Arts 11 - Digital Media: History & Foundations

"The Waterfalls flowed in the East River. The Gates snaked through Central Park. Now New York's latest large-scale public art project is being exhibited in an even unlikelier space: your wallet."... ArtsJournal mclennan

Lee Strasberg's son David Lee is maintaining his late father's acting schools in Manhattan and West Hollywood and even opening a new branch in Mumbai next year. He argues that the Method "is less reliant on psychobabble than most people believe. … [More] interesting is the way developments in neuroscience keep cropping up in his conversation."... ArtsJournal mclennan

Celebrated architect Alvar Aalto may have created a Nordic modernist icon with his 1971 concert hall, but he didn't much care about acoustics, and it showed. So the powers-that-be are turning the place into a convention center and building a new six-venue concert hall with acoustics by Yasuhisa Toyota, known for Disney Hall in L.A.... ArtsJournal mclennan

"If the human brain is data being passed from neuron to neuron at its basic level and we can simulate that in a computer, shouldn't a conscious mind start to emerge?" Not really: "The difference between simulated thinking and conscious thinking can be illustrated by thinking about the difference between a computer-simulated boat and a real one."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"Goofy, gentle, nimbly amateurish, jerking was little known outside certain precincts of this sprawling city [L.A.] until a year ago. But in the last nine months or so, jerking began an unexpected run as an Internet phenomenon." The movement has a "rebellious disregard for the conventions of urban style and music (old school hip-hop artists are referred to as 'baggy daddies')."... ArtsJournal mclennan

They're serious. Says one of the magazine's editors: "The Internet can be considered the first weapon of mass construction … What happened in Iran after the latest election, and the role the Web played in spreading information that would otherwise have been censored, are only the newest examples of how the internet can become a weapon of global hope."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"The subtext of the week's performances [at the Blue Note] - with McCoy Tyner, Roy Haynes, Eddie Palmieri and Jack DeJohnette as guests on various nights - is that Mr. Glover is a musician. The raised wooden board beneath him isn't just his stage; it's his instrument, with eight microphones underneath."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"A tooth and two fingers of Galileo Galilei, the 17th century Italian astronomer, physicist, inventor and mathematician, have re-emerged from a lost wooden case, Florence's authorities [have] announced."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"Augmented reality (AR) has been touted as the bridge between the physical and virtual worlds, as new technologies add information to real-world environments." A new exhibition titled "Give Me More" uses AR "to reveal hidden layers of meaning associated with ordinary objects. … Storybooks become animated, t-shirts bestow powers on their wearers, and Euro notes show their more salacious face."... ArtsJournal mclennan

Sarah Kaufman says that, because U.S. companies are so utterly dependent on income from their annual Nutcracker runs, ballet in this country "suffers from a serious lack of confidence that is only growing more and more paralyzing. … Has ballet become so entwined with its Nutcracker image, so fearfully wedded to unthreatening offerings, that it has forgotten how eye-opening and ultimately nourishing creative destruction can be?"... ArtsJournal mclennan

"Rita Marcalo is an artist doing what artists are supposed to do: creating work that is surprising, challenging, transgressive and exciting. … [She] is drawing attention to the fact that on YouTube (and elsewhere) it's easy to find mobile-phone footage of people having fits - mostly taken without their consent. Curious, isn't it, that controversy should arise when a person with epilepsy consents to being filmed?"... ArtsJournal mclennan

Critic Armond White wrote, "Not since The Birth of a Nation has a mainstream movie demeaned the idea of black American life as much as Precious." Responds the novelist Sapphire, "With Michelle, Sasha and Malia and Obama in the White House and in the post-Cosby Show era, people can't say these are the only images out there."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"It's been an interesting journey. Slowly and surely we have come together through honeymoons and the opposite. I remember Karajan said that with an orchestra like this the first five or 10 years are tradition. I didn't quite believe him. But after what has sometimes felt like moving at the speed of tectonic plates, … we now have a tradition to build on."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"His 19 'Above' books, each with about 150 photographs, include neighborhood-by-neighborhood overviews of Paris, London, Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, San Diego and Seattle." (He covered his hometown with four volumes of Above San Francisco.) "Then there are the volumes showing the natural wonders of places like Yosemite, Big Sur and Hawaii."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"Reading the future and shunning possible mishaps is mankind's oldest dream. In 16th-century Iran and Turkey, … it inspired some of the most intriguing book paintings ever. These were prompted by a peculiar literary genre, the Fal-Nameh, or Book of Omens, which took off around the 1560s and lasted at least until the early 18th century."... ArtsJournal mclennan

"Set in the mid-1960s … Fetch Clay, Make Man, by Will Power, centers on the young boxer's friendship with Stepin Fetchit, the stage name of the actor Lincoln Perry." The play, which "deals with creating personas," opens in January at the McCarter Theater in Princeton. Ben Vereen will play Fetchit, with Evan Parke as Ali; Des McAnuff will direct... ArtsJournal mclennan

Surveying the history of artists' attempts to fool their viewers, from Ancient Rome through Giotto and the Flemish masters to American tricks with pictures of money and sculptors who made rock look like bronze and porcelain resemble wood.... ArtsJournal mclennan

"IBM announced this week that it has a computer system that can simulate the thinking power of a cat's brain with 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses. At just 4.5 percent of a human brain, the computer can sense, perceive, act, interact and process ideas without consuming a lot [of] energy."... ArtsJournal mclennan

18-year-old participant Lauren Lovette: "[Peter Martins] was looking at me as I was sitting there, and I was like: Are you expecting me to say something? Are you reading my mind right now? Stop staring at me. O.K., fine! I really wanted six [dancers to work with]. I'm so happy he gave that to me."... ArtsJournal mclennan

Media psychologist Stuart Fischoff, "says Winfrey is a master of impression management. … People seek leaders who will guide their decisions, according to Fischoff, and he says Winfrey exhibits the very qualities people look for in leaders - authenticity and trust.  … Plus, he adds, Winfrey is smart and unguarded with her faults, which shows her humanity."... ArtsJournal mclennan