Paradox though it may seem–and paradoxes are always dangerous things –it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced…
Playing off the self-esteem theme, digital artist David Sullivan’s contribution to the show is the Ego Machine, a project that uses Google to project Sullivan’s soul into the future and puts the fun back into funeral. —Michelle Delio —Immortality Through Google (Wired) If it has anything vaguely to do with technology, Wired is there. Similar:Recent…
To amuse the crowds around the arena the gladiators would display broad fighting skills rather than fight for their lives, argues archaeologist Steve Tuck of the University of Miami. “Gladiatorial combat is seen as being related to killing and shedding blood,” he says. “But I think that what we are seeing is an entertaining martial…
The problem with Italy’s antiquities and culture is that there is simply too much. How do you conserve ancient and priceless artefacts at the same time as letting people come and see them? —David Reid —Technology rescues Italy’s art (BBC News) Thanks for the link, Rosemary. I’ve toyed with using VR to reconstruct the interior of…
“You are standing in the middle of a pretty town square in the center of a nondescript English town. Like most any other non-descript English towns, there’s not much to see or do here, but maybe you’ll find something amusing and enjoyable to do. A shiny metal phone booth sits in the center of the…
Let me just come at this one from sort of a big picture point of view. (the sound of a million Slashdot readers hitting the “back” button…) —Neal Stephenson —Neal Stephenson Responds With Wit and Humor (Slashdot) Link found via MGK. Similar:Understanding Shakespeare: "Pick a play. Click a line…"Pick a play. Click a line. Instantly see…CultureIntegrating…
Only one school of contemporary art has retrieved an idea of geometrical harmony, reminiscent of the aesthetics of proportion, and that is abstract art. By rebelling against both subjection to nature and to everyday life, abstract art has offered us pure forms, from the geometries of Mondrian to the large monochromatic canvases of Klein, Rothko…
Armed men stormed into an art museum Sunday, threatened staff at gunpoint and stole Edvard Munch’s famous paintings “The Scream” and “Madonna” before the eyes of stunned museum-goers. The thieves yanked the paintings off the walls of Oslo’s Munch museum and loaded them into a waiting car outside, said a witness, French radio producer Francois…
“Art often gets taken down when the school is painted and they don’t get put up again. So many valuable and important works were forgotten in boiler rooms, locked closets, bicycle rooms,” Bernhardt-Hidvegi said. […] “We went through every building, every classroom, every basement, every boiler room, every closet, and under every stage” in Philadelphia’s…
ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. —ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida) Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note! Similar:More Americans now see the media’s influence growing compared with a year agoAmericans’ views about the influence of …CulturePushing and pulling vertices. Components that fit…
Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’? —Michael Mateas —Feds can’t tell art from terrorism (Grand Text Auto) I’d heard about this story in passing, but now that I see how few degrees of separation I am away from the artists in question, I see the situation in a…
Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez’s comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art — “sprites” in programming jargon — along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game…
In Dragon’s Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It’s personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything…
Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like…
Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads. “This is what happens when the game’s off, basically,” said Mike `Burnie’ Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue‘s creators. “They’re chatting away,…
—After some discussion all the outstanding issues in game studies had been settled. (Barry Atkins | Yahoo! Photos) A great collection of cartoons… I do wish the captions were searchable. This one about a deep space anomaly is also good. Atkins is the video game scholar whose talk at the Princeton video game conference, amplified by…
The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files.…
—Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki) Here’s part of a screen capture, showing the development of the “file manager” icon in Windows, from the original release to today. (On the site, clicking the icon takes you to another page that has screen captures of the interfaces for the various applications.) The development…
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to…
[O]bjective achievements in the arts are demonstrable?and if they can be historically established for the arts, then they are even more clearly identifiable for the sciences. These two spheres of human endeavor represent two kinds of potential objectivity: there is as little chance of the human race giving up Homer or the Beethoven symphonies as…