A reporter and photographer travel to Orlando to see 44-year-old Michael Job acting his role at a Biblical theme park called The Holy Land Experience. — National Geographic
Tag: 12.21.18
A Symphony Orchestra In Kinshasa Changes Congolese Lives
A reporter travels to the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo to meet the conductor and musicians of the Kimbanguist Symphony Orchestra and its choir as they rehearse Mendelssohn. (video) — Deutsche Welle
Cleveland Orchestra Is Making Digitized Archives Accessible In Two Ways
First, the orchestra is gradually making all its historic scrapbooks (with concert flyers, program booklets, newspaper articles, etc.) available online. Second, a new touch-screen terminal called the “Magic Box” will make background materials on current concert programs available to audience members at Severance Hall. — The Plain Dealer (Cleveland)
‘Building A More Inclusive American Theater’: The New Director Of The Long Wharf In New Haven
Jacob Padrón: “When I’m thinking about what plays to put on stages I ask: one, does the story reflect the community I am in and, two, is the story in conversation with the world? Those are the two big questions that will guide a lot of my thinking at Long Wharf.” — Connecticut Magazine
Mapping The ‘Cartography’ Of Conscious Feelings Onto The Body
When a team of research psychologists asked subjects to describe where in their bodies they experience various emotional states, they were surprised by just how consistent the correspondence of emotion to bodily area was. — Aeon
Here’s What Happens When Two MIT Folks Teach AI Software To Generate Christmas Movies
Karen Hao and Will Knight “fed plot summaries of 360 Christmas movies, courtesy of Wikipedia, into a machine-learning algorithm to see if we could get it to spit out the next big holiday blockbuster. Suffice it to say I now empathize with researchers who describe training neural nets as more of an art than a science. As I also discovered, getting them to be funny is actually pretty damn hard.” — MIT Technology Review
‘Merry Jinglelog’, ‘Cinnamon Hollybells’, And Other AI-Generated Christmas Carols
“[The Swedish firm Made by AI] fed 100 Christmas songs into a neural network, then waited for the bells to start ringing. While the resulting tunes are kind of a jingly mess, the titles are genius.” — Smithsonian Magazine
When Arts Funding Is Cut, Arts Orgs Lose More Than Just Government Money
An analysis of the situation in the English city of Bath, which steadily reduced its arts grants over a decade before ending them entirely last year, shows that such local funding leveraged three times as much money from other sources — and that those sources cut their giving in tandem with the cuts from the local council. — Arts Professional
Mexico’s Presidential Palace Had An Impressive Art Collection. Where Did It Go?
The official residence, known as Los Pinos, had been off-limits to the public ever since it was built in the 1930s, but new president Andrés Manuel López Obrador has opened it to the public. (He will live elsewhere.) But now that regular people can visit, the mansion’s art collection, including works by Diego Rivera and Rufino Tamayo, is nowhere to be seen. — The Art Newspaper
The Hague’s Art Museum Changes Its Name Because Foreigners Can’t Pronounce It
As the director of what is currently the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag says, “The [Dutch] ‘G’ is a very strange sound for people from abroad.” Not to mention that most of them don’t understand the word gemeente (municipal). The new name will be Kunstmuseum Den Haag. — The Art Newspaper