Category: morning computer

The authors used Ultra-High Performance Liquid Chromatography and High Resolution Mass Spectroscopy to test for the presence of the alkaloids atropine, scopolamine, and ephedrine. Atropine and scopolamine are naturally found in the nightshade plant family, and can induce delirium, hallucinations, and altered sensory perception. Ephedrine is a stimulant derived from certain species of shrubs and pines, which can increase excitement, alertness, and physical activity. The authors detected scopolamine, ephedrine and atropine in three replicated hair samples.

The authors suggest that the presence of these alkaloids may have been due to consumption of some nightshade plants, such as mandrake (Mandragora autumnalis), henbane (Hyoscyamus albus) or thorn apple (Datura stramonium), and joint pine (Ephedra fragilis). The authors suggest that these drug plants may have been used as part of ritual ceremonies performed by a shaman.

More ancient eggs here. This is how they drugged us kids back in the Tinfoil Age.

Archaeologists with the University of Tübingen, in cooperation with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, uncovered ancient Egyptian murals depicting the zodiac signs beneath 2,000 years of grime and soot in the Temple of Esna.

Anna-Sophie Berger.

Gardening for anxiety.

This tends to reinforce modern suppositions that part of Beethoven’s ancestry was non-European, probably North African. It also contributes to our understanding of his own sense of non-typicality and outsiderness.

A recent study published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) claims to have proven a theory that air pollution inspired the painter Claude Monet to create the hazy, ethereal paintings that sparked the Impressionist movement, according to a report by CNN.

The study focuses on Monet and the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner, both of whom were active during the Industrial Revolution, which saw steam engines and coal-powered manufacturing plants emit unprecedented amounts of smoke and soot into the air.

Interesting, but seems to ignore that both artists had visual issues throughout their lives, and both developed cataracts.

Artist Kongkee and his exhibition telling a story of a long-dead Chinese poet returning to life in a cyberpunk future:

Although based on a life of immense suffering, Kongkee’s works are optimistic as he envisions a universe where redemption and reconciliation are possible. The artist shares in a statement:

I asked myself, what happens when a soul emerges after 2,000 years from underwater—does it seek out something new? Does it return to familiar places? Qu Yuan’s poetry has a psychedelic, wandering quality that I tried to reflect in my art, but I also wanted him to reflect the disorientation, as well as the hope, of our era.

John Coulthart finds scans of storied British underground magazine GANDALF’S GARDEN.

Jeff Mills has produced a new score for Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent film Metropolis.

Out now via his own Axis Records label, Metropolis Metropolis combines elements of classical and electronic music and marks the second time Mills has produced a soundtrack of the film – his previous Metropolis score came out in 2000. Where his original score was produced to fit specific scenes and moments in Lang’s original, this latest version is more influenced by the overall storyline of the film.

Headline of the day: Evidence for the existence of a deeply bound dibaryon, built entirely from beauty quarks.

Gallery: Amy Lincoln

Making ink in urban environments.

Berlin opera house closes for renovations, stages opera in Tempelhof Airport, which was closed in 2008.

Sunday’s newsletter.

Simon Reynolds pulled up a collection of lovely unusual old reggae record covers.

In Stanner’s 1956 essay, “The Dreaming“, he attempted to tease out a translation of Indigenous temporality. “The Dreaming conjures up the notion of a sacred, heroic time of the indefinitely remote past, such a time is also, in a sense, still part of the present”, he suggested. “One cannot ‘fix’ The Dreaming in time: it was, and is, everywhen.”

Everywhen.

It was a bold, memorable term. Stanner’s attempt to bring Indigenous knowledges into an Australian public discourse reflected his belief in the importance of understanding Aboriginal history and history-making.

The ARTnews guide to Cubism (and beyond):

Erin Lawlor, gallery partway down.

A new simulation shows how NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will turn back the cosmic clock, unveiling the evolving universe in ways that have never been possible before when it launches by May 2027. With its ability to rapidly image enormous swaths of space, Roman will help us understand how the universe transformed from a primordial sea of charged particles to the intricate network of vast cosmic structures we see today.

I could have called this post Swarmalators!

In 2014, Cornell researchers first introduced a simple model of swarmalators—short for “swarming oscillator”—where particles self-organize to synchronize in both time and space. In the study, “Diverse Behaviors in Non-uniform Chiral and Non-chiral Swarmalators,” which published Feb. 20 in the journal Nature Communications, they expanded this model to make it more useful for engineering microrobots; to better understand existing, observed biological behaviors; and for theoreticians to experiment in this field.

Or, indeed, Stone Of Stars:

From The New Generation Of Transcendental Painters.

Police in Peru have seized a mummified human, between 600 and 800 years old, from a former food delivery man who claimed to have had it at his home for three decades.

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The mummy was in the isothermal bag the man had once used to deliver food to people’s homes.

The man, 26-year-old Julio Cesar Bermejo, will remain in detention while investigators look into the case, a government official told AFP on Tuesday.

Bermejo told local media the mummy, who he called “Juanita,” was “like my spiritual girlfriend.”

“Like Nothing Before,” a new Norah Lorway piece, at Disquiet.

Lyraei is a musical instrument of this kind by Mihalis Shammas. It is a chordophone with magnetic pulses that excite the strings so that they vibrate continuously.

Lyraei – Mihalis Shammas – Intimate Open Studios #2 from iii on Vimeo.

In these (electro-acoustic) compositions, Endean combines the sound of her clarinet with various sounds from her archive, microtonal humming, Leslie speakers ( ‘as a way to spin my bass clarinet around the microphones’), e-bows, magnets, binaural microphone feedback, and field recordings.

When artists like Allan Kaprow and Claes Oldenburg were filling rooms with bizarro installations composed of tires, knickknacks, and trash, Paik was utilizing TV monitors, whose images he would torque into abstractions using magnets. TV was a new technology at the time, and Paik’s was a new kind of art, so naturally, it confused almost everyone. To many critics at the time, his shows seemed like nothing more than rooms full of broken TVs.

Paik was short-circuiting a form of media associated with a one-way stream of information. Here’s how Paik once described his works involving televisual material: “I use technology in order to hate it properly.” Consider this film a reminder that, barring only Jean-Luc Godard, no other 20th-century artist was better at speaking about their work using pithy one-liners.

New Richard Skelton record on the way. “The LP was recorded in the watchlands around the Kielder Observatory.” “Watchlands” is a term I haven’t come across before, and Google is not finding any usage of the term previous to the announcement of this record. I am very curious about this.

A British magazine from 1898-1900 all about poster art, right in the middle of Art Nouveau.

In the 1930s, Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn, mystic and founder of the multidisciplinary Eranos forum, began compiling a diverse visual archive that would allow dreamers to cross-reference their visions with the entirety of cultural history. Frederika Tevebring explores this grandiose undertaking and its effect on the archivist, as images from the collection began to blur with her psyche.