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Wednesday, June 30, 2010

DESIGN A DANCE STUDIO


DESIGN A DANCE STUDIO:

A dance studio is a space in which dancers learn or rehearse. The term is typically used to describe a space that has either been built or equipped for the purpose.

A dance studio normally consists of a smooth floor covering or, if used for tap dancing, by a hardwood floor. In most cases the floor is sprung, meaning the construction of the floor provides a degree of flexibility to absorb the impact of intensive dance exercise, such as jumping. This is considered vital to promote good health and safety.

Other common features of a dance studio include a barre, which is fixed to the wall at approximately waist height and used as a means of support. As music is an integral part of dance, nearly all dance studios have a sound system for playing CDs and a piano is still commonly used to accompany ballet and tap dance, especially in professional studios. In purpose-built dance studios, it is typical for at least one wall to be covered by floor to ceiling mirrors, which are used by dancers to see their body position and alignment.

In China, the term dance studio is also used to describe a place which is established to teach dance. Commonly referred to as dance schools in Europe, they are often based locally and offer classes to interested students who live nearby. Depending on the studio, a variety of dance styles may be offered, or only one.


VIDEO:



History Of Disco dance

History Of Disco Dance



Most Disco dances have strong roots in Swing, Samba, Cha Cha, Mambo, Merengue, Fox Trot and Tango. The Hustle is believed to have originated in New York in 1970.


It went through many variations in the seventies, with line dances for groups of people, solo movements that came and went, and partnership dances. These partnership dances included The Basic Hustle, Latin, Spanish and Tango Hustle, and the most popular Street, Three-Count or Swing Hustle that originated in California as the street Hustle by skaters in Venice and Malibu. John Travolta and "Saturday Night Fever" made dancing the "in" thing for many people, especially men.


Popular disco music of the 70's included Bee Gees "Stayin' alive", "Night fever", "More than a woman", "Everybody Dance" (Chic) and Donna Summer's "Love to love you baby".

Hustle is danced to the contemporary pop dance music of the last 20 years. It is a fast, smooth dance, with the lady spinning almost constantly, while her partner draws her close and sends her away.

"Things may come to those who wait, but only things left by those who hustle." ... Abraham Lincoln.



Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Music Articles And Life Enrichment,


Music Articles And Life Enrichment

Whether you admit it or not, music imbeds our daily life, weaving its beauty and emotion through our thoughts, activities and memories. So if you're interested in music theory, music appreciation, Beethoven, Mozart, or other composers, artists and performers, we hope you'll spend some time with here and learn from these music articles of note for all ages and tastes.

When I first started studying the history of music, I did not realize what I was getting into. I had thought that music history was somewhat of a trivial pursuit. In fact, I only took my history of classical music class because I needed the credits. I did not realize how completely fascinating music history is. You see, in our culture many of us do not really learn to understand music. For much of the world, music is a language, but for us it is something that we consumed passively. When I began to learn about the history of Western music, however, it changed all that for me. I have had some experience playing musical instruments, but I have never mastered one enough to really understand what music is all about. This class showed me.



When most of us think about the history of music, we think of the history of rock music. We assume that the history is simple because the music is simple. In fact, neither is the case. The history of music, whether you're talking about classical music, rock music, jazz music, or any other kind, is always complicated. New chord structures are introduced bringing with them new ways of understanding the world. New rhythmic patterns are introduced, bringing with them new ways of understanding time. And music reflects all of it.

Even when the class was over, I could not stop learning about the history of music. It had whetted my appetite, and I wanted more. I got all the music history books that I could find. I even began to research forms of music that had not interested me before in the hopes of enhancing my musical knowledge further. Although I was in school studying toward something very different – a degree in engineering – I had thought about giving it up and going back to get a degree in musicology. That is how much I am fascinated by the subject.

If you have never taken a course in the history of music, you don't know what you are missing out on. The radio will never sound the same to you again. Everything will seem much more rich, much more luminous, and much more important. A new song can reflect a new way of being, and a new way of imagining life in the world. This is what learning about the history of music means to many of us.

Monday, June 28, 2010

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Owner Name: Abdul Rehman
Company Name: Creative Art
Office Address: H # 185 Saidan Shah Colony,
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Art Of Sufism


Hidden History of the Sufism

by

A.R.Khan
(Copyright 2010)

Sufism belongs in spirit to the modern age. It has an affinity with it; it is in tune with secularism, with the modern thirst for objective knowledge. Yet the Sufi tradition is immensely old. In some quarters a belief still persists that it is a mystical offshoot of Islam, but most reliable sources claim it is far older than the Muslim religion. Evidence is emerging that suggests that the tentacles of the brotherhood reach out to many religions and cultures and extend thousands of years into the past, and that its members were once better known as the Friends of Truth, the Builders, the Masters, the People of the Way and numerous other appellations that had been circulating for far longer than the lifetime of Islam. The Friends, it is said, were already present in Medina during Muhammad’s lifetime and adopted the name Sufi after taking an oath of fidelity to the Muslim cause.1

A number of derivations of the word Sufi have been put forward, including Ain Soph, the Qabalistic term for the unknowable, and Sophos, meaning Wisdom. This is in line with the view held by many students of Sufism, who claim that it corresponds with the hidden esoteric wisdom-dimension that underlies all religions. Thus the British Sufi fellow-traveller and author Ernest Scott believes the Sufi tradition has impregnated Western culture to a degree we rarely realize, leading him indeed to call it the Invisible Tradition. Its covert influence, he says, has been strong in Manichaeism and the Cathar faith, in the Troubadour and Jester traditions of medieval Europe, in the evolution of Jewish Qabalah, in alchemy and in Christianity itself. Scott quotes the Afghan Sufi teacher Idris Shah as saying that “there is evidence that at the deepest levels of Sufi secrecy, there is a mutual communication with the mystics of the Christian West.”2

Scott further quotes Hakim Jami, a twelth-century Sufi master, as implicitly denying Sufism’s Islamic origin by declaring that Plato, Hippocrates, Pythagoras and Hermes lay on an unbroken line of Sufi transmission, thus making a causal connection between Sufism and the Greek Mystery schools of antiquity.3 The British esotericist J.G. Bennett goes further, claiming that the Sufis are the descendants and spiritual heirs of the old master magicians of Altai, and that Central Asia has been their heartland for forty thousand years or more. He says that it was from the Altaic shamans that the Sufis inherited the religious tolerance, supremely practical expertise and democratic ideals that are their hallmark today. And it was from the Siberian schools of wisdom that they learned their unique way of surrender, the way of total obedience to a higher principle than man which has earned them the soubriquet “the slaves of God.”4

Bennett gained much of this knowledge of Sufism’s hidden history from his mentor George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff (1877 – 1949), the Armenian-Greek mystic and spiritual teacher who travelled extensively in the Caucasus and Central Asia and who received Sufi training in the dervish schools he encountered there. In The Masters of Wisdom, Bennett recounts:

Gurdjieff told me that he had learned about these ancient schools of wisdom from researches he himself had made in caves in the Caucasian mountains and in the great limestone caverns of the Syr Darya in Turkestan. I have since learned that there is a Sufi tradition in Central Asia that claims to go back forty thousand years.5

Gurdjieff also told Bennett that the paintings in the Lascaux caves in the Dordogne, France, which the great authority on parietal art, the Abbé Breuil, has dated to about thirty thousand years BCE, were the work of later Sufi descendants of the shamans.6 Gurdjieff took the story of Atlantis literally. He associated it with pre-sand Egypt and believed the Lascaux artists were members of a brotherhood that survived after Atlantis sank seven or eight thousand years ago.7 They were highly evolved Masters of Wisdom, “’psychoteleios’ who had learned the secret of immortality,” and whose centres of initiation on the now submerged Atlantic continental shelf have left us, in their paintings of deer, bison and auroch, a magical message of prehistoric spirituality that lay undeciphered for many thousands of years.

In that palaeolithic age art and religion were still one; secular and religious consciousness had not yet separated out, and spirit and matter were not yet in opposition; nor was evil an absolute force seeking the overthrow of good. All things and all attitudes to things were filled with the magnetic, synthesizing radiance of hypercosmic energy, which Gurdjieff called conscious energy. In such a unified world the great Initiates developed the unique type of spirituality that still distinguishes Sufism today, wherein the polarizing activity of mind is submissive to the over-riding Spirit that ever seeks a return to the One. Only in the later more alienated religious systems, Gurdjieff believed, do we find the divisive seeds of philosophical dualism.

At the apogee of the Sumerian civilization, Bennett continues, the Sufis are believed to have founded a brotherhood called the Sarman or Sarmoun Society, which, according to Gurdjieff, met in Babylon as far back as c. 2500 BCE and was responsible for preserving the inner teachings and initiations of the Aryan tradition in a period of religious decline. Sarmoun is a word meaning bee in Old Persian, and refers symbolically to the practice of the brotherhood of storing the “honey” of both the traditional wisdom and the supernatural energy or baraka enabling it to be understood, and sending this double “nectar” out into the world in times of great need.8 The word Sarmoun can also mean “those who are enlightened.” The Sarmouni are believed to have secret training centres hidden to this day in the most remote regions of Central Asia.

In Gurdjieff: Making a New World, Bennett conjectures that around 500 BCE the Sarmoun Society migrated from ancient Chaldaea to Mosul in Mesopotamia, moving north into the upper valley of the Tigris, into the mountains of Kurdistan and the Caucasus. There it became active in the rise of Zoroastrianism under the Persian monarch Cambyses I. According to Gurdjieff, the Society later moved eastward to Central Asia, twenty days’ journey from Kabul and twelve days’ journey from Bokhara. “He {Gurdjieff] refers,” says Bennett, “to the valleys of the Pyandje and the Syr Darya, which suggest an area in the mountains south-east of Tashkent.”9 Although Gurdjieff was never explicit about his relationship to the Sarmouni or the precise locality of the monasteries in which he trained towards the end of his travels, he provides many hints in such autobiographical writings as Meetings With Remarkable Men that this Sarmoun brotherhood, whose monasteries were situated on the northern slopes of the Himalayas, was the custodian of the most ancient wisdom known and the primary source of his extraordinary esoteric knowledge and powers.

Gurdjieff came to the West as a man with a mission. He had journeyed extensively in the Caucasus, where it is thought he first entered the tekkes of the Yesevi dervishes of Sheikh Adi in the Kurdish foothills and later those of the Sarmouni in Afghanistan, receiving a number of initiations by the remarkable age of twenty two. Those closest to him maintain that he remained in touch with hidden Sufi sources throughout his life and received help and support from them. He clearly believed that he acted on their authority in setting up schools in the West that transmitted the cosmological and psychological teachings he himself had learned during his travels. Yet while freely recounting his many Central Asian adventures in his search for wisdom, Gurdjieff managed to draw a permanent veil of secrecy and ambiguity over all details of these intimate encounters with the dervish tradition. This of course is in line with the extreme reticence of the Sufi orders themselves.

A charismatic hypnotist, carpet trader, Russian spy and mystic extraordinaire, George Gurdjieff was the son of a Greek-Armenian bard and was deeply impressed by his father’s songs concerning the great spiritual luminaries of a vanished past. The boy apparently began his search for the lost wisdom of the ancients at the early age of fifteen, and maintained it at huge cost to his health and material resources until he emerged, nearly thirty years later, a magus of mysterious yet undeniably charismatic authority. Possessed of enormous personal courage, during World War I Gurdjieff led a large posse of Russian followers across Eastern Europe to safety, through the raging battle lines of Bolsheviks and Cossacks in turn, eventually establishing a school in Fontainbleu, outside Paris, for the study and practice of methods of spiritual self-transformation. These methods, revolutionary in their day, are believed to have included the sacred dance and music exercises of the shamanistic Yesevi dervishes of Kurdistan, a community in which Gurdjieff seems to have received his initial training in Sufi techniques of “soul-making.”

The Yezidis, a secretive Kurdish religious sect from which the Sufi Bektashi order has sprung, live to this day in the foothills north of Mosul in Iraqui Kurdistan pursuing a cult of angels. According to the British baroness E.S. Drower, who in 1940 published a detailed paper on the sect, the chief Yezidi angel is Malek Taus, the Peacock Angel who has some likeness to Lucifer, the fallen angel of Christian fame. A black serpent is also held in special reverence in the Yezidi religion as a symbol of magical potency – no doubt ultimately a symbol of kundalini and the spinal system of energies elaborated in spiritual physiology. While paying lip service to the Muslim faith, the Yezidi have their own unique cosmogony, mythology and ritual practices, which have more commonality with the Magian or Gnostic belief-systems than with either Islam or Christianity. Ceaselessly persecuted and destroyed by Kurdish Muslims and Ottoman Turks as well as Islamic armies of both Iraq and Iran, the once powerful Yezidi tribes have been almost wiped out as heretics of the first order. Only isolated groups are now left. These include small pockets in Central Kurdistan, the Russian Caucasus and in satellite communities in Syria, Lebanon, Anatolia and Iran.

Sheikh Adi, a noted mystic of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, was a Median Magi, and although he is regarded as the founder of the Yezidi faith and an incarnation of the Peacock Angel, both the religion and the tribe are ascribed a far earlier date of origin. They are believed to be heirs to an ancient ancestral tradition going back to Noah. Adrian G. Gilbert comments:

It is my belief that they [the Yezidis] are descended from the ancient Chaldaeans. Their own tradition is that they migrated from the South, and they may well be the lost remnants of the Babylonian Magi who disappeared after the time of Alexander of Macedon.10

This is certainly in line with Gurdjieff’s belief that the roots of Sufism lie in a spiritual tradition of extreme antiquity such as is found in the Yezidi faith, and that it was probably centred in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Nevertheless, there are many evidences that Sufism has continually developed beyond its initial form and has amplified its teachings over the ages.

The late Hugh Schonfield, a noted Jewish scholar and author, says that by the third century CE Sufi schools were well established in the Middle East, particularly in Mosul, the heart of the old Assyrian kingdom, under the auspices of the Zoroastrian Magi. There the Sufis were joined by many Jewish refugees from Egypt fleeing Roman persecution. Among these were the Therapeutae, members of an Essene Order of contemplatives strongly imbued with a revolutionary New Covenant with God. The covenant involved a Judaic reformation that forbad militarism and animal sacrifice and embraced the principles of gender equality and an equitable distribution of wealth. The Therapeutae brought to the Sufi tradition not only these enlightened social ideals which were actually already enshrined in its own constitution, but much of the new Hermetic and Kabbalistic mysticism fermenting in Alexandria. Thus, says Schonfield, throughout Egypt and the Middle East

there were religious fusions and amalgamations, and the emergence of spiritual hybrids… Zoroastrianism and Mithraism lent their characteristics to Jewish Essene teaching, and found a Greek expression in the Hermetic and Christian Gnostic. The coverage of the Roman empire right round the Mediterranean carried the cults with it, and opened the way to new blendings.11

In this way Sufism was continually invigorated by new trends and in turn invigorated others. Then, when in the seventh century CE civilization was in danger of total collapse through the ravages of global pestilence, war, earthquakes and the suppression of all Greek learning by Byzantine Christianity, the Sufi masters transferred their allegiance from Zoroastrianism to Islam, the latter offering the greater hope of rehabilitation for humanity. Thus the wisdom and science of Persia, with its great heritage of Greek learning, passed into the Muslim culture and was carried by Muslim sages into every quarter of the globe. The Dark Ages were halted and Islam, supported by the Sufis, brought about a brilliant revival of the Graeco-Roman arts and sciences.12

The conquest of Spain by the Muslim Moors meant Jews, Muslims and Christians were able to live there harmoniously until the fifteenth century, creating a culture of superb beauty and intelligence which lasted until the Jews and Muslims were banished to Byzantium, and which gave Sufism entrance into the rest of backward Europe. During the same centuries Crusaders such as the Templars encountered the rich Saracen culture in the Holy Land and secretly brought back the cream of Sufi thought to Europe to enrich Christian theological scholarship, art and sciences.

With the Mongol invasions, however, came difficult days for European civilization as many sources of Sufi wisdom withdrew. The Sufi Masters of Wisdom known in Central Asia as the Khwajagan lineage withdrew at this time to the Trans-Himalayas, where their schools still persist. The Khwajagan were neither savants nor mystical ecstatics. They were practical men who assiduously practiced the breathing and mantric exercise of the zikr, fought their own weaknesses by means of trials based on humiliation and abasement, and during the Mongol depredations of the conquered western cities built new schools, hospitals and mosques. Some say these Masters, who may be synonymous with the Sarmouni, have continued to this day to head the Sufi hierarchy – which Bennett has called the Hidden Directorate - from its hidden Trans-Himalayan headquarters. Meanwhile, the Sufi orders left behind continued to strengthen their ties with other esoteric systems, such as the Magian secret societies in Persia and the Copts in Egypt, and to extend their formidable influence across the world into South-East Asia.

In the Sunda Islands they amalgamated successfully with the indigenous shamans, Hindu-Buddhists and Taoists and were instrumental in establishing in Java one of the most influential schools of Tibetan Kalachakra Tantra in the world. The result was a chain of hybrid secret societies around the globe whose roots were buried deep in a freedom-loving soil compounded of Sufism, Magian wisdom and the Solomonic and Hermetic wisdom of the Egyptian Essenes. It was these pan-religious amalgamations that produced over the centuries initiatic schools like the Templars, the Chartres masters, the Rosicrucians, the Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Theosophists, all dedicated to working for the religious and scientific dawning of a new age free from religious intolerance.

Throughout the long Sufi saga, the West had been unaware of intervention in its affairs, or indeed of the very existence of a powerful organization in its midst that was monitoring the course of history and at the same time maintaining its own hierarchy, objectives and worldview independently of the visible political and religious structures of society. But the Sufi masters knew that this unconscious condition, mainly imposed on the people by repressive forces outside their control, must end, and that the time of awakening was drawing near.

The two Rosicrucian manifestos pseudonymously published in Germany in the early years of the seventeenth century marked the first Sufi venture into the public domain and caused a sensation. The manifestos purported to advertise a mysterious order called the Fraternity of the Rosey Cross which had been founded, it was claimed, by one Christian Rosencreutz; and a third publication called The Alchemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, written in high Dutch, came out soon after. The manifestos declared that Fr. Rosencreutz had obtained the inspiration for his brotherhood from Arabia, Fez (the home of Sufic alchemy since the eighth century) and Egypt, all centres of Sufi activity. And Rosicrucian tradition has it that Fr. Rosencreutz was initiated in Palestine by an Arabic sect. Observes Ernest Scott:

When it is realized that the Sufi teacher Suhrawardi of Aleppo had a teaching method called the Path of the Rose and that the Sufic word for a dervish exercise has the same consonantal root as the word for a rose, the Sufic origin of the Rosicrucians may be inferred with some confidence.13

As we now know, the series of Rosicrucian publications with their visionary and reforming talk of an invisible college, a “winged academy” dedicated to a commonwealth of man, created a furore in Europe. Some saw the publications as a hoax, others as a God-given sign of the millennium. As ever, the Sufis were not directly mentioned: but, sweeping like a rejuvenating wind through Protestant and Catholic lands alike, the movement stirred up by the mysterious manifestos became a potent though short-lived catalyst for change. It instigated a religious and intellectual uprising that sought reform in education, religion and science, promising a coming utopia in which the dignity and worth of every man and woman would be recognized.

Frances A. Yates, a foremost Renaissance scholar, believes this period in the seventeenth century can rightly be called the Rosicrucian Enlightenment and that out of its “great reservoir of spiritual and intellectual power, of moral and reforming vision”14 came the Royal Society and the age of scientific revolution.

Full of Christian mysticism yet also permeated with Hermetic-Kabbalistic angelology and alchemical religious philosophy, the Rosicrucian teachings proclaimed that this age of enlightenment, in which religion and science would no longer be antithetical, was at hand; great advances were to be made and a reformation of the whole wide world would presage “a great influx of truth and light” into fallen society such as shone on Adam in paradise. For a time large factions of the Church espoused these ideas, and the Jesuits, themselves of occult and hermetic origin, took over much of the Rosicrucian symbolism and emblematics.

Yet in the event the whole programme was aborted by the fiercely reactionary response of the Spanish Inquisition and its political ally, the Hapsburg dynasty, which instigated the Thirty Years’ War, forcing thousands of religious dissidents to flee with the seeds of the new vision to the New World. The Sufi programme had to incubate in secret for several more centuries.

Not until the twentieth century, in a more tolerant and receptive age, were the Sufis finally able to reveal themselves openly. In 1921 Gurdjieff, the emigré and entrepreneur from Armenia, was the first to make this possible. He came with a crucial message for the twentieth century and, as we shall see, for our own era in the third millennium. Of great personal magnetism, drive and unusual psychic powers, Gurdjieff burst upon the western scene with his programme for spiritual development, bringing to the European cognoscenti for the first time an awareness of the sacred ritual dances and dervish exercises of the East. These, he said, had strong links with Altaic shamanism and Tibetan and Chinese Tantra.

But Sufis have never regarded spiritual exercises alone as adequate. Generally speaking, little is said in Sufi literature about baraka, the effective grace that makes spiritual development on this path possible, yet its importance is primary. Baraka, as transmitted from teacher to pupil, is said to be a high emotional energy associated with the heart centre, and according to Bennett, enables the pupil to do what would be quite beyond his unaided strength.15 It is this inner infusion of conscious energy - energy of a high spiritual nature - that enables the zikhr, the Sufi invocatory exercise, to be fruitful. Discipline, austerity and voluntary suffering, which Gurdjieff translated as conscious labour and intentional suffering, were also needed. By intentional suffering he meant exposing oneself to painful situations in order to help others.

While the southern Sufi orders embraced the mystical doctrine of love and union with God, these northern Sufis were strongly influenced by Buddhism and, like the Khwajagan, were concerned with a total liberation from self and the world of appearances. They were regarded by the more conservative southern Sufis as unorthodox, even being accused of magical practices learned from the Siberian shamans to the north. Nevertheless, Gurdjieff saw great benefit for the West in the dervish practices, disapproved though they were by the more purist brotherhoods such as the Nach’shbandi and the Qadiri, and made his unique programme available to all those wishing to develop their human potential.

At his Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainbleu, Gurdjieff trained his students in group dance movements set to dervish rhythms that demanded of them intense physical effort and coordination and which raised the body to a “high state of consciousness” conducive to a transformation of energies. He also encouraged his pupils to observe intensively their own psychic centres of thinking, feeling and instinct as a means of achieving a degree of self-government that man at present entirely lacks – but without which, Gurdjieff insisted, it is impossible for him to govern and maintain the planet. Public performances of Gurdjieff’s dervish dances were put on at various theatres, even in the prestigious Carnegie Hall in New York, and Europe and America marvelled: nothing like it had ever been known. Sacred dances, Gurdjieff said,

have always been one of the vital subjects taught in esoteric schools of the East… Such gymnastics have a double aim: they contain and express a certain form of knowledge and at the same time serve as a means to acquire an harmonious state of being.

At one time it was his intention to use the movements in the traditional way for which they were principally intended in the ancient temples of initiation – that is, as a means of transmitting knowledge directly to the higher centres without passing through the mind, which is the way of Tantra. But a car accident in which Gurdjieff’s physical health was severely damaged put an end to his wider plans for the movements and turned his attention to writing and training selected people to carry on his work at a more intellectual level.

Sufi prescience, Sufi aptitude for the right teaching in the right time and place, is well attested. In many respects, Gurdjieff’s writings contributed enormously to the familiarization of the West to the radical idea of the psyche or soul – the dynamic centre that mediates between the spiritual and the sensory functions – which at that time Sigmund Freud was also bringing to Western notice. Recognition of this unifying centre of relativity, which modifies the traditional absolutes of philosophy and religion on one hand and the physical sciences on the other, was just then opening up, and Gurdjieff’s psychological brand of theosophy, which became the vogue at the same time as Freudian and socialist theory, made a very great impact.

The Gurdjieff schools of self-development spread to numerous countries and his ideas became common coinage in the new enlightenment of the sixties. Through the interest aroused in his methods and teachings, in which the centrality of individuation was paramount, Gurdjieff was able to give out for the first time a certain amount of information about the Sufi tarekats hidden in Eurasia. And in his train came a school of eminent Sufi writers like Guénon, Bennett, Ouspensky, Schuon, Hazrat Inayat Khan and Idris Shah, all of whom further opened up the world of Sufism to a vast reading public.

One of the central strands in Gurdjieff’s belief-system was the principle of world-creation and world-maintenance, which he said was derived from “an old Sumerian manuscript” discovered by a great Kurdish philosopher. The doctrine can be summed up very simply: “Everything that exists maintains and is maintained by other existences.” Peculiar to Sufism and appearing in no other religion, it states that the whole of the universe is a web of mutually supporting systems, “apparatuses for transforming energy”, each one of which produces the means of sustenance for others.

This law of reciprocal maintenance governs all of life and applies to man as well as in his relation to Mother Nature. The world is not made for man, as we have been taught; both are made for each other. Man’s destiny and the destiny of the earth are interdependent. The evolution of the one depends on the evolution of the other, the survival of one on the survival of the other. Man is not separate from the cosmic process; he is himself part of the ecosystem he observes out there, and he must serve the evolution of the world as well as his own. That is the law of the cosmos, even as the palaeolithic shaman defined it many millennia ago.

From the Sarmounis, Gurdjieff learned that man is at present an automaton, a mere mechanism driven by the blind forces of action and reaction, his sense of identity fragmented, his will almost non-existent. Yet even work on himself will not redeem him without an acceptance that he is here to serve the world. Through Gurdjieff, therefore, the Sufis gave out to the twentieth century a new teaching, a new outlook on life that was revolutionary seventy years ago: man cannot advance spiritually unless he fulfils his obligation to planet earth, and through planet earth to the solar system. He must “pay the debt of his existence” by nurturing that which nurtured him.

For man’s cross is a twofold spiritual destiny; to evolve as an individual, but also to serve the evolution of kingdoms other than his own, lives other than his own. Out of the friction these opposed drives generate, said Gurdjieff, there comes a transcendental third, the birth of conscience. This suffering of the tension between the opposites is the law of true religion and is alleviated only by the awakening of the mediating force inherent in the soul; that is, conscience or love. The Sufi theory of world-creation and world-maintenance – “a new master idea for the coming age”, as Bennett called it – has become increasingly relevant as the planet’s ecological crisis has worsened over the decades; and now, looking back from our vantage point in the new millennium, we can see how it has indeed become the hallmark of our time, perhaps the key to its essential meaning. Wherever the next civilization is centred it must be where the third and reconciling power can operate; where conscience can find a home. That is the prime Sufi message for our generation, as it was Gurdjieff’s.



Sunday, June 27, 2010

Houses Design


DESIGN:

Design is the planning that lays the basis for the making of every object or system. It can be used both as a noun and as a verb and, in a broader way, it means applied arts and engineering (See design disciplines below). As a verb, "to design" refers to the process of originating and developing a plan for a product, structure, system, or component with intention[1]. As a noun, "a design" is used for either the final (solution) plan (e.g. proposal, drawing, model, description) or the result of implementing that plan in the form of the final product of a design process[2]. This classification aside, in its broadest sense no other limitations exist and the final product can be anything from clothing to graphical user interfaces to skyscrapers. Even virtual concepts such as corporate identity and cultural traditions such as celebration of certain holidays[3] are sometimes designed. More recently, processes (in general) have also been treated as products of design, giving new meaning to the term process design.

The person designing is called a designer, which is also a term used for people who work professionally in one of the various design areas, usually also specifying which area is being dealt with (such as a fashion designer, concept designer or web designer). Designing often requires a designer to consider the aesthetic, functional, and many other aspects of an object or a process, which usually requires considerable research, thought, modeling, interactive adjustment, and re-design. With such a broad definition, there is no universal language or unifying institution for designers of all disciplines. This allows for many differing philosophies and approaches toward the subject. However, serious study of design demands increased focus on the design process.



Fine Art & Tattos Art

Fine Art:

Fine art or the fine arts describes an art form developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery".[1]

Historically, the fine arts were limited to painting, sculpture, architecture and engraving.[2] Today, the fine arts commonly include visual and performing art forms, such as painting, sculpture, installation, Calligraphy, music, dance, theatre, architecture, photography and printmaking. However, in some institutes of learning or in museums fine art, and frequently the term fine arts (pl.) as well, are associated exclusively with the visual art forms.

The term is today usually avoided by academic art historians, and is much less used in any context in the UK than North America, especially in the singular form.















Saturday, June 26, 2010

History of Graphic Designing

History


Page from the Book of Kells: Folio 114v, Decorated text. Tunc dicit illis

While Graphic Design as a discipline has a relatively recent history, with the name 'graphic design" first coined by William Addison Dwiggins in 1922 [2], graphic design-like activities span the history of humankind: from the caves of Lascaux, to Rome's Trajan's Column to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages, to the dazzling neons of Ginza. In both this lengthy history and in the relatively recent explosion of visual communication in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is sometimes a blurring distinction and over-lapping of advertising art, graphic design and fine art. After all, they share many of the same elements, theories, principles, practices and languages, and sometimes the same benefactor or client. In advertising art the ultimate objective is the sale of goods and services. In graphic design, "the essence is to give order to information, form to ideas, expression and feeling to artifacts that document human experience."[3]

The advent of printing

During the Tang Dynasty (618–906) between the 4th and 7th century A.D. wood blocks were cut to print on textiles and later to reproduce Buddhist texts. A Buddhist scripture printed in 868 is the earliest known printed book. Beginning in the 11th century, longer scrolls and books were produced using movable type printing making books widely available during the Song dynasty (960–1279).[4] Sometime around 1450, Johann Gutenberg's printing press made books widely available in Europe. The book design of Aldus Manutius developed the book structure which would become the foundation of western publication design. This era of graphic design is called Humanist or Old Style.[5]

Emergence of the design industry

In late 19th century Europe, especially in the United Kingdom, the movement began to separate graphic design from fine art.

In 1849, Henry Cole became one of the major forces in design education in Great Britain, informing the government of the importance of design in his Journal of Design and Manufactures. He organized the Great Exhibition as a celebration of modern industrial technology and Victorian design.

From 1891 to 1896 William Morris' Kelmscott Press published books that are some of the most significant of the graphic design products of the Arts and Crafts movement, and made a very lucrative business of creating books of great stylistic refinement and selling them to the wealthy for a premium. Morris proved that a market existed for works of graphic design in their own right and helped pioneer the separation of design from production and from fine art. The work of the Kelmscott Press is characterized by its obsession with historical styles. This historicism was, however, important as it amounted to the first significant reaction to the stale state of nineteenth-century graphic design. Morris' work, along with the rest of the Private Press movement, directly influenced Art Nouveau and is indirectly responsible for developments in early twentieth century graphic design in general.[6]

Twentieth century design


A Boeing 747 aircraft with livery designating it as Air Force One. The cyan forms, the US flag, presidential seal and the Caslon lettering were all designed at different times and combined by designer Raymond Loewy in this one final design.

The name "Graphic Design" first appeared in print in the 1922 essay "New Kind of Printing Calls for New Design" by William Addison Dwiggins, an American book designer in the early 20th century.[7]

Raffe's Graphic Design, published in 1927, is considered to be the first book to use "Graphic Design" in its title.[8]

The signage in the London Underground is a classic design example[9] of the modern era and used a font designed by Edward Johnston in 1916.

In the 1920s, Soviet constructivism applied 'intellectual production' in different spheres of production. The movement saw individualistic art as useless in revolutionary Russia and thus moved towards creating objects for utilitarian purposes. They designed buildings, theater sets, posters, fabrics, clothing, furniture, logos, menus, etc.[citation needed]Jan Tschichold codified the principles of modern typography in his 1928 book, New Typography. He later repudiated the philosophy he espoused in this book as being fascistic, but it remained very influential.[citation needed] Tschichold, Bauhaus typographers such as Herbert Bayer and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and El Lissitzky are the fathers of graphic design[citation needed] as we know it today. They pioneered production techniques and stylistic devices used throughout the twentieth century. The following years saw graphic design in the modern style gain widespread acceptance and application.[10] A booming post-World War II American economy established a greater need for graphic design, mainly advertising and packaging. The emigration of the German Bauhaus school of design to Chicago in 1937 brought a "mass-produced" minimalism to America; sparking a wild fire of "modern" architecture and design. Notable names in mid-century modern design include Adrian Frutiger, designer of the typefaces Univers and Frutiger; Paul Rand, who, from the late 1930s until his death in 1996, took the principles of the Bauhaus and applied them to popular advertising and logo design, helping to create a uniquely American approach to European minimalism while becoming one of the principal pioneers of the subset of graphic design known as corporate identity; and Josef Müller-Brockmann, who designed posters in a severe yet accessible manner typical of the 1950s and 1970s era.

Applications

From road signs to technical schematics, from interoffice memorandums to reference manuals, graphic design enhances transfer of knowledge. Readability is enhanced by improving the visual presentation of text.

Design can also aid in selling a product or idea through effective visual communication. It is applied to products and elements of company identity like logos, colors, packaging, and text. Together these are defined as branding (see also advertising). Branding has increasingly become important in the range of services offered by many graphic designers, alongside corporate identity. Whilst the terms are often used interchangeably, branding is more strictly related to the identifying mark or trade name for a product or service, whereas corporate identity can have a broader meaning relating to the structure and ethos of a company, as well as to the company's external image. Graphic designers will often form part of a team working on corporate identity and branding projects. Other members of that team can include marketing professionals, communications consultants and commercial writers.

Textbooks are designed to present subjects such as geography, science, and math. These publications have layouts which illustrate theories and diagrams. A common example of graphics in use to educate is diagrams of human anatomy. Graphic design is also applied to layout and formatting of educational material to make the information more accessible and more readily understandable.

Graphic design is applied in the entertainment industry in decoration, scenery, and visual story telling. Other examples of design for entertainment purposes include novels, comic books, DVD covers, opening credits and closing credits in film, and programs and props on stage. This could also include artwork used for t-shirts and other items screenprinted for sale.

From scientific journals to news reporting, the presentation of opinion and facts is often improved with graphics and thoughtful compositions of visual information - known as information design. Newspapers, magazines, blogs, television and film documentaries may use graphic design to inform and entertain. With the advent of the web, information designers with experience in interactive tools such as Adobe Flash are increasingly being used to illustrate the background to news stories.

Skills

A graphic design project may involve the stylization and presentation of existing text and either preexisting imagery or images developed by the graphic designer. For example, a newspaper story begins with the journalists and photojournalists and then becomes the graphic designer's job to organize the page into a reasonable layout and determine if any other graphic elements should be required. In a magazine article or advertisement, often the graphic designer or art director will commission photographers or illustrators to create original pieces just to be incorporated into the design layout. Or the designer may utilize stock imagery or photography. Contemporary design practice has been extended to the modern computer, for example in the use of WYSIWYG user interfaces, often referred to as interactive design, or multimedia design.

Visual arts

Before any graphic elements may be applied to a design, the graphic elements must be originated by means of visual art skills. These graphics are often (but not always) developed by a graphic designer. Visual arts include works which are primarily visual in nature using anything from traditional media, to photography or computer generated art. Graphic design principles may be applied to each graphic art element individually as well as to the final composition.

Typography

Typography is the art, craft and techniques of type design, modifying type glyphs, and arranging type. Type glyphs (characters) are created and modified using a variety of illustration techniques. The arrangement of type is the selection of typefaces, point size, line length, leading (line spacing) and letter spacing.

Typography is performed by typesetters, compositors, typographers, graphic artists, art directors, and clerical workers. Until the Digital Age, typography was a specialized occupation. Digitization opened up typography to new generations of visual designers and lay users.

Page layout

The page layout aspect of graphic design deals with the arrangement of elements (content) on a page, such as image placement, and text layout and style. Beginning from early illuminated pages in hand-copied books of the Middle Ages and proceeding down to intricate modern magazine and catalogue layouts, structured page design has long been a consideration in printed material. With print media, elements usually consist of type (text), images (pictures), and occasionally place-holder graphics for elements that are not printed with ink such as die/laser cutting, foil stamping or blind embossing.

Interface design

Since the advent of the World Wide Web and computer software development, many graphic designers have become involved in interface design. This has included web design and software design, when end user interactivity is a design consideration of the layout or interface. Combining visual communication skills with the interactive communication skills of user interaction and online branding, graphic designers often work with software developers and web developers to create both the look and feel of a web site or software application and enhance the interactive experience of the user or web site visitor. An important aspect of interface design is icon design.

Printmaking

Printmaking is the process of making artworks by printing on paper and other materials or surfaces. Except in the case of monotyping, the process is capable of producing multiples of the same piece, which is called a print. Each piece is not a copy but an original since it is not a reproduction of another work of art and is technically known as an impression. Painting or drawing, on the other hand, create a unique original piece of artwork. Prints are created from a single original surface, known technically as a matrix. Common types of matrices include: plates of metal, usually copper or zinc for engraving or etching; stone, used for lithography; blocks of wood for woodcuts, linoleum for linocuts and fabric plates for screen-printing. But there are many other kinds, discussed below. Works printed from a single plate create an edition, in modern times usually each signed and numbered to form a limited edition. Prints may also be published in book form, as artist's books. A single print could be the product of one or multiple techniques.

Chromatics

Chromatics is the field of how eyes perceive color and how to explain and organize those colors in the printer and on the monitor. The Retina in the eye is covered by two light-sensitive receptors that are named rods and cones. Rods are sensitive to light, but not sensitive to color. Cones are the opposite of rods. They are less sensitive to light, but color can be perceived.[11]

Tools


Examples of graphic design made on a computer, setting out various possibilities for a Wikimedia Commons project icon.

The mind may be the most important graphic design tool. Aside from technology, graphic design requires judgment and creativity. Critical, observational, quantitative and analytic thinking are required for design layouts and rendering. If the executor is merely following a solution (e.g. sketch, script or instructions) provided by another designer (such as an art director), then the executor is not usually considered the designer.

The method of presentation (e.g. arrangement, style, medium) may be equally important to the design. The layout is produced using external traditional or digital image editing tools. The appropriate development and presentation tools can substantially change how an audience perceives a project.

In the mid 1980s, the arrival of desktop publishing and graphic art software applications introduced a generation of designers to computer image manipulation and creation that had previously been manually executed. Computer graphic design enabled designers to instantly see the effects of layout or typographic changes, and to simulate the effects of traditional media without requiring a lot of space. However, traditional tools such as pencils or markers are useful even when computers are used for finalization; a designer or art director may hand sketch numerous concepts as part of the creative process. Some of these sketches may even be shown to a client for early stage approval, before the designer develops the idea further using a computer and graphic design software tools.

Computers are considered an indispensable tool in the graphic design industry. Computers and software applications are generally seen by creative professionals as more effective production tools than traditional methods. However, some designers continue to use manual and traditional tools for production, such as Milton Glaser.

New ideas can come by way of experimenting with tools and methods. Some designers explore ideas using pencil and paper to avoid creating within the limits of whatever computer fonts, clipart, stock photos, or rendering filters (e.g. Kai's Power Tools) are available on any particular configuration. Others use many different mark-making tools and resources from computers to sticks and mud as a means of inspiring creativity. One of the key features of graphic design is that it makes a tool out of appropriate image selection in order to convey meaning.[12]

Computers and the creative process

There is some debate whether computers enhance the creative process of graphic design.[13] Rapid production from the computer allows many designers to explore multiple ideas quickly with more detail than what could be achieved by traditional hand-rendering or paste-up on paper, moving the designer through the creative process more quickly.[14] However, being faced with limitless choices does not help isolate the best design solution and can lead to endless iterations with no clear design outcome.

A graphic designer may use sketches to explore multiple or complex ideas quickly[15] without the distractions and complications of software.[citation needed] Hand-rendered comps are often used to get approval for an idea execution before a design invests time to produce finished visuals on a computer or in paste-up. The same thumbnail sketches or rough drafts on paper may be used to rapidly refine and produce the idea on the computer in a hybrid process. This hybrid process is especially useful in logo design[16] where a software learning curve may detract from a creative thought process. The traditional-design/computer-production hybrid process may be used for freeing one's creativity in page layout or image development as well.[citation needed] In the early days of computer publishing, many 'traditional' graphic designers relied on computer-savvy production artists to produce their ideas from sketches, without needing to learn the computer skills themselves. However, this practice has been increasingly less common since the advent of desktop publishing over 30 years ago. The use of computers and graphics software is now taught in most graphic design courses.


Graphic design career paths cover all ends of the creative spectrum and often overlap. The main job responsibility of a Graphic Designer is the arrangement of visual elements in some type of media. The main job titles include graphic designer, art director, creative director, and the entry level production artist. Depending on the industry served, the responsibilities may have different titles such as "DTP Associate" or "Graphic Artist," but despite changes in title, graphic design principles remain consistent. The responsibilities may come from or lead to specialized skills such as illustration, photography or interactive design.

Graphic designers can work in a variety of environments. Whilst many will work within companies devoted specifically to the industry, such as design consultancies or branding agencies, others may work within publishing, marketing or other communications companies. Increasingly, especially since the introduction of personal computers to the industry, many graphic designers have found themselves working within non-design oriented organisations, as in-house designers.

A graphic designer reports to the art director, creative director or senior media creative. As a designer becomes more senior, they may spend less time designing media and more time leading and directing other designers on broader creative activities, such as brand development and corporate identity development. As graphic designers become more senior, they are often expected to interact more directly with clients.

About Graphic Design

Graphic Design Projects



Personal design projects are a great way to find creative inspiration and practice design and software techniques. Without worrying about client demands, they allow you to fully express yourself through design. For the same reason, you may also find yourself creating version after version... but nonetheless, they are often a fun activity and can result in some work for your portfolio.

If a movie was made about your life, what would the movie poster look like? If you wrote an autobiography (or someone wrote a book about you), what would the cover look like? For this exercise, create a movie poster or book cover for a film or story about your life.

Take as much time as you like, and share whatever you like, whether it be a sketch or finished product. Please include some background on your design process, thoughts behind your design decisions, and the software and techniques you used to complete the work.