A video essay by
Kirby Ferguson
The real fight over AI art
You’ve probably heard about the AI that can make any image you want. With these, anyone can make art in seconds. Artists, understandably, have concerns about that. This technology has quickly become VERY controversial.
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What You Skip When You Hit ‘Skip Intro’
Back in 2017, streaming companies introduced the skip intro button. Their motive wasn’t secret: frictionless binging. Come take a dive into the evolutionary journey of this odd vestigial prestige limb of the streaming era.
Monotype’s Marie Boulanger on the nostalgic power of typography in The French Dispatch
Type designer and Monotype brand designer Marie Boulanger was one of the many creatives to be impressed by Wes Anderson’s latest movie, The French Dispatch. And with her keen eye for all things typographic, she’s noticed the hidden world of the film’s incredible type design.
Greta Thunberg Has Given Up on Politicians. But Not You.
Why are we asking a teenager how to solve the climate crisis? “It’s absurd,” says Greta Thunberg, in an Opinion Video guest essay, that we are asking her to answer this question. Even more absurd, she argues, “is the fact that the climate and ecological emergency is being reduced to a problem that needs to be fixed.” On Tuesday, evidence of what Thunberg calls the “political and economic failure” to address climate change was on full display when the United Nations released their annual report detailing “the difference between where greenhouse emissions are predicted to be in 2030 and where they should be to avert the worst impacts of climate change.” The report paints a bleak picture of missed targets and pledges that don’t go far enough. In her video guest essay, Thunberg criticizes the presidents, prime ministers, kings and queens attempting to wield her image for their own political gain. The animated video offers a unique window into the life of the 18-year-old Swedish activist. “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you!? You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” Thunberg famously said to the United Nations. Our video unpacks the experience of being transformed into an icon; the experience of being Greta Thunberg. And Thunberg is correct — selfies and hashtags won’t save the planet. And yet, she still believes humanity has not failed. In a rising ocean of troubling news, she has managed to hold on to hope. Hope, not from politicians and leaders, but from ordinary people. The masses, she argues, have the power to create change. As political powers head to Glasgow next week for COP26, Thunberg has a message to those of us not going to Scotland: “Hope comes from people, from democracy, from you.” “It’s up to you and me,” she says. “No one else will do it for us.”
Two Sides of the Border: Reimagining the Mexico-US region
The shared histories, cultures and economics of the US and Mexico through the lens of architecture and design.
Under the direction of Mexican architect Tatiana Bilbao, thirteen architecture studios and students across the United States and Mexico undertook the monumental task of attempting to capture the complex and dynamic region of the US/Mexican border. Two Sides of the Border envisions the borderland through five themes: migration, housing and cities, creative industries, local production, tourism, and territorial economies. Building on a long-shared history in the region, the projects covered in this volume use design and architecture to address social, political, and ecological concerns along the shared border.
Find the book here:
https://www.lars-mueller-publishers.com/two-sides-border
More about the topic
https://monocle.com/radio/shows/monocle-on-design/extra-246/
Two Swipes Right
Tinder and Photography a Kasia Łoś exhibition
The photographs presented at the Two Swipes Right exhibition at TA3 Gallery are the first of its kind in Poland. Kasia Łoś’s photos document her meeting with men she met thanks to the popular Tinder dating application. The artist visited her heroes in their apartments, crossing the barrier of a perfect virtual world and her comfort zone. Armed with a camera-shield, she entered the personal space of strangers, where she could get to know their more credible self, often different from the photos they themselves published in the application. During the project lasting over a year, the artist made several dozen shots – portraits, interiors and personal objects. Black-and-white, high-contrast images bring to mind the sociological works of Zofia Rydet, and are also associated with the somewhat brutalist style of Nan Goldin, capturing the uncensored nightlife of New York. Kasia Łoś uses photography to meet other people and record the accompanying tension.
Visit the exhibition in Warsaw until end of July
Galeria Ta3 / Kamienica Artystyczna Ta3 / Tarczyńska 3 / Warszawa Ochota
https://www.facebook.com/events/1336427930074667?ref=newsfeed
Aldo Rossi -The Architect and the Cities
A retrospective on the extraordinary theoretical and practical contribution of an “unusual architect”. On display materials from archives and collections from all over the world.
Aldo Rossi (3 May 1931 – 4 September 1997) was an Italian architect and designer who achieved international recognition in four distinct areas: architectural theory, drawing and design and also product design. He was one of the leading exponents of the postmodern movement.
He was the first Italian to receive the Pritzker Prize for architecture.
More about this in Wallpaper Aldo Rossi: Work and legacy celebrated.
Why captchas are getting harder
It’s not you — captchas really are getting harder. The worst part is that you’re partly to blame. A captcha is a simple test that intends to distinguish between humans and computers. While the test itself is simple, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. The answers we give captchas end up being used to make AI smarter, thus ratcheting up the difficulty of future captcha tests. But captchas can be broken by hackers. The tests we’re most familiar with already have been broken. Captcha makers try to stay ahead of the curve but have to balance increasing the difficulty of the test with making sure any person on earth — regardless of age, education, language, etc. — can still pass it. And eventually, they might have to phase out the test almost entirely.
Read more about captchas from the Verge: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/1/182…
Subscribe to Vox channel! http://goo.gl/0bsAjO Vox.com is a news website that helps you cut through the noise and understand what’s really driving the events in the headlines.
Check out http://www.vox.com.
99% of Ocean Plastic Pollution is “missing”
For the past several years scientists have been trying to account for the 8 million metric tonnes of plastic that we dump into the ocean each year. The assumption was that a large portion of it was floating out in one of the large garbage patches, where swirling debris accumulates thanks to ocean gyres. But recent measurements of the amount of trash in the patches fell far short of what’s thought to be out there. Scientists are getting closer to an answer, which could help clean-up efforts and prevent further damage to marine life and ocean ecosystems.
For more reading, check out this New Yorker article on the missing plastic problem, which inspired this video: Where does all the plastic go?
More information: vox.com
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