February 3, 2012
Larry Cuba (b. 1950) is a computer-animation artist who became active in the late 1970s and early 80s. Born in Atlanta, he did his Master’s Degree at California Institute of the Arts which includes parallel schools of Dance, Music, Film, Theater, Fine Arts, and Writing.
In 1975, early computer animator John Whitney, Sr. invited Cuba to be the programmer on one of his films. The result of this collaboration was ‘Arabesque.’ Subsequently, Cuba produced three more computer-animated films: ‘3/78 (Objects and Transformations),’ ‘Two Space,’ and ‘Calculated Movements.’ Cuba also provided computer graphics for ‘Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope’ in 1977. His animation of the Death Star is shown to pilots in the Rebel Alliance.
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February 3, 2012
John Whitney (1917 – 1995) was an American animator, composer and inventor, widely considered to be one of the fathers of computer animation. Whitney was born in Pasadena, California and attended Pomona College. His first works in film were 8 mm movies of a lunar eclipse which he made using a homemade telescope. In 1937-38 he spent a year in Paris, studying twelve-tone composition under French composer Rene Leibowitz. In 1939 he returned to America and began to collaborate with his brother James on a series of abstract films.
During the 1950s Whitney used his mechanical animation techniques to create sequences for television programs and commercials. In 1952 he directed engineering films on guided missile projects. One of his most famous works from this period was the animated title sequence from Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film ‘Vertigo,’ which he collaborated on with the graphic designer Saul Bass.
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February 3, 2012
Spirograph is a geometric drawing toy that produces mathematical curves of the variety technically known as hypotrochoids and epitrochoids. The term has also been used to describe a variety of software applications that display similar curves, and applied to the class of curves that can be produced with the drawing equipment (so in this sense it may be regarded as a synonym of hypotrochoid).
The name is a registered trademark of Hasbro, Inc. Drawing toys based on gears have been around since at least 1908, when The Marvelous Wondergraph was advertised in the Sears catalog. The ‘Boys Mechanic’ publication of 1913 had an article describing how to make a Wondergraph drawing machine. An instrument called a spirograph was invented by the mathematician Bruno Abakanowicz between 1881 and 1900 for calculating an area delimited by curves. The Spirograph toy was developed by the British engineer Denys Fisher, who exhibited it in 1965 at the Nuremberg International Toy Fair. In 1968, Kenner introduced Spirotot, a less complex version of Spirograph, for preschool-age children, too young for Spirograph.
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February 2, 2012
Steve McQueen (1930 – 1980) was an American movie actor. He was nicknamed ‘The King of Cool.’ His ‘anti-hero’ persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s.
His popular films include ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Great Escape,’ ‘The Thomas Crown Affair,’ ‘Bullitt,’ ‘The Getaway,’ ‘Papillon,’ and ‘The Towering Inferno.’ In 1974, he became the highest-paid movie star in the world. Although McQueen was combative with directors and producers, his popularity put him in high demand and enabled him to command large salaries.
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February 2, 2012
Charles Bronson (1921 – 2003), born Charles Dennis Buchinsky was an American actor, best-known for such films as ‘Once Upon a Time in the West,’ ‘The Magnificent Seven,’ ‘The Dirty Dozen,’ ‘The Great Escape,’ ‘Rider on the Rain,’ ‘The Mechanic,’ and the popular ‘Death Wish’ series.
He often cast in the role of a police officer or gunfighter, often in revenge-oriented plot lines.
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January 31, 2012
15 minutes of fame is short-lived, often ephemeral, media publicity or celebrity of an individual or phenomenon. The expression was coined by Andy Warhol, who said in 1968 that ‘In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.’ The phenomenon is often used in reference to figures in the entertainment industry or other areas of popular culture, such as reality TV and YouTube. It is believed that the statement was an adaption of a theory of Marshall McLuhan, explaining the differences of media, where TV differs much from other media using contestants.
The expression is a paraphrase of a line in Warhol’s catalog for a 1968 exhibit at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. In 1979 Warhol reiterated his claim, ‘…my prediction from the sixties finally came true: In the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.’ Becoming bored with continually being asked about this particular statement, Warhol attempted to confuse interviewers by changing the statement variously to ‘In the future 15 people will be famous’ and ‘In 15 minutes everybody will be famous.’
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January 30, 2012
Six degrees of separation refers to the idea that everyone is on average approximately six steps away, by way of introduction, from any other person on Earth, so that a chain of, ‘a friend of a friend’ statements can be made, on average, to connect any two people in six steps or fewer.
It was originally set out by Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy and popularized by a play written by John Guare.
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January 30, 2012
Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions—in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed. The phrases in her works often include use of pronouns such as ‘you,’ ‘your,’ ‘I,’ ‘we,’ and ‘they.’ Much of Kruger’s work engages the merging of found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark white letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read ‘I shop therefore I am,’ and ‘Your body is a battleground.’
Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. Kruger juxtaposes imagery and text critical of sexism; the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in her work. A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. The importance of appropriation art in contemporary culture lay in its ability to play with preponderant imagistic and textual conventions: to mash up meanings and create new ones.
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January 29, 2012
A lava lamp is a novelty light that contains blobs of colored wax inside a glass vessel filled with clear liquid. The wax rises and falls as its density changes due to heating from an incandescent light bulb underneath the vessel. Briton Edward Craven-Walker invented the lava lamp in 1963; it was originally called the ‘Astro Lamp.’
The wax is transparent, translucent or opaque mix of mineral oil, paraffin wax and carbon tetrachloride. The density of common wax is much lower than that of water and would float on top under any temperature. However, the carbon tetrachloride is heavier than water (also nonflammable and miscible with wax), and is added to the wax to make its density at room temperature slightly higher than that of the water.
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January 27, 2012
The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is an annual four day music festival created and produced by Superfly Productions and AC Entertainment, held at Great Stage Park on a 700-acre farm in Manchester, Tennessee. It hosted its tenth annual event in 2011. The main attractions of the festival are the multiple stages of live music, featuring a diverse array of musical styles including indie rock, world music, hip hop, jazz, bluegrass, country music, folk, gospel, reggae, electronica, and other alternative music. The festival began with a primary focus on jam bands, but has diversified greatly in recent years. The festival features craftsmen and artisans selling unique products, food and drink vendors, a comedy tent, a silent disco, and a cinema tent, and a Ferris wheel.
The word Bonnaroo, popularized by New Orleans R&B singer Dr. John with his 1974 album ‘Desitively Bonnaroo,’ means ‘a really good time.’ It is a Ninth Ward slang construction taken from the French ‘bon’ meaning ‘good,’ and ‘rue’ from the French ‘street,’ translating to ‘the best on the streets.’ The name was chosen both for its literal meaning and to honor the rich Louisiana music tradition. The first Bonnaroo took place in 2002 and took inspiration from music festivals like Coachella in California and Glastonbury in England.
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January 26, 2012
Patrick Nagel (1945 – 1984) was an American artist. He created popular illustrations on board, paper, and canvas, most of which emphasize the simple grace of and beauty of the female form, in a distinctive style descended from Art Deco. He is best known for his illustrations for ‘Playboy’ magazine, and the pop group Duran Duran, for whom he designed the cover of the best selling album ‘Rio.’ Nagel would start with a photograph and work down, always simplifying and removing elements which he felt were unnecessary. The resulting image would look flat, but emphasized those elements which he felt were most important. Nagel’s figures generally have black hair, bright white skin, full-lipped mouths, and the distinctive Nagel eyes, which are often squared off in the later works.
According to Elena G. Millie, curator of the poster collection at the Library of Congress: ‘Like some of the old print masters (Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard, for example), Nagel was influenced by the Japanese woodblock print, with figures silhouetted against a neutral background, with strong areas of black and white, and with bold line and unusual angles of view. He handled colors with rare originality and freedom; he forced perspective from flat, two-dimensional images; and he kept simplifying, working to get more across with fewer elements. His simple and precise imagery is also reminiscent of the art-deco style of the 1920s and 1930s- its sharp linear treatment, geometric simplicity, and stylization of form yield images that are formal yet decorative.’
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January 26, 2012
Derek Vincent Smith (b. 1983), better known as Pretty Lights, is an American electronic music artist. Smith wrote and produced hip hop music while attending high school in Fort Collins, Colorado, but the music of such artists as Aphrodite attracted him to American raves. After graduating from high school, he attended University of Colorado at Boulder, but dropped out during his freshman year to focus instead on his music. Smith’s music relies heavily on digital sampling and crosses many genres, forming a combination of ‘glitchy hip-hop beats, buzzing synth lines, and vintage funk and soul samples, sometimes grime.’
Pretty Lights’ sound is generated by synthesizing samples and organic beats using the Novation X-Station, monome, and the Akai MPD32. Smith uses these digital controllers to program the music production software Ableton Live 8. Due to the sample-based nature of his music, Smith releases all his music for free with a recommended donation, so as to avoid having to clear samples. When performing live, Smith uses two Macbook Pros running Ableton Live 8 and two Akai MPD32s.
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