The Theremin!

Full disclosure, one of my bands has a lot of theremin in it ;)

“Eyck agrees that the sight of a human body manipulating invisible electromagnetic fields adds to the theremin’s otherworldly aura. The fact that it sounds like nothing so much as an unhinged soprano – listen again to the original Star Trek theme – adds to the unsettling effect.

“You don’t tune it to the A from the piano, but you tune it to your own body and to the surroundings,” she says, citing something called “body capacitance”. In this way the instrument is unique, “except for the voice, but that’s inside you”.

“With its sci-fi antennae bristling left and right, Russian physicist Leon Theremin’s novel invention of 1919 remains the only musical instrument you play without touching anything. “Aerial fingering” was the technique devised by the inventor’s original Lithuanian prodigy, Clara Rockmore, in the 1930s.”

Magnus Hjalmar Munsterhjelm (19 October 1840 – 2 April 1905) was a Finnish landscape painter

Hjalmar Munsterhjelm was a painter I was digging on last night. Wiki is pretty cool for finding this kind of stuff, bonus points that the jpgs are sometimes in the 4k relm.

Albert Bierstadt- painter best known for his lavish, sweeping landscapes

Just a little dive into Albert Bierstadt, this painter I was looking up. His landscapes are really something. I like the lighting quiet a bit.

"NO CGI" is really just INVISIBLE CGI

Cool break down of some older movies and very old VFX techniques. From the comments:

‘5:47 Removing bluescreens from behind the scenes footage is just wild”

Band poster and EP artwork!

Made a new band poster for a show and did the artwork for this EP by Manx. Rock and Roll Portland Peoples!

High-resolution image of The Night Watch

Man they are not kidding. You can really punch into this thing.

“The new high-resolution image of The Night Watch represents a major advance in the state of the art for imaging paintings, setting records for both the resolution and the total size of the image. The sampling resolution is 5 µm (0.005 mm), meaning that each pixel covers an area of the painting that is smaller than a human red blood cell. Given the large size of The Night Watch, this results in a truly enormous image: it’s 925,000 by 775,000 pixels – 717 gigapixels – with a file size of 5.6 TB!”

The Iron Claw

Watched this the other night and by the end of it I was utterly fascinated. What a crazy real life story about the Von Erich family called, “The Iron Claw“. Starts kinda slow but well worth a watch.

North American purgatory, Glen Rubsamen

Very cool photography here by Glen Rubsamen. Sorry for the insta link, it’s all I can find. Might do some CG based on these…

DAX NORMAN's Online Museum of Curios

Just found Dax Norman’s god damn awesome art on tumblr and this stuff is freakin awesome. He is on Giphy as well, which happens to be where I make my stupid music show gifs.

Neal Stephenson Interview on the Atlantic

Author Neal Stephenson did a recent interview on The Atlantic that is interesting.

Wong: About a year ago, in an interview with the Financial Times, you called the outputs of generative AI “hollow and uninteresting.” Why was that, and has your assessment changed?

Stephenson: I suspect that what I had in mind when I was making those remarks was the current state of image-generating technology. There were a few things about that rubbing me the wrong way, the biggest being that they are benefiting from the uncredited work of thousands of real human artists. I’m going to exaggerate slightly, but it seems like one of the first applications of any new technology is making things even shittier for artists. That’s certainly happened with music. These image-generation systems just seemed like that was mechanized and weaponized on an inconceivable scale.

…

Wong: Do you think we’re seeing some of that naivete today in people looking at how generative AI can be used?

Stephenson: For sure. It’s based on an understandable misconception as to what these things are doing. A chatbot is not an oracle; it’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate. Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society. We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI.

Painter Amy Bennett

Interview with painter Amy Bennett on Juxtapoz. Enjoy this work. It’s a mix between Gregory Crewdson and also has elements of macro / tilt shift photos some how. More paintings at Richard Heller Gallery.

“About a quarter of the paintings in Open Season were begun before the pandemic. I made a substantial model inspired by attending a 4H fair, and noting with curiosity that it seemed to attract both extreme ends of the political spectrum. I wanted to challenge myself to make images outside of the domestic realm. Painting crowds in the open air seemed like a counterbalance to the isolated interiors I had been immersed in. But it wasn’t long into lockdown that the theme felt too disconnected from our alarming new reality. We could finally see what a paradise we’d lost. In the very limited studio time I had then, with two kids suddenly needing to attend school at home, I returned to scenes in the home of marriage and family, that in hindsight, reflected a lot of grief, anxiety, and exhaustion.”

VIA Metafilter.

Oli Kellett-Cross Road Blues

Some really nice cityscapes here by Oli Kellett. Nice use of lighting.