An interactive website put up by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam traces the interactions between Van Gogh and Gauguin. Attaching colors to sounds, allowing the viewer to change the color palette of the website, and linking pictures to paintings, the site explores the artists’ lives and work.
Category: ideas
What Place Animals In The World?
“Along with other ecologically concerned citizens, scholars are trying to articulate the place that animals occupy in our world – or, less anthropocentrically, how human and nonhuman animals share this world. This work involves deconstructing the divisions and prejudices that separate people from animals, going all the way back to the Great Chain of Being in Aristotle’s scala naturae and the proclamation of human mastery over animals in Genesis. Much of the most exciting current research comes out of the humanities and social sciences rather than the natural sciences.”
How Do You Manage Creativity?
A number of big media companies have been ousting top executives and replacing them with money guys. “This trooping of grey faces into the unruly media world marks a distinct change of mood. Talk of ‘vision’, ‘synergy’ or ‘new paradigms’ is out; the daily grind of evaluating and improving operating performance is paramount. Show business doesn’t attract leaders who know how to listen properly or leave people alone. But when you manage creative people, you must intrude carefully.”
Mickey Mouse, From Behind Bars
So how does Mickey Mouse feel now that the US Supreme Court has refused to spring him into the public domain? Jesse Walker asked him: So yeah, they created me. But they don’t want to let other people build on me when they make their own creations, the way they did when I was born. And now I’m locked up for another stinking 20 years! Do you have any idea what it’s like to have to greet kids at Disneyland every single day, always smiling, never slipping off for a cigarette?
The New Class System
“There is a big academic debate on social class as opposed to income. There are sociologists who argue that social class is in decline in regard to lifestyle, consumption factors and politics as coherent, meaningful groups.” One study finds that “lumping people into big groups like the ‘working’ or ‘middle’ class on the basis of their incomes ultimately had little to do with what they bought, what they watched or whom they voted for. Rather, cultural and political similarities are more likely to be found among people who are in the same profession or do the same type of work, reinforced first by educational training and then by work experiences.”
Putting The NY Public Library On The Web
The New York Public Library is testing a database that will put images of much of its collection online. “At its inception, the Image Gate database contains approximately 80,000 images spanning a wide range of subjects. This number will grow as The Library digitizes more images; this phased rollout will end in 2004, when the site will include more than 600,000 images.”
Exploring The Architecture Of Music
“Since music is the only one of the arts that is designed for the ears rather than the eyes, we sometimes tend to forget that it is part of the corporeal world, since our sense of reality is so eye-driven. However, all sound must emanate from somewhere, which makes the notion of space in music the most down-to-earth of all of the components that go into the making of music. Thinking of music without acknowledging its spatial possibilities is sort of like the study of plane geometry. You can learn a lot of formulas and neat shapes, but the real world is 3D!”
Pocket Guide To The Intellectual Property Wars
Having trouble sorting through competing claims in the intellectual property wars? The Electronic Frontier Foundation issues a report called “Unintended Consequences” that documents the harm to the public interest since passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in 1998. Among the documentation are examples of the chilling of free speech and scientific research, jeopardization of fair use, and the choking of competition and innovation.”
Teaching As Intellectual Pursuit
Shouldn’t teaching be the subject of research? Not just what is taught, but how teaching works… “That is, teaching as intellectual work, which can be discussed, reviewed, critiqued, adapted, and built upon by peers. Part of that includes a belated recognition that the way people teach is related to what they teach; generic ideas on pedagogy have their use, but any serious effort to professionalize teaching in higher education, and to make it intellectually respectable as a topic of scholarship, has to be discipline-specific.”
Thoroughly Modern Jazz?
Is jazz “modern”? “There has been no systematic discussion of jazz as a branch of artistic modernism, and jazz’s own ‘modernity’ has for all intents and purposes been taken for granted.” A new book tries out definitions of modern jazz. Alfred Appel “believes that if modernism itself is to survive as an idiom of continuing interest, it will only be through the work of those artists who sought to be ‘accessible’ and ‘tonic’ rather than inaccessibly abstruse and hermetic, who drew their inspiration from vernacular culture, and who endeavored to speak not merely to the ‘insular, marginalized’ world of ‘enthusiastic fans’ but to a popular audience.”