Best Movie about Roleplaying in 2009

The Dalai Lama on "All in the Mind"

Australian radio recently aired a fascinating three-part discussion with the Dalai Lama. The panel discusses neuro-plasticity, behaviorism, morality, and positive psychology. (Part 1, Part 2 & Part 3)

Duchamp on French TV

This is my favorite video I've seen on UbuWeb, so far. It is an hour long interview with Marcel Duchamp that aired on French TV in the early '60s. I visited the most important Duchamp collection last Tuesday, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The main Duchamp room was full Boy Scouts. They looked upset and confused. Later on I passed them and they were joking about how they would be doing the public a favor if they were to smash the art. (Link.)

A serial killer reviews The Phantom Menace...

...while putting all your 4d projects to shame (NSFW):

WWJD WWDD

SOURCE

Old notes

I attended the Siggraph conference in New Orleans in August. Siggraph is the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Techniques. The conference has been at the heart of the computer graphics industry since 1967, so I figured it was a good place to go to figure out if I should be a computer graphics professional. (I shouldn't.) The long-and-short of it is that the art galleries presented by MIT's Leonardo society jazzed me much more than any of the technical demos. The galleries set-up by the Leonardo society were entitled, "BioLogic : A natural history of digital life". The title suggests cellular automata, such as Conway's Game of Life. The pieces in the exhibit did not deal with this directly, but rather dealt with bio-mimicry stylistically. There were several stand-out pieces:

• A piece entitled "One" by Yoon Chung Han imagines a drop of ink as a microcosm/planetoid. Here's a video:

One (2009) from Yoon Chung Han on Vimeo.

• Philip Beesley's "Hylozoic Soil" depicts an environment of micro-machines much like a coral reef:

• The best piece in a gallery of generative art was a lantern by this guy:

• Here's a conference Uncle Bruce did on generative art. (Link.)

I didn't see the coolest technical demo until I was home from the conference. I spotted this on a Blender news site. (Link.)

The neuroscience of meditation

This looks like fun

via Rhizome

Arthur Ganson

A superb drawing, in all respects.

Antimatter

Conceptual art can solve any problem, and Jonathan Keats saves the world from economic disaster. . .

“Economic equilibrium is upset by our unbalanced pursuit of material wealth,” explains Mr. Keats. “My plan is to offset materialism with modern science, by exploiting the economic potential of antimatter, which is the physical opposite of anything made with atoms, from luxury condos to private jets.”

Backed by private Swiss funding, his scheme will be implemented beginning on November 12, 2009, when the First Bank of Antimatter opens in San Francisco’s Monadnock Building, the location of Modernism Gallery.

The bank will serve as a hub for antimatter transactions worldwide, eventually financing the building of antimatter infrastructure and providing the public with a full range of investment opportunities. “But our first order of business will be printing money,” says Mr. Keats. “Cash is the foundation of any economy, and an anti-economy is no exception.”

via beyond the beyond