Category Archives: art

art: artists respecting artists

Posted on 2022-04-13 by skierpage

Here’s the cover of Paul McCartney’s 2013 album New: I saw it and immediately knew the cover’s designers were riffing on Dan Flavin‘s neon fluorescent tube sculptures. Dan Flavin was “an American minimalist artist famous for creating sculptural objects and … Continue reading →

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TV: let shows run no longer than they need

Posted on 2022-03-15 by skierpage

We started watching Katla, an intriguing Icelandic show about mysterious goings-on near a volcano. But it’s ponderous SLUDGE. A few momentous things happen in a tiny community, but the damn people never meet up to review what’s happening and tell … Continue reading →

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art: fantastic video art hidden in movie

Posted on 2022-03-07 by skierpage

The Electrical Life of Louis Wain is a reasonably good biopic with Benedict Cumberbatch doing his reliably impressive legible acting. You don’t see someone acting, you read his interior state. Near the end there’s an amazing video sequence of lines … Continue reading →

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playing Pong with your mind vs. William Gibson

Posted on 2021-04-12 by skierpage

Ars Technica has an appropriately level-headed article about Elon Musk’s Neuralink company getting a monkey to play Pong with its mind, which reminds people of William Gibson: the old Cyberpunk fan in me dreams of cyberdecks: devices without screens or … Continue reading →

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science: cocaine-fueled Hollywood-quantum matchup?

Posted on 2021-01-09 by skierpage

Don’t you love those Hollywood-excess parties, where Spiros Michalakis (research professor and manager of outreach at Caltech) is doing cocaine with a bunch of industry heavyweights and remarks “I have a lot of grant money from the National Science Foundation … Continue reading →

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computers generating art

Posted on 2020-06-19 by skierpage

First came text GPT-2 and other AI (Artificial Intelligence) Transformer models are impressive. After you hand the AI an enormous corpus of text, you give it some text and it continues, generating character after character that make up recognizable, even … Continue reading →

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Hamilton musical beyond outstanding

Posted on 2019-08-30 by skierpage

Before seeing “Hamilton” I listened to its soundtrack while reading through most of its lyrics and some of the excellent annotations on the Genius site, stopping before I learned too many of the reveals in Act 2. So I knew … Continue reading →

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art: Jhane Barnes inspires

Posted on 2019-01-18 by skierpage

I’ll pull out a Jhane Barnes shirt I haven’t worn in a while and I’m Ricky Fitts in American Beauty: “I need to remember… Sometimes there’s so much beauty in the world, I feel like I can’t take it.” (This … Continue reading →

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art: the greatest walks away from her canvas

Posted on 2013-08-03 by skierpage

This is like Morris Louis, Agnes Martin, or Piet Mondrian putting away their brushes. (And Jhane Barnes is way better at geometric abstraction than every capital ‘A’ artist who’s practiced it.) Jhane Barnes’ blog post is frank and clear, in … Continue reading →

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a retrospective as Grand Theft Auto V nears

Posted on 2012-10-28 by skierpage

The approach of Grand Theft Auto V makes me reflect on the series. Highest and purest style: GTA: Vice City Ridiculously gargantuan sandbox: GTA: San Andreas[*] Best damn radio patter: GTA: Liberty City Stories (Dan Houser and Lazlow’s finest moments) … Continue reading →

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