Many of us think that we inhabit a linear, coherent, anthropocentric world. Agnieszka Kurant rejects this simplistic belief. Today’s world is increasingly being shaped by a multitude of intelligent agents: some are human, but most are not. They are animals, of course, but also microorganisms, viruses, minerals and algorithms. They do not exist in silos. They hybridise, they waver between the biological, the mineral and the digital, the natural and the artificial, the living and the non-living.
For the first time, state-of-the-art biomechanics technology has allowed us to scientifically measure just how deadly are two iconic Aboriginal weapons.
In First Weapons, an ABC TV series aired last year, host Phil Breslin tested out a range of Indigenous Australian weapons. Among these were two striking weapons—the paired leangle and parrying shield, and the kodj.
A research team led by Assistant Professor Makoto Miyoshi of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) has independently re-analyzed observation data of the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy obtained and published by the international joint observation project Event Horizon Telescope (EHT). They found that the structure is slightly elongated in the east-west direction.
A passage in the Norse “Sverris Saga,” the 800-year-old story of King Sverre Sigurdsson, describes a military raid that occurred in AD 1197, during which a body was thrown into a well at Sverresborg Castle, outside Trondheim in central Norway, likely as an attempt to poison the main water source for the local inhabitants.
A new study published in iScience on October 25 describes how researchers used ancient DNA to corroborate the events of the saga and discover details about the “Well-man,” blending history and archaeology with science and setting a precedent for future research on historical figures.
“This is the first time that a person described in these historical texts has actually been found,” says Professor Michael D. Martin of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s University Museum in Trondheim, Norway.
You can also sense the apparent vacuum of animated discourse about aesthetics – what you could call a lack of an avant-garde, although metaphors of conquest feel inappropriate here. Nuanced conversations are happening, of course – but “underground,” offline, or in private forums like Discords and group chats. (To paraphrase critic Caroline Busta, you won’t find counterculture on Instagram.) These nonpublic networks are what tech blogger Venkatesh Rao calls the “cozyweb.” It’s a refuge from the “dark forest” of the open internet, a corporate superfund site stalked by bots, trolls, censors, hackers, scammers, aggregators, and advertisers. Why is the forest silent at night? Not because it’s empty – but because there are predators. The platform still known as Twitter used to fuel a kind of discourse, but lately, it’s gotten risky to really spill your guts where your hot-headed or empty-headed bons mots get stamped into the public record for eternity (much like Holzer’s laughable series of Trump tweets stamped into chunks of lead) and can lead to physical threats
Is art going in circles? Is it looking backwards? Definitely. These maneuvers are tactical. This is contemporary art as refuge. Tapped to entertain in art’s castles, artists and curators find it more strategic to retell old stories, reprise old work, rehash old battles, and pine for old peace. Contemporary art is cozy art in a dark forest. The fire is in the hearth.
that to simply mirror reality is to lose the purpose of art. Art exists to mediate our experience. Art makes sense of our world; it doesn’t simply regurgitate it back to us. The “omnicrisis” will not be solved by the tactics of the omnicrisis.
The miniature fireplaces are the remarkably preserved remains of two ritual events dating back 500 generations.
Nowhere else on Earth have archaeological expressions of a very specific cultural practice known from ethnography, yet traceable so far back, previously been found.
But the humble cave painting discovered in Indonesia is the oldest known narrative artwork ever made by human hands, dating back more than 51,000 years, new research said on Wednesday.
“This is the oldest evidence of storytelling,” Maxime Aubert, an archaeologist at Australia’s Griffith University, told AFP.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
It’s time to move on, toward whatever happens next.
A recent discovery by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) confirmed that luminous, very red objects previously detected in the early universe upend conventional thinking about the origins and evolution of galaxies and their supermassive black holes.
An international team, led by Penn State researchers, using the NIRSpec instrument aboard JWST as part of the RUBIES survey identified three mysterious objects in the early universe, about 600–800 million years after the Big Bang, when the universe was only 5% of its current age.
I had no idea this record even existed.
Things were not looking up in 1974. From oil-crisis-induced austerity to Watergate in the US, the West was undergoing a pan-cultural nervous breakdown. Bad vibes abounded at every turn; the hippie dream deferred, as clear in the headlines as in Hollywood. But no cultural document captures that era’s transitional unease better than June 1, 1974, an art rock meeting-of-the-minds that placed luminaries Kevin Ayers, John Cale, Nico and Brian Eno before a bewildered live audience at London’s Rainbow Theatre. Released fifty years ago this month, its potency – and oddness – remains intact.
QUOTE OF THE DAY:
… her hard-won victories over the excellent carnage of being young.
Iwagumi is a Japanese term that refers to the methodical arrangement of rocks in aquascaping. Usually taking on the form of bold, weighty stones resting among each other in opposition to open, airy surroundings, the distinctive art form appreciates and showcases the humble beauty of rocks. For the tenth edition of the i Light Singapore art festival in Marina Bay, art and technology studio ENESS pays homage to the creative tradition with a major installation titled Iwagumi Air Space.
Kate Carr’s new album is a ‘sonic transect’ across London. She slices the city from her Loughborough Junction home out west to Staines and east to Slade Green, travelling on public transport and recording as she goes. Her work is based around field recordings, which morph into electronic tracks, distortion emerging across the stereo spectrum from bus and train noise, and blending back into the sounds of the places she visits.
In this new quarterly column, I’m going to be getting to the heart of this resurgence in traditional and folk music, focussing particularly on those practitioners who possess a progressive energy, whether in sound or philosophy. I call it a resurgence, rather than a ‘revival’, for a reason. Just because more mainstream attention is increasingly being drawn to those performing traditional music, does not mean that they have ever been absent.
they were in fact taken in 1924 by Minya Diéz-Dührkoop, and they show the “masks” – actually intricately constructed and dazzlingly inventive full-body costumes – made and worn by German dancers Lavinia Schulz and Walter Holdt for their own performances in the early 1920s. T
The collection of texts that make up Nos Invisibles purport to channel, via Briatte (or indeed Charles d’Orino), the voices of Honoré de Balzac, Emile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, Alphonse de Lamartine, and other illustrious writers and thinkers from beyond the grave — the authenticity of which, readers can determine for themselves.
Nitrate film stopped being used in the early 1950s. What had once been the industry standard was replaced by a variety of “safety” film stocks, so named because they, unlike their predecessor, were not prone to spontaneous combustion into inextinguishable fire. A festival dedicated to the projection of nitrate film will inevitably hit a historical limit. Every year at the Nitrate Picture Show, hosted by the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, the prints get older and more brittle. At some not-too-distant point in the future, it will become impossible to run the festival at all.
I liked this bon mot from later on in the piece:
In his opening remarks, Festival Director Peter Bagrov quipped that an “esteemed colleague” likened the festival to “spoiled billionaires eating extinct animals.”
“From the perspective of simulating the warp drive dynamically, the key challenge is stability,” the authors explain. Equations show that the Alcubierre Drive can initiate a warp bubble using the Einstein Equation, but no known equations can sustain it.
“There is (to our knowledge) no known equation of state that would maintain the warp drive metric in a stable configuration over time. Therefore, while one can require that initially, the warp bubble is constant, it will quickly evolve away from that state, and, in most cases, the warp fluid and spacetime deformations will disperse or collapse into a central point.”
Though instability is a prime obstacle to warp drives, it’s also what could make them detectable.
After analyzing the remains of 64 ancient sacrificed individuals, most of whom were children, researchers have revealed new details about human sacrifice at the ancient Maya site of Chichén Itzá.
Published in Nature, these results show that contrary to popular belief, every one of the ritually sacrificed individuals was male. Additionally, many of them were closely related, including two pairs of identical twins, evoking important themes of Mayan mythology.
These ancient genomes also show that despite European colonialism, the genetic legacy of the ancient Maya continues in today’s Indigenous people from the region.
