DW Documentary (April 28, 2023) – Pakistan’s Sindh region is one of the cradles of human civilization. It’s seen as the homeland of the Indus Valley Civilization, an advanced Bronze Age civilization. But the events of 1947 brought drastic change to the cultural landscape of the Sindh.
The 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent into India and Pakistan was devastating for those living in the Sindh region. Most were Hindus and fled to India, as the area was completely assigned to Pakistan. Many Muslims from India then resettled in Sindh and changed the face of this region, whose cultural heritage had been formed over centuries.
Suddenly, the Hindus who remained found themselves in the minority. Many members of the Sindhi community are now scattered across the globe. They’re making every effort to preserve the old stories and traditions and are proud of their legacy as descendants of one of the oldest human civilizations.
The Local Project – (April 28, 2023) – Inside an heirloom home, unification lies at the centre. In designing Wainscott Residence, Bates Masi + Architects considers the fabric of the area and the immediate and future needs of the house.
Video timeline:00:00 – Introduction to the Heirloom Home 00:22 – The Salt Box 00:47 – Acknowledging the Culture of Place 00:57 – The Brief 01:40 – A Walkthrough of the Heirloom Home 02:06 – The Art Cube 02:39 – Intertwining Domestic and Vacation Living 02:58 – The Future Needs of the Materials 03:41 – The Interiors Palette 04:07 – Unifying the Home and Immersing in its Surrounds 04:55 – Coming Together to Form One Voice
Its structure and materiality connect the residing family to the landscape, art and heritage of the area, whilst also bringing them together through considered multigenerational living. Bates Masi + Architects thoughtfully responds to the needs of the future home’s inhabitants, who came with a desire to display a significant art collection inside an heirloom home, to maintain views of the landscape and to house their two adult children as the family grows.
This forms the basis of the residence’s distinct structure, which is made of three individual volumes that operate just as seamlessly separately as they do together. Wainscott Residence reveals what lies inside an heirloom home. It is inherently linked to the surrounding landscape, dominated by picturesque green lawns, trees and a distant skyline that give a fresh, vibrant feel that is echoed in the coveted art collection. The southern aspect connects to the surroundings; every south-facing room opens up to the outside, with the doors pocketed into the walls so that the house can be completely unified with the landscape.
The Art Newspaper April 27, 2023: This week: AI and art. We explore some of the key aspects relating to artificial intelligence and its use in the art world: the works being made using AI technologies and exploring their impact; anxieties about machines replacing humans; the idea of AIs being able to think and create independently; and whether we can truly grasp the significance and possible effects of the technologies and those who control it, and more.
Host Ben Luke talks to Noam Segal—an associate curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, whose focus is on technology-based art—about AI, its history in art, its social and environmental effects, and how artists are using it today. The Art Newspaper’s live editor, Aimee Dawson, talks to the artist and writer Gretchen Andrew about making art with AI and together they explore its wider application across the art world.
And this episode’s Work of the Week is Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, an image made using AI by the photographer Boris Eldagsen. The piece caused controversy earlier this month when it was awarded a prize at the Sony World Photography Awards, which Eldagsen refused to accept. The researcher and photographer Lewis Bush discusses the work, the controversy and wider questions around AI and photography.
Florence TV (April 28, 2023) – The centenary of the birth of Don Lorenzo Milani in 2023 gave us the excuse to return to Barbiana, in the municipality of Vicchio, where Don Lorenzo was sent by the Florentine Curia in 1954. There, in a place isolated and unknown at the time, he gave life to a school and to a teaching capable of speaking to the whole world.
Barbiana is located in the region of Tuscany. Tuscany’s capital, Florence is approximately 14 mi away from Barbiana (as the crow flies). The distance from Barbiana to Italy’s capital Rome (Rome) is approximately 149 miles.
The Globalist, April 28, 2023: China’s defence minister, Li Shangfu, attends a security summit in India. Also, the latest on the situation in Sudan with Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Ukraine’s looming counteroffensive and Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, visits London.
After Republicans passed a bill that pairs spending cuts and fossil fuel support with raising the nation’s borrowing cap, the president must decide when and how to negotiate
The state seemed poised to take the first meaningful action in decades to address its deep housing shortage. But the plans fell apart, in yet another indictment of dysfunction in Albany.
On tiny farms they’re testing creative ideas to stay ahead of the cascading threats — heat and drought, cyclones and floods — transforming their world.
Science Magazine – April 28, 2023 issue: Mammals come in a wide variety of shapes and sizes, here represented by some of the least well known and most unusual—clockwise from top left: a fossa, a Hoffmann’s two-toed sloth, a lesser hedgehog tenrec, two tree (or white-bellied) pangolins, and an aye-aye.
Mammals are one of the most diverse classes of animals, ranging both in size, across many orders of magnitude, and in shape—nearly to the limit of one’s imagination. Understanding when, how, and under what selective pressures this variation has developed has been of interest since the dawn of science.
The 240 mammals sequenced through the Zoonomia project include the famous sled dog Balto, who was reported to have led a team of sled dogs in the final leg of the race to carry a life-saving serum to Nome, Alaska, in 1925. His genome, in conjunction with others, was used to reveal his ancestry and adaptations, as well as predict aspects of his morphology, including his coat color.
Researchers deploy a wave glider to measure seafloor displacement associated with earthquakes.PHOTO: TODD ERICKSEN
The destructive behavior of great earthquakes in subduction zones, such as in Japan in 2011, depends on details of the earthquake slip. A slip at shallow depth is the dominant driver of tsunami. Using recently developed seafloor geodetic instrumentation, Brooks et al. found that the deeper slip of the July 2021 magnitude 8.2 Chignik, Alaska earthquake was followed 2.5 months later by a second stage of (aseismic) slip. This approximately 2 to 3 meters of “silent” slip allowed the shallow fault to catch up with its deeper portion, reducing its future earthquake potential.
The Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions
By Jonathan Rosen | Penguin Press
A young man’s ife of brilliant promise was overtaken when his struggle with mental illness took a turn into delusion and nightmare. Review by Richard J. McNally.
A Brutal Reckoning: Andrew Jackson, the Creek Indians, and the Epic War for the American South
By Peter Cozzens | Knopf
The most consequential Indian war in U.S. history didn’t take place on the prairie but among the forsts and marshes of the Deep South. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Review by Fergus M. Bordewich.
The names and dates of battles that changed history are well-remembered. But what about storms or volcanic eruptions? For eons, human civilizations have shaped—and been shaped by—the natural world. Review by Tunku Varadarajan.
The country needs a new political settlement that diminishes the power of extremists
As israel marks its 75th anniversary, take a moment to admire how it has triumphed against the odds. Before it declared independence in 1948 its own generals warned that it had only a fifty-fifty chance of survival. Today Israel is hugely rich, safer than it has been for most of its history, and democratic—if, that is, you are prepared to exclude the territories it occupies. It has overcome wars, droughts and poverty with few natural endowments other than human grit. It is an outlier in the Middle East, a hub of innovation and a winner from globalisation.
Or Russian fighter jets may win control of Ukrainian skies
As Ukraine prepares its forces for a crucial counter-offensive, the argument among its Western allies about what equipment to provide chunters on. Having finally received the tanks it had been pleading for since last year, Ukraine has increased the intensity of its demands for fighter jets. Yet its pleas are falling on largely deaf ears.
François Ghebaly Gallery, New York City (April 27, 2023) – François Ghebaly is proud to present Station by Matt Bollinger. Ithaca-based artist Matt Bollinger works from a complex interdisciplinary base: as painter, draftsman, animator, and elegist, he creates work that straddles the projects of both visual art and narrative fiction.
His stories, by and large, are of America’s rural working class–each is told through a bricolage of memory, family history, direct observation, art-historical research, and literary invention. For his latest exhibition, Bollinger chronicles the semi-fictional inhabitants of a rural central Missourian community, offering in the process ruminative, disillusioned vignettes of the real ‘American Dream.’
Matt Bollinger, Brothers V, 2022.
Spanning the far wall, Uncle Dave (2023) is the most ambitious work in Bollinger’s show–with its impressive vertical dimension, some eight feet-tall, the painting acts as an anchor to the New York gallery space, drawing the eye in and upward. The work depicts three sanitation workers surrounding the bright yellow cab of a dump truck. Framed by wildflowers underfoot and the scintillating glare of another truck’s headlight, the men are shown in progressive life stages.
Matt Bollinger, Cape Hollow II, 2022.
At the far right, the youth holds a rake and stares listlessly out of view. The middle-aged man, partially obscured, gestures forward with a lighter and a yellow traffic flag, while the eldest is positioned above the other men and descends from the cab, directly confronting the viewer’s gaze. The work’s triadic symbol of labor, class, and the passage of time ––alongside compositional affinities, somewhere between Courbet and religious genre painting ––underscores many of the themes latent both in the exhibition title and in the artist’s work at large.
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