“Traditional dance games like Dance Dance Revolution use a plastic floor mat plugged into the game console, and on-screen symbols that tell the players where to step. In Dance Central, players simply try to mimic the on-screen moves of expert dancers. The Kinect sensor, which can track 48 different points on a human body, watches the players” and “awards points.”
Tag: 06.16.10
Pilobolus Founder Jonathan Wolken Dies At 60
“The cause was complications of a stem cell transplant Mr. Wolken underwent in April, his wife, JoAnne Torti, said. He had been ill with myelofibrosis, a bone marrow disease…. Founded in 1971 by Mr. Wolken and Moses Pendleton, classmates at Dartmouth whose combined dance experience was practically nil, Pilobolus was beyond category from the first.”
Challenge To Hollywood: China’s Biggest-Budget Film Ever
A 3-D Chinese “mash-up of ‘Avatar,’ ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ … is the vision of a film-obsessed real estate magnate, Jon Jiang,” and “the boldest effort yet by businessmen here to establish China as a global moviemaking powerhouse, one that can create big-budget English-language spectacles to rival those of Hollywood.”
Why A Puppet-Theatre Auschwitz Reenactment Works
“Puppets can seem more real than actors, because they leave more to our imagination. Stripped of his striped camp garb, the naked puppet becomes transparent…. Actors can never reenact what happened in a place like Auschwitz, at least not realistically, because what happened cannot be recreated.”
Four Seasons Seeks Red‘s Fake Rothko Art, Strikes Out
“Marc Glimcher, president of the Pace Gallery, which represents the [Rothko] estate … said he saw the Four Seasons’ idea as bad art karma. ‘I think you’re getting way too close to the edge of something weird, where an almost-completed-but-fake painting is hung in the place where the artist decided he was not going to let the real painting hang.'”
The Power Of Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho Score
“Going far beyond the temporary shock effects of conventional scary-movie scores, the composer summons what Edmund Burke defined as terror–something deeper than horror…. That Herrmann used only strings, normally a Hollywood marker for schmaltzy romance, is even more startling.”
When Art Schools Take Sports Seriously
“Art-school sports resemble intercollegiate athletics at other colleges and universities, but there are some notable differences. For one thing, art-school athletes often haven’t been active in sports previously. … At art school, the stars are still artists, rather than athletes, and celebrations of victories are relatively muted.”
The Rise Of The TV Antihero
“Although film has savored the antihero for close to a century, only recently has TV embraced these contradictory and complex protagonists. It remains the almost-exclusive domain of cable, with a few notable exceptions, such as ‘Lost’ and ‘Heroes,’ both of which celebrated characters with dark sides and both of which recently ended their network runs.”
How We Came To Lionize James Joyce
“Wednesday, people around the world will gather in libraries and theaters, pubs and restaurants, streets and squares to commemorate a precise set of events … that occurred between daybreak and midnight in a provincial European city on June 16, 1904 — events they know full well never happened.”
Searching For The Next Stieg Larsson
“Publishers and booksellers are in a rush to find more Nordic noir to follow Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy…. Scandinavian crime fiction has been popular among serious mystery readers for decades, but even best-selling novelists like Henning Mankell are not yet widely known in the United States.”