Scientists at MIT report that East Asians with strong cultural affinities naturally pay more attention to visual context than Westerners, who focus more closely on individual objects within a visual context. This study is the latest in a number of studies (this one, for example) that attempt to chart how cultural backgrounds affect vision. […]
Three variations on the theme:
1.) Stumbled across an interesting site a few weeks back: Strictly No Photography. In its current state, the idea may be more interesting than the execution–users register and upload their photographs of people, places, and things that are not supposed to be photographed. The site advertises itself as featuring […]
The Globe and Mail reported today that the Sanders portrait of William Shakespeare has passed the most recent analysis in the battery of tests being undertaken to prove the unprovable–that it represents the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted while he was still alive. It set me off on a search of portraits of […]
An article on NewScientist.com describes new software being developed to help bridge the gap between verbal and visual searches. Pretty cool. Until now, most engines like Google have relied on tags attached to pictures, or the page in which photographs and other art are embedded, to produce image results. This new prototype […]
After my last post about The Splasher phenomenon, Michael Kimmelman, lead art critic for the Times, wrote this opinion piece about how to interpret The Splasher.
Kimmelman deserves credit for underlining the hazy nature of the targets of The Splasher’s acts of “vandalism”:
The current agitators, although they’ve got some of the revolutionary patter down, seem […]
A story in the paper today about “The Splasher,” a mysterious figure who runs around flinging splashes of paint at street art. It’s all a little bit ridiculous.
First, “the crime”: if you’re painting something illegally on the street, how angry can you get when someone puts paint on top of it? What’s the […]
An interesting paragraph in the New York Times today, buried in a story about development projects for Governors Island. Here’s the snippet that caught 291’s eye:
As all the design teams recognized, the magic comes from the island’s setting. It is surrounded by the Manhattan skyline to the north, the Brooklyn waterfront to the east […]
It looks like Nikon has sunk a lot of money into their latest marketing campaign, “Picture Town.” If you haven’t seen the ads, here’s the basic idea: Nikon hands out 200 of its new D40 digital SLR cameras to the people of a small, “All American” town a few miles outside of Myrtle Beach, […]
