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Jason Bailey explains why you should love generative art , which uses computers to introduce random elements to the work but is still under the artist's control. With roots in the 1960s and many women artists, it now includes various machine-learning elements too. The article has many examples and links to even more, but you can also try to make some yourself. If you already know how to code, Tim Holman explains the process in Generative Art Speedrun (captions available) and has tutorials for nearly-recreating famous works using JavaScript at Generative Artistry. If you don't know how to code, you can play with Heydon Pickering's Mutable Gallery to calibrate and download pieces for yourself.
posted by harriet vane at 11:43 PM PST - 9 comments

"Released in the year 2000, BGM 1980-2000 was a compilation of all the background music MUJI had commissioned a select bunch of Japanese musicians (and a wayward Penguin Cafe Orchestra violinist) to soundtrack their stores, all the way to the year of its release." [more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns at 10:06 PM PST - 9 comments

kids were asked to create 500,000 scale aircraft models Following the 1941 aerial attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics put out a call to action, aimed not at recruiting adult volunteers or teen enlistees but schoolchildren. For training purposes, models were especially important — per the U.S. Army-Navy Journal of Recognition, it was critical that observers be able to see an “object as a whole” and be “able, through constant practice, to recognize that object (plane, tank, ship, etc…) from any angle.”
posted by MovableBookLady at 9:26 PM PST - 7 comments

CALEXIT GOES NATIONWIDE: In 1869, the Supreme Court ruled that a state may secede "through consent of the states". Therefore, modeling the successful strategy of the Convention of States campaign, Yes California is announcing its new mission to pass a "Consent to Secede" resolution in a majority of the Nation's state legislatures. [more inside]
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 8:20 PM PST - 59 comments

Parasitic Vines That Feed on Parasitic Wasps That Feed on Trees "Scientists studying wasps that target oak leaves found that a second parasite, a vine, can get its tendrils into the homes set up by the wasps, called galls, subverting their diversion of the host’s resources. After that, things don’t go so well for the wasp."
posted by dhruva at 5:53 PM PST - 25 comments

Beat Saber, the VR game that has players slashing colored blocks in time to music, has reinvigorated both the VR gaming scene and the music/rhythm genre, quickly spawning 3rd-party modifications that allow players to create their own custom notetracks. While the large majority are based on existing songs, some enterprising modders are applying the game's choreographed swordplay to more unusual types of audio. [more inside]
posted by subocoyne at 5:35 PM PST - 5 comments

wideNES: Peeking Past the Edge of NES Games by Daniel Prilik “The NES was one of the flagship consoles of the glorious era that was the 1980s. Many of the most popular games on the platform involved some sort of adventure through scrolling screens — Metroid, Super Mario, and Zelda all used this common technique. For many games, keeping track of the map was a huge chore and meant mapping by hand on graph paper or using the screenshots published in Nintendo Power magazine. These day’s there’s a better way. [Daniel] set out to automatically map these huge two-dimensional worlds, developing software he calls WideNES to do it. WideNES is an add-on to [Daniel]’s own NES emulator, ANESE [GitHub]. As part of the emulator, WideNES can easily read the various registers of the NES’s Picture Processing Unit, or PPU. The registers of the PPU are used to control the display of the background and sprite layers of NES graphics, and by monitoring these, it is possible to detect and map out the display of levels in various NES games.” [via: HACKADAY]
posted by Fizz at 4:27 PM PST - 19 comments

A series of photos created by workers at Home Depot: The Sun God - The Mata Hari - Tree on a hill - Sunset - Groovy, man - This Pineapple - Supernova - Mushroom Cloud - Toxic Mitosis... Courtesy of the r/unstirredpaint subreddit [more inside]
posted by growabrain at 3:54 PM PST - 9 comments

The Village Voice has been shut down — The loss of the legendary New York publication is a tragedy for local media, alt-weeklies, and criticism. [more inside]
posted by tonycpsu at 2:07 PM PST - 63 comments

It was printed with a repeating image that might have been a rustic barn with a wagon wheel perched outside or an old mill with a water wheel, surrounded by reddish orange and gold flowers, and possibly wild fowl like pheasants or turkeys. The fabric also had a fuzzy velour-type texture, but it was scratchy against the skin. And the arms, made out of scrolling dark wood covered in more of that fabric, were hard and unfriendly for leaning against.
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 12:06 PM PST - 87 comments

Two takes on why and how it feels like we all end up at the same coffee shop wherever we go. The first, the danger of planning a trip online where we see what the numbers lead us to: The Algorithmic Trap. On the same side of the coin, the proliferation of the places that all feel the same anyway: The Unbearable Sameness of Cities
posted by moogs at 11:34 AM PST - 59 comments

Lyrical Ladies, Writing Women, and the Legend of Lauryn Hill: Joan Morgan’s “She Begat This” looks back at how Lauryn Hill crashed through hip-hop’s glass ceiling, while our critic looks at how the author and a cadre of black women writers did the same for hip-hop music journalism. [more inside]
posted by praemunire at 11:15 AM PST - 6 comments

Rocky, do you love trash? Are you eating? Say you'll never ever leave us. Amy Dempsey of The Toronto Star talked with a researcher weighing this year's racoonsicles, baited her neighbourhood's green bins with rotisserie chicken, painstakingly set up surveillance cameras, and got into prolonged discussions with city employees about the definitions of "raccoon-resistant" versus "raccoon-proof". Result? "Toronto built a better green bin and — oops — maybe a smarter raccoon." [more inside]
posted by maudlin at 10:01 AM PST - 31 comments

A Mormon Bishop faces excommunication for wanting to stop sexual interviews of children. Starting at the age of 7 years old, youth in the Mormon Church begin worthiness interviews. These interviews happen behind closed doors and include questions of a sexual nature about masturbation, sexual thoughts, and chastity. [more inside]
posted by ShakeyJake at 9:42 AM PST - 45 comments

On the British Columbia coast, the Heiltsuk First Nation asserts its rights to manage its resources, and who has access to them, through the seasonal herring harvest. [more inside]
posted by poffin boffin at 9:29 AM PST - 8 comments

In 2007 a quirky animated short appeared on the Internet and went viral. It led to one of the greatest TV shows of all time. [more inside]
posted by 1970s Antihero at 9:04 AM PST - 19 comments

“At the time of its publication, it was widely denounced. Writing from the depths of the Great Depression, and amidst a burgeoning black communist internationalism, Black Reconstruction was Du Bois at his finest. By deftly applying classical Marxist analysis to a population so often overlooked by its orthodoxies, Du Bois’s general strike thesis emerged not only as a historical corrective, but as a stark critique of Western philosophy and modern academic inquiry itself.” When Slaves Go on Strike: W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction 80 Years Later. (Black Perspectives) ”As Du Bois argued, Reconstruction and the history of slavery in the United States had been shaped by “one of the most stupendous efforts the world ever saw to discredit human beings” through the use of public education and public memory.” The Legacy of Black Reconstruction. (Jacobin) The Urgency of a Third Reconstruction: The ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment marked a turning point in U.S. history. Yet 150 years later, its promises remain unfulfilled. (Dissent).
posted by The Whelk at 8:58 AM PST - 4 comments

The US Education Department reported that nearly 240 schools had at least one school shooting in 2015-16. NPR found that only 11 incidents could be verified. This seems to be a matter of incompetence-- designing a good questionnaire and checking on the results is harder than it sounds. [more inside]
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 8:44 AM PST - 27 comments

Making the baseball sequence of "The Naked Gun."
posted by Chrysostom at 8:27 AM PST - 15 comments

In 1983, Amos Barkai performed an experiment to see if he could determine why lobsters were plentiful around Malgas Island but literally nonexistent around Marcus Island, only four kilometers away. He took about a thousand lobsters from Malgas and moved them to Marcus to see how they would fare. The results were horrifying, and provided strong evidence for alternative stable states—the idea that an ecosystem can exist in very different yet completely stable configurations.
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 7:58 AM PST - 50 comments

From IFC Films, Pick of the Litter is like Survivor With Puppies: out of 800 dogs every year, who will be good enough to become a guide dog for the blind? NYT review. Description from the Guide Dogs for the Blind web site.
posted by Melismata at 7:55 AM PST - 16 comments

NBC News reports that "Cheese and yogurt were found to protect against DEATH FROM ANY CAUSE, and also against death from cerebrovascular causes, like stroke". The Washington Post gives a fair and considered opinion of the piece. Previously on MetaFilter.
posted by Wordshore at 7:52 AM PST - 60 comments

A small museum attempts to slow down the visitor and encourage contemplation. (SLWAPO) In doing so, it finds itself at the center of the debate about museums, access, Instagram, and the "Mona Lisa Moment."
posted by PussKillian at 7:40 AM PST - 10 comments

The site also has ambitions beyond introducing a few strange, old movies every few months. Taken as a whole, byNWR makes a case for several lost or dying institutions at once: the low-budget exploitation film, of course, but also the obsessively focused zine, the Web 1.0-era online magazine, and the video-store clerk willing to recommend something truly unusual to jaded viewers who think they've seen it all. [more inside]
posted by smcg at 7:39 AM PST - 2 comments

Cody Johnston has an incredibly funny and intelligent youtube show called "Some More News". His video on the straw ban is fact-filled and nuanced (and funny) as are his other videos . Here's the Straw Ban video:
posted by bearette at 7:04 AM PST - 38 comments

Why Technology Favors Tyranny - "Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it." (via)
posted by kliuless at 6:36 AM PST - 8 comments

The first trailer for HBO's adaptation of Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend has been released. [more inside]
posted by grumpybear69 at 6:19 AM PST - 17 comments

With zero warning, Eminem dropped a new album last night titled Kamikaze, with thirteen tracks (two of which are skits rather than songs) including music from the Venom soundtrack.

Bonus: wholesome video of rapper Hopsin after noticing that he was name-dropped on the album
posted by 256 at 5:36 AM PST - 21 comments

Orson Welles' last movie is finally finished and comes out in November and the very '70s trailer is out today. Welles largely completed filming forty years ago but never got the funding to complete the edit and it was snarled in legal battles until recently when Netflix stepped in to pay to complete the film. (previously)
posted by octothorpe at 4:58 AM PST - 35 comments