That's Interesting
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Moby Dick Big Read
30th October, 2024The Moby Dick Big Read grew out of the University of Plymouth’s, The Arts Institute’s Whale Festival (2011) and was conceived and curated by Philip Hoare (winner of the 2009 Samuel Johnson prize for non-fiction for Leviathan or, the Whale) and the acclaimed artist, Angela Cockayne, whose exhibition, Dominion, also held at The Arts Institute’s Levinsky Gallery in 2011, provided vital inspiration.
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How Henri Matisse Scandalized the Art Establishment with His Daring Use of Color
22nd October, 2024Even those of us not particularly well-versed in art history have heard of a painting style called fauvism — and probably have never considered what it has to do with fauve, the French word for a wild beast. In fact, the two have everything to do with one another, at least in the sense of how certain critics regarded certain artists in the early twentieth century. One of the most notable of those artists was Henri Matisse, whose unconventional use of color, emotionally powerful but not strictly realistic, eventually got him labeled a wild beast.
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Artificial Intelligence & Drones Uncover 303 New Nazca Lines in Peru
20th October, 2024A team from the Japanese University of Yamagata’s Nazca Institute, in collaboration with IBM Research, discovers 303 previously unknown geoglyphs of humans and animals, all smaller in size than the vast geometric patterns that date from AD 200–700 and stretch across more than 400 sq km of the Nazca plateau
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David Lynch Releases on YouTube Interview Project: 121 Stories of Real America Recorded on a 20,000-Mile Road Trip
16th October, 2024Conceived by Austin Lynch, who along with filmmaker Jason S. (known for the documentary David Lynch: The Art Life), drove 20,000 miles through the U.S. in search of what it’s tempting to call the real America, a nation populated by colorful, sometimes desperate, often unconventionally eloquent characters, 121 of whom Interview Project finds passing the day in bars, working at stores, or just sitting on the roadside.
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Download 9,200+ Free Films from the Prelinger Archives: Documentaries, Cartoons & More
02nd April, 2024Depending on how you reckon it, the “American century” has already ended, is now drawing to its close, or has some life left in it yet. But whatever its boundaries, that ambiguous period has been culturally defined by one medium above all: film, or more broadly speaking, motion pictures.
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An Animated Introduction to the Rosetta Stone, and How It Unlocked Our Understanding of Egyptian Hieroglyphs
28th March, 2024This animated video, created by Egyptologist Franziska Naether, explains “how scholars decoded the ancient message of the Rosetta Stone,” a painstaking process that took decades to complete. By the 1850s, philologists had unlocked the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphs and, with them, the secrets of ancient Egyptian civilization.
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Found: a controversial painting hidden inside a painting by Vermeer
11th October, 2022When restoring a painting by Vermeer, conservators discovered an image of Cupid covered up by an additional layer of paint. The paint was removed, revealing the painting as the Dutch master had originally intended it. While this discovery settles old debates about the work, it also raises some new questions — like: who covered it up?
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The Midlife Crisis
14th September, 2022This paper documents a longitudinal crisis of midlife among the inhabitants of rich nations. Yet middle-aged citizens in our data sets are close to their peak earnings, have typically experienced little or no illness, reside in some of the safest countries in the world, and live in the most prosperous era in human history. This is paradoxical and troubling.
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Sacred Trees in Japan
07th July, 2022Trees provide many benefits, from clean air to carbon absorption. Some benefits are less measurable, however. In Japan, ancient trees and forests have long been valued for their cultural and spiritual significance.
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