For those of you who haven’t had a chance to see this yet, it is a contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights, commissioned for the 500-year anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death. Wish I could have seen the exhibition at the MOTI Museum in Holland when it all happened last year, I bet it was amazing.
PARADISE – A contemporary interpretation of The Garden of Earthly Delights from STUDIO SMACK on Vimeo.
This weekend you can swing by the UK’s National Space Centre for an out of this world experience featuring the Science of the Time Lords exhibit. On the 28th and 29th they will be doing a presentation about the science behind the UK’s most popular TV franchise, Doctor Who. Each year they set up a fun family weekend where they look at the fact behind the fiction of this iconic program, and this time they are focusing on the core concept of the show: Time Travel and the ultimate Time Lord vehicle, the TARDIS! The schedule includes workshops, competitions, challenges, talks, exhibitions, and so much more. The exhibits I would most like to see in person include the fully realized recreation of the 1978 TARDIS Control Room from the Tom Baker era, and the Members of the UK 15th Cyber Legion showing off their costumes and detailing how you can create your own. From my perspective, the only down side to these events are the fact that they will be happening on a continent different from the one I live on. I intend to do my best to attend next year, though!
Picturehouse teamed up with the Science Museum in the UK to give away 10 pairs of tickets to the Robots exhibition. Why is this important enough to mention, even though the odds of my stopping by before it closes are slim to zip? Because I wish I could be there, and if I mention it you might manage to actually make it. This isn’t a collection of metal boxes with faces painted on them; it is the 500-year-old story of humanoid robots and what it means to be human. The presentation is set in five different periods and places, with over 100 robots, 15 of which still work today. If you are one of the luck few that manage to attend this display, I would be grateful if you could take a few pictures and send them my way, so I could post them here. The exhibition will be running from from February 8th to the 3rd of September 2017, so you have a bit of time to catch it.
The Smithsonian has an online exhibit you may enjoy: 50 Years of Human Spaceflight. Of course, the first humans were launched into space in 1961, so I am guessing that was originally an exhibit at the brick and mortar Air and Space Museum back in 2011. There is some fascinating information including a lot of details most folks have forgotten these days.
For decades Virtual Reality has been expensive and flaky, but no more; this is the year it goes mainstream and affordable. Part of that is because of projects like Google Cardboard, allowing you to assemble your own VR headset for as little as $150 (cell phone, head set, and trigger button). Until recently there has been a lack of content for VR, but that has changed as well, with everyone from the Discovery Channel to the Dali Museum putting together presentations for it. In the case of the museum, they converted one of Dali’s paintings into a Virtual Reality exhibit entitled Dreams of Dali. Once at the museum they have Oculus Rift headsets for you to wear while exploring the VR environment they created of it.
The animation was created by Janis Skulme for the music video of Olga Korsak’s Behind Closed Doors, and filmed at the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. The paintings and statues were brought to life using Crazy Talk 7 and an array of painting, video editing, and compositing software. To give you an idea of what’s involved in a project like this I have included his Video Effects Showreel 2014, which includes a number of instances of the original footage, and the steps they went through on their way to the final product. The fact that the song and performance are so powerful go a long way to making this a memorable video.
Olga Korsak – "Behind closed doors" from Janis Skulme on Vimeo.