May 31, 2013 Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring: The Adoration of the Earth In 2013, to commemorate the centennial of the premiere of The Rite of Spring, Stephen Malinowski and Jay Bacal collaborated to produce a graphical score of Igor Stravinsky’s landmark composition.
Jay Bacal performed the music using virtual instrument software by VSL.
Stephen Malinowski created the animation using his Music Animation Machine (MAM) software.
May 30, 2013 An Efficient Nectar Mop Brown University scientists have found that a species of bat uses blood flow to reshape its tongue while feeding. The quick dynamic action makes the tongue an effective “mop” for nectar and could even inspire new industrial designs.
May 29, 2013 Return of the Cicadas Cicadas are among the most fascinating insects, and the 17-year periodical cicadas are the most interesting of all. Transported from the past, they bubble up from the ground in otherwise sedate suburban yards and parks. At this moment, billions of them are emerging along the mid-Atlantic coast of the United States, from North Carolina to Connecticut. They can be found in and around Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York City. This is one of if the largest outbreaks of insects on Earth, with trillions due to appear over the next month.
May 28, 2013 A Linguistic Dissection of 7 Annoying Teenage Sounds The next time you find yourself wondering about the highest use of linguistics, or enduring the insulting grunts and groans of petulant adolescents and wondering how such noises could even be described, bring the two worlds together. Clearly, linguistics exists just so we can give a technical description of those hard-to-spell sounds that erupt from callow youths. Here are seven examples (with three bonus variations). James Harbeck explains.
May 27, 2013 The World is Young — Wayne Miller Wayne Miller, a photographer whose intimate images from the front lines of war, the streets of Chicago’s South Side and his own family life captured a world in transition in the middle of the 20th century, died on last week at his home in Orinda, Calif. He was 94. From the horrors of war to the complexities of childhood, Miller captured intimate moments of life on film for over 50 years.
May 24, 2013 Crack Babies: A Lie from the Drug War In the 1980s, many government officials, scientists, and journalists warned that the country would be plagued by a generation of “crack babies.” They were wrong.
May 23, 2013 Among Giants Risking injury and incarceration, an environmental activist disrupts the clear-cutting of an ancient redwood grove by sitting on a tiny platform a hundred feet up in the tree canopy. Already three years into the tree-sit when filming begins, Among Giants blends vérité cinematography with intimate personal reflection to remarkable effect.
May 22, 2013 Ron Mueck | Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art 2013 This is Mueck's first major exhibition in Europe since the hugely successful Cartier Foundation Cartier exhibition of 2005.Based in Mueck works slowly in his small North London studio, making time itself an important element in his creative process. His human figures are meticulously detailed, with surprising changes of scale that place them as far from academic realism as they are from pop art or hyperrealism.
May 20, 2013 Wild In The Streets: Jilly Ballistic Wild In The Streets is a 10 part series documenting art on the streets of New York City as it's happening.The first episod features Brooklyn based artist Jilly Ballistic.
May 17, 2013 36 Unusual Units of Measurement A weekly show hosted by John Green, where knowledge junkies get their fix of trivia-tastic information. This week, John looks at unusual units of measurement such as a the jiffy, hogshead and micromort.
May 14, 2013 Mammas — by Isabella Rossellini After showing the world the unconventional mating and scandalous sex lives of animals in her Webby-award winning, internationally acclaimed short film series Green Porno and Seduce Me, Isabella Rossellini returns to Sundance Channel and sets her provocative lens on creatures' rites of passage into motherhood in her latest series Mammas. Featuring fantastical costumes and weirdly delightful enactments, the actress writes, directs and slips into the role of animal mothers, examining the different ways their maternal instinct is put into action in nature.
May 13, 2013 Isotopes v.02 / Nonotak The idea of "ISOTOPES" is to generate a dematerialised space. The catalyst of the project have been post Fukushima's atmosphere. This tragedy that collided within our memories and childhood has led us to think about the brittleness of reality. Through the metamorphoses of its appearance, this installation leaves the visitor between what once existed and what didn't, drawing them into the spectrum of their own volatile emotions.
May 10, 2013 Protect Yourself from FBI Manipulation Learn how the FBI can manipulate what you say and use it against you, and how to prevent them from doing so! With civil liberties and civil rights attorney Harvey Silverglate.
May 9, 2013 This is Water — by David Foster Wallace In 2005, author David Foster Wallace was asked to give the commencement address to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College. However, the resulting speech didn't become widely known until 3 years later, after his tragic death. It is, without a doubt, some of the best life advice we've ever come across, and perhaps the most simple and elegant explanation of the real value of education.
May 8, 2013 The Ray Harryhausen Creature List The four and a half minute compliation of every Ray Harryhausen animated creature in feature films, presented in chronological order.
May 3, 2013 OOrutaichi — Hamihadarigeri Hamihadarigeri is a bizarre blend of chopped Moondog samples, sing song half Japanese/half made up lyrics a great driving beat and a cloud of visual accompaniment.
May 2, 2013 Learn To Say F**k You / Sol LeWitt - Tim Armstrong In 1965, Sol LeWitt wrote fellow sculptor Eva Hesse a four-page letter of encouragement, urging her to stop doubting herself and to simply continue making her work. Despite the fact that some would consider their friendship unlikely, the two sculptors were close friends and wrote to each other frequently about their ideas, work, and personal lives from 1960 until Hesse's death ten years later. Often quoted, LeWitt's letter has become a source of inspiration and a vote of confidence for many artists the world over. Producer Aaron Rose (Beautiful Losers, Become a Microscope) worked with punk rock band Rancid to remake LeWitt's words into a bold and boisterous song. With wild and wavy LeWitt-inspired animation, this video energetically embodies the message of its writer.
May 1, 2013 Life Through Google's Eyes Using billions of searches, Google has prototyped an anonymous profile of its users. This reflects the fears, inquiries, preoccupations, obsessions and fixations of the human being at a certain age and our evolution through life.
April 26, 2103 Removing The Traffic Lights Due in for new roads and traffic signals, the transient town of Poynton completely transformed itself into a must-stop destination by removing the traffic lights.
April 25, 2013 Three Years of Sun in Three Minutes In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun's rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.
April 22, 2013 Mysteries of Vernacular: Miniature Miniature's root may be Latin, but its meaning is rooted in books, where red pigment was used to denote chapter breaks. Jessica Oreck explains how we got from there to the meaning of miniature today: something smaller than others of its class.
April 19, 2013 Magnetic Putty Magic Deep black with subtle green sparkles, Super Magnetic Thinking Putty has a mind of its own. Near a powerful magnet it comes alive! You'll be mesmerized by the invisible forces at play.
April 16, 2013 Dan Dennett: The Illusion of Consciousness Philosopher Dan Dennett makes a compelling argument that not only don't we understand our own consciousness, but that half the time our brains are actively fooling us. Dennett argues that human consciousness and free will are the result of physical processes and are not what we traditionally think they are. His 2003 book Freedom Evolves explores the way our brains have evolved to give us -- and only us -- the kind of freedom that matters, while 2006's Breaking the Spell examines religious belief through the lens of biology.
April 15, 2013 Gap-Toothed Women What do Lauren Hutton, Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, and Chaucer's Wife of Bath have in common? They all have a space between their two front teeth.
April 12, 2013 Glenda Jackson's Dismatles Thatcher in Tribute Debate “But the basis to Thatcherism — and this is where I come to the spiritual part of what I regard as the desperate, desperately wrong track that Thatcherism took this country into — was that everything I had been taught to regard as a vice — and I still regard them as vices — under Thatcherism was in fact a virtue: greed, selfishness, no care for the weaker, sharp elbows, sharp knees. They were the way forward."
April 10, 2013 John Berger / Ways of Seeing A BAFTA award-winning BBC series with John Berger, which rapidly became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made. In the first programme, Berger examines the impact of photography on our appreciation of art from the past.
April 9, 2013 2012 Human Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain The most important Human Tower Competition is called “Concurs de Castells” and it takes place in the city of Tarragona once every two years. Its XXIV edition took place during the 6th and 7th October 2012 with the participation of 32 teams from all around Catalonia and a live audience of more than 20,000 people. During the competition, the higher and difficult to build a tower is, the more points a team gets. Every human tower is usually between six and ten levels high. Teams are made of between 100 to 500 women and men. Young and light members form the top of the tower while heavier members form the base.
April 5, 2013 Angelo Musco: Conception Conception is a journey into the mind of Angelo Musco, one of today's most compelling young artists — a film exploring the connection between pain and beauty, passion and obsession, nature and the human experience.
April 4, 2013 Turbo Fatcap Art from a graffiti writer's perspective should be fast and effective. Fatcap spray caps are commonly used for covering large areas quickly but their flow has more to show. iNO has been a graffiti writer since 2000. The earlier years he produced mostly letters and bombing but after 2008 he focused in developing his style in characters. He studied Fine Arts and is active as a street artist. He is working constantly to evolute his spray painting technique and produce large scale murals.
April 3, 2013 Sperm Motion-Capture Dance In a 60-second commercial by Masashi Kawamura, animated sperm dance in formation to music. Kawamura describes the unusual lengths he and his team went to to create it. "We looked around and there was an all-male crew, so we decided to collect our sperm and bring it to a bio lab," he says. "We scanned it and motion-captured our sperm and used that data to create the animations. I think nobody else has done that in history."
April 2, 2013 Beat Keeping in a California Sea Lion One of our resident sea lions, Ronan, is the first non-human mammal shown able to find and keep the beat with musical stimuli. This challenges earlier evidence from humans and parrots suggesting that complex vocal mimicry is a necessary precondition for flexible rhythmic entrainment.
