Category: Art

Stay Young By Enjoying Art

Who doesn’t like art? If you find yourself answering “me” to that question then perhaps you should check out different galleries. Recent research has shown that people who regularly engage with art and feel something about it tend to age slower. Even engaging with art all east once a month show a 3% decrease in aging speed. Neat!

Stay young, enjoy art, live life.

“These results demonstrate the health impact of the arts at a biological level,” said Daisy Fancourt, the study’s lead author and the head of University College London’s social biobehavioral research group, told The Guardian. “They provide evidence for arts and cultural engagement to be recognized as a health-promoting behavior in a similar way to exercise.”

The study was conducted among 3,356 adults between 2010 and 2012, and included survey data and blood tests. Individuals’ rate of aging was assessed according to epigenetic clocks, which are analytic methods that track age-related changes to DNA and can be used to estimate biological age, which may differ from a person’s chronological age.

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Thanks to Fono!

Get an Early Warning for the Apocalypse

If you’re worried about an impending apocalypse then this is the app for you! The Apocalypse Early Warning System is an art project created by Kyle McDonald that is a commentary on the inequities of wealth. The ultra-wealthy tend to have insider information on global events so Kyle figured that if there were to be an apocalypse then the ultra wealthy would be amongst the first to know. And what would the wealthy do? They would flee to their bunkers using their private jets, so the early warning system simply uses private jet flight data to let commoners know that the elite are up to something.

It’s a neat art project that makes wealth inequality clear in a way that we can all understand.

In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers. This site tracks this indicator in realtime. The current emergency level is reported on a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being an indicator of a likely imminent apocalypse.
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For this app, business jets are a fixed aircraft cohort selected from public aircraft metadata by ICAO hex. The filter looks for jet records whose manufacturer, model, or ICAO type matches common business-jet families such as Citation, Gulfstream, Falcon, Global, Challenger, Learjet, Phenom, Praetor, HondaJet, PC-24, Hawker, Beechjet, Eclipse, and Vision Jet. It excludes aircraft marked military and obvious airliners or regional airliners such as Boeing 7xx, Airbus A3xx/A2xx, CRJ airline variants, ERJ/EMB regional jets, MD/DC aircraft, and other large transport categories. It is a practical type-based cohort, not proof of private ownership, passenger identity, or trip purpose.

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Kids Who Go To Art Galleries Are More Generous

Raising kids is a challenge, raising kids that are conscientious and caring is even harder. From new research it’s clear that taking kids to enjoy art will help them care more about the world around them and make them more generous. Art helps people of all ages experience awe and that’s the key to success. Awe can come from many things, but art is a good pathway and it’s easy to take kids to your local gallery.

To figure this out, the research team asked 159 volunteers aged 8 to 13 to watch short movie clips. Some of these clips were neutral, others cheerful, and others awe-inspiring. The researchers then asked the kids to determine how many items in a list of foods should be donated to a food drive for needy families. Alternately, the kids were given the option of donating their reward for participating in the study–a ticket to a local art museum–to a refugee family. 

“Children who watched the awe-inspiring video chose to count 50 percent more items for the food drive than children who watched the joy-inspiring clip and more than twice as many items as children who watched the neutral clip. Children in the awe-inspiring condition were also 2 to 3 times more likely to donate their museum tickets than children in the joyful or neutral conditions,” reports the Association for Psychological Science blog. 

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Artists Show the Real Toronto

Hopefully next week Toronto will have a new mayor (vote Gil Penalosa!) and oust the mediocre John Tory. Mayor Tory is infamous for not leading not making any real decisions except for helping car drivers drive through the city, which will cost the people of Toronto half a billion dollars. He’s not a good mayor yet he has a chance of winning. To bring attention to Tory’s ineptitude artists have created the #austerityTO project.

“Looking around the city, this is his work of art. This is the thing that he has created in his time of office,” said James McLeod, a communications manager and former journalist who helped create the project. “The long-term austerity has led to these increasingly absurd situations in our city that are really striking when you have the eyes to see them.”

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“We were trying to take what is obviously a lack of vision for the city – and reinterpret it as though it were a clear, deliberate vision,” he said.

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This Book Can Improve Your Creativity

The recently released book, Jam This Game, explores concepts of creativity and creation in the world of game design. You may find it challenging tot be creative on demand and this book wants to help you overcome that hurdle. The book is about the games industry however the chapters on creativity can be useful to anyone engage in a creative practice. Full discourse, I wrote the foreward to the book and if you follow the link below you will find a secret twist about the creation of the book.

Making video games is a challenge unto itself and getting a start in the games industry is equally challenging. Jam This Game reveals insights into the industry while providing advice to improve your creative process.
Ashton Irving, an industry expert, provides a comprehensive guide to help you think of video game design and how to start your creative process.
With more games being made than ever before how will you ensure your’s stands out? By providing prompts of ideas for a game within the book you will find new ways to come up with video game ideas.
Chapters will help you improve your teamwork and communication, or help you better think about the games industry at large.
If you’re working on a game already – great! These idea prompts are still useful to help you add fun to your game.

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