A Brief History of Pretty Much Everything

This imag­i­na­tive bit was a stu­den­t’s final project for an art course. The flip­book, made entire­ly out of biro pens, was cre­at­ed with 2100 pages of draw­ings and took about 3 weeks to devel­op. Need­less to say, the stu­dent got an A.

Thanks to @kirstinbutler for flag­ging this one.

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A History of the World in 100 Objects

Work­ing with the BBC, Neil Mac­Gre­gor, the Direc­tor of the British Muse­um, has launched a down­right smart project. A His­to­ry of the World in 100 Objects uses impor­tant pieces from the muse­um’s col­lec­tions to recount the long his­to­ry of human­i­ty. Through­out the year, the seri­al­ized radio pro­gram will air 100 episodes, each aver­ag­ing 15 min­utes, and they will cov­er two mil­lion years of human inno­va­tion and artis­tic cre­ation. Below, I’ve includ­ed a recent episode that revis­its the Oldu­vai hand axe, a tool invent­ed some 1.2 mil­lion years ago that proved vital to human evo­lu­tion and our migra­tion out of Africa. You can access the full series in audio via iTunes, RSS Feed, as well as oth­er for­mats found here. A big thanks to Stephen in the UK for flag­ging this pro­duc­tion for us.

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2009: The Year in Pictures

Some very pow­er­ful images in this New York Times fea­ture. But, tak­en togeth­er, they don’t say much good for 2009. Bring on the New Year…

Visages d’Art

Anoth­er “eggman913″ mov­ing art spe­cial. (Check out his full col­lec­tion on YouTube.) This time, the images morph in sync with Bach’s Pre­lude And Fugue No. 6 In D Minor BWV 851 — Prae­ludi­um from the Well-Tem­pered Clavier, Book 1 per­formed by Daniel Ben Pien­aar (avail­able at Mag­natune).

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Ira Glass on the Art of Story Telling

Since 1995, Ira Glass has host­ed and pro­duced This Amer­i­can Life (iTunes — Feed — Web Site), the award-win­ning radio show that presents mas­ter­ful­ly-craft­ed sto­ries to almost 2 mil­lion lis­ten­ers each week. What’s the secret sauce that goes into mak­ing a great sto­ry, par­tic­u­lar­ly one primed for radio or TV? Glass spells it out in four parts. Part 1 (above) gets into the build­ing blocks of a good sto­ry. Part 2 talks about the impor­tance of find­ing the right sto­ry. Part 3 reas­sures you that cre­ative excel­lence takes time to devel­op. It also comes with hard work. And Part 4 flags com­mon errors to avoid. Give Glass 17 min­utes, and you will be a bet­ter sto­ry­teller for it…

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Beauty Through a Microscope


vangoghish

This year, Nikon held a con­test and select­ed the best “pho­tomi­cro­graphs,” essen­tial­ly pic­tures tak­en through the micro­scope. 20 final­ists were select­ed in total, and you can view them on Nikon’s web site, or even more eas­i­ly on Wired’s web site. Among the final­ists, you’ll find the pic­ture above. Nope, it isn’t a Van Gogh. It’s a “10-year old prepa­ra­tion of bar­bi­tal, fenace­tine, val­i­um and acetic acid” cap­tured under a micro­scope.

via @timoreilly

Hidden America Exposed

Taryn Simon pho­tographs the hid­den and unfa­mil­iar in Amer­i­ca (see book here). Above, her 18 minute pre­sen­ta­tion takes you inside the Amer­i­ca not often seen, pro­vid­ing glimpses of the CIA’s abstract art col­lec­tion, the fed­er­al gov­ern­men­t’s mar­i­jua­na grow room, a Braille edi­tion of Play­boy pro­duced by the Library of Con­gress (just the arti­cles, not the pic­tures, of course), and more. I’ve added this clip to our YouTube Favorites. Thanks to the var­i­ous Twit­ter streams that flagged this clip for me this week­end.

Caravaggio and Rembrandt Side by Side

Straight from Metafil­ter. Seemed worth pass­ing along to our read­ers:

The Rijksmu­se­um in Ams­ter­dam invites you to com­pare Car­avag­gio and Rem­brandt. For an overview of Rem­brandt’s work here are Rem­brandt van Rijn: Life and Work and A Web Cat­a­logue of Rem­brandt Paint­ings. For Car­avag­gio there’s caravaggio.com which makes use of the Ital­ian web­site Tut­ta l’opera del Car­avag­gio.

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