“Humans interact with space; shapes define space; humans then interact differently with the space after new objects have entered the picture. In the case of the dancer in the video, her movements are tracked by a machine that then bends an industrial CNC pipe to mimic her. The objects are then placed around the room, thereby affecting her future choreography.”
Month: July 2016
Lessons Learned Running My Little Free Library
“Not only was I not a librarian, I wasn’t even really dealing in reading material. That the objects in our Little Free Library happened to be books was beside the point. The salient fact was that the items were free. We may as well, I suspected, have been offering plastic spoons, Allen wrenches and facial tissue. I tested this hypothesis by mixing in non-book items including an instructional DVD on how to use an exercise ball, and a few packets of echinacea seeds.”
America’s “Gatekeeper” Problem In Spreading Big Ideas
“There’s a very narrow doorway through which big ideas get to audiences,” said Chris Jackson, the editor-in-chief of Random House’s One World imprint. But as mainstream culture looks increasingly unlike America, there’s reason to hope cultural gatekeepers will soon be forced to expand their horizons.
Some Aesthetic Misgivings About Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Floating Saffron Piers
“It is undeniable that “Floating Piers” has tapped into the public imagination, drawing 270,000 visitors within the first three days of opening and over 500,000 to date. But if we are to take the work as a purely artistic statement (and a very popular one), it is nonetheless one that connects the private villa of an arms manufacturer to the mainland, drawing the parched masses to the Beretta family’s closed doors. I came, I saw, and I left feeling that a beautiful lake had been mired by a large-scale reinforcement of the social fabric: a paean to neo-feudalism, no less.”
What’s Ailing The Met Opera? We Need To Change The Way We Talk About It
“The arts world has to let go of these popular, though incorrect clichés. First, paid capacity is a terrible way to gauge success—it does not provide real numbers that are actually tied to the budget. That four-year old study from the NEA needs to be put to rest, and we need a more updated, nuanced study of arts attendance in this country. And “Baumol’s cost disease” is an idea that has been vastly overplayed when talking about the arts… to the degree that Baumol himself is pushing back on how it’s being used.”
That Time Igor Stravinsky And The Boston Symphony Caused A National Scandal
“He did compose a weird arrangement of the national anthem, and the Boston police really did ban him from performing it — sparking a national uproar and a tense showdown that played out live on the radio. Depending on how you read it, it’s a story of ego and hubris, or patriotism and generosity.”
Why Some Bad Ideas, Like Zombies And Kudzu, Just Won’t Die (There Are Still Flat-Earthers, For Pete’s Sake)
Yes, “the belief that the best ideas will always succeed is rather like the faith that unregulated financial markets will always produce the best economic outcomes. … But in the marketplace of ideas, zombies can actually be useful. Or if not, they can at least make us feel better. That, paradoxically, is what I think the flat-Earthers of today are really offering – comfort.”
Joshua Kosman Assesses David Gockley’s Ten Years Running San Francisco Opera
“Gockley has stayed true to that maxim throughout his career, making sure never to let one aspect of the art form outshine another. But at the same time, Gockley’s omnivorous stance, along with the compromises it entails, has made it that much trickier for him to stake a claim to overarching excellence in any single arena.”
There Is No Such Thing As A Distinct Scientific Method
James Blachowicz argues that what we think of as the scientific method is basically the same as the process by which one edits a poem or hones a philosophical argument.
NPR’s Podcast Strategy To Grow Its Audience
“The demographic that went up the most in the first quarter of 2016 was the 18 to 24 year-olds [average quarter hour listening was up 20% according to Nielsen]. To be fair, it’s not a huge audience. But I point it out because it’s the direction we want to go. It didn’t come at the expense of any of our journalism either.”