Letters Remain

Category: art

  • Prediction Markets for the Oscars, Golden Globes, Emmys, and More

    Each year I get caught up in the big film and television awards, trying to watch as many as possible and speculating on the various winners. I just discovered Gold Derby, a fun site for following and predicting the Hollywood ‘races’ yourself. Gold Derby takes predictions on everything from the Oscars to RuPaul’s Drag Race,…

  • How to Title Your Work

    Written as advice to visual artists (painters, sculptors, etc.), How to title your art is half rallying cry half tutorial on why and how you should give your art a title. As Claudia Dawson said in Recommendo, the guidance is useful for anyone who writes titles or headlines. Some points that stuck out for me:

  • A Visual Technique Library for Film Shots

    From the common to the lesser-seen cinematographic techniques, Eyecandy is a “visual technique library” for film shots. A database of over 5,000 GIFs, organised into around 100 different techniques, you select the technique and you get a short description and a wall of example clips. While I love movies, I’m certainly a cinematography neophyte, so…

  • Music Theory, Language Transfer, and the Thinking Method

    I’ve wanted to learn music theory for a number of years, but have never found a source that’s both engaging and educating. That is, until now, thanks to Language Transfer’s music theory course. For a while now, whenever I’ve read an article or post about language learning, someone in the comments invariably praises Language Transfer…

  • Art in 140 Characters

    Is it possible to encode and compress an image to such a degree that the raw data can fit in a single Twitter message (140 characters) that, when decoded again, is still recognisable? The answer to the questions is a resounding Yes, as confirmed by a coding challenge inspired by Mario Klingemann’s attempt to compress…

  • Art Forgeries and the Uncanny Valley

    In the third instalment of the Bamboozling Ourselves series (a look at the master Vermeer forger, Han van Meegeren), Errol Morris interviews the author of The Forger’s Spell, Edward Dolnick, and the two discuss the application of the uncanny valley in the forgery of art. I particularly like Dolnick’s thoughts on the hindrance of expertise (final paragraph of…

  • Why We Make Lists

    One of the current exhibitions being held in the Musée du Louvre, Paris has been curated by author and consistent top intellectual, Umberto Eco. The Infinity of Lists, as the exhibition is called, looks at the human fascination with lists and how they have progressed cultures. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It…

  • Your Job as an Artist

    Andrew Keen, the so-called Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley, tackles his common ground of technology and creativity in a piece from the Telegraph where he hopes to discover Why are Artists so Poor? After a bit of Twittering, Andrew found that his: responses extended to everything from lucid one-worders like “oversupply” to philosophical tweets such as…

  • In Defense of Sampling: Why Stealing is Inspiring

    Audio sampling in contemporary music is a form of budding innovation that proves not only the evolution of the industry, but a method to build on creative works that inspire us.  The practice of sampling is common in most creative industries, but often less obvious than it is in music.  Music sampling happens to receive…

  • Art and the Brain

    Jonah Lehrer, a neuroscientist and writer I’ve mentioned many times, has a wonderful article in Psychology Today that looks at the field of neuroaesthetics and how the brain interprets art. All the adjectives we use to describe art-vague words like “beauty” and “elegance”-should, in theory, have neural correlates. According to these scientists, there is nothing…