The Spike Jonze film “raises two questions that have long preoccupied philosophers. Are nonbiological creatures like Samantha capable of consciousness – at least in theory, if not yet in practice? And if so, does that mean that we humans might one day be able to upload our own minds to computers, perhaps to join Samantha in being untethered from ‘a body that’s inevitably going to die’?”
Tag: 03.02.14
Oscar-Nominated Doc About Indonesia’s Mass Murders Fails To Stir Up Indonesia
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, about the killing of half a million people following a failed 1965 coup against Suharto, has won a slew of awards and lots of attention seemingly everywhere but Indonesia, where even the Oscar nomination was largely ignored. (The massacres are still an extremely sensitive subject there.)
A Bunch of Grain Silos Will Become South Africa’s New MoCA
“The British designer Thomas Heatherwick has been chosen to convert a 1920s [waterfront] granary in Cape Town into a museum for contemporary African art collected by Jochen Zeitz, the former chairman of sportswear company Puma.”
Live Theatre Broadcast Of “War Horse” Breaks National Theatre Record
More than 155,000 bought tickets to see the play in local movie theatres. “National Theatre Live broadcasts theatre productions to cinemas around the world. Since it began in 2009, more than two million people globally have watched more than 30 broadcasts of different productions.”
Are These The 12 Best Ballerinas Of All Time?
“How can we define the best of the best? It is a matter of opinion and will always be subjective, but there is also the question of popularity and influence.”
Why The Razzies Are A Joke Past Its Prime
“Uproarious disasters and offbeat passion projects are lumped in with the bland and forgettable, with precedence given to nominees who are famous, attractive and/or rich. (In that respect, the Razzies is notably shallower than the ceremonies it supposedly sends up.)”
How Teen Angst Is Being Expressed In The Digital Age
“It is no longer enough to ask whether young people are being shaped by digital technology or are themselves shaping it when both teens and tech are increasingly being configured by a commercial imperative to turn users into more readily sellable data.”
If You Offer Your Plays For Free, You Have To Keep On Opening Everything Up
“For Radical Hospitality to truly be a mission-based initiative, it can’t just be about giving our audiences free tickets, it’s also about providing our audience access to our space, to the artists, access to our process. So from those realizations we created a program called Free Speech.”
How The Oscars Logistics Work
“How those envelopes end up in those briefcases, how the ballots are counted, how they get transported to the ceremony via not just one clandestine route but two different routes — it’s all part of a security system so impregnable, not even the NSA could hack it.”
Is Matthew McConaughey Going To Win An Oscar Because Of ‘True Detective’?
Were most Academy voters too afraid to see “12 Years A Slave”? And many, many other (disturbing) questions raised by these “brutally honest” ballots from Academy voters.