Where I’ve Been Online (Mar. 8 2014)

Approximate Reading Time: 3 minutes
  • “We’ve heard the importance of failure and experimentation in learning. In this excellent interview on Science Friday, inventor James Dyson speaks about his direct experience with failures and schools’ need to accommodate it.

    “My life and my day are full of failures,” he says. “Failures are interesting.””

    tags:inventor schools kids Dyson

  • ““No one wants to be a woman,” cartoonist and noted misogynist Dave Sim once said in one of his many screeds on the inferiority of the female gender. Judging by most video games, you’d think he was right.

    Although women make up nearly half of all gamers, only a fraction of videogame characters are female, and fewer still are playable. Maybe that’s why I felt so shocked when I played Left Behind, the newest chapter of the award-winning survival game The Last of Us.

    “I don’t understand how this is even happening,” I said over and over again.

    I was playing as Ellie, a 14-year-old girl who must venture out alone into a post-apocalyptic world of monsters and murderers armed with nothing but a pocket knife, desperately trying to find medicine for her badly injured friend Joel. But if battling mercenaries and zombies as a teenage girl weren’t interesting enough, the half of the game with no combat at all is more compelling. After flashing back in time, you spend your time walking around a mall with your best friend Riley, talking, playing games and trying to repair your friendship after a falling out.”

    tags:videogame wired life game

  • “Eyewire: A Game to Map the Brain
    Sebastian Seung’s neuroscience lab at MIT has created a game where players score points by correctly coloring in the connection pathways between retinal neurons in 3D cube simulations of tiny chunks of the brain. So far, players have colored in more than 2 million of the 3D cubes, allowing the lab to map the connections in 90 brain cells. The researchers hope that by mapping the connections in retinal cells, they may uncover the connections essential to motion perception and other visual perception. Eyewire”

    tags:nautilus sentence science game brain

  • “Darshan is an ongoing series consisting of photographically recreated, classical images of Hindu Gods and Goddesses that are pivotal to mythological stories in Hinduism. Most commonly used in the context of Hindu worship, Darshan is a sanskrit word that means “apparition” or a “glimpse.”. Lead by the experiential nature of a Darshan, this series explores the delicate relationship between photography and representation.

    Having left a ritual-driven community in India, my move to the U.S. precipitated an enormous cultural shift. It was this cultural paralysis that motivated me to use my one medium of worship–the camera–to study, construct and deconstruct the mythologies of my land. The goal was to turn multidimensional memories of sculptures and ornamental paintings of Hindu Gods, into two-dimensional photographs. For centuries, the way that we have experienced darshans (metaphysical connection established upon sight) is via laying gaze upon a molded figure, a carved statue or an illustration that represents a likeness to avatars described in Hindu scripture. This series of images invites the viewer to consider a photograph as means of spiritual engagement.

    To make the imagery for the series, exhaustive research on each character lead to the assemblage of a diorama, by a team of approximately thirty-five Indian craftsmen who created props, sets, prosthetics, make-up, costumes, and jewelry to exacting specifications. Printed on a massive scale, these photographs are presented in an elaborate installation that resembles the experience of a Hindu temple… complete with incense, lamps, and invocation.

    By bridging the gap between the significant ceremonies of my parents lives and my own mythology, this series has become my reason to immerse, question and push the boundaries of my faith, not only beyond my imagination, but beyond the very frame that surrounds the photograph.”

    tags:websites photography art

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Be the first to like.


Leave a Reply