Month: February 2014
Astrology has no basis in science whatsoever, yet half of our countrymen here in America believe it is either “very scientific” or “sort of scientific.” On top of that, a quarter of Americans don’t know that Earth orbits the Sun. Research conducted by the National Science Foundation uncovered those truths and more: less than half […]
Natalie Dee, creator of the aptly named Natalie Dee comics and one half of the team behind Married to the Sea, created Natalie Dee Machine, a bot that automatically generates comics in her distinctive style. No word on how exactly it’s done, but I’d imagine Dee pre-created a bunch of illustrations and the bot Markov-chains through […]
To highlight Russia’s heightened security measures put in place to keep Sochi safe beyond the so-called “ring of steel,” NBC News filed a report from the North Caucasus on Ramzan Kadyrov, the notorious, social media-savvy ruler of the Chechen Republic. Despite his macho image, he’s also a devout Muslim who wasn’t afraid to cry when […]
Wang Bing’s doc ‘Til Madness Do Us Part will be screening at MoMA this Wednesday, as part of Documentary Fortnight 2014, the museum’s international festival of nonfiction film and media. Gleaned from 300 hours of footage, the film provides an unyielding, four-hour long look inside a mental institution in the Yunnan Province of China. Like the clip above, the […]
Andrea Hasler’s Matriarch references the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, a historic protest in which 30,000 women gathered at a British air force base to stand against nuclear weapons. According to Hasler, the work metaphorically “[takes] the notion of the tents which were on site during the women’s peace camp as the container for emotions and [humanizes] […]
The very bad Jamaican bobsled team has a very good promotional video courtesy of their country’s tourism board and the legendary music producer Sidney Mills, who has worked with the likes of Steel Pulse and Boogie Down Productions. Set to a bouncy reggae-flavored tune by Mills, we see 8-bit versions of the team cruising down […]
Soft snow at the Winter Olympics in Sochi has led to international condemnation from athletes riding the half pipe, lots of injuries, and an emergency delivery of large grain salt from Switzerland to make the slopes icy enough to compete. But today, it wasn’t the snow that was keeping events from taking place, it was […]
Leonardo DiCaprio’s rousing speech as Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street just got more rousing, if you’re into Swedish extreme metal. Behold, the Messhugah mash-up version. Really brings out the performative nuances of DiCaprio’s screaming face and that dark camaraderie of the whole chest-pounding/chanting routine, which wasn’t even part of the script, but something Matthew McConaughey does before his scenes […]
In the above grainy surveillance footage, a New York City snow plow drives down Austin Street, in Forest Hills, Queens, past the Exo Cafe, and all hell breaks loose. It looks like a small bomb going off. According to police, the plow struck a garbage can and sent it through the restaurant’s windows, sending three […]
ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original “idea sketch” next to a finished piece. This week, Jonas Lund talks about We See In Every Direction! a Web browser for collaborative, synchronized surfing made for Rhizome’s online exhibition series The Download. The idea started when Zoë Salditch invited me to do a piece for Rhizome’s The Download. […]
