Markus Buehler’s team used laser imaging to create a 3D map of webs made by tropical tent-web spiders (Cyrtophora citricola). They identified each thread’s vibrating frequency through its size and elasticity, then converted those frequencies into ones that can be heard by humans. – New Scientist
Does Esperanto Have Any Hope Of Ever Catching On As A World Language? Not Really, No.
There are two fundamental problems with Esperanto as a genuinely global lingua franca. One is that, while it was intended to be have grammar simple and intuitive enough to be mastered quickly, Esperanto is really only intuitive for speakers of European languages; its grammar is alien to native speakers of, for instance, Chinese, Arabic, Yoruba, or Tamil. The other is that there’s a fundamental disagreement among its enthusiasts and keepers about how Esperanto should develop. – 3 Quarks Daily
Video Now/Live Later — How Pacific Northwest Ballet Approached Its Commissions After COVID Shut Down This Season
“PNB opted for an all-digital 2020-21 season, honoring its commissions from Lang, Donald Byrd, Alejandro Cerrudo, Edwaard Liang and Christopher Wheeldon by filming premieres that they hope will be performed live in later seasons. For patrons, the message is ‘Stream the new dances now, see them live onstage once public health guidelines allow.'” – Dance Magazine
What TikTok Has Taught Us About Learning
A recent Harvard study showed that students actually learn more when education is built on “active learning,” which promotes working collaboratively on projects. And now, the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the disruption of education as kids and young adults have been forced to learn from home. In the collective reckoning on what learning should look like going forward, I’ve found that the social media platform TikTok offers some surprising insights. – Fast Company
How NFTs Fit Into The Performance Art Tradition
“As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in radical ways by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society.” – The Conversation
Filtered
As I hear my student playing the piano through Zoom, just for a moment, I think I am hearing Paderewski in 1912. The sound is imperfect. At moments it drops out. There are distortions of speed and rhythm. Yet, my ear, my mind is hearing music: completing and linking together the aural information that is there. – Bruce Brubaker
Raising the flag
As it happens, I don’t care at all for Childe Hassam’s better-known etchings — I find them fussy — but lithography brought out a freer, more adventurous streak in his work, and there is one print of his that I have long sought, Avenue of the Allies. Also made in 1918, it is a lithographic monochrome pendant to the well-known series of thirty-odd brightly colored “flag paintings” that Hassam made during and after World War I. – Terry Teachout
A Year Into The Pandemic, Dancers Talk About How They’ve Adjusted Their Movement And Approach For Online Performance
“How are dancers developing performance energy? How can artistry best be communicated through the camera? What is the best angle to present technique? Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Derek Brockington explains that dancing for film is ‘about acknowledging that it’s not going to be the same experience — it’s a different way of dancing.’ Below, Brockington and several other dancers share their takeaways after a year of dancing on camera.” – Pointe Magazine
A Lawsuit About AI And Intellectual Property Law Now Involves R2D2 And WALL-E
An American company is suing a Chinese company in U.S. federal court for copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property violations. The goods in question? Interactive toy robots. And both the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case and the plaintiff’s response have invoked the famous movie robots. – The Hollywood Reporter
The Saga Of The Jefferson Davis Chair Comes To An End (And No, It Wasn’t Really Used As A Toilet)
A shadowy art/activist collective calling itself White Lies Matter made a bit of a stir earlier this month when it stole a chair dedicated to the first and only president of the Confederate States from a cemetery in Selma, Alabama and threatened to turn it into a commode if their demands weren’t met. Here’s an explainer covering what exactly the group demanded, why it chose the particular target it did, and what ultimately became of the 3,000-pound piece of outdoor furniture. – Slate
Nature Documentaries Are A Lot More Like Porn Than You’d Like To Think
It’s not just that they’re wildly popular and can be addictive. It’s because nature documentaries have at least as much artifice as any studio-produced adult video and maybe more. (“Are these seabirds supposed to be majestic or comical as they enact their mating dance? The music tells us. Whom are we to root for in this interaction of predator and prey? Listen for the menacing strings.”) Emma Maris argues that “the solution to the way [nature docs] might warp our expectations is the same as it is for porn — not to ban them, but to diversify them.” – The Atlantic
The Surrealists Would Have Loved TikTok
In fact, reporter Angela Watercutter compares the 15-second-video service old Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse: “The platform, thanks to its duetting and stitching functions, automates a lot of what the Surrealists were doing. It’ not exactly an exquisite corpse, since TikTok records the entire genealogy of any given work, and there is a want for continuity with what others have contributed before. But there is a similar spirit of spontaneous collaboration, and a kindred quest for the absurd.” – Wired
Fabio Luisi, Dallas Symphony Music Director, Takes A Third Orchestra
The Italian maestro, who is also chief conductor of the Danish National Symphony and is now winding up his term as music director of the Zurich Opera House, has been named chief conductor of the NHK Symphony, widely considered to be Japan’s leading orchestra, beginning with the 2022-23 season. – Dallas Morning News
Benin Bronzes Are Not Safer Held In The West, Say Researchers
“They have been equally unsafe in the hands of British, not least because of attack in 1897, which destroyed so much royal and sacred landscape,” said Dan Hicks, an archaeology professor at the University of Oxford in England who has written extensively on the Benin Bronzes. And, he added, many Benin Bronzes have headed to market in Europe, leaving their whereabouts and their safety uncertain. “The most important of the collections have been sold off in the West.” – ARTnews
Dallas Symphony Invites Out-Of-Work Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Musicians To Play Joint Concert
“Someone on our team said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we could bring together musicians around the U.S. who are not working, for some project?’ It morphed into involving Fabio Luisi, who’s been really bummed out about the Met, which has had such a hard year. He thought about Mahler 1, and bringing in about half the Met Orchestra. – Dallas Morning News
After More Than A Year Apart, Singers Miss Collaborating
Afro-Brazilian musician Luedji Luna: “It’s been a sad year for artists and for the three of us: What we love doing most is performing with each other.” But it hasn’t been all terrible. “When the pandemic started, we all reacted differently. Xenia is more of a meditative person, so she wasn’t online much. Larissa started to produce beats. And I became a mom.” – The New York Times