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Son Jung Wan Spring 2018

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18-19/ ∞ photos of Sebastian Stan

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Artists Covertly Scan Bust of Nefertiti and Release the Data for Free Online

An Iraqi/German pair of artists just pulled off what might be one of the most digitally-enhanced art heists in recent time. They covertly scanned the Nefertiti bust (with an Xbox 360 Kinect sensor, no less) and released the 3D printing plans online. They did so as an act of defiance, as the bust was actually looted from an Egyptian site by German archaeologists.[x]

[article by Claire Voone /Hyperallergic]

Last October, two artists entered the Neues Museum in Berlin, where they clandestinely scanned the bust of Queen Nefertiti, the state museum’s prized gem. Three months later, they released the collected 3D dataset online as a torrent, providing completely free access under public domain to the one object in the museum’s collection off-limits to photographers. Anyone may download and remix the information now; the artists themselves used it to create a 3D-printed, one-to-one polymer resin model they claim is the most precise replica of the bust ever made, with just micrometer variations. That bust now resides permanently in the American University of Cairo as a stand-in for the original, 3,300-year-old work that was removed from its country of origin shortly after its discovery in 1912 by German archaeologists in Amarna.

Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles with the 3D bust in Cairo

The project, called “The Other Nefertiti,” is the work of German-Iraqi artist Nora Al-Badri and German artist Jan Nikolai Nelles, who consider their actions an artistic intervention to make cultural objects publicly available to all. For years, Germany and Egypt have hotly disputed the rightful location of the stucco-coated, limestone Queen, with Egyptian officials claiming that she left the country illegally and demanding the Neues Museum return her. With this controversy of ownership in mind, Al-Badri and Nelles also want, more broadly, for museums to reassess their collections with a critical eye and consider how they present the narratives of objects from other cultures they own as a result of colonial histories.

The Neues Museum, which the artists believe knows about their project but has chosen not to respond, is particularly guarded towards accessibility to data concerning its collections. According to the pair, although the museum has scanned Nefertiti’s bust, it will not make the information public — a choice that increasingly seems backwards as more and more museums around the world are encouraging the public to access their collections, often through digitization projects. Notably, the British Museum has hosted a “scanathon” where visitors scanned objects on display with their smartphones to crowdsource the creation of a digital archive — an event that contrasts starkly with Al-Badri and Nelles’s covert deed.

3D rendering of the bust of Nefertiti

“We appeal to [the Neues Museum] and those in charge behind it to rethink their attitude,” Al-Badri told Hyperallergic. “It is very simple to achieve a great outreach by opening their archives to the public domain, where cultural heritage is really accessible for everybody and can’t be possessed.”

In a gesture of clear defiance to institutional order, Al-Badri and Nelles leaked the information at Europe’s largest hacker conference, the annual Chaos Communication Congress. Within 24 hours, at least 1,000 people had already downloaded the torrent from the original seed, and many of them became seeders as well. Since then, the pair has also received requests from Egyptian universities asking to use the information for academic purposes and even businesses wondering if they may use it to create souvenirs. Nefertiti’s bust is one of the most copied works from Ancient Egypt — aside from those with illicit intents, others have used photogrammetry to reconstruct it — and its allure and high-profile presence make it a particularly charged work to engage with in discussions of ownership and institutional representations of artifacts.

“The head of Nefertiti represents all the other millions of stolen and looted artifacts all over the world currently happening, for example, in Syria, Iraq, and in Egypt,” Al-Badri said. “Archaeological artifacts as a cultural memory originate for the most part from the Global South; however, a vast number of important objects can be found in Western museums and private collections. We should face the fact that the colonial structures continue to exist today and still produce their inherent symbolic struggles.”

Al-Badri and Nelles take issue, for instance, with the Neues Museum’s method of displaying the bust, which apparently does not provide viewers with any context of how it arrived at the museum — thus transforming it and creating a new history tantamount to fiction, they believe. Over the years, the bust has become a symbol of German identity, a status cemented by the fact that the museum is state-run, and many Egyptians have long condemned this shaping of identity with an object from their cultural heritage.

The heist: museumshack from jnn on Vimeo

Ultimately, the artists hope their actions will place pressure on not only the Neues Museum but on all museums to repatriate objects to the communities and nations from which they came.

Rather than viewing such an idea as radical, they see it as pragmatic, as a logical update to cultural institutions in the digital era: especially given the technological possibilities of today, the pair believes museums who repatriate artifacts could then show copies or digital representatives of them. Many people have already created their own Nefertitis from the released data; the 3D statue in the American University in Cairo stands as such an example of Al-Badri and Nelles’s ideals for the future of museums, in addition to being one immediate solution that may arise from individual action.

“Luckily there are ways where we don’t even need any topdown effort from institutions or museums,” Al-Badri said, “but where the people can reclaim the museums as their public space through alternative virtual realities, fiction, or captivating the objects like we did.”

3D-printed bust of Nefertiti

[source: Hyperallergic, emphasis mine]

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every appearance of Steve Rogers in the MCU

Captain America: The First Avenger

The Avengers

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Avengers: Age of Ultron

Captain America: Civil War

Spider-Man: Homecoming

Avengers: Infinity War

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How NOT to Start Your Novel

Morning routine that is mundane TO THE READER. Nobody cares how long your main character showers or what their favorite kind of cereal is. Only start your novel with your main character’s morning routine if it is something that isn’t routine to your reader. Does your MC have to steal their breakfast? Include that! Does your MC feed their dragon at the crack of dawn? That’s interesting! Do they spend way to long deciding what to wear? Nobody cares. That’s boring.

A dream. Readers will feel cheated when they read a bunch of interesting stuff only to find out none of it was real.

Excessive world building. Fantasy novels are especially prone to falling into this trap. Little bits of world building that are naturally woven into the narrative are fine. Info dumps are not. Remember, the purpose of the first chapter is to introduce the MC and get the reader invested in what will happen to them, not to give the reader a history lesson about a world they have no reason to care about yet.

Too long before the main conflict. While you don’t necessarily need to dive straight into the main conflict, you shouldn’t keep the reader waiting for it to start for too long. I suggest laying the groundwork for the main conflict in the first chapter and maybe hinting at it directly. That will help the plot get going at a good pace.

Without anything to ground the reader in what’s going on. The reader needs some time to get invested in the main character. While starting in medias res can work, you need to help your reader why they should care about what’s happening to the MC. Otherwise, you might as well be jingling keys in the reader’s face. Be especially careful about starting your novel with a chase scene or a battle since those can be disorienting and might not make it clear why the reader should be rooting for your MC specifically.

Without showing why your reader should care about the MC. Your MC should be one of the main things that keeps your reader hooked throughout the novel. If your reader doesn’t feel invested in them by the end of the first chapter, then there’s a good chance they won’t keep reading.

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The relationship between capitalism and eco-disaster is neither coincidental nor accidental: capital’s “need for expanding markets”, its “growth fetish”, mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability.

Capitalist Realism - Mark Fisher (via communize-anarchy)

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“We regularly ask teenage girls to read books in which characters degrade women, expecting them to understand that the book’s other merits outweigh its misogyny. To set such an expectation and not consider its effect on young women is foolish and hypocritical; we rarely expect young men to do the same, and hardy ever expect young white men to read extensively in traditions where their identities aren’t represented or are degraded. We need to reflect on the way the literature we celebrate supports the idea that women who are sexually frustrated create problems for themselves, while men in the same situation create problems for the world. Though the links are subtle, our celebration of a canon of sad white boy literature affects the way we think, and how much tolerance we offer to men like [Alek] Minassian and [Elliot] Rodger.”

— Erin Spampinato, from this article on the correlation between celebrated literary canon and the ‘incel’ culture that has arisen in online spaces (Jun. 2018)

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New Miniature Lace Scenes by Ágnes Herczeg Capture Quiet Domestic Moments

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Gustav Klimt

The Kiss

(via @lonequixote)

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The Matrix (1999)

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Tommy Shelby season 1x2

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civil war but when zemo says the trigger words bucky goes into factory reset mode and starts speaking spanish like buzz lightyear in toy story 3

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Infinity War is wild because people from all corners of the MCU fandom are just concerned about the different characters/relationships they care about, and no one cares about Thanos or the war

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So I just started my short story writing class! These are dialogue tips from Janet Burroway’s Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft

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They kept asking me, ‘What does the poem mean? What does the poem mean?’ And it was frustrating me because poems don’t mean. They suggest. They enact. They provoke.

Richard Siken (via egracely)

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La Vie En Rose playing from another room Edith Piaf

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Wandered into an article with 140 iconic cinematic shots, the comments complained there was no explanation to their composition. Decided to give it a run down and keep it to myself. 

The compositions are mostly self explanatory but I wanted to see what patterns I could find. That’s just how you learn stuffs.