No one had any idea if people would tune in to all this arts content when the digital floodgates opened in March. Now arts organizations are reporting massive increases in online audiences driven by viewers and participants who have never set foot inside their buildings. – Hannah Grannemann
Month: September 2020
William Burroughs’s Prophetic Mutterings
“Battle Instructions is Burroughs the self-styled revolutionary in 1960 at his most historically explicit, the courageous whistle-blower denouncing and exposing moguls, political leaders and scientists as part of a larger, deeper conspiracy at work behind the scenes of the mid-20th century.” – Jan Herman
Australia Wants To Charge Google, Facebook For Showing News Stories. Google’s Fighting Back…
Australian regulators say the tech giants benefit from publishing news generated by others, but Google and Facebook are so dominant in search and social, respectively, that publishers can’t make them pay for it. It’s not the first time a country has tried to force Google and Facebook to pay media companies for republishing their news. – Wired
Mark Twain, Skeptic Though He Was, Believed In Telepathy
“He believed, he once wrote, that a mind ‘still inhabiting the flesh’ could reach another mind at great remove. There was an inciting incident in the spring of 1875 (before Twain’s red hair went gray), which he recollected as ‘the oddest thing that ever happened to me.'” – The Paris Review
Early Departure Of The Canadian Opera Company’s General Director Is A Good Course Correction
“What Alexander Neef failed to do spectacularly is build an audience. It is a failure that one might attribute to the vagaries of the economy, the advent of livestreaming, the price of parking or any number of standard-issue excuses that have potential validity anywhere. But there is a central and specific explanation for the underperformance of the COC: a parade of supposedly innovative productions that required a manifesto from the stage director to understand and a six-pack of Red Bull to sit through.” – La Scena Musicale
What A Time For Belarus Free Theatre To Be Starting A New Season
As protests against the latest rigged election of Alexander Lukashenko continue to rock the former Soviet state, “will the theatre, which has won increasing acclaim on tours abroad but puts on plays in a garage when in Minsk, finally be performing in a new, democratic Belarus? Or will Lukashenko launch a fresh crackdown that makes things even more unbearable for the arts?” – The Guardian
What Will Happen When Our Brains Can Talk Directly To Computers?
Voice recognition, like that used by Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, is a step toward more seamless integration of human and machine. The next step, one that scientists around the world are pursuing, is technology that allows people to control computers — and everything connected to them, including cars, robotic arms and drones — merely by thinking. – The New York Times
How Chekhov Created The Short Story As We Know It Today
“John Cheever [once] told [an] audience he was ‘one of perhaps ten American writers who are known as the American Chekhov’. The description isn’t unhelpful because it’s used carelessly, but because Chekhov’s influence is so widespread: most short story writers are Chekhovians, whether they realise it or not.” Chris Power looks at the nearly ubiquitous features of modern short fiction in English which Chekhov more or less invented. – New Statesman
Starchitect Richard Rogers Retires At Age 87
“Pritzker Prize-winning architect and high-tech architecture pioneer Richard Rogers has retired from Rogers Stirk Harbour + Partners, the practice he founded in 1977. … He is perhaps best known for designing the Centre Pompidou in Paris, London’s Lloyd’s building, Millennium Dome and Heathrow Terminal Five. His two Stirling Prize-winning projects are Madrid’s Barajas Airport and a Maggie’s Centre in London.” – Dezeen
How Did A Removed Confederate Monument End Up At An African-American Museum?
The CEO chose to take it, that’s how. “Spirit of the Confederacy, a bronze sculpture of an angel holding a sword and palm branch, was removed from Sam Houston Park in June … and is now on display in the courtyard of the Houston Museum of African American Culture. ‘As an educational space, we wanted people to think about it and engage with it,’ said John Guess, the museum’s Chief Executive Officer.” – Hyperallergic