The AI-generated Digital Marilyn chatbot lets you interact “in real-time using advanced natural language processing, deep learning and GPT 3.5,” Soul Machines said in announcing the project Friday. - Variety
The movie industry is notorious for learning precisely the wrong lesson from its successes, not to mention failures. Here are some trends from last year that I hope to see more of. - Washington Post
Russian authorities have announced plans to memorialise the destruction of the occupied city in the Donbas—which it blames on Ukraine—with a new “museum of the liberation of Mariupol”, scheduled to open in summer 2024. - The Art Newspaper
"Residents of Japan’s ancient capital have struggled to reconcile the financial boost from a return to pre-pandemic visitor numbers with overcrowding and incidents of bad behaviour among tourists," especially in the geisha district of Gion. While the neighborhood's alleyways are now off-limits, its main street remains open. - The Guardian
Here’s what has me perplexed: The word itself means doing something excessively, and to do anything excessively means doing it more than is reasonable or acceptable. If that’s still true and the English language hasn’t shifted just yet, then to binge means to do something too much. - The Smart Set
In years past, what used to be called Off-Off-Broadway would take place on small, out-of-the-way stages in storefronts, schools or church basements. Post-pandemic, they're happening in people's living rooms or tiny backyards or on their rooftops. - Gothamist
At some point, we have to make a principled decision about what the category is and why that is the best way to think about it, because the world isn’t pre-divided into nice categories that we simply have to notice. - The Reader
Sometimes we ignore a book’s material presence: absorbed, ‘good’ reading is often figured as a forgetting of the material conditions of book, body, room and time, even though these conditions affect how we read. With certain other books it makes no sense to separate text from object. - London Review of Books
"Counterfeiting occurs when a party poses as a book’s real publisher to sell fake versions of books. … Sometimes these versions are obviously fake — bad scans of a book are not uncommon. Sometimes the fakes are actual EPUBs that the counterfeiter duplicated." There's a new way to help block these forgeries. - Publishers Weekly
Just as Joseph Stalin called artists the “engineers of the soul,” Gemini and other AI bots may function as the engineers of our mindscapes. Programmed by the hacker wizards of Silicon Valley, AI may become a vehicle for programming us—with profound implications for democratic citizenship. - The Atlantic
Although choreographers for the stage are represented by the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the film/television/video industry had no equivalent of SAG-AFTRA or the Writers Guild for dancemakers — until 2022, when the Choreographers Guild was born. Here's a Q&A with a few of its founding leaders. - LA Dance Chronicle
"There is hardly a space in pop culture today that hasn’t been touched by Akira Toriyama’s art. … He brought manga and anime into the global mainstream and broke down the walls that had once sealed off Japanese storytelling." - The Washington Post (MSN)
Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and HNTB designed the planned 33,000-seat arena for the team currently known as the Oakland A's, which is moving to Nevada. Ingels himself describes the structure as a "spherical armadillo." The stadium will be on the Strip, on the current site of the Tropicana. - Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
"I mean, it’s not like we tried to make it look like an armadillo." On comparisons to the Sydney Opera House: "I’ll definitely take it as a compliment. I think it’s one of the most beautiful buildings on Earth. And I think, in all fairness, this is a very different building." - The Athletic
"The company, which was founded in 1988 by a group of Northwestern University graduates and achieved national fame for its original theatrical works, has been struggling financially since the COVID-19 crisis and has seen its theater production activities dwindle." - Chicago Tribune (MSN)
