Leonardo da Vinci: a four hour documentary directed by Ken Burns

Showing all posts tagged: art

Leonardo da Vinci: a four hour documentary directed by Ken Burns

6 December 2024

This I wouldn’t mind seeing… a four hour documentary about Renaissance age artist and polymath Leonardo da Vinci, by American filmmaker Ken Burns.

A 15th century polymath of soaring imagination and profound intellect, Leonardo da Vinci created some of the most revered works of art of all time, but his artistic endeavors often seemed peripheral to his pursuits in science and engineering. Through his paintings and thousands of pages of drawings and writings, Leonardo da Vinci explores one of humankind’s most curious and innovative minds.

I’m hoping this will be available, eventually, to stream in this part of the world, at the moment though even access to the trailer and preview clips seem to be blocked in Australia.

The physics of running and keeping fit on the Moon

8 July 2024

Rhett Allain, writing for Wired, looks at the physics of this important question.

If humanity is ever to establish bases on the Moon, ways of keeping occupants fit in the low lunar gravity need to be worked out. A wall of death sort of gizmo, that’s a little like a stationary hamster-wheel, but turned on its side, that emulates Earth-like levels of gravity, may be a solution. But there might be more effective alternatives.

But check out the article’s artist impression of a suited up astronaut “jogging” on the surface of the Moon. Straight up running in this way is a fanciful keep fit option unfortunately, as simple as the idea may at first seem. It’s too bad though, because what a sight it would be to behold: Earth floating in the lunar sky, as you ran.

I doubt Earth would be quite as big as depicted in Nzoka John’s image, but it still be quite the spectacle. And on the subject of what Earth might look like from the surface of the Moon, a gallery of images by American illustrator and writer Ron Miller, depicting how other planets in the solar system would appear from Earth, if they were as close as the Moon.

The Artocalypse, an IndieWeb arts community by Chris Shaw

26 June 2024

The Artocalypse is a subscription based community for artists on IndieWeb, created by Chris Shaw at uncountable thoughts. This a great cross-promotional idea, showcasing the work of artists, while also spreading the word about IndieWeb.

I dare say some of the participating artists will already have followings elsewhere, and their membership of Artocalypse will introduce IndieWeb to people who have not heard of it before.

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art, artists, community, IndieWeb

Matt Adnate wins Archibald Packing Room Prize for Baker Boy painting

31 May 2024

Matt Adnate has been named the 2024 winner of the Archibald Prize’s Packing Room Prize, with his portrait of Indigenous Australian rapper Baker Boy, AKA Danzal Baker.

As the name suggests, the prize is awarded by the staff of the packing room at the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), which administers the Archibald. Packing room staff, who are among the first to see each year’s Archibald entries, are usually more interested in the aesthetics — or, how much they like the look of a painting — rather than other of its aspects.

The Archibald Prize is awarded annually for Australian portraiture, and is one of Australia’s most prestigious visual arts prizes. Participating artists can paint choose to paint any Australian subject, so long as they have some sort of celebrity status.

For the all the buzz the Packing Room Prize generates, check today’s AGNSW Instagram reel, it is derided by many artists who consider it the kiss of death. To date, no winner of the Packing Room Prize has ever gone onto win the Archibald Prize itself.

The work of this year’s fifty-seven finalists, who were also named today, is impressive, but I’m going to go out on a limb, and suggest history may be made this year. I wouldn’t be surprised if Adnate’s work takes out the top prize. Not long to wait until we find out though, the Archibald winner will be announced next Friday, 7 June 2024.

1500 Vincent van Gogh artworks digitised and online

29 June 2023

Fifteen hundred paintings and drawings by Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh, who died in 1890, have been digitised and made available online by the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Why didn’t this happen when I was studying high school art history? Van Gogh was of course one artist who’s work we looked at. A resource like this would have been awesome to work with.

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art, artwork, Vincent van Gogh

Julia Gutman wins 2023 Archibald Prize with Montaigne painting

5 May 2023

Gadigal/Sydney residing artist Julia Gutman has been named winner of the 2023 Archibald Prize, for her painting of Australian musician Montaigne. Awarded annually, the Archibald celebrates the finest works of Australian portraiture.

In other presentations, Zaachariaha Fielding took out the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting, while Doris Bush Nungarrayi won the Sulman Prize for genre or mural painting.

Andrea Huelin named winner of 2023 Archibald Packing Room Prize

27 April 2023

Cairns, Queensland, based Australian artist Andrea Huelin, has been named winner of the 2023 Archibald Packing Room Prize, with her portrait of New Zealand comedian Cal Wilson, titled Clown Jewels.

In addition, fifty-seven works were selected as finalists for the 2023 Archibald Prize, the winner of which will be announced on Friday 5 May 2023. This year over nine hundred entries were received for the annual art award honouring Australian portrait painting.

Finalists were also announced for the Wynne Prize for Australian landscape painting, the Sulman Prize for genre or mural painting, and the Young Archies, for artists aged five to eighteen.

The winners of these prizes will also be named next Friday, ahead of the opening of the exhibition of the works of the winners and finalists, on Saturday 6 May 2023, at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, in Sydney.

More than a Spotify genre, Glitchcore explored and defined

24 April 2023

Glitcgcore, Glitch artwork by Enrique Meseguer

Image courtesy of Enrique Meseguer.

Too Long; Didn’t Read: Glitchcore is a type of electronic music that features noisy digital artefacts including distortion, static, crackle, interference, and other warning sounds that means something’s not right. But there’s nothing wrong with the music itself. Read on for more of the story…

Twenty five years ago — give or take — a web design trend called “TV lines” was all the rage. Like all fads, it was short lived, but if you were a web designer who was anyone, the graphics on your website had to feature TV lines. The effect would have looked a little like the image above, created by Enrique Meseguer, and conveyed the impression your image was a screen-grab from a TV show.

Although images with TV lines have largely disappeared from the web, it can be argued their influence lingers, albeit non-visually, in the form of Glitchcore music. As the name suggests, Glitchcore is a genre that blends what are considered to be inharmonious noises, caused by errors of some sort, into the mix. These anomalies include distortion, static, crackle, interference, and other noisy artefacts. But Glitchcore is more than an amalgamation of discordant sounds, it’s also a blend of other genres, according to volt.fm:

Glitchcore is a genre of electronic music that combines elements of glitch, IDM, and breakcore. It is characterized by its chaotic and unpredictable sound, often featuring heavily distorted and chopped up samples, rapid-fire drum patterns, and complex, syncopated rhythms.

Yecch, syncopated rhythms. I sucked at syncopated strumming during my guitar playing days. But back to Glitchcore, which actually owes little to mellow, mostly unobtrusive, TV lines, than it does to boldly coloured, garish online memes, and Glitch art. Like Glitchcore music, Glitch artists make use of visual digital defects, in their artworks. And while Glitch art sounds like a contemporary movement, it isn’t. Instances of the form can be traced back to 1935, when experimental New Zealand filmmaker Len Lye incorporated analogue flaws into his short film, A Colour Box.

But Glitch art became more prominent in the early twenty-first century, when digital artists began to embrace errors and unwanted visual artefacts, spewed out by digital technologies, and crafted artworks from them. A Glitchcore musician then might look at a work of glitch art — refer again to Meseguer’s image above — and wonder how it could be rendered as a musical piece.

Musically, Glitchcore is seen as subgenre of Glitch music. Or Hyperpop, depending on who you ask. Glitch music became popular in the 1990s, but its origins can be traced back to the second decade of the twentieth century. In 1913, Luigi Russolo, an Italian artist and composer, produced The Art of Noises (L’arte dei rumori), a Futurist manifesto, which was considered by some to be the basis of noise music. Here, anything, particularly machinery, that made noise, could, somehow, be used in a musical composition.

Hyperpop (think of the music of Charli XCX), meanwhile, emerged about ten years ago, even though the term was first used in 1988 by a music writer named Don Shewey, when describing the Cocteau Twins, an erstwhile Scottish act. Wikipedia defines Hyperpop thusly:

Hyperpop reflects an exaggerated, eclectic, and self-referential approach to pop music and typically employs elements such as brash synth melodies, Auto-Tuned “earworm” vocals, and excessive compression and distortion, as well as surrealist or nostalgic references to 2000s Internet culture and the Web 2.0 era.

Glitchcore become more widely heard in 2020. And like Hyperpop, the name also seems to have preceded the music, if this excerpt from the March 2001 edition of SPIN magazine (and might they be referring to Matthew Herbert here?) is anything to go by:

Herbert is a former piano prodigy and Exeter drama student who went from touring with UK big bands to freaking clubbers with samplers and kitchen utensils, and his cozy records merge glitchcore buzz and tech-house heat.

So, there, at last we have it, an explanation of Glitchcore. Assuming the genre, subgenre, in fact exists, something Cat Zhang, writing for Pitchfork, says is debatable. And given its smorgasbord of genre ingredients, I can see where the doubters are coming from. Spotify, however, has no such misgivings. It’s a verified genre to them, as people perusing their annual Spotify Wrapped music listening reports would have noticed.

In case Glitchcore is new to you, as it was to me, here’s a small selection of the music to check out: Money Machine by 100 gecs, Ethanol by Madge, and This World is Sick by IC3PEAK. I should say a language warning may apply to some of these tracks.

And on the off chance the existence of Glitchcore is blowing your mind, and you think there’s too many music genres, and subgenres already, bear in mind some one hundred and twenty three thousand new songs are released daily across the world. That’s daily with a D. If that’s the case, there’s going be a whole lot more music genres coming to Spotify Wrapped in the future.

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art, music, trends

100,000 plus new songs released daily, so what to listen to?

4 April 2023

By some estimates, one hundred and twenty three thousand new songs are released across the globe every day. That’s surely more music than any person could listen to in a lifetime. In a seemingly arts saturated world though, American jazz critic and music historian, Ted Gioia, contends the problem isn’t necessarily with supply, but rather demand. This means creating more demand driven initiatives, in other words, finding new ways of putting this new music in front of audiences.

Yet almost every arts-related institution in the world is focused on the supply side, almost to an obsessive degree. This feels good — we love giving money to artists. But even from a purely financial standpoint, these programs don’t do half as much good as genuine audience expansion. If you offered a musician the choice between a hundred dollars and a hundred new fans, they absolutely benefit more from the latter. It’s a no-brainer. In fact, musicians probably make more from just one loyal fan.

This is something we see with fiction publishing in Australia, and likely worldwide. As I’ve written before, a first-time writer of a literary fiction novel in Australia might expect to see a maximum of two thousand sales of that book. Australia doesn’t have the biggest of populations, but surely there’d be more interest in a book than that. In a somewhat supply saturated market, granted. As Gioia says, it is demand driven initiatives that are needed.

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art, music, trends

Trove receives funding to continue ongoing operation

4 April 2023

Trove, Australia’s online library database of historical and cultural documents, which is operated by the National Library of Australia, has received a new round of funding from the Australian federal government. The move ends months of uncertainty that had been shrouding Trove’s future:

The National Library of Australia welcomes the commitment made by the Albanese Government to provide $33m over the next 4 years to maintain Trove, with $9.2m ongoing and indexed funding from July 2027. We are delighted that Trove’s future has been secured.

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