▲Visual Arts▼

there are some magnificent oceanic ones also... - Adriano

World map fish tank lets your fish travel around the world. \\ Map made of world currencies. - Adriano

"In M.C. Escher’s engraving “Ants”, a procession of ants is presented performing a potentially perpetual march upon a Möbius-like strip, a one-sided surface produced by twisting and joining the ends of a strip or ribbon. In a number of other engravings, Escher toyed with infinity by employing several variations of the same idea, twisted ribbons implying an endless route. The German graphic artist Max Bill (1908-1994) was similarly inspired by this representation and in his aptly titled sculpture “Endless Ribbon” made an elegant comment on the twisted ribbon as a symbol of infinity." - Adriano

"We have developed a novel experimental platform, referred to as a substitutional reality (SR) system, for studying the conviction of the perception of live reality and related metacognitive functions. The SR system was designed to manipulate people's reality by allowing them to experience live scenes (in which they were physically present) and recorded scenes (which were recorded and edited in advance) in an alternating manner without noticing a reality gap. All of the naïve participants (n = 21) successfully believed that they had experienced live scenes when recorded scenes had been presented. Additional psychophysical experiments suggest the depth of visual objects does not affect the perceptual discriminability between scenes, and the scene switch during head movement enhance substitutional performance. The SR system, with its reality manipulation, is a novel and affordable method for studying metacognitive functions and psychiatric disorders." - Adriano

"Out on the playa of Nevada's Black Rock Desert, more than 50,000 participants gathered last week to form Black Rock City, a temporary city that became the home of the 26th annual Burning Man Festival. Every year, participants from around the world descend on the playa -- performers, artists, free spirits, and more -- to form a self-reliant community, to dance, to express themselves and take in the spectacle of the festival." - Adriano

must see, absolutely amazing ! "Wiltshire takes a helicopter journey over Rome and then draws a panoramic view of what he saw, entirely from memory. [H]e drew it in such great detail that he drew the exact number of columns in the Pantheon." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano

"Dudely Lama: “Life is short and complicated and nobody knows what to do about it. So don’t do anything about it. Just take it easy, man. Stop worrying so much whether you’ll make it into the finals. Kick back with some friends and some oat soda and whether you roll strikes or gutters, do your best to be true to yourself and others – that is to say, abide.” Knowing that, now you can die with a smile on your face without feelin’ like the Good Lord gypped you. And that’s what Dudeism’s all about. See ya later on down the trail." - Adriano

"The Spanish filmmaker @DavidVictori was the grand prize winner of the first Your Film Festival, an online competition sponsored by YouTube, Scott Free Productions and Emirates airlines, for his short film “The Guilt,” about a man out for revenge after his wife’s murder. The announcement was made at the Venice Film Festival on Sunday after his film was selected from a pool of 10 finalists by a jury that included the director Ridley Scott and the actor Michael Fassbender." NYT http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012... - Adriano

see the entries by the 50 semi-finalists: http://www.youtube.com/user... - Adriano

"Little Miss Sunshine" - The new American family; fractured, broken, strange, but in the end, coming together to get something done. Also beautifully explores that strangest of American rituals, the child beauty pageant. \\ "American Beauty" - Perfectly explores the monotony of American suburbs and teenagers wasting away in them, the crises that people have in America as they get older as to their "wasted lives," and the dischord in families that look perfectly normal, as well as the desire for these families to save face in front of their neighbors. \\ "Wedding Crashers" - Gets American wedding culture, the wedding industry, anxiety to get married, the "meeting the family", and politics, mixes it together in a blur of champagne bubbles and manages to laugh at itself." - Adriano

"Story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world's greatest sushi chef, proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station: It is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage, calling months in advance and shelling out top dollar for a coveted seat at Jiro's sushi bar. For most of his life, Jiro has been mastering the art of making sushi, but even at his age he sees himself still striving for perfection, working from sunrise to well beyond sunset to taste every piece of fish; meticulously train his employees; and carefully mold and finesse the impeccable presentation of each sushi creation. At the heart of this story is Jiro's relationship with his eldest son Yoshikazu, the worthy heir to Jiro's legacy, who is unable to live up to his full potential in his father's shadow." - Adriano

On his commitment required to become and remain a master at a craft: "You must fall in love with your work. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is." --Jiro ONO - Adriano

Restaurant review w/ photos: "The sushi courses came out at a rate of one per minute. 19 courses in 19 minutes. No ordering, no real talking -- just making sushi and eating sushi. After the sushi is done you are motioned to leave the sushi bar and sit at a booth where you are served your melon. We took that melon at a leisurely 10 minute pace, leaving us with a bill of over $300 per person for just under 30 minutes time. At the end of the meal, Jiro went outside the restaurant and stood guard at the entrance, waiting to bid us formal adieu. At over 10 dollars a minute I have no problem letting an 86 year old man stand and wait for me to finish my melon if he wants to." --Dave Arnold, http://www.cookingissues.com/2012... - Adriano

"Featuring instrumentals from all five seasons of the show, you now have the perfect tunes to play while cooking, bugging an F.B.I. field office, or playing with magnets." E.g. the composition, "Cleaning House" http://soundcloud.com/madison... - Adriano

Expressive beautiful set... - Adriano

for Primer on 3D Printing (additive manufacturing), see http://ff.im/QeVCT - Adriano

"The impression is at once staggering and meditative. Nauman creates a work that is environmental, enveloping the viewer in a 360 degree experience and engaging them on multiple sensory levels. The fountain almost outgrowing the room, Nauman employs a signature method, leaving only a small , narrow track, or corridor, from which to view the work, making the experience that much more visceral and provoking. Through its cyclical rhythm, One Hundred Fish Fountain also invites the viewer to reflect on its many states, suggesting the tension between life and death, concealment and revelation, and perception versus reality." - Adriano

must see, really extraordinary! -- "This technology may someday be used to build cameras that can look "around" corners or see inside the body without X-rays." See also computational photography, http://femtophotography.info where Raskar is Project Director at MIT Media Lab: "We exploit the simple fact that the photons statistically will trace the same path in repeated pulsed illuminations. By carefully synchronizing the pulsed illumination with the capture of reflected light, we record the same pixel at the same exact relative time slot millions of times to accumulate sufficient signal. Our time resolution is 1.71 picosecond and hence any activity spanning smaller than 0.5mm in size will be difficult to record." - Adriano

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... - Adriano

The collective ranking of 250 top films since 1902 http://ff.im/12Aw1d was smoothed using exponential moving averages, and then plotted (in blue) -- which allows us to eyeball the general trends (in red). Image enlarged: http://i.imgur.com/iwm0d... The data indicates that the quality of cinema appears to be getting worse since the 1950s :( - Adriano

I don't know how to interpret this :( - Amit Patel

Amit, the best film produced next year will roughly have a 1.2 rank lower than this year's best -- at the rate estimated by the post-1950 trend. - Adriano

Shouldn't that metric decline even if films are just as good? The overall number of films is increasing so the probability that the next film is better than previous ones should go down over time. Maybe I'm misunderstanding :) - Amit Patel

Quentin Tarantino's film ranked 133 in the British Film Institute top 250: http://ff.im/12Aw1d -- great script! (and bad mofo wallet :-) - Adriano

"After 50 years at the top of the Sight & Sound poll, Orson Welles’s debut film [Citizen Kane] has been convincingly ousted by Alfred Hitchcock’s 45th feature Vertigo – and by a whopping 34 votes, compared with the mere five that separated them a decade ago. Hitchcock, who only entered the top ten in 1982, has risen steadily in esteem over the course of 30 years, with Vertigo climbing from seventh place, to fourth in 1992, second in 2002 and now first, to make him the Old Master: http://ff.im/12zgRY Back in 1962 a brand-new film, Antonioni’s L’avventura, vaulted into second place. If there was going to be an equivalent today, it might have been Malick’s The Tree of Life, which only polled one vote less than the last title in the top 100. In fact the highest film from the new century is Wong Kar-Wai’s In the Mood for Love, just 12 years old, now sharing joint 24th slot with Dreyer’s venerable Ordet." - Adriano

Only three made ​​in the last twelve years, and four in thirty? - Amira

all films nominated: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightan... -- search on "(20" for this century. Embargo lifted on top 250: http://explore.bfi.org.uk/sightan... -- ranking within this century: 26 In The Mood For Love, 28 Mulholland Dr, 107 The Tree of Life, 130 Tropical Malady, 155 Cache (Hidden), 172 The Werckmeister Harmonies, 202 The Death of Mr Lazarescu, 207 There Will Be Blood, 208 WALL-E, 212 Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, 215 Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks, 216 Russian Ark, 218 Spirited Away, 231 The Turin Horse, 237 Melancholia. - Adriano

Timeline, top 250 in chronological order: http://goo.gl/mGwCh Cinematic history! - Adriano

"What fascinates me is that both films are intensely personal and autobiographical. Welles gives us a portrait of a gargantuan man of unlimited ambitions and appetites, whose excesses outran his resources. Hitchcock gives us a man obsessed with control, who had a fetish not simply for blondes in general but for the specific features of a specific blonde. Both plots are labyrinthine. Kane as a character turned out to be uncannily prophetic of Welles's own life. Scottie as a character reflected not only Hitchcock's fetishes but his fears. The films originated in the self-knowledge of their makers. They guide our eyes: "Look here... now there... focus on this... now that... make this connection... feel this absence. That is the best I can say about what it is like to be me."" - Adriano

Yasujirô Ozu's "Tokyo Story" places third overall, but Ebert recommends "Floating Weeds." See filmography: http://www.imdb.com/name... \\ "Tokyo Story" finishes first in the BFI Ten Greatest Films of All Time, as chosen by 358 directors: http://www.bfi.org.uk/news... - Adriano

"The 2D tessellation becomes a collection of shadows, a fake and poor copy of the real world, an idea strongly reminiscent of the Socratic theory of forms. The two races or species finally reconcile in the foreground by shaking hands in the new, three dimensional world. The strongest feature of the engraving is indisputably the illusion of interplay between the 2D and 3D worlds. By some invisible source of light hovering centrally above, the creatures’ shadows radiate from the center of the scene, some seemingly still half attached on the tessellation. It is exactly there that the boundary between the two dimensional world of the shadows and the three dimensional world of the dancing creatures becomes vague and undecided." - Adriano

About 325,000 years ago, the European range and the African range became separated. The European range evolved into Neanderthal, the African range eventually turned into modern humans. New research raises questions about the theory that modern humans and Neanderthals at some point interbred, known as hybridisation. The findings suggest that common ancestry, not hybridisation, better explains the average 1-4% DNA that those of European and Eurasians share with Neanderthals. PNAS, 14 Aug 2012 http://www.pnas.org/content... - Adriano

"Dimension announced today that they will open Sin City: A Dame To Kill For nationwide on October 4th, 2013. The sequel once again comes from Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez. Academy Award winner William Monahan (The Departed) also had a hand in the script. Mickey Rourke and Jessica Alba are confirmed to return. Rumored to return are Michael Clarke Duncan, Rosario Dawson and Michael Madsen. “The film is about Dwight McCarthy planing to have his vengeance against the woman who betrayed him, Ava Lord, while Nancy is trying to cope with Hartigan’s death. The film will begin production this summer. Most likely at Robert Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin, Texas." - Adriano

"The Barcelona born artist has taken images of sky scrapers from the world’s cities and digitally reworked them with 3D rendering techniques. In doing so he creates buildings that pour out onto the street, bend horizontal, extrude their features in wild directions and even expand into trumpet like forms. The impossible buildings look like the imaginative mind of Frank Gehry run wild. Enrich’s highly realistic renderings are thanks to over a decade of work in the field of professional 3D architectural visualization. Now he applies those hard earned talents toward warping the minds of his viewers, creating buildings which often make little sense in the real world. His works attempt to give us a new and different view of “reality,” challenging us to question the current norms and look at the world with new eyes." - Adriano

posted only for its entertainment value :-) ref: http://ff.im/YxXUL - Adriano

the print quality of some her larger pieces is really impressive. When one looks really up close, it's evident that Sherman makes no attempt to disguise her body props, for example, by using photo editing software. - Adriano

"Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. The pseudonym Chris Marker -- which originally appeared in print as "Chris. Marker" -- dates from the late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction. "Sans Soleil" (1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Marker’s late works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan. He then made two essays on Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander Medvedkin, one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky ("One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich") and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the 1985 film "Ran" ("A.K.")." - Adriano

In the realm of all astronaut photographs this one probably holds the most veracity for me because Stanley Kubrick created what Baudrillard calls "hyper-reality" -- using cinematic signs in a hermetically self-contained film (not even including the Star Child part where the black monolith consumes Bowman and leads him through a metamorphosis from matter to pure energy :-) To this date, many concepts of being-in-space implicitly reference 2001, not actual experience. Also, unlike the communication between astronauts and Houston, the dialogue between Bowman and HAL 9000 is truly unforgettable. In short, we don't have detailed narratives of real astronauts which we can read into their photographs. - Adriano

in today's news: "Images taken by NASA's Lunar Reconaissance Orbiter (LRO) show that the American flags planted on the Moon by Apollo astronauts are mostly still standing. The flags are still casting shadows -- except the one planted during the Apollo 11 mission. This matches Buzz Aldrin's account of the flag being knocked over by engine exhaust as Apollo 11 lifted off." http://www.bbc.co.uk/news... - Adriano

whereas the trailer is here: http://youtu.be./xJ4dAY3DW4c \\ The film will be directed by Sam Mendes ("American Beauty") -- his video blog: http://youtu.be/NRY55wrWSwM - Adriano

"Our ability to conceptualize our own end creates tremendous psychic strains within us; in each man’s chest a tiny ferret of fear at this ultimate knowledge gnaws away at his ego and his sense of purpose. If man really sat back and thought about his impending termination, and his terrifying insignificance and aloneness in the cosmos, he would surely go mad, or succumb to a numbing sense of futility. \\ The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; as a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong -- and lucky -- he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s elan. He can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining." - Adriano

Happy Birthday ! LIFE photos from the set of 2001, http://life.time.com/culture... -- "there’s something about Kubrick’s strange, insular onscreen universe that commands our attention. 2001 remains one of those exceedingly rare works of art that feels intrinsically indifferent: indifferent to the usual laws of filmmaking; indifferent to criticism (or praise)." - Adriano

Difference between chemistry and cooking? Never lick the spoon, yolo :-) - Adriano

trivia: Walter White drives a tan 2004 Pontiac Aztek. It was discontinued after the 2005 model year -- criticized by George Ouzounian as the world's second ugliest car: "pilfering the Aztecs of their last remaining treasure, their name." #BreakingBad - Adriano

LOL - Sepi ⌘ سپی

trivia2: Save Walter White, http://www.savewalterwhite.com, is a *real* site -- check it out. Donations do not go the White family, but rather to the National Cancer Coalition. \\ White's budget as infographic: http://goo.gl/URpCA - Adriano