Category: issues

Artist Tries To Burn Down HQ Of Russia’s Secret Service And Says It’s “Art”

Petr Pavlensky told the crowd that they are living in a society controlled through “uninterrupted terror”, that surveillance in Russia is on the rise but that people’s own fear is making them prisoners. That was the stark message the artist wanted to send when he conceived “Threat” and selected the headquarters of Russia’s powerful security service, the FSB, as his canvas – or target.

The Man Who Invented The World Wide Web Thinks It Needs To Be Reinvented

Tim Berners-Lee: “It controls what people see, creates mechanisms for how people interact. It’s been great, but spying, blocking sites, repurposing people’s content, taking you to the wrong websites – that completely undermines the spirit of helping people create.” So this week Berners-Lee met with a group of his peers to consider ways to create a Web that’s less centralized and less subject to control by governments and corporations.

Orlando Ballet And Philharmonic Hire New CEOs

Caroline Miller “becomes the ballet’s seventh leader in five years. The leadership turmoil has been accompanied by significant financial struggles, even as the ballet seeks to raise millions for a new headquarters.” Christopher Barton “replaces veteran leader David Schillhammer, the only executive director the Philharmonic has ever known. The Phil has an unblemished record of balancing its budget but is in the midst of a large fundraising campaign to renovate its new home.”

How The Internet Is Shaping Our Aesthetic Experiences

“For years technology had seemed to be the masculine form of the word culture. If you wanted to sell men on a culture story, you did well to frame it as a tech story — a story about the plumbing or stock price of Netflix rather than a story about the pixels that constitute ‘Bloodline.’ Technology is built stuff that aims to be elegant and engaging. Apps are founded on science in the same sense that a watercolor is founded on science, where the chemistry of pigments and the physics of brush strokes are the science. But the resulting painting, if successful, hints at transcendence or at least luminous silence, something whereof we cannot speak.”

Amsterdam To Tourists: Go Visit The Hague For A Change, We’re Drowning Here!

The Dutch capital’s huge success as a vacation destination “has spawned eye-poppingly long queues outside the biggest attractions … so much so that Amsterdam officials recently decided to ‘make some savings’ in its marketing budget … [and] Mayor Eberhard van der Laan has appealed directly to visitors to seek accommodation in other often overlooked cities such as Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht.”