Last year Dr. Monica Gagliano published a heady and meandering memoir about the conversations with plants that inspired her peer-reviewed work, titled “Thus Spoke the Plant.” She believes, like many scientists and environmentalists do, that in order to save the planet we have to understand ourselves as part of the natural world. It’s just that she also believes the plants themselves can speak to this point. – The New York Times
Tag: 08.26.19
Christian Marclay Turns Snapchat Into Sound Into (Fleeting) Images
“What’s surprising is the similarity and the banality,” he says. “And the fact that people around the world do the same things with their phone. … It’s a new form of language — a very visual language.” – Los Angeles Times
Is A Market Correction Coming To Humanities Studies?
“There is a certain truth to this recent narrative of humanistic decline as it plays out in liberal arts schools, but it is not that of obsolescence or expense. Nor is it reducible to the liberal arts school itself, even as such schools often stand in for the fate of humanities in recent academic debates. Rather, this moment reveals shifts in the coalition among the humanities, government budgets, and institutional finance as each has assumed new dimensions since the 1970s.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Conductor Daniel Harding Will Take Year Off To Work As Commercial Pilot
“‘I am fascinated by the feeling of flying a plane,” said the 43-year-old, who has just stepped down as music director of the Orchestre de Paris. “In the spring I will join Air France as a co-pilot and in the 2020/21 season I will take a sabbatical as an orchestra conductor … to dedicate myself to flying.” – The Strad
Major Portions Of Paris’s Pompidou Center Closed For Renovation
“The museum said Tuesday that the ‘caterpillar’ escalator as well as the sloping stone plaza in front of the iconic structure were closed to the public Tuesday for work expected to last until September 2020. As a result, the centre’s three million annual visitors will have to use an entrance around back.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
“Context Collapse” Theatens The Art World
“Content collapse” and “narrative deficiency” are phenomena that characterize social media, where users have multiple distinct communities—friends, family members, colleagues—collated into a single audience. The differences between traditional face-to-face relationship-based interaction and the potentially infinite audience of social media—or, we might logically extrapolate, businesses that scale in a parallel manner, such as big art fairs—is an issue that these industries are beginning to face. – artnet
Share The Wealth: A New Model For Art Fairs?
For the first four editions of Future Fair, all 36 of the “Founding Galleries” who participate in the first version will split 35 percent of the profit. That might be nothing the first time around, Mijares Fick admits, explaining that, as is often the case with new businesses, the first year’s goal is just to break even. After that, she and Rebeca Laliberte expect galleries to get a return of “three to four figures.” – artnet
We Need A Plan To Survive Artificial Intelligence
“The more time we have to prepare before superintelligent AI is achieved, the more likely we’ll survive what follows. But you’ll get total disagreement from scientists on how soon this might happen, and even whether it will happen at all.” – LitHub
Creating Comic Books For The Blind
“Working in a highly visual art form, [Chad] Allen managed to create an auditory experience that closely mimics the sensation of reading a comic book. A whooshing sound occurs whenever a panel changes; the intentionally stilted delivery of lines, as well as narration that prompts mental images, conjure a feeling of being inside a high-stakes comic book world.” – Los Angeles Times
Using Science Fiction To Teach Computer Science Students Ethics
“There’s a long, tangled debate over how to teach engineers ethics — and whether it’s even worth doing. … But Team Ethics is making a comeback. With the morality of Big Tech again called into question, schools like MIT, Carnegie Mellon, and Stanford have launched new ethics courses with fanfare” — and with the quandaries posited in many science fiction narratives making them very useful texts. – Wired