the-finer-arts
Queen Victoria is the Internet's Latest and Greatest Oversharer
A month ago, at the push of a button and as a diamond jubilee gift to the world, Queen Elizabeth II put her great-great-grandmother’s complete journals online. Like WikiLeak’s Cablegate page, Queen Victoria’s Journals combines Web 1.0 aesthetics with a...
Say Happy Birthday to Antoni Gaudí With These Eye-Twisting Designs
Today, Antoni Gaudi, father of modern Catalan architecture would be 160. Creator of Spain's most legit, most Toon Town in-real-life designs, was the same man who appeared as not-worth-taking-to-the-hospital when he walked across a busy street in 192...
Perusing the Blast Door Cave Art of Nuclear Armageddon
Imagine that this is your job. You have an office of sorts located 30 or more feet underground somewhere in the American Great Plains. The office is shaped roughly like a small submarine, with concrete and steel reinforced walls, one access shaft...
I Believe I Can Flying Wallenda
Somehow I managed to go until yesterday evening before learning that Nik Wallenda—the 33-year-old acrobat of the world-famous Flying Wallendas—was planning to walk across Niagra Falls on a seven-ton, 1,800-foot long high-wire tonight. Naturally, the...
It's OK to Not Be A Luddite: Thomas Pynchon, Digitized
For all the bombed out, drug adled techno-anxieties that scream across the works of American novelist Thomas Pynchon, news of the reclusive author's e-book foray is, at first glance, the equivalent of a 20-megaton V-2 rocket blast. But, sure enough...
The Secrets We Share With Distant Servers
Today the Internet is just another place to be yourself. It’s about micro-confessions per second, the tang of authenticity, an ever-widening scope for self-promotion -- just like in the meatspace. Once upon a time, you could be anyone online -- this...
The Black Walls, Train Sets, and Giant Skulls of H.R. Giger: Interview
HR Giger, regardless of how many museum or galleries he fills with volumes of his other work, will almost certainly go down in history as that strange Swiss guy behind the _Alien_ movie. During the '70s Giger produced a book called _Necronomicon...
How Do You Borrow a Book From the Library of Utopia?
Is the library of utopia inching closer to opening its doors? Maybe, maybe not. Nicholas Carr has an exhaustive look at Harvard’s Digital Public Library of America initiative, and it raises all sorts of gut-churning questions about copyright law, the...
Yes We Can: What New Packaging Says about Taste in the Beer Industry
In college, there were three kinds of beer at parties. On one end was keg beer – that was the worst. You drank it out of red cups, you played games with it, you inhaled it while someone held you upside down by your feet. On the other end were the...
The New-Old Photogenics: How the Countess of Castiglione Launched Portrait Photography
With all due respect to those noble Frenchmen who inadvertently huffed so much silver nitrate while inventing photography, recounting the self-obsessed origins of the camera and photograph may only be possible by looking at how these technologies...
Seeing Through the Diamonds: Jason Rohrer Continues to Make Games More than Just Art
I’m really hoping to be dead and rotting by the time humanity gets sucked into the matrix. I can faintly hear the sound of ad men and bureaucrats salivating waterfalls over technology that can mind-read your dreams and contact lenses that “double as a...
Bombers in Hollywood: The Price of Military Tech Assistance in Movies
If the most powerful armed force in history isn’t winning in reality, it certainly is on the big screen. And like so many problematic aspects of late capitalism, the military-Hollywood complex has a grimly understandable logic. For example, consider...