Art
neurophilosophy | July 22, 2007London City Skyline, 2006, by Stephen Wiltshire.
The neurologist Oliver Sacks, who devotes a chapter to Wiltshire in his 1995 book An Anthropologist on Mars, describes first meeting the autistic artist in a short article from the New York Times:
When I first met Stephen in 1988, I was intrigued by the silent, withdrawn boy, who was clearly autistic. He seemed without much language until he put pen to paper.
And then there were these wonderful drawings, prodigious in powers of memory and detail, beautiful in draftsmanship, full of humor, vitality and charm, so that one felt a complete…
voltagegate | July 13, 2007A "green" art show just opened up in Lexington titled "HOT: Artists Respond to Global Warming", where area artists wanted to "participate in the conversation about climate change" through their works.
The objective of the show was to go beyond the informational and factual aspects and allow the artists to become true evaluators of the world around them, she said. The results include numerous media -- pottery, sculpture, oil paintings, watercolor paintings, fabric, and multimedia. The exhibit is laid out clearly, taking visitors from the immediately accessible depictions of global warming to…
sb admin | July 12, 2007A music video, a crowdsourced homecast cultural expression ... Brain Tamer by Peter Johnson.
Brain Tamer
pharyngula | July 10, 2007The NCSE is running a contest to design a new logo. Guidelines are at the link; If you've got any graphical talent at all, send something in. Fame and glory and a free subscription to Reports of the NCSE could be yours!
neurophilosophy | July 10, 2007
The Maze by William Kurelek (1927-1977); on display at the Novas Gallery in Southwark as part of an exhibition called Redefining Bedlam: The Art of Healing the Mind, which features more than 200 works by artists with mental illnesses, and runs until August 18th.
The Maze was painted just a few miles away from the Novas Gallery, in 1953, while Kurelek was a patient at the Maudsley Hospital in Denmark Hill. Read his own description of the painting, and see Out of the Maze, which he painted in 1971, below.
(Click both pics to enlarge)
The subject, seen as a whole, is of a man (…
omnibrain | June 30, 2007Thanks to Vaughan over at Mind Hacks we've discovered that the great movie The Brain That Wouldn't Die is now in the public domain :) You can watch it below the fold or even download it in full right here or here. This movie is a wonderful, wonderful movie! ... ok, really, I've never seen it nor do I think I'll take the time to watch it unless I'm really bored. But you should! Let us know how it is. It is after all about brains!
Here's the plot summary from imdb:
After a car crash, a man keeps his wife's head alive in his laboratory. As if this weren't enough, an evil beast pounds and…
chaoticutopia | June 17, 2007I've had a link to the original zoomquilt on my blogroll for as long as I've had a blogroll. The idea of a collaborative online art project has always intrugied me. Can a dozen plus different artists around the world paint the same canvas, and still have a cohesive work of art? The first zoomquilt was strange, an eclectic collection of surreal and morbid scenes, each blending practically seamlessly into the next. Now, there is a second Zoomquilt available:
Zoomquilt 2: Click to visit and zoom in. (Flash is required.)
Like the first, this Zoomquilt is a montage of bizarre images. The scenes…
aardvarchaeology | June 15, 2007
Most rock carvings have very little archaeological context: people who search for them tend to remove hastily any layers on top of them, and they quit digging when they reach the edge of the carved panel. But in recent decades, there has been a trend among Bronze Age scholars to dig beside the panels and try to find ones that are still covered by culture layers. Such digs tend to turn up carving tools of stone, pottery, enigmatic clay marbles and above all lots of evidence of burning. Cultic fires illuminating the carvings as drunk fertility cultists cavorted and copulated in Mycenaean…
cogdaily | June 11, 2007This is a guest post by Suzie Eckl, one of Greta's top student writers for Spring 2007
Forget color television.
Before we had color, we had black and white. Before we had movies, we had photographs. And before photographs we had...
Engravings?
Prior to August 19, 1839, the date Daguerre and Niepce revealed that they had created the world's first photograph, artists had all the control in reproducing the world as they saw it. Many artists chose not painting or sculpture but engraving. They carved their images into wood or burned them into metal.
In a fascinating analysis, Danielle Zavagno…
pharyngula | June 10, 2007OK, that last post might have given you nightmares. Here's something to soothe your frazzled nerves: femme femme femme. Women sure are pretty.
(via toomanytribbles)
aardvarchaeology | June 8, 2007
An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck's interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and quite impossible to ignore for anyone working in that field.
Writes Hagen Keller (and I translate):"On 8 May Karl Hauck died, aged 90. He was the founder of the Institute for Early Medieval Studies and former…
omnibrain | June 7, 2007An oldie but goodie starring I Dream of Jeannie as god ... Enjoy!
Here's Ned Flanders dealing with an evolution exhibit.
And here's the evolution vs. creationism debate starring Lisa.
aardvarchaeology | June 5, 2007David Nessle is a Swedish comic artist, author, editor, translator, sf fan and blogger. His blog is without any serious competition the wittiest one I've encountered in the Swedish language, and I read it religiously. Recent themes of his blogging have been a Saami version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky", an ongoing tiff among Swedish poets, amateurish 60s comics, small-town Swedish food packaging, what to do with all one's books, his collection of plastic action figures and classic dinosaur artist Zdenek Burian. Go read!
vhughes | June 3, 2007
Above, Elvis's famous coif has been pasted over the faces of three famous people. Does the hair make it more difficult to recognize them?
You may un-coif the faces at the online "Memory" exhibit produced by San Francisco's interactive museum, Exploratorium.
The website includes loads of these kinds of visual demonstrations and memory games, webcasts of lectures from cognitive scientists who specialize in memory research, even an interactive dissection of a sheep's brain.
Another section features the paintings and drawings of a local San Francisco artist, Franco Magnani. Magnani, who…
omnibrain | May 31, 2007500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art morphing between each other. Pretty cool eh?!
via boingboing
omnibrain | May 22, 2007Since the whole internet seems to be especially preoccupied with visual illusions in the last couple days, here's another one:
If you don't see it ... start moving back from your monitor.