History is rife with ambivalence, rehabilitating some of its characters over time and newly castigating others. Many of the works here addressed these concerns by re-examining historical episodes now largely forgotten, misunderstood or simply regarded as inconvenient.
Continue ReadingLike van der Werve’s films, the history of transportation is also littered with quashed dreams, failures, and falls: grandiloquent names like Concorde, Challenger, and Titanic almost precognitively augured their own spectacular demises.
Continue ReadingStarfish, it was once thought, led a largely static and plant-like existence. Yet the advent of time-lapse photography in the 1950s unveiled their secret world: a rich, slow-motion society replete with many of the curious behaviors common to the rest of the biosphere.
Continue ReadingDesigners here gathered to examine whether browser mania is just the latest form of "reinventing the wheel," arguing that typographers have spent centuries successfully honing the art of readability. Why add yet another meta-layer of color-coordinated symbols and rotating orbs that first need to be studied before being put into use?
Continue ReadingThe cozy relationship between music and art has been the focus of many recent shows, prodding BOZAR to steer clear here of art–music dabblers and dilettantes, and focus instead only on artists who treat music and visual art as equals.
Continue ReadingIf sheer numbers mean anything, the much-discussed documentary-film revival of the last year continues unabated. What remains less clear is whether the documentary world's next wave will remain as firmly polemical as the last, which grabbed attention and a surprisingly large share of the box office for hard-edged message films.
Continue ReadingA Dutch farmer is currently the only one in Europe with permission to sell camel’s milk. He saw an untapped market in the rising number of immigrants to Europe from Somalia and Morocco, where camel’s milk has long been popular for its supposed curative properties.
Continue ReadingAfter so many tales of posed famine victims, scripted reality TV and staged military rescues, disbelief of visual representation has become a reflex.
Continue ReadingUntil now, the most prominent holder of MP3 patents has been the Fraunhofer Society of Germany. But other companies, including Thomson, Philips and Alcatel-Lucent, are increasingly being backed up by aggressive enforcement efforts.
Continue ReadingJust as most British towns have a street named after Queen Victoria, many African cities have an Avenue Patrice Lumumba, named in honour of the Republic of Congo’s first democratically elected leader. South African photographer Guy Tillim took pictures of many of these eponymous streets in Angola, Benin, Mozambique, Madagascar and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
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Self-adjustable spectacles, which let untrained wearers set the right focus themselves in less than a minute, greatly reduce the need for trained optometrists, who are rarely available in Africa and many parts of Asia. But the competition is sometimes palpable amongst the companies that want to be the first to distribute adjustable glasses in the millions...
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A Dutch engineer has invented a collapsible plastic shipping container which, he hopes, will replace the steel ones. Because it is made of a fibreglass composite, it weighs only three-quarters as much as a standard container but—more importantly— when it is empty, it can be folded down to a quarter of its size.
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It had all the markings of a television detective show. Posing as patients, three undercover observers got themselves admitted as patients to a locked psychiatric ward to investigate conditions on the inside. And a remote team monitored the project via hidden cameras and microphones from a command center in a nearby hotel.
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Art traded from 1951 to 2007 appreciated just a little more than 4 percent annually, much less than the Standard & Poor’s 500 average of 8.90 percent over the same period. The figure is also significantly less than figures from previous studies that pegged art’s annual returns at 8 percent or even 13 percent.
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