curation

Not the output of a machine-learning algorithm (check those out here, here, here and here) alone but rather a collaborative effort between human artist and robot that demonstrates that the two types of intelligences together are better than at odds, artist Isabel Kim’s Infinite Artwork Simulator project generates such absurdity precisely because the descriptions—for all their airs—strike one as perfectly plausible and something one could find attached to any item in a gallery or modern museum collection. Check out more of these formulaic recipes whose ingredients generally call for a pinch of something from pop culture, a bit of art history, a bit of cultural appropriation, plus something edgy to yield a useful blurb at Hyperallergic at the link above

star-crossed

A century after it was first conceived, the very personal tale of a forbidden romance between a human and an elf which the author struggled to complete over the span of his entire literary career, has been stitched together and edited by JRR Tolkien’s son and collaborator, Christopher, and is available as a stand-alone book. Set during the first age of Middle Earth and whose ill-fated love are alluded to as legend in other works, the mortal man Beren and the immortal elvish maiden Lúthien are faced with difficult choices, unsupportive parents asking the impossible and werewolves and is an allegory for Tolkien own difficult courtship. Though the project defied completion in Tolkien’s life time, the author’s burial plot that he shares with his wife Edith also bears the inscription Lúthien and Beren.

an inconvenient alternative

Due to revelations that you may have heard tell of, Al Gore’s sequel to his sobering, Academy Award-winning environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth will be treated to a quick recut.
While the feature is being updated ahead of its postponed, late summer box-office release date to reflect Dear Leader’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, audiences in select cities across the US will be treated to free screenings of the current version of An Inconvenient Sequel. The brutish wrongheadedness of his woefully unpopular stance is reflective of a hypocritical, insincere romancing of the Rust Belt and jobs that cannot and will not be brought back (advanced, clean technologies are surely offering better paying careers and would have been more sustainable for communities had Dear Leader not forfeited that opportunity), even if the regime were genuine in its concern over them.

dreamtime stories

No—that’s not an incident of pareidolia nor even an example of an acheiropoieton that you’re seeing but rather an apartment complex in Melbourne, completed in 2015, called the “Portrait.”
Architects designed the façade of balconies to form the image, when viewed at a distance, of Beruk (Anglicised as William Barak) son of Bebejan who was the last traditional tribal elder (ngurungæta) of the aboriginal inhabitants, the Wurundjeri clan, of the lands that host the present-day metropolis. Barak, who died in 1903, dedicated his life to fighting for aboriginal social justice causes and was an important informant of his people’s folklore and mythology. Of course such a tribute has no pretensions of amending the grievous suffering that the Aborigines experienced because of European settlement but perhaps the edifice is at least edifying enough to inspire curiosity and move people not to just examine these darker chapters but also the heritage and culture of the population the portrait represents.

liturgy

The Ancient Greeks had a nominal system of taxes and tithes that helped promote trade and kept the polis able to operate on a day-to-day basis (compare to Rome whose wealthiest oligarch, Pompey the Great, accumulated all that treasure by owning the city’s fire department and extorting), but the financing of extraordinary expenditures—like emergency repairs to roadworks or bridges, a new amphitheatre, public festivals or even defensive actions fell exclusively to the super-rich to shoulder as their public duty and social obligation.
Not only were the wealthy eager to pay a progressive tax that needed no enforcement, theirs was also the oversight and execution of the liturgical (λῃτουργία, meaning public-service) tasks that they took responsibility for. The best technical counsel and artisans would be employed to make sure that their benefaction and charity optimised the welfare for all, since those whom delivered inferior public-works were as roundly condemned as those who were perceived to be tight with their money and horded wealth for its own sake. If one donor was feeling particularly put upon and suspected his fellow associates were poor-mouthing and shirking their duties, the former could issue a challenge: the later either take up the liturgy or submit to a tribute to determine who was richer—failing to answer that summons would result in the two parties exchanging estates. What do you think? The received representative democracy is certainly very different from the politics of the agora but maybe technology has advanced sufficiently to manage all the voices crying out to be heard without falling into mob-rule and disorder. I suspect, however, that we still need saving from ourselves. Such a voluntary taxation regimen seems appealing, but I do wonder if the same template could be applied without the engagement and participation of every single citizen and whether we’ve not—considering the mutual levels of distrust and distaste for politicians (professional or otherwise)—already to a person been designated denizens and guest-workers for the ruling-class.

stonewalled

Whilst some seem to have as much of a problem acknowledging truths outside of their default level of ignorance or denial, others are making it free to be you and me with the Republic of Ireland is managing to elect its first openly gay (and half Indian) Taoiseach, and heart-warmingly a devoted couple of male vultures residents at a zoo in Amsterdam, as Dave Log v 3.0 informs, have adopted and hatched a chick, keepers having given the frustrated but diligent and caring pair an egg that was rejected by another bird. Dear Leader has predictably remained silent on the matter of declaring the month of June as pride month, allowing his Number One Daughter to usher in a celebration for the sodomites.