Category: visual

Seattle Remembers Deceased Homeless People By Placing Engraved Bronze Leaves On Sidewalks

In all, 281 bronze leaves are in 15 locations around the city. They serve as headstones for those who all too often can’t afford them. The leaves are paid for by donations, engraved with names and dates, and usually placed on sidewalks near where their namesakes lived. The only requirement is that the remembered person was homeless in Seattle and also died in Seattle.

What Brazil Lost In The National Museum Fire

Many foreign correspondents have reached for analogies to give readers a sense of the disaster, but it’s hard to convey the museum’s significance: in addition to containing one of the richest collections of natural-history artifacts in the world, it was one of Latin America’s leading centers for postgraduate studies. It’s as if, in New York, the American Museum of Natural History and the New School, or a part of the Columbia campus, had been built on the same spot, and then was reduced to ashes.

‘Quantum Blue’, A New High-Tech Azure Pigment, Is On Its Way To Market

“The new color uses nanotechnology to achieve an exceptionally pure hue of blue that is best seen under ultraviolet (UV) light, which gives it an otherworldly, radioactive glow. (Without UV lighting, it has an unremarkable off-white appearance.) The key components of the futuristic blue are quantum dots: tiny semiconductor particles usually measuring no more than one millionth of an inch in size.”

In Search Of The Pigment Described In The Bible As The Most Perfect Blue

“Forty-nine times the Bible mentions a perfect, pure blue, a color so magnificent and transcendent that it was all but impossible to describe. Yet, for most of the last 2,000 years, nobody has known exactly what ‘biblical blue’ — called tekhelet in Hebrew — actually looked like or how it could be re-created.” Writer Noga Tarnopolsky tells the story of the team who figured it out.

A Test: Can You Tell Which Of These Paintings Was Painted By A Machine?

All six artists participating in the experiment were commissioned to paint a piece inspired by the same collection of 20th-century American abstract expressionists. For Cloudpainter, a painting robot developed by Virginia-based artist Pindar van Arman, the collection became a dataset to train its algorithm. Its final output (painting F above) is a far cry from the geometric, color-between-the-lines art you might imagine from a robot artist. Instead, with dripping colors and blurred lines, the piece looks surprisingly, well, human.

The Grand Park NY’s Central Park Might Have Been

By 1856, the commission had adopted a plan by its engineer-in-chief and landscape design expert Colonel Egbert Ludovicus Viele, and they were preparing to start construction on the grand new park. But their plan hit a road bump. An architect named Calvert Vaux had recently relocated to the city and had gotten a glimpse of the proposed design. It was a disaster.

A New Canvas For The 5Pointz Artists

Nearly five years after a developer sneaked crews in during the night to paint over the graffiti murals, there’s a new space in town: The Museum of Street Art. “The museum, which fills the stairwell of a new hotel, will showcase 20 artists, all of whom painted at 5Pointz. It is meant to be a vertical love letter to the Lower East Side and the Bowery.”

An Artist Takes On Borders As ‘Anathema To Art’

Mary Kelly, who has been creating conceptual and feminist art for decades – often with compressed lint from the dryer – says closing borders is devastating for artists. “Living all over very different places gives you insight about how different cultures and political systems work, but it also shows you in some way how things are connected. … Internationalism is, I believe, always connected to movements that are progressive and the opposite goes for closing down.”