A list of Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail, including an Apple Powerbook 100, a SGI R4000 Indigo, the Motorola Envoy (PDA), and some Thinking Machines CM-5s. “This is a Unix system, I know this!”
There is nothing more I love in this world right now than these two lunch ladies performing Firestarter by The Prodigy.
Using William Blake (aka “the patron saint of unclassifiable artists”) as an example, Evan Puschak’s latest video explores how society often rejects artists whose work doesn’t fit neatly into established categories and frameworks of criticism and commerce.
What you’re seeing here, these are not paintings. They’re prints of engravings from Blake’s illuminated books, which he designed, wrote, etched, colored, and printed himself using a technique that he invented. These extraordinary books are works of art that mix and synthesize categories. And as a result, the art world of the late 17 and early 1800s didn’t really know what to make of them. And Blake never sold more than a handful.
Tags: art · Evan Puschak · poetry · video · William Blake
A digital museum of video game levels…you can move freely around each level using your keyboard. Heavy on Nintendo games (Mario Kart 64, Wii Sports, etc.) but also includes Portal, Halo, Katamari Damacy, GTA III, and World of Warcraft.
I have lived more than two score and twelve years on this Earth and somehow I didn’t know that there are two copies of the Gettysburg Address written in Lincoln’s own hand in the Library of Congress (and five overall).
The Cassette Tapes of the Great Migration, a collection of oral histories recorded in Michigan in the 1970s of Black people who had previously escaped the Jim Crow South. “If we don’t get it from those individuals, then we can’t get it from anyone else.”
“Researchers let AI models run a simulated society. Claude was the safest — and Grok committed 180 crimes and went extinct within 4 days.”
Near the end of 1995, the artist and producer Brian Eno wrote the following about new media in his diary, which entries were later collected in a book called A Year with Swollen Appendices.
Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit — all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.
It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.
Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.
Nailed it.
Tags: Brian Eno
Google Is Building an A.I. Fence Around the Internet It Once Championed. “Google has often said it was ‘sending out more traffic & the web is bigger than ever. And then right next to that is a bunch of publishers whose businesses are getting destroyed.’”
Elephants May Hear Ground Vibrations Through Their Bones, Helping Them to Communicate Over 6 Miles. “Studying elephant hearing isn’t as simple as asking an elephant to wear headphones…”
I’m a Scholar of Genocide. We’re Entering a Terrifying New Era. “It is a future in which other nations or leaders may have an incentive to pursue genocidal policies knowing they will not only get away with murder but may even benefit from it.”
I’m currently doing the thing I do after seeing a movie (The Odyssey) I really enjoyed or found interesting: digging into related media. Yesterday I had an hour in the car, so I listened to this episode of The Daily podcast with Madeline Miller and Emily Wilson.
I think it’s quite odd to think that one book or one translation erases the others. I mean, if people prefer some other translation or if people want to read the Greek, I would love for them to do that. I think it’s great. I have no desire to legislate about which versions of “The Odyssey,” or of any ancient text, people want to engage with. So I think there’s something quite strange about the idea that the canon doesn’t have room for many, many different interpretations, translations, engagements, reinventions.
I’ve also flagged this New York Review of Books podcast with Daniel Mendelsohn, another NYT podcast with Madeline Miller, and this WNYC podcast with Emily Wilson for future listening.
As for reading, Wilson and Mendelsohn both did contemporary translations of The Odyssey within the past few years: The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson (I loved this, read it aloud to my kids) and The Odyssey translated by Daniel Mendelsohn. Actor Stephen Fry recently did a more approachable reimagining of The Odyssey. The Odyssey: A Graphic Novel by Gareth Hinds is even more accessible, especially for younger readers.
Miller is the author of two great novels based on the Iliad and the Odyssey: Circe (my personal favorite of the two…I love this book and tell everyone to read it)1 and The Song of Achilles.
Other novels based on Homer’s works: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood and A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes.
Mendelsohn also wrote An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic back in 2018; it sounds really interesting:
When eighty-one-year-old Jay Mendelsohn decides to enroll in the undergraduate Odyssey seminar his son teaches at Bard College, the two find themselves on an adventure as profoundly emotional as it is intellectual. For Jay, a retired research scientist who sees the world through a mathematician’s unforgiving eyes, this return to the classroom is his “one last chance” to learn the great literature he’d neglected in his youth—and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist.
Do you have any recommendations for podcasts or favorite Odyssey translations/retellings?
I would love to see a $200 million blockbuster adaptation of Circe directed by, say, Céline Sciamma, Sarah Polley, Chloé Zhao, Celine Song, Patty Jenkins, or Greta Gerwig…no shortage of great options. ↩
Tags: books · Daniel Mendelsohn · Emily Wilson · Madeline Miller · Margaret Atwood · movies · Natalie Haynes · remix · The Odyssey
The trailer for Behemoth!, a forthcoming film written and directed by Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton, Andor) and starring Pedro Pascal & Olivia Wilde. Great trailer: it pulls you in without revealing anything about the plot.
From photographer Richard Silver, vertical panoramic photos of churches that emphasize their often incredible ceilings. (via ignant)
[This is a vintage post originally from Oct 2015.]
Tags: architecture · photography · religion · Richard Silver · timeless posts
On the use of AI for creative work (type design in this case). “A tool that shields us from the friction of the work is compelling, but if we don’t experience the friction, we will never change the work.”
Mission Impossible. Oppenheimer. F1. The Odyssey. Top Gun: Maverick. Mad Max: Fury Road. Inception. Dune. Filmmakers and studios who make movies like these love to emphasize their heavy use of practical effects, i.e. real cars jumping real bridges or real people hanging off of real airplanes. “No CGI”, they say, despite the hundreds of names in the visual effects section of the films’ credits.
In his six-part series, Jonas Ussing, who co-owns a visual effects studio in Denmark, takes a look at these “No CGI” films and shows us just how much digital graphical effects goes into them. For instance, did you know that every single flying jet in Top Gun: Maverick, a movie we were assured was all practical effects, was built with CGI? Take a look:
His latest video is all about Christopher Nolan:
I’ve only watched bits and pieces of these videos so far (the Nolan one is 71 minutes long), but when ILM’s Todd Vaziri says something film-related is good, it’s good.
Tags: cgi · film school · Jonas Ussing · movies · video
The official trailer for Avengers: Doomsday. They’ve gotten (some of) the band back together — perhaps this will be a return to form for Marvel?
New lecture series from authoritarianism scholar Timothy Snyder: Hitler and Stalin Today. “The course begins with the colonial background that made totalitarianism possible, and which remains an essential element of our politics now.”
The Lost Joy of Music Piracy. “Still to this day, I’ve never seen such an actively maintained network of knowledge and output, it really sucked me in.”
Artist Lewis Prosser describes himself on Instagram as an “absurdist basket-maker”. His costumes for a project called Making Merrie reflect that self-description.
Making Merrie explores the material culture of folk theatre. Inspired by mummers’ plays and masked traditions along the Wales/England border, Making Merrie combines craft, performance, and language to reflect on cultural heritage and exchange.
Mummers’ plays are traditional folk performances with roots over 500 years old, often tied to Christmas and New Year. Full of humour and spontaneous revelry, these plays were staged in streets, homes, or pubs by amateur troupes, telling simple stories of combat, death, and miraculous revival. Unlike the religious Mystery Plays, mummers’ plays are secular, carnivalesque, and performed for community fun.
The project features large-scale wicker costumes, handcrafted using regional willow basketry techniques, highlighting basketry as an essential human skill we’re at risk of forgetting—a skill that, if lost, means losing part of what it is to be human.
(via colossal)
Tags: art · Lewis Prosser
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