1.
Belgium
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Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a sovereign state in Western Europe bordered by France, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, and the North Sea. It is a small, densely populated country which covers an area of 30,528 square kilometres and has a population of about 11 million people. Additionally, there is a group of German-speakers who live in the East Cantons located around the High Fens area. Historically, Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg were known as the Low Countries, the region was called Belgica in Latin, after the Roman province of Gallia Belgica. From the end of the Middle Ages until the 17th century, today, Belgium is a federal constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system of governance. It is divided into three regions and three communities, that exist next to each other and its two largest regions are the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders in the north and the French-speaking southern region of Wallonia. The Brussels-Capital Region is a bilingual enclave within the Flemish Region. A German-speaking Community exists in eastern Wallonia, Belgiums linguistic diversity and related political conflicts are reflected in its political history and complex system of governance, made up of six different governments. Upon its independence, declared in 1830, Belgium participated in the Industrial Revolution and, during the course of the 20th century, possessed a number of colonies in Africa. This continuing antagonism has led to several far-reaching reforms, resulting in a transition from a unitary to a federal arrangement during the period from 1970 to 1993. Belgium is also a member of the Eurozone, NATO, OECD and WTO. Its capital, Brussels, hosts several of the EUs official seats as well as the headquarters of major international organizations such as NATO. Belgium is also a part of the Schengen Area, Belgium is a developed country, with an advanced high-income economy and is categorized as very high in the Human Development Index. A gradual immigration by Germanic Frankish tribes during the 5th century brought the area under the rule of the Merovingian kings, a gradual shift of power during the 8th century led the kingdom of the Franks to evolve into the Carolingian Empire. Many of these fiefdoms were united in the Burgundian Netherlands of the 14th and 15th centuries, the Eighty Years War divided the Low Countries into the northern United Provinces and the Southern Netherlands. The latter were ruled successively by the Spanish and the Austrian Habsburgs and this was the theatre of most Franco-Spanish and Franco-Austrian wars during the 17th and 18th centuries. The reunification of the Low Countries as the United Kingdom of the Netherlands occurred at the dissolution of the First French Empire in 1815, although the franchise was initially restricted, universal suffrage for men was introduced after the general strike of 1893 and for women in 1949. The main political parties of the 19th century were the Catholic Party, French was originally the single official language adopted by the nobility and the bourgeoisie
2.
Franco-Belgian comics
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Franco-Belgian comics are comics that are created for a Belgian and French audience. These countries have a tradition in comics and comic books, where they are known as BDs. In Europe, the French language is spoken not only in France but also by about 40% of the population of Belgium. The shared language creates an artistic and commercial market where national identity is often blurred, Flemish Belgian comic books are influenced by Francophone comics, yet have a distinctly different style, both in art as well as in spirit. Among the most popular Franco-Belgian comics that have achieved international fame are The Adventures of Tintin, Gaston Lagaffe, Asterix, Lucky Luke, the term bandes dessinées is derived from the original description of the art form as drawn strips. It was first introduced in the 1930s, but only became popular in the 1960s, the term bandes dessinées contains no indication of subject matter, unlike the American terms comics and funnies, which imply a humorous art form. Indeed, the distinction of comics as the art is prevalent in Francophone scholarship on the form, as is the concept of comics criticism. The publication of Francis Lacassins book Pour un neuvième art, la bande dessinée in 1971 further established the term and these were humorous short works rarely longer than a single page. In the Francophonie, artists such as Gustave Doré, Nadar, Christophe, in the early decades of the 20th century, comics were not stand-alone publications, but were published in newspapers and weekly or monthly magazines as episodes or gags. Aside from these magazines, the Catholic Church was creating and distributing healthy, in the early 1900s, the first popular French comics appeared, including Bécassine and Les Pieds Nickelés. In the 1920s, after the end of the first world war, Saint-Ogan was one of the first French-speaking artists to fully utilize techniques popularized and formulaized in the USA, such as word balloons. In 1920, the Abbot of Averbode in Belgium started publishing Zonneland, a magazine consisting largely of text with few illustrations, which started printing comics more often in the following years. One of the earliest proper Belgian comics was Hergés The Adventures of Tintin, with the story Tintin in the Land of the Soviets and it was quite different from future versions of Tintin, the style being very naïve and simple, even childish, compared to the later stories. The early stories often featured racist and political stereotypes that Hergé later regretted, the success was immediate, and soon other publishers started publishing periodicals with American series. This continued during the remainder of the decade, with hundreds of magazines publishing mostly imported material, the most important ones in France were Robinson, Hurrah, and Coeurs Vaillants, while Belgian examples include Wrill and Bravo. In 1938, Spirou magazine was launched, Spirou also appeared translated in a Dutch version under the name Robbedoes for the Flemish market. Export to the Netherlands followed a few years later, when Germany invaded France and Belgium, it became close to impossible to import American comics. The occupying Nazis banned American animated movies and comics they deemed to be of a questionable character, both were, however, already very popular before the war and the hardships of the war period only seemed to increase the demand
3.
Maurice Benayoun
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Maurice Benayoun is a French pioneer new-media artist and theorist based in Paris and Hong Kong. His work employs various media, including video, immersive virtual reality, born in Mascara, Algeria in March 1957, he moved to France in 1958. Graduating in Fine Arts in the early 1980s, Benayoun directed video installations and short videos about contemporary artists, including Daniel Buren, Jean Tinguely, Sol LeWitt, in 1987 he co-founded Z-A, a computer graphics and Virtual Reality private lab. Between 1990 and 1993, Benayoun collaborated with Belgian graphic novelist François Schuiten on Quarxs, in 1993, he received the Villa Medicis Hors Les Murs for his Art After Museum project, a virtual reality contemporary art collection. After 1994 Benayoun was involved with more virtual-reality and interactive-art installations, one of these was described by Jean-Paul Fargier in Le Monde as the first Metaphysical Video Game. One important work from this period includes The Tunnel under the Atlantic and this was a tele-virtual project linking the Pompidou Center in Paris and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. The Tunnel under the Atlantic introduces the concept of dynamic semantic shared space, the Navigation Room and The Membrane were created for the Cité des Sciences de la Villette. The Navigation Room presented, through an interface, highly personalized visits and content. The Membrane — the core of the exhibition Man Transformed — was a large surface breathing and feeling the presence of the visitors, the Panoramic Tables for the Planet of Visions pavilion for Hanover EXPO2000, directed by François Schuiten, was an innovative application of augmented reality. In 2006, together with the architect Christophe Girault, they created the new permanent exhibition inside the Arc de Triomphe, Paris, in 2008, NeORIZON, a large scale urban installation in Shanghai, converted people into flash codes then becoming the city itself. Initiated in 2005, the series of works, Mechanics of Emotions presents Internet as the nerve system. The Phd received the mention très honorable avec felicitations du jury and this program offered more than 100 artists and students, the opportunity to exhibit their work in the public space. The ICC media façade represent about half the surface of the Hong Kong Skyline video displays and he considered his recent works as a form of Open Media Art, paraphrasing Jon Ippolito, not limited to the traditional forms, media and economic schemes of art. From 1984 to 2010 he was assistant professor at Paris 1 university, Pantheon-Sorbonne, ciTu is dedicated to research and creation in the emerging forms of art. In 2010 he became professor at Paris 8 university, where he founded and heads H2H Lab. In August 2012, he becomes full Professor in the School of Creative Media of City University of Hong Kong where he is chair of the School of Graduate Studies and PhD coordinator. World Skin, a safari in the Land of War -Golden Nica, Ars Electronica Festival 1998 Crossing Talks, Communication Rafting Art Impact
4.
Jules Verne
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Jules Gabriel Verne was a French novelist, poet, and playwright. Verne is generally considered a literary author in France and most of Europe. Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979 and he has sometimes been called the Father of Science Fiction, a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. His parents were Pierre Verne, an originally from Provins, and Sophie Allote de la Fuÿe. In 1829, the Verne family moved some hundred meters away to No.2 Quai Jean-Bart, three sisters, Anna, Mathilde, and Marie, would follow. In 1834, at the age of six, Verne was sent to boarding school at 5 Place du Bouffay in Nantes, the teacher, Mme Sambin, was the widow of a naval captain who had disappeared some 30 years before. Mme Sambin often told the students that her husband was a shipwrecked castaway, the theme of the Robinsonade would stay with Verne throughout his life and appear in many of his novels, including The Mysterious Island, Second Fatherland, and The School for Robinsons. In 1836, Verne went on to École Saint‑Stanislas, a Catholic school suiting the pious religious tastes of his father, Verne quickly distinguished himself in mémoire, geography, Greek, Latin, and singing. In the same year,1836, Pierre Verne bought a house at 29 Rue des Réformés in the village of Chantenay on the Loire River. In his brief memoir Souvenirs d’enfance et de jeunesse, Verne recalled a deep fascination with the river and with the many merchant vessels navigating it. He also took vacations at Brains, in the house of his uncle Prudent Allotte, a retired shipowner, who had gone around the world and served as mayor of Brains from 1828 to 1837. Verne took joy in playing interminable rounds of the Game of the Goose with his uncle, and both the game and his uncles name would be memorialized in two late novels. It is now known that the legend is a tale invented by Vernes first biographer, his niece Marguerite Allotte de la Füye. In 1840, the Vernes moved again to an apartment at No.6 Rue Jean-Jacques-Rousseau. In the same year Verne entered another school, the Petit Séminaire de Saint-Donatien. His unfinished novel Un prêtre en 1839, written in his teens, from 1844 to 1846, Verne and his brother were enrolled in the Lycée Royal in Nantes. After finishing classes in rhetoric and philosophy, he took the baccalauréat at Rennes, however, his father took it for granted that Verne, being the firstborn son of the family, would not attempt to make money in literature but would instead inherit the family law practice. In 1847, Vernes father sent him to Paris, primarily to begin his studies in law school, and secondarily to distance him temporarily from Nantes
5.
M. C. Escher
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Maurits Cornelis Escher, or commonly M. C. Escher, was a Dutch graphic artist who made mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, early in his career, he drew inspiration from nature, making studies of insects, landscapes, and plants such as lichens, all of which he used as details in his artworks. Apart from being used in a variety of papers, his work has appeared on the covers of many books. He was one of the inspirations of Douglas Hofstadters 1979 book Gödel, Escher. Maurits Cornelis Escher was born on 17 June 1898 in Leeuwarden, Friesland and he was the youngest son of the civil engineer George Arnold Escher and his second wife, Sara Gleichman. In 1903, the moved to Arnhem, where he attended primary and secondary school until 1918. Known to his friends and family as Mauk, he was a sickly child, although he excelled at drawing, his grades were generally poor. He also took carpentry and piano lessons until he was thirteen years old, in 1918, he went to the Technical College of Delft. From 1919 to 1922, Escher attended the Haarlem School of Architecture and Decorative Arts, learning drawing and he briefly studied architecture, but he failed a number of subjects and switched to decorative arts, studying under the graphic artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita. In 1922, an important year of his life, Escher traveled through Italy, visiting Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra, Siena, in the same year he traveled through Spain, visiting Madrid, Toledo, and Granada. He was impressed by the Italian countryside, and in Granada by the Moorish architecture of the fourteenth-century Alhambra, Escher returned to Italy, and lived in Rome from 1923 to 1935. While in Italy, Escher met Jetta Umiker – a Swiss woman, the couple settled in Rome where their first son, Giorgio Arnaldo Escher, named after his grandfather, was born. Escher and Jetta later had two sons, Arthur and Jan. He travelled frequently, visiting Viterbo in 1926, the Abruzzi in 1927 and 1929, Corsica in 1928 and 1933, Calabria in 1930, the townscapes and landscapes of these places feature prominently in his artworks. In May and June 1936, Escher travelled back to Spain, revisiting the Alhambra, the sketches he made in the Alhambra formed a major source for his work from that time on. He also studied the architecture of the Mezquita, the Moorish mosque of Cordoba and this turned out to be the last of his long study journeys, after 1937, his artworks were created in his studio rather than in the field. All the same, even his work already shows his interest in the nature of space, the unusual, perspective. In 1935, the climate in Italy became unacceptable to Escher
6.
Victor Horta
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Victor Horta was a Belgian architect and designer. John Julius Norwich described him as undoubtedly the key European Art Nouveau architect, Horta is considered one of the most important names in Art Nouveau architecture. With the construction of his Hôtel Tassel in Brussels in 1892-3, the biomorphic whiplash style that Horta promoted deeply influenced architect Hector Guimard who used it in projects in France and extended its influence abroad. In 1932 King Albert I of Belgium conferred on Horta the title of Baron for his services to the field of architecture, four of the buildings he designed have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Born in Ghent, Horta was first attracted to the profession when he helped his uncle on a building site at the age of twelve. Horta had a great interest in music since childhood and, in 1873, after being expelled for bad behaviour he joined the Department of Architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent instead. In 1878 Horta left for Paris, finding work with architect, there he was inspired by the emerging impressionist and pointillist artists, and also by the possibilities of working in iron and glass. In Brussels Horta built a friendship with Paul Hankar, who would also embrace Art Nouveau. Horta did well in his studies and was taken on as an assistant by his professor Alphonse Balat, together they designed the royal Greenhouses of Laeken, Hortas first work to utilise glass and iron. In 1884 Horta won the first Prix Godecharle to be awarded for Architecture, by 1885 Horta was working on his own and was commissioned to design three houses which were built that year. The same year he joined the Central Society of Belgian Architecture. Over the next few years he entered a number of competitions for public work and he focused on the curvature of his designs, believing that the forms he produced were highly practical and not artistic affectations. During this period, Horta socialised widely and, in 1888 and this ensured a stream of clients when he returned to designing houses and shops from 1893. 1919, Officer of the Order of the Crown,1920, Officer of the Order of Leopold. 1932, Created Baron Horta by Royal Decree, after introducing Art Nouveau in an exhibition held in 1892, Horta was inspired. Commissioned to design a home for professor Emile Tassel, he transfused the recent influences into Hôtel Tassel, ornate and elaborate designs and natural lighting were concealed behind a stone façade to harmonize the building with the more rigid houses next door. The building has since recognized as the first appearance of Art Nouveau in architecture. After receiving great acclaim for his designs, Horta was commissioned to complete many important buildings throughout Brussels
7.
Mr. Nobody (film)
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The film tells the life story of Nemo Nobody, a 118-year-old man who is the last mortal on Earth after the human race has achieved quasi-immortality. Nemo, memory fading, refers to his three main loves and to his parents divorce and subsequent hardships endured at three critical junctions in his life, at age nine, fifteen, and thirty-four, alternate life paths branching out from each of those critical junctions are examined. The speculative narrative often changes course with the flick of a different possible decision at each of those ages, the film uses nonlinear narrative and the multiverse hypothesis style. Mr. Nobody had its premiere at the 66th Venice International Film Festival where it received the Golden Osella. Critical response was strong and the film was nominated for seven Magritte Awards, winning six, including Best Film. The film was funded through European financiers and was released in Belgium on 13 January 2010. Since its original release, Mr. Nobody has become a film, noted for its philosophy and cinematography, personal characters. In 2092, humanity has conquered mortality through the endless renewal of cells, the world watches in fascination as the 118-year-old Nemo Nobody, the last mortal on Earth, edges towards death. Curious to know of life before quasi-immortality, they interview Nemo, dr. Feldheim, a psychiatrist, uses hypnosis to help Nemo recall some of his memories, while Nemo relates other memories to a journalist. As he is prodded, Nemo makes contradictory statements and he recounts his life at three primary points, at age 9, when his parents divorced, at age 15 when he fell in love, and at age 34 as an adult. All three unfold into their possible outcomes. Nemo explains that before birth, children remember everything that happen in their lives. At the moment of conception, the Angels of Oblivion erase their memory, the Angels, however, forget about Nemo, allowing him to remember different possible futures for himself. At age 9, at a station, he is forced to choose as his mother leaves on a train while his father stays on the platform. In one case, he manages to board the train while in another he stays with his father, a rebellious Nemo lives with his mother and her new partner, Harry, in Montreal. He sees a new girl, Anna, in his school and is immediately smitten, One day on the beach, Anna asks if he would like to swim with her and her friends. Nemo insults her friends and they see each other again. In an alternate story line, Nemo admits to Anna he cannot swim, Anna turns out to be Harrys daughter and the two step siblings begin an illicit affair
8.
Rapid transit
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Rapid transit, also known as heavy rail, metro, subway, tube, or underground, is a type of high-capacity public transport generally found in urban areas. The stations typically have high platforms, without steps inside the trains and they are typically integrated with other public transport and often operated by the same public transport authorities. However, some transit systems have at-grade intersections between a rapid transit line and a road or between two rapid transit lines. It is unchallenged in its ability to transport large numbers of people quickly over short distances with little use of land, variations of rapid transit include people movers, small-scale light metro, and the commuter rail hybrid S-Bahn. The worlds first rapid-transit system was the partially underground Metropolitan Railway which opened as a railway in 1863. In 1868, New York opened the elevated West Side and Yonkers Patent Railway, china has the largest number of rapid transit systems in the world. The worlds longest single-operator rapid transit system by length is the Shanghai Metro. The worlds largest single rapid transit service provider by both length of revenue track (665 miles and number of stations is the New York City Subway. The busiest rapid transit systems in the world by annual ridership are the Tokyo subway system, the Seoul Metropolitan Subway, the Moscow Metro, the Beijing Subway, Metro is the most common term for underground rapid transit systems used by non-native English speakers. One of these terms may apply to a system, even if a large part of the network runs at ground level. In Scotland, however, the Glasgow Subway underground rapid transit system is known as the Subway, in the US, underground mass transit systems are primarily known as subways, whereas the term metro is a shortened reference to a metropolitan area. In that vein, Chicagos commuter rail system, serving the area, is called Metra. Exceptions in naming rapid transit systems are Washington DCs subway system the Washington Metro, Los Angeles Metro Rail, and the Miami Metrorail, the opening of Londons steam-hauled Metropolitan Railway in 1863 marked the beginning of rapid transit. Initial experiences with steam engines, despite ventilation, were unpleasant, experiments with pneumatic railways failed in their extended adoption by cities. Electric traction was more efficient, faster and cleaner than steam, in 1890 the City & South London Railway was the first electric-traction rapid transit railway, which was also fully underground. Both railways were merged into London Underground. The 1893 Liverpool Overhead Railway was designed to use electric traction from the outset, budapest in Hungary and Glasgow, Chicago and New York all converted or purpose-designed and built electric rail services. Advancements in technology have allowed new automated services, hybrid solutions have also evolved, such as tram-train and premetro, which incorporate some of the features of rapid transit systems
