These model train photos were taken by Peter Feigenbaum on his home train layout. Pete is a guitarist, illustrator, and architecture student at Yale University.
"Ansel Adams" takes a new look at the work of this important and influential photographer through approximately 125 images drawn from The Lane Collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
An Adams black-and-white is photography at its most technical: It depends on knowing everything there is to know about a film stock's "characteristic curve" and "spectral sensitivity graph" and other photographic esoterica. Ask anyone who's mastered Adams's famous Zone System -- a kind of 10-step program for perfect photographic exposure -- and they'll speak of long nights in the darkroom and eyes blurred from formulas.
I reread nothing. I intentionally don't look at the stuff at all until I've finished the book. At that stage when you go back and reread for the first time, it's kind of horrific. But I don't want to have everything perfectly made before I take the next step. It seems like moving forward with armed guards.
Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow
Topic: Arts
2:30 pm EDT, Sep 16, 2007
Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.
The set of contributors might be useful:
Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York.
Everyone has some kind of place that makes them feel transported to a magical realm. For some people it's castles with their noble history and crumbling towers. For others it's abandoned factories, ivy choked, a sense of foreboding around every corner. For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library.
John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter beach reading (You don't go to the beach in winter? Exactly.), while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night is a real book, masterfully written and actually about something.
Diversity Becomes Its Opposite | Des Moines Register
Topic: Arts
10:46 am EDT, Sep 16, 2007
If there is no common culture, no common standards, then each group becomes an island; metaphorical sharks are perceived to cruise between the islands, so they have less and less to do with one another, and diversity becomes its opposite.
...[T]he rapprochement between kings and the bourgeoisie led to an amalgam of chivalric ideas and mercantile rigor in material things that became the code of civilized manners for 300 years. This code improved the personality of both noble and commoner, making the one considerate instead of arrogant and the other dignified instead of obsequious. The code lasted about halfway into the 20th century.
Mercantile rigor has overpowered the chivalric ideas. Hence we are at sea, unmoored, drifting on a sea of trash.
I have long held the view that when alien space explorers assess Earth (or any planet) to determine its relative level of civilization, they will study fashion.
It is worth asking why fashion remains the most culturally potent force that everyone loves to deride.
It is to be driven by the dictates of desires and not needs. And yet the appetite for change so essential to fashion is a more culturally dynamic force than is generally imagined. Luxury, and not necessity, may be the true mother of invention, as the writer Henry Petroski observed. This proposition is an easier sell when the luxury in question is an iPhone, and not a Balenciaga handbag, but the same principles hold.
Much as bird's nests--rather a clever bit of vernacular technology--may enhance avian reproductive fitness by better sheltering fragile eggs, might not clever technologies like Lasik surgery, hybrid automobiles, implants and--yes--even Google enhance our own by making us more attractive, effective, and desirable?
The question is rhetorical; its implications are not. Innovations that make us more attractive, more effective, and more desirable are more likely to diffuse than those that don't. Just as significant, innovations we think will make us more attractive, more effective, and more desirable are likely to be disproportionately diffusive.
Want to predict the future of innovation? Simply predict the future of attractiveness, effectiveness, and desirability. Then act accordingly.
Owen Wilson doing better after apparent suicide attempt
Topic: Arts
8:00 pm EDT, Sep 3, 2007
Actor Owen Wilson, who was hospitalized Aug. 26 after an apparent suicide attempt, is doing well and even making colleagues laugh. The 38-year-old Wilson was taken by ambulance to a hospital after police responded to a call about a suicide attempt at his Santa Monica home.
