“Thanks to a new breed of neural network machine-learning algorithms, compelling yet fictitious video, images, voice, and text can be synthesized whole cloth. Photos of imaginary faces can be realistically fabricated by computers — their emotions, skin, age, and gender dialed in by a knob on a machine. … Videos of politicians can be produced as you might control a puppet. … But in a way, this technological leap could actually be good news for journalists.” (Says a journalism professor.)
Tag: 05.15.18
Tom Murphy, Ferocious Irish Playwright, Dead At 83
Fintan O’Toole: “[He] didn’t do kitchen-sink drama and he was always a little bit on the outside. But he produced play after play marked by soaring imagination, ferocious honesty, great artistic ambition and unshakable integrity. … What made Murphy such a distinctive, original and restless presence in the theatre of the last six decades was his ability to evade easy categorization, to bring together the intense exploration of private anguish and the epic treatment of history, politics and myth.”
A New Record Price For A Russian Artwork At Auction: $85.8 Million
Kasimir Malevich’s Suprematist Composition (1916) became the top lot in the Christie’s Impressionist and Modern Art Evening Sale on Tuesday when it sold for $85.8 million with fees, securing a new record for the artist — and for any work of Russian art ever offered at auction.”
Stolen Costumes Returned To Dance Company After Media Campaign
Third year students, who were halfway through a tour of England and Wales when the van was taken, launched an appeal to find the costumes and raise money to replace other items in the van, which included lighting, sound and rehearsal equipment. Last night (May 14), a member of the public found the costumes in an open garage in Bromley-by-Bow in London, close to where the tour vehicle was last tracked, and called Ballet Central to report the news.
Lawsuit Accuses Obama Library Planners Of “Bait And Switch”
A federal lawsuit filed by a Chicago nonprofit in an attempt to block the Obama Presidential Center from being built in Jackson Park accuses organizers of pulling an “institutional bait and switch” by shifting the center’s purpose away from being a true presidential library.
The Rise Of TV Has Disrupted How We Think About The World
“To what moment does the rise of television respond? And what is the significance of this medium? Above all, new television responds to an omnipresent loss of normative authority, of a robust failure of humans to feel at home in their world: to trust their governments, their leaders, their role models, their traditions and, ultimately, even their senses. New television confronts this state of affairs artistically and politically, presenting – like film – some order to such a world, but over weeks and months and years.”
America’s Concert Ticket-Selling Business Is Effectively A Monopoly (Screw The Consumer)
Live Nation is by far the largest ticket provider in America, thanks in part to President Barack Obama’s Justice Department, which approved the company’s merger with Ticketmaster in 2010. Ticketmaster controlled over 80 percent of the market before the merger, and that holds true of Live Nation today, buttressed by its role as the nation’s largest concert promoter and owner of over 200 venues. Because Live Nation manages over 500 major music artists, they can demand that venues wanting to host concerts exclusively use Ticketmaster instead of a competitor.
‘Pre-Gutenberg’ – How Poet Anna Akhmatova Made Sure Her ‘Requiem’ Would Survive Stalin’s Reign Of Terror
“Akhmatova knew that the secret police might search her apartment and find her writings, so she burnt the paper on which composed drafts of the poem, after learning it by heart. But what if she were arrested and executed? To ensure the survival of her poem, she taught it to her closest female friends who would remember the poem after her own death. She called this situation ‘pre-Gutenberg’ because state terror had forced her and other underground writers to live as if the printing press had never been invented.”
Composer/Musician Matt Marks, 38
As a performer, Mr. Marks was known best as a French horn player for Alarm Will Sound, of which he was an integral member. The ensemble has been critically praised and is known for its unusual stylistic breadth and commitment to innovation.
Under Stress, Your Brain Gets Better At Processing Bad News – And Only Bad News
That’s what a pair of researchers found when studying firefighters in Colorado and undergraduates in London. “When you experience stressful events, whether personal (waiting for a medical diagnosis) or public (political turmoil), a physiological change is triggered that can cause you to take in any sort of warning and become fixated on what might go wrong.”