UNDER TOMORROWS SKY. In Practice: David Byrne And St. Vincent. 75 Scientific Mysteries, Illustrated by Some of Today's Hottest Artists. By Maria Popova A beautiful celebration of the unknown at the intersection of art and science.
As a lover of the intersection of art and science, I find myself more excited about The Where, the Why, and the How: 75 Artists Illustrate Wondrous Mysteries of Science (public library) than I’ve been about a book in ages. In this gem, as intellectually stimulating as it is visually stunning, creative trifecta Julia Rothman (♥ ♥ ♥ ♥), Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe, better-known as Also Online, invite some of today’s most celebrated artists to create scientific illustrations and charts to accompany short essays about the most fascinating unanswered questions on the minds of contemporary scientists across biology, astrophysics, chemistry, quantum mechanics, anthropology, and more.
The questions cover such mind-bending subjects as whether there are more than three dimensions, why we sleep and dream, what causes depression, how long trees live, and why humans are capable of language. John Maeda: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders. You teach the reader that he’s way smarter than he. David Foster Wallace: The future of fiction in the information age. The Age of the Essay. September 2004 Remember the essays you had to write in high school?
Topic sentence, introductory paragraph, supporting paragraphs, conclusion. The conclusion being, say, that Ahab in Moby Dick was a Christ-like figure. Oy. So I'm going to try to give the other side of the story: what an essay really is, and how you write one. Mods The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless.
How did things get this way? During this period the study of ancient texts acquired great prestige. The time was then ripe for the question: if the study of ancient texts is a valid field for scholarship, why not modern texts? And so began the study of modern literature. What tipped the scales, at least in the US, seems to have been the idea that professors should do research as well as teach. Writing was one of the casualties. No Defense. Socrates vs. Seinfeld: Faculty Teach Pop Culture.
When doing research, some Harvard professors slip on white cotton gloves to protect 16-century manuscripts, or conduct controlled interviews in sterilized laboratories.
Others watch "The Simpsons. " Classes on Michael Jackson or the poodle skirt are relatively rare in Harvard's hallowed halls, but a handful of faculty members focus their energies on MTV instead of Machiavelli, and analyze Coca-Cola advertisements rather than Cezanne. And their numbers are growing. Today, nearly every department in the humanities and the social sciences offers courses in contemporary popular culture. Their ranks include linguist Bert R. A few decades ago, however, an academic analysis of artifacts of popular culture would have been practically unheard-of. Lynne B. "I think my professor thought I was a lunatic," she says.
But, Layton says, she remembers feeling that Mitchell spoke more directly to her life than the other high cultural works they were studying. Film without words: the 70mm story of life, death, and rebirth in 'Samsara' 6inShare Jump To Close With blockbusters focusing on CG spectacle, and high-profile filmmakers rushing towards the latest digital innovations, one cinematic option often gets left behind: the grandeur of 70mm.
Hollywood’s own high-resolution alternative to 35mm film, the format was used to shoot the likes of Lawrence of Arabia and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Now filmmakers Ron Fricke and Mark Magidson have created a new film shot entirely on the format: Samsara. A follow-up to 1992’s Baraka, the film eschews dialogue and traditional narrative techniques. I spoke with Fricke (director and cinematographer) and Magidson (producer) about the creative process behind Samsara, and the benefits of using 70mm in a digital world. Samsara isn’t a film with a conventional narrative, but it conveys a very emotional story on a gut level. Ron Fricke: Well, maybe a way to answer that is how we edited the film.
Was that something you had in mind from the very beginning when you sat down, in the outline process?