Sincerely apologizing on my end for the lack of updates/posts on the site for the last month +. As in the case of small operations like Losmosis, sometimes life-interferences can add up and put a halt on things. Just a little reassurance that we’re coming back soon (aiming for within the next 7 days or the first week of Dec at the latest) with all the mental stimulation you’ve come to expect.
Black Panther: The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas traces the graphic art made by Emory Douglas while he worked as minister of culture for the Black Panther Party from 1967 until its discontinuation in the early 1980s. Douglas’s powerful visuals helped define the trademark visual style of the group’s newspapers, posters, and pamphlets. Douglas’s substantial body of work exists as a powerful graphic record of the Black Panthers’ legacy, reflecting their development and evolving mission to improve the lives of African Americans by calling for resistance and change, as well providing social services to their communities. With a firm understanding of the need to disseminate information and communicate the party’s agenda visually, Douglas’s bold illustrations and striking images spoke forcefully to a community ravaged by poverty, police brutality, and poor living conditions. With unmistakable humanism, Douglas portrayed a populace that was emerging from segregation and proudly fighting to assert their rights to equality.
Really love the bit posted on Cyana about the Emory Douglas exhibit at the New Museum in New York. Seeing his work now, it’s fairly evident the inspiration his style and sense of commentary in many of the prominent street artists today.
The City Dark is a feature documentary about light pollution and the disappearance of the night. The film follows filmmaker Ian Cheney, who moves to New York City and discovers skies almost completely devoid of stars. Posing a deceptively simple question — why do we need the night? — he leads viewers no quest to understand what is lost in the glare of city lights.
Upon one of the first things I noticed when I moved to Los Angeles was the inability to see the stars in the sky. Of course the city has plenty to offer to compensate, but that dull tint that covers the night skyline of heavy urban environments is still a sad thing. Looking forward to this flick.
Proof that photographer and director are not one in the same. Mute this video less you want to hear something not unlike a Goo Goo Dolls song. If this is all what “living” covers are about, then save for the glorious resolution of the Red Camera, there’s not much beyond some weird borderline territory of shitty music video and softcore porn. To top it all off, the actual cover of “the sexiest woman alive” just plain.. sucks. Color me disappointed.
Thanks to Kottke for finding this gem from the past. A Philip Glass composed piece that aired on Sesame Street to stimulate learning in children. My aunt just had a baby and it’s only now I realize just how wonderfully deranged the world of children learning videos are.
Every day, in a city the size of London, 30 million meals are served. But where does all the food come from? Architect Carolyn Steel discusses the daily miracle of feeding a city, and shows how ancient food routes shaped the modern world. Understanding the flow of food will help us reconnect with what we eat. (Recorded at TEDGlobal, July 2009, Oxford, UK. Duration: 15:41)
If you’ve been to a summer house party within the last two years, there’s a high chance you’ve probably heard a Girl Talk track at some point — infectious multi-snippetted jams that blend and recontextualize samples into an almost elevated form of the mash-up. Jonah Lehrer breaks down Girl Talk’s work from a neurological perspective, proposing that the mash-up song is an apt metaphor for the production of new ideas in working memory.
Let’s say you’re listening to that catchy Wu-Tang song, with the chorus “And let’s start it like this, son, rollin’ with this one / And that one, pullin’ out gats for fun”. Once the acoustic snippet enters working memory, individual neurons in the prefrontal cortex will fire in response to the stimulus – they are the neural representation of the song. Here’s where things get interesting: even when the stimulus disappears – you’ve now started listening to a different song, perhaps that Boston song “Foreplay/Long Time” – those working memory cells continue to fire. They’re still holding on to the Wu-Tang clip, which is why working memory is a type of memory. This echo of activity only lasts for a few seconds, but it’s long enough so that our thoughts get blended together, as seemingly unrelated sensations overlap. (Scientists refer to this as RAM-like activity, since these brain cells are acting just like random access memory in a computer, which is rewritable temporary storage that allows multitasking.) The end result is that prefrontal neurons start to form connections that have never existed before. We can imagine how Wu-Tang and Boston might sound as a mash-up, if only because working memory allows the samples to intersect in the frontal cortex. From the perspective of the brain, such new ideas are merely old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
