Animation brings 2500-year-old vase to life

Oxford academics have teamed-up with an animator to bring ancient Greek vase scenes to life.

The images on this 2,500-year-old vase have been animated to show what life was like in ancient Greece.

The Classics in Communities project, which is led by Mai Musié of Oxford University to encourage the teaching of ancient languages like Latin and Greek, has teamed up with the Panoply Vase Animation Project following an award from the Oxford University Knowledge Exchange Fund.

The animation is freely available to watch online, and its creators hope it is used by teachers and lecturers to support their teaching of topics related to ancient Greece.

'Our animation features a cup that would once have been used at ancient drinking parties 2,500 years ago,' says Dr Sonya Nevin, co-director of the Panoply Vase Animation Project.

A Hidden Estonian “Forest Library” for Listening to Nature

Around 50% of Estonia is covered in forest. This past August, in one of the most remote corners of untouched nature, interior architecture students from the Eesti Kunstiakadeemia (Estonian Academy of Arts) in Tallinn constructed three megaphone-shaped structures as a hidden forest library, where sounds of the surrounding woods are amplified into the spaces for reading, solitude, and even meditative music performances.

The project called “Ruup,” shared by Designboom, was revealed last month in the Pähni Nature Centre. As BLDGBLOG pointed out, the design by student Birgit Õigus is reminiscent of the acoustic mirrors of World War I, used by the United Kingdom to amplify the noise of incoming German zeppelin raids (one of these concrete mirrors had a restoration completed earlier this year). No audio is yet available online, but as architectural installations, the wooden cones appear as unobtrusive constructions among the trees, offering shelter while opening an oculus view to the surrounding forest.

Can going to the theatre boost academic achievement?

Sarah Cassidy reports on Start - an initiative to link young people from deprived backgrounds with the arts - and how it is capturing young hearts and minds.

On a cold winter's day in east London a class of eight- and nine-year-olds are wrestling with some big questions. Is it right to steal from the rich to give to the poor? Should someone's choice of job be restricted because of their gender? These are just some of the issues thrown up for the children after watching a production of Robin Hood.

The previous day the children, from Nightingale Primary School in Woolwich, south-east London, could be found laughing uproariously at the show at Greenwich and Lewisham Young Person's Theatre, which they attended for free as part of a groundbreaking programme which aims to bring the arts to children from deprived backgrounds.

Research shows that the numbers of primary school-age children visiting theatres, galleries and museums have plummeted over the past five years. But the situation is worst for children from poor backgrounds and thousands of them leave school without ever having set foot in one of these establishments.

Government statistics show that the number of children going to the theatre has fallen from just under half in 2008-09 to fewer than a third last year. Only 30 per cent of primary pupils engaged in dance activities in 2013-14 (compared to 43 per cent in 2008-09), while 37.2 per cent partook in a musical activity out of school (down from 55.3 per cent five years earlier).

The Start programme aims to counter this decline by linking participating schools with local arts venues and funding a programme of activities which take pupils to visit theatres, galleries and museums and sends artists back into the schools. The programme has linked leading venues such as the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead and the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings with schools in deprived areas.

The scheme was set up in 2006 by The Prince's Foundation for Children & the Arts – a charity founded by Prince Charles after he visited a pupil referral unit in Birmingham and found children studying Romeo and Juliet without ever having seen the play.

At Nightingale School, in one of the UK's most deprived wards, very few pupils had ever been to a theatre before their school joined the programme. Under the scheme they will watch performances at the theatre and take part in follow-up workshops.

Students play Led Zeppelin on Xylophones

Watch this amazing video of the 2014-2015 Louisville Leopard Percussionists rehearsing "Kashmir", "The Ocean" and "Immigrant Song" by Led Zeppelin.

These student musicians, who come from several different schools in Kentucky, are between the ages of 7-12 and each learns several different instruments such as xylophones, marimbas, drums, timbales, vibraphones, congas, bongos and piano.

http://www.booooooom.com/2015/02/25/video-day-kids-play-led-zeppelin-xylophones/

Academics and Archaeologists Fight to Save Syria’s Artifacts

CAIRO — In 2011, after three decades of working in Syria, the archaeologist Glenn M. Schwartz was unable to return to his dig at the Bronze Age city of Umm el-Marra. The intensifying civil war had made work in the country impossible.

Like many archaeologists of the Middle East, Mr. Schwartz, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, is watching the news from the region with deep concern and, he said, a feeling of impotence.

“It’s heartbreaking to see what’s happened in Syria in terms of cultural heritage and more so for the country at large,” he said.

The upheavals and conflicts sweeping the Middle East in recent years have caused untold human suffering, and they have resulted in deep losses to the heritage of the region.

Scholars can do little to stop the fighting and looting, but they have created blogs, websites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts to monitor the destruction and raise awareness about it. By sharing excavation records, scholars outside the Middle East have helped their counterparts in the Arab world to compile online lists of missing or stolen objects.

How playing an instrument benefits your brain

When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What's going on? Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians' brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0JKCYZ8hng&feature=em-subs_digest

10 must see ancient greek temples

Back in Ancient Greece the temple was the most important building. The first temples to be constructed from stone began to appear in the 6th century. The Greek temples were not used as places of worship, but rather as monuments to their beloved gods and goddesses. Some of the best examples of Greek temples standing today are located not only in Greece, but in what would have been their ancient empire that stretched to various other locations including Italy, which is home to some of the most well-preserved Greek temples.

 
1 Parthenon, Acropolis

The Parthenon, located atop the Acropolis is a monument dedicated to the goddess Athena, a goddess of wisdom.

 

The Parthenon is an example of an early temple, being built in the mid 5th century and was originally constructed to replace an older temple that was destroyed by the Persians. The statue of Athena that stood in the temple was made from ivory, silver and gold but was unfortunately stolen and later destroyed. 

30 Days of “Quantum Poetry” Celebrating the Glory of Science

From black holes to DNA to butterfly metamorphosis, bewitching verses on the magic of nature.

“The ideal scientist thinks like a poet and works like a bookkeeper,” the influential biologist E.O. Wilson said in his spectacular recent conversation with the former Poet Laureate Robert Hass, exploring the shared creative wellspring of poetry and science. A beautiful embodiment of it comes from 30 Days, an unusual and bewitching series of “quantum poetry” by xYz — the pseudonym of British biologist and poet Joanna Tilsley, who began writing poetry at the age of eight and continued, for her own pleasure, until she graduated college with a degree in biology.

 In April of 2013, while undergoing an emotional breakdown, Tilsley took a friend up on a dare and decided to participate in NaPoWriMo — an annual creative writing project inviting participants to write a poem a day for a month. Immersed in cosmology and quantum physics at the time, she found herself enchanted by the scientific poetics of nature as she strolled around her home in North London.

 Translating that enchantment in lyrical form, she produced a series of thirty poems on everything from DNA to the exoplanet Keppler-62F, a “super-Earth-sized planet orbiting a star smaller and cooler than the sun,” to holometabolism, the process by which the caterpillar metamorphoses into a butterfly, to the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human being to see Earth from space.

Picasso and Einstein Got the Picture

Breakthroughs in science and art begin with an image.

Most of the big steps forward in science are made possible by visualization. Albert Einstein said he visualized the theory of relativity before he worked out the formula. Previous explanations of the universe made no aesthetic sense to him. He was mathematically and physically oriented. But he was driven by aesthetics.

Humans have an underlying desire to have things be aesthetically pleasing. We don’t like crummy figures. We have a built-in sense for proportion, for symmetry, for what feels right. As a scientist, there is a real feeling of joy when your vision is borne out by your research.

In that way scientists are like artists. There was a time when people talked about the “two cultures” of science and art. Don’t believe the demarcation for a minute. The two fields have one general principle: to interpret the world and reflect it. Scientists and artists have different buildings blocks. Artists use musical notes or paint and scientists rely on logic and measurements. But both have the same driving force: creativity. And the seed of that creativity is the visual image.

To consider how art and science interact, we should be aware of what happens in the brain when we perceive an image. Visual perception begins with the retina, a layer of brain tissue that lines the inner eye. The retina receives light and generates nerve signals within photoreceptor cells. These cells, divided into rods and cones and specialized for night and day vision, convert light into electrochemical signals through the action of light-sensitive molecules called photopigments. Different cone cells respond to red, green, and blue light, and enable us to perceive colors.

The sorrow and defiance of Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history

With your bitter twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

So begins one of Maya Angelou’s poems, written in 1978. One of her most famous, it unsurprisingly features in many of the obituaries and pieces that commemorate her life. It is used to demonstrate her individuality, her political voice, her strength.

The poem catches the tone, the pace and rhythm of all her writing, whatever its genre. There is the gritty, determined and defiant attitude, the sometimes literal refusal to take anything lying down. There is the simple energy and downright forthrightness of expression. There is the direct address. Sometimes that direct address is to the reader, establishing an almost unbelievable intimacy between the speaker and the spoken to, the “I” and the “you”; at other times it is to all those who would deny the humanity of Angelou – as an African American, as a woman, as one of those denied opportunity, choice and power.

Above all, there is the link with the whole tradition of African American music – spirituals, blues, gospels, jazz, rap – that uses insistent rhythms, hypnotic repetition, lines that swing, sway and curve their way into the mind and soul to make a point, to play on an idea, to strike an attitude and, more simply, to assert a belief and a presence, a being in the world.

Drawing Autism: A Visual Tour of the Autistic Mind from Kids and Celebrated Artists on the Spectrum

Pattern-recognition, demon-taming, and a humbling invitation into a different way of experiencing the world.

Autism and its related conditions remain among the least understood mental health issues of our time. But one significant change that has taken place over the past few years has been a shift from perceiving the autistic mind not as disabled but as differently abled — and often impressive in its difference, as in extraordinary individuals like mathematical mastermind Daniel Tammet or architectural savant Gilles Trehin. And yet despite the stereotype of the autistic mind as a methodical computational machine, much of its magic — the kind most misunderstood — lies in its capacity for creative expression.

Three years after the original publication, New-York-based behavior analyst Jill Mullin returns with an expanded edition of Drawing Autism (public library) — a beautiful and thoughtful celebration of the vibrantly creative underbelly of autism, featuring contributions from more than 50 international graphic artists and children who fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, with a foreword by none other than Temple Grandin.

After 450 years, we still don’t know the true value of Shakespeare

The extent of Shakespeare’s legacy 450 years on from his birth is incalculable. But this, of course, does not stop some from trying. To many the crown of Britain’s cultural output, Shakespeare is integral to our very language, widely celebrated, studied, acted, seen. So sourcing hard evidence on the cultural value of Shakespeare is a fool’s game, if a fun one.

To start with, both the words in the concept of “cultural value” are so overloaded, so controversial, that real figures for either of them are impossible to find. Are we talking about the anthropological or the aesthetic version of culture? Are we in the realm of economic use, exchange, symbolic or discursive value? And Shakespeare? Are we referencing the texts, the editions, the amateur and professional productions, or the stories, the adaptations, the movies?

The only evidence we have is about the life, writing and social relationships of the writer. And this cannot hope to explain the crazy variety of ideas and objects that shelter under the most famous name in history.

Shakespeare’s plays came to dominate the cultural production of later times by providing free content for the new theatres that opened after the theatrical lock-down of the English civil war. In their printed version, they became a point of reference for those who claimed the supremacy of English writing in contests with classical literature. They also provided useful, out of copyright, texts for the hugely expanded literature market created by universal education.

Byzantine monastery and mosaic floor discovered

An impressive monastery and mosaic dating to the Byzantine period was discovered at the entrance to Hura in the northern Negev during the course of an IAA salvage excavation for the purpose of building a highway interchange.

The structure, measuring 20 × 35 meters, is divided into halls built along an east–west axis, the most outstanding of which are the prayer hall and dining room due to the breathtaking mosaic carpets revealed in them.

The prayer hall is paved with a mosaic on which a pattern of leaves is vibrantly portrayed in blue, red, yellow and green colors. The dining room floor is a colorful mosaic pavement depicting floral motifs, geometric decorations, amphorae, baskets and even a pair of birds.


According to Daniel Varga, excavation director on behalf of the Israel Antiquities Authority, “It seems that this monastery, located near the Byzantine settlement of Horbat Hur, is one monastery in a series of monasteries situated alongside a road that linked Transjordan with the Be’er Sheva‘ Valley”.

The mosaic carpets also include four Greek dedicatory inscriptions denoting the names of the monastery’s abbots: Eliyahu, Nonus, Solomon and Ilrion, and the dates when the pavements were constructed in the different halls. These inscriptions also aided archaeologists in dating the monastery to the second half of the sixth century CE.

Famous paintings help study the Earth’s past atmosphere

A team of Greek and German researchers has shown that the colours of sunsets painted by famous artists can be used to estimate pollution levels in the Earth’s past atmosphere.


In particular, the paintings reveal that ash and gas released during major volcanic eruptions scatter the different colours of sunlight, making sunsets appear more red.

When the Tambora volcano in Indonesia erupted in 1815, painters in Europe could see the colours of the sky changing. The volcanic ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere travelled the world and, as these aerosol particles scattered sunlight, they produced bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for up to three years after the eruption. J. M. W. Turner was one of the artists who painted the stunning sunsets during that time. Now, scientists are using his, and other great masters’, paintings to retrieve information on the composition of the past atmosphere.


“Nature speaks to the hearts and souls of great artists,” says lead-author Christos Zerefos, a professor of atmospheric physics at the Academy of Athens in Greece. “But we have found that, when colouring sunsets, it is the way their brains perceive greens and reds that contains important environmental information.”

More than blood and bling: our many visions of the Vikings

 

The Vikings have arrived at the British Museum. This exhibition, the first of its kind for decades, is notable for its scale and ambition. That there is sufficient demand is unsurprising, given the recent flurry of publications, exhibitions, documentaries, and even TV dramas. But does this popularity simply emerge from the romance of mythology and adventure, or is something more interesting at play?

The Vikings have an enduring appeal in the popular and academic consciousness. The narrative that surrounds them is invariably tied to a very tired debate as to whether the Vikings were raiders or merchants. But this raider-trader dichotomy has largely been put to rest in academic circles.

So I find it far more interesting to consider how and in what conditions this panoply of “Viking” characters arose, to track how our view of the Vikings has shifted. Our interest has never been politically neutral. And so the study of the period carries an inherent responsibility to write about a Viking Age that is not only archaeologically and historically precise, but also socially responsible.

Mysteries of Vernacular: Quirky Animations Explore the Meaning of Language

Mysteries of Vernacular is an ongoing video series by NYC-based Myriapod Productions that explores the etymology of individual words through a carefully animated book. According to Myriapod the series will eventually include 26 stories, each of which takes nearly 80 hours to research, construct and animate.

Getty Launches Virtual Library

 

Getty Publications has introduced a virtual library that will provide free online access to more than 250 backlist titles, available online or as PDF downloads. The library includes titles published by the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the Getty Research Institute, with new titles added on an ongoing basis.

“Last year we made freely available thousands of images of works in our collections that were in the public domain or to which we held all the rights,” said Getty president and CEO James Cuno. “As a next step in our increasing digital engagement, we are now making hundreds of publications—many of which are out of print—freely available to scholars and the interested public around the world.”

Study of jazz players shows common brain circuitry processes music and language

Researchers scanned brains while musicians 'traded fours'

 

  

The brains of jazz musicians engrossed in spontaneous, improvisational musical conversation showed robust activation of brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax, which are used to interpret the structure of phrases and sentences. But this musical conversation shut down brain areas linked to semantics — those that process the meaning of spoken language, according to results of a study by Johns Hopkins researchers.

The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track the brain activity of jazz musicians in the act of "trading fours," a process in which musicians participate in spontaneous back and forth instrumental exchanges, usually four bars in duration. The musicians introduce new melodies in response to each other's musical ideas, elaborating and modifying them over the course of a performance.

Wishes 2014

 

 

 

 

 

What would you wish for the new year? A group of children animated 2014 and added their wishes: health, happiness, peace, creation, love, imagination...

The children met for three hours at Exile Room, Athens-Greece, and created all the images and sounds used in the film.
The workshop was carried out by Christina dePian together with the very efficient and helpful assistance of Ioanna Giakoumatou, Elena Ioannou, Luis Maly and Alexia dePian.

Faust/Marsalis: The art of learning

Wynton Marsalis and Harvard President Drew Faust in 2009.(Photo: Darren McCollester, Getty Images file photo)

Arts education gives students skills to create, adapt and take risks in the future.

 

Anxiety abounds concerning the demands of our rapidly changing and ever more complicated world and about the ability of our educational system to respond. Yet the education we are fashioning for our children and their children seems ill-suited for the lives they will lead.

We hear widespread calls for "outcomes" we can measure and for education geared to specific employment needs, but many of today's students will hold jobs that have not yet been invented, deploying skills not yet defined. We not only need to equip them with the ability to answer the questions relevant to the world we now inhabit; we must also enable them to ask the right questions to shape the world to come.

We need education that nurtures judgment as well as mastery, ethics and values as well as analysis. We need learning that will enable students to interpret complexity, to adapt, and to make sense of lives they never anticipated. We need a way of teaching that encourages them to develop understanding of those different from themselves, enabling constructive collaborations across national and cultural origins and identities.