Individual letters or parts of letters are printed on each face of a cube, so cubes can be placed in rows to form words, or cubes with letter fragments can be stacked to create letters at a large scale. They’re then placed on blank wayfinding infrastructure that has a small lip to hold them up. The resulting system is similar to a beautifully considered mega game of Scrabble, and can easily be adapted to meet the needs of the community it serves. – Fast Company
Month: September 2020
2020 Has Taken A Turn Back To The Existentialist
“One reason we define ourselves and others on the basis of class, religion, race, and nationality, or even childhood influences and subconscious drives, is to gain control over the contingencies of the world and insert ourselves in the myriad ways people have failed and succeeded in human history. But this control is illusory and deceptive, existentialists insisted. It might be an alluring distraction from our own fragility but it eventually yields a pseudo-power that corrodes our ability to live well.” – Boston Review
World’s First Immersive Virtual Museum
The result is a 360-degree, fully immersive experience that lets museumgoers get as close as they want to, say, Manet’s Olympia or Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights. Using a computer’s arrow buttons, a visitor can virtually “walk” around the museum, zooming in on different works of art. The user-friendly setup feels much like a computer game. – Smithsonian
Sex And The Definitions Of Sex
Many people assume that if there are only two sexes, that means everyone must fall into one of them. But the biological definition of sex doesn’t imply that at all. – Aeon
How To Survive The Internet? Books!
“On the one hand, we feel that everything is moving so fast, but we simultaneously feel trapped in our social structures and patterns of life, imprisoned, deprived of meaningful choice.” – Harper’s
American Artist Defends Controversial Sculpture Of Melania Trump
Brad Downey, a conceptual artist from Kentucky based in Berlin, said the statue that replaced an earlier wooden carving destroyed in an arson attack in July, was motivated by his “frustrations with the policies of my birth country.” – The Guardian
Uh-Oh! NY Post Is Afraid Beethoven Might Be Canceled
“To woke critics, Beethoven’s music has taken on a new, darker meaning. To musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding, stars of the “Switched on Pop” podcast produced in association with the New York Philharmonic, the Fifth Symphony is a stand-in for everything they don’t like about classical music and Western culture. As far as they’re concerned, it’s time to cancel Ludwig.” – New York Post
Zubin Mehta: Levine And Domingo Were Blacklisted!
Mehta doesn’t mind that both Domingo and Levine are facing allegations of sexual harassment in the United States. “We leave the blacklists to American puritanism. Levine has been ruined by the US media. Domingo has had to leave the Los Angeles Opera, which was worth nothing before him. And all because of complaints that have come from failed artists after 30 years . That sounds like revenge,” commented Mehta. – Weiner Zeitung
Europe’s First Drive-In And Bike-In Opera
The cars get, let’s say, preferential treatment at the new La Bohème. “The unintended genius of English National Opera’s modern-day, 90-minute staging of Puccini’s opera is to spread the class politics from stage to audience.” – The Guardian (UK)
The Fight Over The Fight Over Digital Privacy
California tried to legislate digital privacy, but it was a rushed legislative process, and the massive loopholes left during that process haven’t been fixed. But can a ballot initiative, Prop 24, fix them? Some say nope. “Privacy advocates resisting a privacy initiative is less intuitive.” – Wired