English Conversation Course

Do you know that photo ? There is even an opinion that it is the most famous war photograph. I didn’t even know that the word “famous” can be used to describe that kind of photography. The author of this picture is Kevin Carter, a member of (again) famous photo group “Bang Bang Club”. Bang Bang Club is a label that 4 photographers used to describe themselves. Kevin Carter, Greg Marinovich, Ken Oosterbroek, and João Silva worked in the early 90s in RPA during the transformation period and the fall of apartheid. They showed the world how a war in South Africa looked like. The photo I’ve mentioned in the beginning is the most recognizable from their works. It was shot by Kevin Carter and is said to be the reason for Carter’s suicide. The fact is that despite their big success, worldwide fame and journalist prizes, they had to face serious mental problems due to everything they experienced. Carter photographed a starving girl with a companion of a vulture. Public opinion accused hi...

Those are my free thoughts and reflections about traveling, backpacking, and related topics, that have been stuck in my mind since I started my journey. Eli, Eli Edwin is a tourist guide in Manila. He shows his city to people who travel from different parts of the world. To be specific, his job is to show people the slum’s life. He takes western travelers, backpackers, photographers, journalists to slums where he used to live and where he grew up. People walk through poverty, through disabled, through extreme misery of humanity, taking photos, and saying to each other: “look, what a great shot I’ve made”. Of course after a great shot, a little poor kid gets his one dollar, or a cookie, and everybody is happy. A Western, photographer gets his perfect frame, a poor kid earns money for the rest of the week. The photographer will come back home and show his great pictures to his friends, and they will say: “You are so brave, you’ve been in slums” and he will say: ”Yes, that’s true. It ...

Every now and then, the media burst out with news describing cases of excessive force usage against the protesters or an abuse of power by police officers, in the most common situations. Incidents described below present only a few examples of extensive police brutality observed in USA and Poland over the last decade: ·          26 th November 2014, officers from Cleveland Police Department shot a 12 year old boy twice in the torso, after a citizen called 911 and reported that the child had been playing with a gun in the park, terrorizing people. As it turned out, the gun with which the child was playing, was found out to be BB replica. Here is a video of the incident : http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/11/26/cleveland-shot-boy/19548827/ ·          February 2014, LAPD squad, during a hunt for a spree killer, over 100 bullets were shot at the wrong car inside which, two innocent w...

For decades masses of Poles have been leaving Poland in search for a better world. Although directions of the migrations have been changing, the most popular target countries remained: Germany, UK, USA, France, Australia, Brazil, Canada and Norway. Statistics say that up to 35.5% of all Poles in the world live outside Poland and in the USA alone there are 10 million of them. In many factory-based countries, Poles are majority of the employees. For instance, Swedish Tacx which produces top notch cycle trainers and rollers employs almost exclusively Poles. What is more, Poles work also at the shipyards in Norway, where citizens complain about losing jobs to the immigrants.                                                            The reasons to leave Poland are quite obvious, but do you think is it hard to leave homeland? Are...

The future is closer than you think. Modifying humans genetically has been debated by scientists all over the world and it's a very hot ethical issue.  Working on genes either to create a superior kind of people or simply to choose one visual trait over the other still raises a lot of questions. In the 90's about 30 healthy babies were born with a genetic material from three people and they will pass on their "mutation" to the next generations. These children were born to women who had problems conceiving. Extra genes from a female donor had been inserted into their eggs before they were fertilized to help the mothers to conceive. Nowadays in some countries there already is a way to choose the gender of a child (called preimplantation genetic diagnosis) which involves implanting only male or female embryos. But of course some people have a problem with not using all the embryos created. So there is a new technique that is also getting more popular which uses ...

I would like to show you an interesting group and their projects that I've found. PanGenerator is a new media art group that was founded in Warsaw in 2010 by four guys - Krzysztof Goliński, Jakub Koźniewski, Piotr Barszczewski, Krzysztof Cybulski. Their projects can be seen in galleries, museums and art festivals. They create both very large, impressive installations and small yet innovative gadgets. Regardless of their size, they both always stand out by being highly interactive and expressive. They almost always try to engage their audience and make them become an active part of creating art and use new technologies to find new ways of looking at art world. CONSTELLACTION Video:  http://vimeo.com/76479685 This installation was made in 2013 for the Copernicus Science Center. It's an interactive project that contains 400 blocks. Every one reacts to light (and lack thereof) by lighting up for a short time and making a sound. If there is another block nearby it ca...

Video mapping is a part of VideoArt. Video mapping also known as projection mapping,   mapping, video mapping 3d, spacial augmented reality- they all mean the same. What is the definition of „mapping”? It’s a projection technology, which uses videoprojectors. The projection is displayed on an object. Of course an object must be mapped earlier. It is mapped for a better effect. Simply “the display of an image on an arbitrarily complex surface”. This phenomenon consists of art and technology. Vizualization whitch will be displayed must be matched with the object well. Then the effect is amazing. A flat surface can become space as well. Additionally, the cooperation of light and music is really important in this technique. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX6JcybgDFo This is amazing mapping. It’s one of the best mapping which I’ve ever seen. Many people created this project: programmists, motion designers and many others. „The first known instance of pr...