The Ideas Festival ABC ADVENTURES We Feel Fine / by Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar Scanner 3D May Save Vanishing Languages from Extinction | Huliq The Institute is funding the research and development of a 3D optical scanner through a $507,233 interagency agreement with the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) announced Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) and IMLS Director Anne-Imelda Radice, Ph.D. Sept. 20. “This agreement underscores the federal commitment to making critical and irreplaceable collections held by the Phoebe A. “The 2,700 wax cylinder recordings held by the Hearst museum are jewels in a treasure trove of early recordings that we hope will be rescued,” Radice said. Other rare recordings that would benefit from the technology include: • Field recordings of linguistic, cultural, and anthropological materials, such as early 20th century Mexican-American folk recordings from Southern California and Hawaiian folk music recordings. • Field recordings of American and European folk music, including those recorded and collected by John Lomax.
mission. « YOU ARE REMARKABLE mission. plain and simple, the mission is: to spread big or small bits of love and things that make you smile and laugh, little bits of unexpected happiness and affirmation. we believe in feeling good and spreading it; we want everyone everywhere to know that somebody somewhere loves you because you are amazing in all your strange and wonderful ways. here you will find lists on how to love yourself more, beautiful things, ways to share your beauty & knowledge & love. you will also find stories of people who have discovered YOU ARE REMARKABLE through the tangible guerrilla love sharing. anonymity is excellence: bits of paper with an i-love-you-just-because scribbled in rushed handwriting, a well thought out essay on the back of a photograph, a drawing hid between the pages of a book. leave your heart in random places for strangers; send a lover a letter without your name. committ a selfless act of love just because you can. share your secrets & what you’ve found! yar@tellmesomething.org
Another 20 games that make you think about life First we gave you five. Then we gave you ten. Now we are giving you 20 games that make you think about life. If you have developed a taste for games of a philosophical nature, then you should be in for a treat - we have some seriously innovative games here, everything from Elude, a game that explores the nature of depression, to Ulitsa Dimitrova, a tale about a street-urchin in Russia. As with our previous lists, we have focused mainly on free games that you can play in your browser. 1 Elude Developed by Singapore-MIT Gambit Game Lab, Elude is a dark, atmospheric game that aims to shed light on the nature of depression. The forest that you start the game in represents a normal mood. This is a gloomy underground cavern, with a sticky muddy base that sucks you down. 2 Air Pressure You will have to play through Air Pressure - a Flash port of an interactive novel by Bentosmile - more than once to truly understand the characters and themes in this game. 3 Symon 4 Ulitsa Dimitrova 5 Ute 6 Aether
Making Alternative Meaning out of Museum Artifacts Seb Chan has a lovely, long interview up at Fresh+New with Helen Whitty about the Powerhouse Museum's new mini-exhibition, the Odditoreum. The Odditoreum is a temporary gallery for the summer school holiday in which the Powerhouse is displaying eighteen very odd objects alongside fanciful (and fictitious) labels written by children's book author Shaun Tan, schoolchildren, and visitors. The Odditoreum is another wrinkle in the study of visitors' understanding and interpretation of authenticity in museums. That discussion has traditionally focused on visitors' ability to distinguish real artifacts from props and the question of whether an experience with a reproduction is lesser than, equivalent to, or superior to engaging with "the real thing." But in the Odditoreum's case, it's not the object that's in doubt but the interpretation. The objects are real, the labels absurd. Here are a few design decisions I noticed that I think really add to the Odditoreum's success:
Museum should reach out to all its citizens THE National Museum of Australia on Acton Peninsula in Canberra was opened just over 10 years ago on March 11, 2001. For many people the dream of the museum has been realised only partially. Many see its short history only as a story of public controversy over frontier conflict. For many commentators the museum's building is the butt of architectural critique. The building has its enthusiasts and its detractors, but before the museum had a building it had legislation: the National Museum of Australia Act, framed in 1980. If you read it, or any of the early planning documents about the museum, you will see that the focus was less on building an edifice than on building a collection. Ten years after opening the question facing the NMA remains: how can it best work in the national interest? A fundamental part of this is for the museum to make sense of some of the enduring stories that have contributed to our uniqueness and distinctiveness as a nation.