The connection between lens making, photography and Vermeer:
David Hockney’s, A Secret Knowledge. You can find the entire documentary on Youtube. Here is Hockney on the Charlie Rose show
Not everyone agrees with Hockney’s thesis. Some counter arguments, here and here. The later one is perhaps the most valid because its author is a scholar. Hockney’s project has inspired further exploration and scholarship.
“Tim’s Vermeer”a documentary by Penn and Teller (yes, THAT Penn and Teller) about one man’s obsession with discovering Vermeer’s secrets. Hint: camera obscura! Trailer | NY Times article
Gilles Jobin was the 2012 artist-in-residence at the CERN* physics laboratory in Switzerland. He created an abstract dance piece inspired by concepts in particle physics. A brief description from this New York Times article.
“…dancers will begin with a subtle jiggling motion that evokes the vibration of subatomic particles, which could be seen as a sort of quantum twerk. Under crackling ambient music assembled from supercollider data by the composer Carla Scaletti, they begin to orbit and swarm, pulled by invisible forces like gravity and magnetism. The spectacle will be lit, somewhat ominously, by lamps that swing on motorized pendulums — a “lumino-kinetic sculpture” contributed by the German artist Julius von Bismarck. “You don’t have to know anything about physics, it’s not a demonstration or explanation of scientific concepts,” Mr. Jobin said. “Now that I know that everything is moving, that we are mostly made of emptiness, that our bodies are holding together with incredible forces, it feels different to move my body.”
March 2nd 2014: A reported drone strike killed three in the village of Al-Shabwan, 5km from Marib, while travelling in or sleeping near their vehicle. #drone #drones #yemen (at Erq al-Shabwan, Marib Province)
Endia Beal, who told me about her project in which she took white middle-aged women to a hair salon and gave them “black” hairstyles. She then took their photographs in the style of corporate headshots. Her work had a mix of humor and poignancy, a look at both race and gender; it quickly went viral.
“I wanted people that had a certain idea of what you’re supposed to look like in the workspace, because it would be a challenge for them to understand what I experienced in that space,” Beal said. “And to a degree, many young white women have shared that experience, but for older white women it’s an experience they haven’t necessarily had.”
Annette Messager
Cindy Sherman
Yoon Sung Min (Dwelling)
Micah Lexier
Germaine Koh
Tom Friedman
Douglas Gordon
Bruce Nauman
Sylvie Cotton – The Theory of Sylvie
Hadley and Maxwell
Pepon Osorio
Kelly Mark
Gabriel Orozco
John Sasaki – Life line video
Doug Jarvis – The sound of a ball rolling around the inside of his head
The Hard Nut, a reinterpretation of The Nutcracker! Part One | The Party Scene | New York Times article about a regular production of the Nutcracker (adorable children) versus The Hard Nut (drunken adults).
A lot of people just assume I took some Beatles and, you know, threw some Jay-Z on top of it or mixed it up or looped it around, but it’s really a deconstruction. It’s not an easy thing to do. I was obsessed with the whole project, that’s all I was trying to do, see if I could do this. Once I got into it, I didn’t think about anything but finishing it. I stuck to those two because I thought it would be more challenging and more fun and more of a statement to what you could do with sample alone. It is an art form. It is music. You can do different things, it doesn’t have to be just what some people call stealing. It can be a lot more than that.[2]
An all Black cast (yay!!!) reinterprets of The Wizard of Oz (both the 1939 movie and the original 1900 children’s novel, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). The Whiz starts in Harlem.
Staring Dianna Ross, Michael Jackson and Nipsy Russell
More Abelardo Morell | Above image is The Grand Tetons in the Resort Room, 1997
• Kunie Sugiura | 
• Erica Baum | 
