An Iliad at Arden Theatre Co.

This weekend, I had the pleasure of seeing An Iliad at the Arden Theatre. The show is a retelling of the Greek epic using a mix of song, modern vernacular, and classical storytelling techniques. This two person production—one poet and one musician—is truly one of the best theatrical experiences I have ever had, and the…

“Little Birdies,” r/Art, & The Hidden Gems of Internet Artistry

TRIGGER WARNING: Depictions of abuse IN LINKED ARTWORK. Just yesterday, a reddit user posted this piece by Yuliya Litvinova to r/Art, entitled “Little Birdies” (mistakenly identified in the reddit post as “Angels”). The work, which was apparently done for a Russian horror-art collection called Evil Book II, absolutely floored me. Even though it is intended…

Recursion in Music

This video from music theory YouTuber Adam Neely deals with the idea of “musical fractals”—melodies whose individual pitches are made up of the greater melody itself. It’s a bit hard to describe, but it is super interesting to see how music can essentially be made of smaller versions of itself with the help of just…

Listen to Wikipedia

This website houses the visualization that I mentioned in our last class, Listen to Wikipedia. The site utilizes both sound and visuals to represent edits being made to Wikipedia in real time, with changes in instrumentation, pitch, and color corresponding to the types, sizes, and sources of different edits. It serves as an extremely interesting…

Coldplay & The Art of “Building Hype” in Music Marketing

Coldplay have just recently begun promoting their upcoming eighth LP, Everyday Life. Before any official announcement was made about the album release, however, the band slowly teased that a new project was on the way. On YouTube, they first altered the music videos of one song per each of their previous albums, changing the thumbnails…

Bunraku—Japanese Puppet Theatre

For my Theatre History class last week, I gave a presentation on the art of bunraku, a form of Japanese puppet theatre that has existed since 1600. Perhaps the most interesting part of bunraku is that there are 40 standard puppet designs used in the entire art form, with each puppet having a name and…

Sunday in the Park with George

My favorite musical, Sunday in the Park with George tells a fictionalized account of the life of artist Georges Seurat as he works to complete his masterpiece, Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte). The play explores Seurat’s isolation—both as an artist and…

Monty the Penguin

As we are currently working on short-form narratives with Project 2, I figured that this week I would share my favorite television commercial. In the UK, department store John Lewis & Partners is known for releasing a highly-sentimental Christmas commercial every year, a practice which they have continued annually since 2007. Their 2014 advert, “Monty…

Capturing Sound—In Appreciation of Album Art

Album artwork has always been one of my favorite types of artistic design. I am forever fascinated by how different artists find ways to represent audio in a purely visual form. A well-executed piece of album artwork works to compliment or enhance the lyrical content or mood of an album, and, when done well, it…

Slicing in Style: Knives of All Kinds

This YouTube channel—a favorite of mine for some time now—showcases the process of hand-making chef’s knives out of all sorts of strange materials. Milk, pasta, cardboard, etc. Admittedly, the videos can be a bit… well, bizarre. The person who runs the channel has quite an odd sense of humor. But, there is a strange sort…