The cloud is the future of videogaming, and it could arrive sooner than many players expect, with important implications for investors. Once pricey hardware is no longer necessary and top-tier games can run on two year-old smartphones, even casual gamers will become candidates for the latest releases from Electronic Arts (ticker: EA) and its peers.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Why Brutalist Architecture Doesn’t Work On Social Media
When Tumblr users reblog photographs of brutalist architecture, they turn them into pieces of furniture for their own pages. On Instagram, the effect of reblogging, or posting found images on a user’s feed, is to create of visual map to the user’s identity. There’s nothing wrong with this practice per se; it’s a very democratic way to access visual culture. But the social aspect to social media has turned the cultivation of aesthetics into an exercise in personal branding.
Rise Of The Instagram Museums
We might call this “new genre” the Instagram museum. Operating under the guise of installation art, its exhibits are seemingly designed to attract the kind of visitor whose main purpose for visiting is to share the photographic evidence of their visit on social media. The insta-museum arrives amidst an existential crisis for museums of old, which have, in recent years, tried everything from mini-golf to Snapchat in a bid to attract wider audiences.
Why Burning Man Worked And Why It Doesn’t
At the heart of Burning Man—not just the artworks but the entire festival—is its ability to inspire in attendees a combination of awe and pride: We made it. Look what we did. Look at what we’re capable of. There’s an earnestness to this sentiment that’s both admirably pure and grossly myopic, as if Burners were the only ones ever to have built a city, experimented with alternative models of living, or spent time in the Black Rock Desert. This is the root of so much of the self-congratulatory language that can make the festival seem insufferable to those who’ve never been.
AI Can Give You Ace Dance Moves Even If You’re A Bumbler With No Rhythm
In a paper posted to the arXiv preprint server this week, researchers at the University of California Berkeley demonstrate how they designed AI that, given video of an expert dancer and an amateur, can transfer the moves from one to the other and create convincing video of the amateur pulling off some seriously impressive rug-cutting. But that’s not all.
Remembering Neil Simon
“I am not without my supporters, but I often feel it will go no further than Clive Barnes’ succinct evaluation: ‘Neil Simon is destined to remain rich, successful and underrated,’” Simon wrote in the introduction to a volume of his plays. He made clear, however, that, painful as this assessment might be, he had no desire to be “poor, unsuccessful and overrated.”
How Digital Image Manipulation Has Invaded The Culture
“For my generation, editing your own image has become as routine as using social media. We grew up with airbrushing and Photoshop and saw the exposés of flawless magazine cover stars who weren’t flawless at all. Instead of rejecting the falsehoods we’ve made it part of our daily lives, crafting idealised digital versions of ourselves that feel like an essential corollary to real life. Technology has set a new standard for beauty that quite literally doesn’t exist in real life. Rather than reject that, we’ve embraced it.”
A Scottish City Banks On A Jewel Of A New Museum
The new V&A museum opens in September. It marks the end of an eight-year undertaking that saw Dundee embark on one of the most important cultural projects Scotland has known. The spectacular new museum has been built on the city’s waterfront, the first to bear the imprint of the V&A outside London. Its Japanese architect, Kengo Kuma, has said he wanted to “create a new living room for the city.”
Will US Tariffs Kill Sales Of Chinese Art?
The latest list of targeted Chinese goods ran to 205 pages. It included sand blasting machines; eels, fresh or chilled (excluding fillets); hats; and, at the bottom of the last page, paintings and drawings executed entirely by hand, original sculptures, and antiques more than 100 years old. The tariffs would apply to all artworks that originated in China, regardless of how they entered the United States. That means American buyers could be required to pay 25 percent more for a Ming dynasty bowl sold by a British owner at an auction in New York, as well as for a painting by a young Beijing-based artist at a gallery in Hong Kong.
Cleveland Museum Invites The Musicians In To Be Inspired
“We’re in a very unique position at the art museum to be a tremendous platform or area for churning up ideas and inspirations. So what if we have composers in and say, with very few or no restrictions, ‘This is all here for you. What comes from this?’ And a broader, wider open space to think deeply about what moves us and what can come from that.”