Artists, designers, filmmakers, and writers and the organizations that serve them have a unique power to craft and circulate art and stories that illustrate what is at stake — schools, hospitals, infrastructure, and more — and inspire people to respond. They can adapt quickly and touch people in our new digital reality. The census and organizers in the civic engagement space need them right now. – Hyperallergic
Month: September 2020
Could A Drive-In ‘Nutcracker’ Work This Christmas? This Company’s Trying It
“For five nights [Atlanta Ballet] will construct a pop-up drive-in movie theater on its surface parking lot, and will welcome patrons at $100 a carload ($150 for the front-row parking spaces). … The film will feature the new staging of The Nutcracker, with its outsize sets and startling video projections, introduced to Atlanta audiences in 2018 by artistic director Gennadi Nedvigin.” – Atlanta Journal Constitution
TikTok Asks Judge To Nullify Trump’s Threat Of A Ban
TikTok contends that Trump has exceeded his presidential power in ordering the ban, which it says amounts to impermissible regulation of users’ “personal communications” and was not “motivated by a genuine national security concern, but rather by political considerations relating to the upcoming general election.” – The Hollywood Reporter
Lost Arts: What New York Would Have Had This Weekend If There Were No Pandemic
“We look at the toll the shutdown is taking through data (jobs vanished, revenues gone), visuals (picturing the season that isn’t) and personal stories (22 arts workers who should have been working this weekend, and what they’re doing instead). One weekend, lost, but also, so much more.” – The New York Times
We Thought Phone Calls Were Over. Then The Pandemic Came And People Rediscovered Talking
“Verizon said it was now handling an average of 800 million wireless calls a day during the week, more than double the number made on Mother’s Day, historically one of the busiest call days of the year,” reported The New York Times back in April. “Verizon added that the length of voice calls was up 33 percent from an average day before the outbreak. AT&T said that the number of cellular calls had risen 35 percent and that Wi-Fi-based calls had nearly doubled from averages in normal times.” – Nautilus
‘Enormous Upsurge’ In Complaints Of Racist Behavior To UK Equity
“‘In a period of time [during the lockdown] when nothing was happening, we were receiving dozens of complaints from groups and artists, and we’re still receiving them now,’ said [union general secretary Paul] Fleming. ‘There has been a huge amount of dignity issues around hair and makeup through to reports of casual racism in dressing rooms and racist language in casting processes when people are at their most vulnerable.'” – The Guardian
How A Viral Video About Math Ignited A Philosophical Debate
Cunningham had unwittingly re-ignited a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science. What, exactly, is math? Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with—numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on—real? – Smithsonian
Caravaggio As Therapy (Caravaggio?? Yes.)
Teju Cole: “He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. … I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.” – The New York Times Magazine
An AI Scientist Explains Why The GPT-3 Bot Is So Good At ‘Writing’ Original Text
“It’s far and away the most ‘knowledgeable’ natural language generation program to date, and it has a range of potential uses in professions ranging from teaching to journalism to customer service. GPT-3 confirms what computer scientists have known for decades: Size matters.” – The Conversation
Arts Fundraising Needs To Be Fully Professionalized As A Field
“As many as 44% of fundraisers fell in the profession by accident, with only 5% gravitating to fundraising as an intentional career choice. … We wouldn’t, for example, find a surgeon, accountant or lawyer who said they had got into their role by accident. All those roles would require a set period of study, with key milestones for passing training and competency-based testing. Yet in careers such as fundraising, there is no such pathway.” – Arts Professional