other equipment which share the space, it’s kept at a crisp 60F degrees. Since there’s not much movement happening in the room’s air that doesn’t tend to affect the prints, but it does seem to make the glue used to stick the prints to the platform and the plastic web between the pieces when they’re being printed stiffen faster, so some individual pieces would be just attached enough to each other to cause them to be yanked off the platform mid-print and eventually turn into Katamari Damashi.

I managed to work around the temperature issue by turning on the raft option in the Cube Software settings. A raft in this case is a grid which is printed on the platform before the models are printed on top of it.

A raft keeps smaller pieces from detaching from the platform since it expands it’s connection to the platform beyond its otherwise tiny base size. The grid needs to be manually cut off around the edges after the print is complete, but that’s usually a quick process akin to peeling or shucking a really plasticy fruit or veggie.

After peeling it makes for a nice set ready to be shipped a whole three floors down! Sadly, I won’t be on this side of the Atlantic on Saturday due to other fun stuff, but if you want to see 3D printed chess in action, stop by and have fun in my place!

Just like our previous scans, we’re releasing the latest models under a Creative Commons license which you can download and print on your own 3D printer.

Download all models used in our chess collection (CC-BY-3.0) on Thingiverse

Janet Stone's yoga class at YogaTree, San Francisco. Photo courtesy of Yogawomantv.com.

Like so many New Yorkers, the thought that I don’t have to get on the subway and go somewhere to find happiness or enlightenment is a radical idea. I know I’m not the only one who has taken away something from stretching my body and sitting quietly for a few moments. Yoga has provided a wide variety of insights to a diverse audience in urban cities and around the world. Historically, and one of the most interesting facts, is that yoga originated as a mostly male practice. It’s evolved in western culture as a very empowering practice for women (in addition to men). The film, Yogawoman highlights this story.

Africa Yoga Project, Kenyan school children practicing yoga in the fields of Nairobi. Photo courtesy of Yogawomantv.com.

Through inspiring personal stories from practitioners and teachers around the work from New York to Kenya, Yogawoman traces the impact of yoga as a source of inspiration and power it has had for us busy women.

Join us tonight for this very special advanced screening. Purchase tickets to reserve your spot in the Auditorium. Doors will open at 6:30pm this evening for the 7pm show.

Abu Jandal. As seen in The Oath. Credit: Khalid Al Mahdi

He’s also an engaging and intriguing character with a magnetic personality.  Dare I use the oxymoron charismatic extremist? Regardless, the film is a powerful document to the trails of the Middle East, the justice system, and the personal relationships affected by those complex networks. Tension comes not only from the timely subject matter but by the candid approach and ethnographic insights explored. Recent events make it particularly fitting to see right now.

How does one meet (let alone film) the former bin Laden body guard?

I was fortunate enough to have a phone conversation with editor and co-producer Jonathan Oppenheim. He gave some back-story and will be on hand for a Q&A after the screening to share more:

Abu Jandal. As seen in The Oath. Credit: Khalid Al Mahdi

Oppenheim explained that the film originally focused on the families of Guantanamo bay prisoners who were waiting for their loved ones to be released. Abu Jandal was the brother-in-law of one such prisoner named Salim Hamdan. Another layer to the story is that Salim Hamdan is the plaintiff in the 2006 US Supreme Court Case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, also the first person to stand trial for war crimes at Guantánamo. A lawyer working on the case put Director Laura Poitras and Abu Jandal in touch. From the get-go Oppenheim stated Jandal was very forthcoming which is extremely surprising given his unique position. The footage was too important to ignore.

In an earlier interview, Director Laura Poitras stated, “Themes of betrayal, guilt, loyalty, family and absence are not typically things that come to mind when we imagine a film about Al Qaeda and Guantánamo. Despite the dangers of telling this story, it compelled me.”

Perhaps it will for you too. Purchase tickets. The screening will take place on Thursday, June 23rd @ 7. Editor and co-producer, Jonathan Oppenheim will be on hand for a Q&A after the film. You won’t want to miss it.

The Oath is a co-production of Praxis Films and the Independent television Service (ITVS) in association with American Documentary | POV.

Kings of Pastry screening as part of our POV film series this Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 7 p.m.

Such is the experience watching Kings of Pastry. As part of our collaboration with the award winning documentary series, POV, the film will screen May 26 at 7pm in the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Auditorium.

“Meilleur Ouvrier de France” (Best Craftsman in France)

The film documents the quest for the distinguished “Meilleur Ouvrier de France” (Best Craftsman in France). The contenders throw caution to the wind when it comes to the amount of butter, sugar, flour, and chocolate involved. What we see is a fascinating portrayal of the human spirit, of chef’s doing what they do best and doing it for the sake of it.

And as always it’s important to ask why. Why this film and why at the Brooklyn Museum? In answer, firstly let me say that to be in Brooklyn is in many ways to be a foodie. There are countless award winning bakeries and cafes within a ten, five, two mile radius or maybe even a block away from where you read this. There are Brooklyn specific food blogs, countless culinary classes, tastings to attend, as well as succulent restaurants other cities probably wish they had.

Jacques Torres ("Mr. Chocolate") will host a Q&A with us following the screening. Torres is not only in Brooklyn, he is the youngest person to ever win this prestigious “Meilleur Ouvrier de France” (Best Craftsman in France).

Also exciting, the famous chocolatier Jacques Torres (“Mr. Chocolate”) is in Brooklyn and will be at the screening for a Q&A after the film along with local film legends DA Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus.

Kings of Pastry documents the very similar path of a culinary artist. It compels us to watch, cheer for our favorites, lick our lips, and point fingers at the judges. Get your tickets. It’s all worth it for (like in any good competition) the process is just as important as the final product.

The partnership started as all partnerships do, with an idea and a goal. With the change in museum hours, now open until 10pm, the thought of a film series sparked. A list of potentials ran through my head including: local filmmakers, local films, Brooklyn films, museum films, films about our thriving Brooklyn cultural, films with appropriate subject matter that could play in compliments to our permanent exhibitions and rotating special exhibitions, films by certain distributors, and films you can’t see anywhere else on a big screen. Having evening hours planted a seed. I sent a few emails and wound up connecting with the community engagement folks at POV. After one hour-long meeting, it seemed my jumbled list of potential ideas was taking shape into something more concrete and fluid. I was in Coney Island and I had found the perfect hot dog.

Why POV? The cinema term for “point of view” POV is televisions longest-running showcase for independent non-fiction films. Their community engagement efforts aim to build new audiences, broaden public debate, and bring important social, political, and economic issues to light (a familiar mission statement). Plus, they reach a large audience and their films have won every major film and broadcasting award (including Emmy’s and Academy Awards just to start).

Q&A that followed the screening of Off and Running. Photo by Lavonda Manning.

In January and February we showed POV films Good Fortune and Off and Running respectively. Filmmakers (all local Brooklyn) were on hand for Q&A after each screening. We were pleased with the films and how they relate to the museum, the turn out, audience discussions, and continued excitement for more films from the audience evaluations passed out at the end of each screening.

Olga smoking in her kitchen in Moscow — from the documentary film My Perestroika by Robin Hessman. Courtesy of Red Square Productions.

The series will continue on May 5^th with My Perestroika, a story of five Moscow schoolmates living in post-Soviet Russia. They share personal stories of their Soviet childhoods, the huge changes of Perestroika (Restructuring), and let us see the true nature of contemporary Russian life.  Screening at the museum around Victory Day of May 9^th, (when Russia celebrates the victory over Nazi Germany) and recent, radical government change (think current events), not to mention the large Russian Community living in Brooklyn, and a local filmmaker to boot, the film is timely and appropriate.

Young Soviet Pioneers on Red Square during a May Day demonstration, Moscow, 1977 — from the documentary film My Perestroika by Robin Hessman. Courtesy of Red Square Productions.

We are delighted to have director Robin Hessman on hand for a Q&A after the film. The Meyersons, one of the families in the film, are making the trip from Russian to be here for the screening. If that still doesn’t spark your interest, Perestroika’s recent sold out shows at IFC and this New York Times article and review might.

We encourage you to purchase tickets in advance. We’ve been to Coney Island and found the perfect hot dog so look for more POV films at the Brooklyn Museum Thursdays @ 7.

The catalogue for the show Jesper Just: Romantic Delusions draws our attention to how Jesper Just uses a variety of popular songs in his films, from the Ink Spots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire” to Olivia Newton-John’s “Please Don’t Keep Me Waiting.” Those pop tunes are prominently featured in two of the films shown in the exhibition: Bliss and Heaven and The Lonely Villa.

There is, however, another episode in Just’s treatment of music, this one involving the rarified world of grand opera. His early film The Man Who Strayed (2002) consists almost entirely of a sparse restaging of Violetta’s death scene from the end of Verdi’s La Traviata. And surprisingly, this could be Just’s most widely seen film, largely because it’s available online at Artnode and has been bootlegged on YouTube (below) and elsewhere.

In The Man Who Strayed, what are we to make of a classical-music drama so remote from the torch songs, ballads, and Top Forty hits heard in many of Just’s other films? Why does he take us to the opera?

It’s useful to remember that Verdi’s 1853 masterpiece is only one of numerous adaptations of the story of Marguerite Gautier (called Violetta in Verdi), first told in the novel The Lady of the Camellias (La Dame aux camélias) by Alexandre Dumas, fils, published in 1848. Stage adaptations of the Dumas novel about a tubercular courtesan of the Parisian demimonde subsequently became vehicles for stars from Sarah Bernhardt and Eleanora Duse to Tallulah Bankhead and, later on, Isabelle Adjani. On film, the property served Greta Garbo well in her MGM Camille (1936), directed by George Cukor, as it has many other actresses (or, as we now say in our gender-neutral way, “actors”).

The story has become a touchstone, in recent times, of gay-themed drama, in which it has been frequently retold. The 1973 play Camille: A Travesty on La Dame aux camélias, written by—and starring, in drag—the late, great Charles Ludlam, founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, is in some ways the most important neo-Traviata: a full-fledged cross-dressing remake in modern colloquial language, its denouement capped by a memorably tragicomic eulogy spoken over the deceased heroine: “Much will be forgiven you, for you have loved much. Toodle-loo, Marguerite.” Adding a further layer of reference, a decade later Ludlam would play the lead role in his Galas: A Modern Tragedy (1983), about a thinly disguised diva named Maria Galas, a renowned Violetta and Norma, whose stage career ends bitterly, as does her affair with a Greek tycoon. Others have pursued the Violetta/Camille story as well: in Terrence McNally’s 1989 play The Lisbon Traviata, the two affectionately satirized opera-fanatic principals, Mendy and Stephen, briefly act out lines or vignettes from their favorite Maria Callas records (epitomized by the pirate LPs of her celebrated performance in Lisbon) as comments on their own unsatisfactory love lives: to them, the way she abandoned herself to the role of the doomed heroine becomes a template for how destiny inexorably undoes the life of the heart. The chapter “The Callas Cult” in Wayne Koestenbaum’s book The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire (1993) points to the broader implications of such self-identification with Callas’s Violetta: remarking on fatalistic views of the late soprano, who died aged only 53, Koestenbaum writes, “Untimely death assists her legend and connects her to themes that have shadowed gay culture: premature mortality, evanescence, solitude.”

The Violetta/Camille trope thus inevitably carries a lot of baggage. Yet despite an array of precedents and analogues, The Man Who Strayed puts its own distinctive twist on this familiar nineteenth-century story.

For one thing, The Man Who Strayed tells the story in a relentlessly anti-glamorous way. Its barren urban setting, perhaps recalling the cruising zones in certain Fassbinder films, consists of little more than rough pavement under a concrete overpass, seen in unforgiving daylight, with none of the lush, shadowy, film-noir atmosphere of other Just productions.

Another deglamorizing feature of the film, unusual elsewhere in Just’s body of work and in La Traviata retellings: both protagonists are decidedly middle-aged. As his characters, Just puts before us two frankly unlovely guys, both with considerable mileage on them, rather than a somewhat older individual infatuated with a much younger person as seen in the relationship between Verdi’s Violetta and the boyish Alfredo or in several of Just’s other films.

Even as it casts a cold eye on its urban streetscape and its aging actors, the film also drags Verdi’s soaring music back down to earth. The two men mime and sing along to the end of La Traviata‘s final act, from the lines “Più a me t’appressa, ascolta, amato Alfredo” (“Come closer and listen, Alfredo my beloved”) to the last cries of “È spenta!” (“She is dead!”) and “O mio dolor!” (“Oh, my grief!”), one of them singing the role of Violetta and the other, Alfredo. We watch with growing discomfort as the rasping, untrained voices of the two men, sometimes resorting to quavering falsetto, sometimes almost shouting, heedlessly take on the high-flying demands of Verdi’s arching melodies. As would-be opera singers, the two of them strain heroically, and fail desperately.

Yet it is precisely the way their distressing vocal performances, at first unaccompanied, are mercifully lifted aloft by the entrance of a professional recording of the opera—welling up, after a while, on the soundtrack—that carries the two men from harsh urban grit to some transcendent realm of human tenderness and utter heartbreak. For there’s no denying the emotional power of the travesty we’re witnessing, as surging waves of melody break over the street-level action. It may come as something of a revelation that the death of one graying, badly dressed, middle-aged man in the arms of another can be as poignant, as tragic, as Violetta’s dying in the embrace of ardent young Alfredo. But the outpouring of lyrical music makes it so. Singing along with the prerecorded opera that surrounds the couple, Just’s expiring “Violetta” croons his love-death as a kind of karaoke Liebestod.

The two remarkable actors are Niels Weyde and Søren Steen. The brief scene played out between them, lasting little more than five minutes, can bring tears to our eyes even as it veers dangerously close to the ridiculous—a potently ambiguous state of affairs familiar in opera itself.

Roger Bonair-Agard in Masquerade. Photo by Peter Dressel

The first is a performance this Saturday, January 19, at 2 p.m. by Brooklyn-based Caribbean members of spoken-word collective louderARTS Project. It is hosted by Def Poetry Jam’s Roger Bonair-Agard, and features poets Hallie Hobson, Rich Villar, and Cheryl Boyce Taylor.

Next weekend, on January 26, we will be collaborating with the organization Domestic Workers United to present their short film “Work and Respect” in the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art. Members of Domestic Workers United, many of whom are from the Caribbean, will talk about the film making process and their experience organizing for their rights as domestic workers in New York City.

I am really looking forward to both these programs which highlight many important voices from our community and, if you join us, we would love to know what you think.

The episode “Protest,” showing Saturday, October 13 at 2 p.m., features artists Jenny Holzer, Nancy Spero, Alfredo Jaar and An-My Lê. The artists in this episode employ visual art as a means to provoke personal transformations and social revolutions. This episode is particularly relevant to the exhibitions featured in our Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art because it speaks to the themes of The Dinner Party and Global Feminisms Remix. Following the screening, Brooklyn-based artist An-My Lê will discuss her work (see above for a clip from “Protest” featuring An-My Lê).

On Sunday, October 14 at 2 p.m, we are screening the episode “Paradox” as part of our Caribbean Film Series. “Paradox” features the artists Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, whose video and photographs are featured in Infinite Island. The episode explores artists responding to paradoxes between global and local realities, and engaging with uncertainty in the art they create. Following the screening Eve Moros Ortega, Art:21’s Series Producer, will discuss the episode.

As I am committed to closely linking public programs to themes and questions that are raised by the works of art in our exhibitions, I am enthusiastic about the two Art:21 episodes that we are screening and the talks that accompany them. If you join us we would love to know what you think!