5 Intriguing Things
1. Museum reviews on Yelp as "vernacular criticism."
"In this way, many Yelp reviews confront the engineered homogeneity of the museum experience, the standardized conditions that Brian O’Doherty, an artist and critic, wrote about in Inside the White Cube. In these essays, written in the 1970s, O’Doherty describes the origins of ubiquitous gallery architecture and offers a critique of the white cube’s transformation of the viewer into a phantom, a spectral organ of cognition designed for the bodiless appreciation of art. The abruptly intimate accounts of subjective experience in a museum found on Yelp defy the white cube’s bloodlessness—even if all they do is address mundane concerns about a body’s movement in space."
2. Manipulating things within photographs as if they were 3D objects.
"Our approach uses publicly available 3D models to guide the completion of the geometry and appearance of the revealed areas of the object. The completion process leverages the structure and symmetry in the stock 3D model to factor out the effects of illumination, and to complete the appearance of the object. We demonstrate our system by producing object manipulations that would be impossible in traditional 2D photo-editing programs, such as turning a car over, making a paper-crane flap its wings, or manipulating airplanes in a historical photograph to change its story."
3. Why so many companies want to control the standards around the "Internet of Things."
"'If you want to know where the pot of gold is around all this, it has to do with the fact that the Internet of Things is fundamentally about capturing data from all these things and tracking the behavior of these things—and, of course, whoever is using those things,' says Think Strategies' Kaplan. The data from, say, a network-connected thermostat or network-connected car then streams back to third parties (the original manufacturer or a partner company) so the firm can 'try to gain a competitive advantage in winning more business from the user of those things.'"
4. What WWI sailors got tattooed on themselves before heading to war.
"During the World war sailors of the United States Navy would line up, as many as ten at a time, in their bare feet, in my tattoo shop and I was so busy I had to have my wife help me with the tattoo work. The barefooted sailors would have a pig tattooed on one foot and a chicken an the other. They said it would save them in case their ship was torpedoed. I don't know why."
5. Project Astoria is a gorgeous, uncanny fantasy world created by photographer Todd Baxter.
"The Astoria System is a new planet and its moons, discovered hidden within our Sun's system by an amateur astronomer in Astoria, Illinois, in the 1920's. Its two moons, named for his daughters, are found to be habitable and are colonized by a multinational expedition from our own world not long after the first successful landing on Earth's moon. Fifteen years later, the first generation of Astoria youth are ascending into adulthood. The images follow them as they explore and grow in their world, more familiar to them than Earth could ever be. Moving between the surreal feeling of a fairy tale and something more comfortable and deceptively mundane, the Astoria Project takes Baxter's unique visions to an ambitious new level."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
charm suggests some quality of enchantment, secret means of attraction, fascination, allurement. For the noun in literary criticism see LITERARY CRITICS' WORDS.
The White Cube’s Bloodlessness