Kernels of Inspiration. Visit brainpopcorn.com for more on museums, education, and interdisciplinary play
Visual processing is one of the most complex of mental operations and by some estimates takes up about a third of our thinking process, although we’re almost unconscious of what’s happening.
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-Henry Adams via: Smithsonian Magazine
This blog post is fascinating. It illustrates, in depth, the most challenging aspect of visual merchandising. To figure out how the observers brain will process an installation, and alter the objects within. (Essentially, if I can crack the code, I decide their path through the store.) -Kathy
What a Physics Student Can Teach Us About How Visitors Walk Through a Museum
(via yourabode)
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Physics, museum visitors, and artful infatuation. An unexpectedly fascinating combo!
setting the stage
Humans like stories. We really like stories. And while we don’t always like to guess how a story ends, we like being able to track the logic of it after the fact.
Humans also like patterns. Three brothers, three bears, three nights dancing — patterns show up in a lot of our…
Here’s another parallel for you: In at least one version of the Tam Lin song/story I know, in response to Tam Lin’s perceived betrayal, the Queen says “Tam Lin if I had known/I would have plucked out both your eyes/to give you eyes of stone.” Sebastian then throws a rock salt slushie that causes Blaine an eye injury.
(Oh, how I love finding folklore in something as often baffling and frustrating as Glee—it makes it so much easier to accept the fact that I watch it.)
London-based artist Zadok Ben David created this installation using 12,000 cut steel botanical specimens modeled from old textbook illustrations, each embedded in a thin layer of sand. (via thisiscolossal)
I’m not sure whether I’m impressed by the level of exquisite detail or somewhat freaked by the idea of metal plants embedded in sterile white sand. There is a sort of pleasing circularity to the whole specimen->illustration->art object->photograph of art object thing, though.
Sculptures by Kate MacDowell
Brains: it’s a jungle in there. (Mine definitely has more koalas than snakes)
neaq:
In honor of World Penguin Day, we present a little blue penguin for your viewing pleasure.
Could not get more endearing if it tried.
That man really knew how to write a villanelle.
W. H. Auden’s social, political, and personal consciousness—not to mention his well-rhymed music—hits a tonic note even seventy years later, in our own disorganized time.
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Leap Before You Look
The sense of danger must not disappear:
The way is certainly both short…
If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.
— John Quincy Adams
Live long and prosper, Barack
I can’t think of a better picture to post today. Here is the President of the United States and Nichelle Nichols who played Uhura on Star Trek: TOS. I wrote about Uhura here.
I love having a geek sitting in the big chair in the Oval Office. Really, really love it.
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
— from The Velveteen Rabbit (or How Toys Become Real) by Margery Williams, 1922
I have always loved this story. It’s one of the only books where I don’t mind the fact that it makes me teary-eyed.
