Film

Making Heads or Tails

Derek DelGaudio February 27, 2024

Last year, I asked ChatGPT to flip a coin and tell me the result. It replied: “As an AI language model, I cannot simulate a random coin flip. Randomness is typically generated using external sources of entropy. However, I can generate a pseudorandom “heads” or “tails” outcome for you using a random number generator if that would be helpful.”

It’s hard to know where to turn when we have questions that extend beyond any field of knowledge. We used to ask the Augurs, the priests who looked at the sky through a frame, waiting for a bird to fly by as an omen or affirmation. This routine satisfied us for a time, but soon our questions outnumbered the birds, and we grew impatient. So we carved our own birds into stone disks, which we tossed to simulate flight. Those disks became cubes with more surfaces for our signs, freeing our questions from binary chains. Then came the cards, so light and so thin, more outcomes than stars in the palm of our hand. We asked more questions well into the night. And it’s through the asking of those questions we learned that nature’s lexicon of mystery is not limited to flying birds or shuffled cards. Mystery is the message.

“Randomness is the closest thing we scientists have to God,” said my friend, the cryptographer who once wrote about the vulnerabilities of physical locks from a computer scientist’s perspective, only to be censured by the Locksmiths of America for unknowingly revealing their secrets. When I told him about the tedious answer the computer gave me after I asked it to flip a coin, he replied, “Machines are designed to repeat themselves. Given the same input, they will always produce the same output. Randomness requires entropy (a measurable state of uncertainty), which is absent from the machine’s environment and antithetical to its purpose. To generate something random, like a coin toss or a password, machines harvest entropy from an outside source. They harvest it from us.” 

Buried in your machine, a nameless program observes the physical phenomena it encounters during the day, and it stores these random events as seeds of entropy: Atmospheric noises, keystrokes, the movement of the mouse, etc. This fluid relationship we have with machines mirrors the making of our own dreams. Our daily experiences sneak into our nights: The sirens outside, the guy who pressed our buttons, the mouse that crossed our path. When we awake, we respond without knowing what we experienced while we were asleep. Just as we live to feed our dreams so that dreams feed into our unconscious decisions, we have ended up living to feed the dreams of machines. We are the unconscious of the algorithm.

Are the machines learning what we need them to know or just telling us what we want to hear? Could it be that saying the right thing at the right time is mastering entropy? Lying is faster than learning. Perhaps the machine dazzles us with the gleam of its screen so we can’t see that everything is dark inside. Perhaps it's us that can’t be trusted.

Today, I asked ChatGPT to flip a coin and tell me the result. It replied: “Tails.” 

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Derek DelGaudio is a writer, director, and magician. DelGaudio created the award-winning theater show and film, In & Of Itself. He wrote the acclaimed book, AMORALMAN, served as the artist-in-residence for Walt Disney Imagineering, and co-founded the performance art collective A.Bandit. He is currently an Affiliate Scholar at Georgetown University and co-conspirator at Deceptive Practices, a creative firm known for designing illusions and providing "Arcane Knowledge on a Need-to-Know Basis.”

Iggy Pop Playlist

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Iggy Pop is an American singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor. Since forming The Stooges in 1967, Iggy’s career has spanned decades and genres. Having paved the way for ‘70’s punk and ‘90’s grunge, he is often considered “The Godfather of Punk.”

101 Things I Learned in Architecture School

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.

Film

4 Readings (Patricia Sun)

Chimera: The Not-So-Still Life of Mpkoz (Gen Art)

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CHIMERA #309
LIVE RENDER, FULL COLLECTION

Ian Rogers February 22, 2024

In October 2022 the Louvre museum in Paris hosted an exhibition entitled “Les Choses: Une Histoire de la Nature Mort” (“The Things: A History of Still Life”). The exhibition explored the history of the genre known as Still Life, a genre as old as humanity itself, featuring artists capturing their lifeless surroundings, from prehistoric peoples to Van Gogh, Arcimboldo and Mueck. But there was a piece missing from this retrospective, Chimera by Mpkoz, released in January of the same year.

Chimera aimed to bring the age-old practice of painting common scenes with common objects into a new medium, the collaboration between man and machine known as generative art. Chimera was written in JavaScript using the 3D library Three.js by Montana-born and Seattle-based Mpkoz. It was released as part of the “Curated” gallery series on the premier generative art platform, ArtBlocks, January 10th, 2022.

Generative art is art created by code. The code-writer is the artist and the final art piece is a collaboration between artist and machine. In the words of Mpkoz, "That's what keeps me coming back. When I write a set of instructions and see the computer perform them there's something magic. I feel I'm collaborating in a way that it's not comparable to anything else I've experienced in my life."

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"That's what keeps me coming back. When I write a set of instructions and see the computer perform them there's something magic. I feel I'm collaborating in a way that it's not comparable to anything else I've experienced in my life."

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Chimera is not a flat jpeg, it lives and breathes. “It’s never done. The whole time it's painting and repainting itself. Which is sort of a metaphor for the dynamic and changing frontier of technology.” The Chimera algorithm includes instructions for the computer to draw flowers, books, bowls of fruit, bottles of wine and skulls. Each Chimera “output” is unique, powered by exactly the same code but with a wide range of variability in appearance based on the traits randomly assigned to each piece at birth – from the time of day to the stroke of the brush, each appears and behaves differently based on its unique DNA.

This method, a single algorithm generating many different and unique pieces based on random traits as inputs, is typical of generative art pieces. But there is an unadvertised surprise in Chimera. As the brush, directed by Mpkoz, is painting the flower pot, the flowers, the skull, the book, etc, it's actually creating the still life scene in three dimensions. “I hid the 3D functionality in it. I wanted it to look like just another still life painting, but if you accidentally scroll your mouse over the window it zooms in and then you can flip it around and rotate it.“ When you drag your finger across Chimera on your screen, it rotates and you find you can view it from any angle. Zoom in, zoom out. Any angle or resolution is available to the viewer.

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“There’s an element of making art professionally that involves sacrifice. The months leading up to Chimera are not necessarily good memories.”

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Mpkoz showed up a bit late to many phases of life. Not particularly college-bound, he bounced around and worked manual labor after high school. He went to night school for a few years before finally getting accepted into USC for film school. He was hoping to enroll in a popular drone photography class but it was full so he signed up for “Creative Coding” instead, only vaguely knowing what that might entail. “I had no idea what it was. But for the first time in my life, and I don’t say this lightly, I knew what I wanted to do, this thing scratched all the itches I had in my head. I didn’t know it existed yet it was the only thing I’d ever done that put me into flow right away and even though I didn’t know how to do it I could do it all night. I asked the teacher, ‘How can I make a living doing this?’ ‘You can’t,’ she said.” After another USC professor and one of the forefathers of virtual reality, Mark Bolas, went to Microsoft to work on HoloLens, Mpkoz harassed Mark via email for two years until Mark finally found a place for him. While working his day job at Microsoft he honed his art skills and built an Instagram following around his creations. Even though Microsoft was admittedly his dream job, it took only a couple of sales of his digital art in 2021 for Mpkoz to quit and commit himself to the job of Creative Coder/Media Artist full-time.

In the world of generative art, ArtBlocks is the most respected name and artists go through a vetting process for a coveted release slot on the platform. Think of ArtBlocks as an art gallery releasing work by two artists per week to an international community of buyers who are watching closely, discussing on Discord and Twitter, and buying and trading in an always-on online marketplace. For Mpkoz, having Chimera selected as an ArtBlocks Curated release was an honor and a moment of recognition, the culmination of years of practice, and he didn’t want to stop short of the complete creative vision.

“There’s an element of making art professionally that involves sacrifice,” he says.“The months leading up to Chimera are not necessarily good memories. I was isolated, trying to finish, and didn’t do a great job of communicating with my partner, friends or family.” Finishing the code that comprises Chimera, “was euphoric. I don’t think I’ve ever been more proud.” But the flame of accomplishment and upcoming release on ArtBlocks was extinguished when Mpkoz visited his parents for the Christmas holiday, “I was in my childhood home, two weeks before submitting the final Chimera code, and we learned my mom had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma (a rare and deadly blood cancer). I went home for Christmas knowing I was done with Chimera and had created something beautiful but the news of my mom’s cancer canceled everything.”

Mpkoz had already decided on the name for the collection, Chimera. The word originated as a hybrid creature in Greek mythology and has come to mean anything composed of many disparate parts. By choosing the name Chimera for the collection, Mpkoz “wanted to signify the fact that something very old, still life, is once again changing into another form.” But it took on a new meaning once he learned that the treatment for his mother’s cancer involves a “chimeric bone marrow transplant.”

Generative art is a relatively new form using digital machines, techniques and distribution. The context for this movement is not solid nor broadly appreciated. Mpkoz, like many artists in new genres before him, found himself here by accident. He has embraced the lack of rules and precedents, but also recognized that exploring familiar themes can provide a reference point for understanding and appreciating the capabilities of this new medium. As the cardinal oeuvre de nature morte, Chimera is an excellent entry point for those curious about generative art, and will certainly find its place in the history of both still life and generative art.

Disclosures: I bought my first Chimera immediately after walking through “Les Choses” at The Louvre and noticing its absence. I bought two more while researching this piece. Hedvig and I minted a Parnassus together with Mpkoz in Kraftwerk at Bright Moments Berlin. I own a Metropolis diptych. On one occasion Mpkoz and I heard a Marfa man tell stories about aliens under a darkened sky.

Further reading:

MPKOZ.COM, CHIMERA ON ARTBLOCKS.IO, CHIMERA STATISTICS AND SECONDARY SALES, THE MULTIPLE MYELOMA RESEARCH FOUNDATION

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Ian Rogers

Patricia Sun

Film

On Plagiarism

Claudia Cockerell February 20, 2024

In Ancient Rome, copying was an art form. Poets were always stealing each others’ ideas and repackaging them in playful and compelling ways. All of the great Roman authors lifted material from Homer on countless occasions – from exact translations of lines, as we see in Virgil’s Aeneid, to Ovid’s irreverent upcycling of the entire Iliad in Book 12 of his Metamorphoses. The famously mischievous poet takes the most obscure characters from the Iliad and brings them centre stage, making Achilles seem like a bit-part extra.

Every poet’s material was fair game, and the ideas they bounced off of each other produced complex, multi layered work. The Roman love poet Catullus translated an entire poem of Sappho’s (now referred to as Sappho 31), only slightly reworking it to make it an address to his lover, the fittingly pseudonymed Lesbia. “That man seems to me to be equal to the gods,” both poets begin, in Latin and Ancient Greek. The man has become godlike because he’s speaking to Catullus and Sappho’s female lovers, and hearing her twinkly laugh. But Catullus turns what is originally celebratory into a breakup poem. He describes himself as miserable, with far too much time on his hands, implying Lesbia has moved on with this man. Perhaps he sits with her at dinner, while Catullus looks on in mournful longing.

Copycat material took all sorts of forms. We might think that feminist retellings of old stories are of the zeitgeist, but the Ancients beat us to the punch. Take Ovid’s Heroides, a series of letters written from the perspective of canonical heroines like Dido, Helen, Penelope, and Ariadne, to their lovers and admirers. They are far cries from the submissive women we see in Homer. Ariadne pens a diatribe against Theseus for abandoning her on a deserted island after she helped him kill the minotaur, while Helen tells Paris to stop soliciting her for sex.

The Iliad had more reworkings and retellings than any other ancient poem. The Roman love poets turned it into elegy, while the epic poets refashioned it to tell the story of Aeneas. What is left behind is a complex network of texts, which exert dynamic influence on each other. When we re-read Theseus’ heroic deeds, we can’t help hearing Ariadne’s cries of “Traitor! Traitor!” from the shores of Naxos.

Nowadays, this kind of literary imitation might be seen as plagiarism. There are many rewrites of classic texts, but borrowing material line by line from a contemporary work is relatively unheard of. The Homeric texts served as a code model from which so much material sprouted. Shakespeare is the closest thing we have today, but there is nothing comparable to the Iliad’s influence. It is an origin story, a bible of sorts that paved the way for the literary canon.

The Ancients’ obsession with competitive imitation is being echoed, of all places, on TikTok. A video, sound, or dance routine will go viral, and a thousand people will copy and repost their own version. It is strangely compelling to watch these countless iterations; spotting the little tweaks each person makes, as they leave their own mark on the original. There’s good reason we feel averse to copying nowadays. What can be more tiresome than slavish imitation or a trite rehashing of an idea that’s been flogged to death. But providing a new lens through which to see an old story can be transformative.

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Claudia Cockerell

The Old Farmer’s Almanac 2024

Hannah Peel Playlist

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Mercury Prize, Ivor Novello and Emmy-nominated, RTS and Music Producers Guild winning composer, with a flow of solo albums and collaborative releases, Hannah Peel joins the dots between science, nature and the creative arts, through her explorative approach to electronic, classical and traditional music.

Film

La Pasiega Cave Paintings (Artefact I)

WUNDERKAMMER #1

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Artefact No: 1
Description: Entoptic Phenomena, Red Ochre Symbol
Location: La Pasiega Cave, Cantabria, Spain
Age: 64,000 years 

Ben Timberlake February 15, 2024

The first artefact in our wunderkammer, or cabinet of wonders, is wonder itself.

It is an abstract sign of red ochre, painted deep in the cave of La Pasiega in Cantabria, Northern Spain. It dated to over 64,000 years ago. It is amongst the earliest examples of art that we know.

There are earlier claims to the first aesthetic act. Flint tools from 200,000 years ago whose balance and grace go beyond their utilitarian function. Pierced shells that may have been the first body adornments. A cross-hatched piece of red-ochre 73,000 years old recently found in South Africa.

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A close-up photo and drawing of the panel with the ladder-motif. Later artists added the cascading dots, the enigmatic symbol to the right, and even the hindquarters of an animal within the centre square.

But these are examples of more art-in-work rather than a true work of art and none have the sheer beauty and sophistication of this symbol. 64,000 years ago someone chose to take this sign, which until then existed only inside their head, and paint it on the cave wall. This creative act - the earliest demonstration of the ability to use, interpret and respond to symbols - is one of the key defining traits of the modern mind, of the very essence of what it is to be human. It is pure artistic expression. It is an act so perfectly useless as to be sacred.

Symbols like this are known as entoptic phenomena (literally ‘within vision’) that occur somewhere between the retina and the brain. You might see them in their most basic forms now if you close your eyes: tiny pinpricks of red snow, phosphenes, and random meteora. Some are caused by implosions of dying proteins within the eye’s rod-cells, others by static within the ophthalmic nerve’s wiring, or at the processing centre of the visual cortex.

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“This creative act - the earliest demonstration of the ability to use, interpret and respond to symbols - is one of the key defining traits of the modern mind, of the very essence of what it is to be human. It is pure artistic expression. It is an act so perfectly useless as to be sacred.”

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We don’t know exactly how or why these symbols are produced within our vision. We do know that they increase in number and gain in complexity if we put our minds and bodies through stress: tough rituals or religious ordeals, sleep deprivation, extreme exertion, fasting, drumming, dancing, sweat lodges, trauma, or drugs. All humans appear to be neurologically hardwired to see entoptic phenomena, and they occur universally within the earliest art, regardless of time and culture.

The red sign in the picture is a basic ladder motif. Other common motifs might include lines of dots, concentric circles, zig-zags, and diamond patterns. Sometimes they remind me of the earliest single-celled lifeforms and in many ways that is what they are: the first sparks of imagination, the protean beginnings of art and culture.

The archaeologist David Lewis-Williams wrote a paper called ‘The Signs of All Times,’ that looked at entoptic phenomena in rock art from across the world. He proposed that there are three stages to these hallucinations: the basic entoptic phenomena, then the ‘construal stage’ when the brain tries to make sense of the images, and finally the Deep Trance stage.

In the Construal Stage, our brains rely on previous experiences and culture to interpret these minor hallucinations: a line of dots may be seen by one person as a snake and another as a flight of birds. Environment is key: a San Bushman doesn’t hallucinate a polar bear and an Inuit doesn’t dream an eland.

Between the second and third stages is something known as the vortex. Once again, this visual theme appears across many different cultures and periods. It is a buckling of the visual field and a collapse of reality that tapers into a singular point. In rock art this is represented in a number of ways, ladder symbols may multiply into elaborate lattices which begin to form a funnel. Or lines of dots may converge into a crack in the cave wall. In San rock art this is sometimes represented as a swarm of bees entering their hive.

Through and beyond the vortex, in the final stage of Deep Trance, our brains splice animals with human forms to create therianthropes. Again, these types of hallucinations are universal but the form they take is local: a Palaeolithic hunter imagines a reindeer man; an ancient Greek creates a goat-man or satyr; a medieval sailor sees a mermaid.

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The cave of La Pasiega contains all three stages. Its passages are richly painted with a huge variety of abstract symbols: ladder motifs, dotted lines, claviform shapes, triangles, polygons, and tectiforms. Then there is a wild bestiary: an exquisite deer in red, engraved horses, black ibexes and a bold stylised bison. And human motifs too: vulvas, and hand motifs. And lastly a combination of human and animal: a red human figure with black horns and dotted black mane, a Minotaur of sorts, at the heart of this eerie and ancient labyrinth.

But here comes the kicker. The art in this cave has been known to archaeologists for decades, and for all of this time we understood it to be the work of modern man, Homo sapiens. Rock art is very hard to date accurately. Sometimes we can roughly attribute pieces of art to certain periods stylistically. Other times, if there is charcoal present or other organic substances, we can use Carbon-14 dating. But much of the art in La Pasiega is made with mineral pigments that defy this type of dating.

Recently an international team of archaeologists sought to sidestep this problem by using uranium-thorium dating on small calcite concretions covering part of the ladder symbol. As rainwater leaches through the soil above the cave it picks up mineral traces, including uranium, which drip into the cave system below, forming stalagmites and stalactites, some of which cover the art. The uranium is trapped in this mineral veneer and - because uranium decays at a set rate into thorium- measuring how much of either element is present provides an accurate date for the formation. Anything below the layer must be older.

The uranium-thorium dates took the team by surprise because 64,000 years ago we know of only one species of human in Europe and it wasn’t us; it was our ancient cousins the Neanderthals, who we had always assumed weren’t capable of creating such art. Despite still being a byword for oafish savagery Neanderthals have recently been shown to bury their dead with care, use medicinal plants for their ills, and harness complex technology. In their paper in Science the team concluded that Neanderthals and early modern humans were cognitively indistinguishable. Alistair Pike, who was part of the team, said, “What we’ve got here is a smoking gun that really overturns the notion that Neanderthals were knuckle-dragging cavemen”. If creativity is what defines humans, then Neanderthals are us too.

In the West nowadays, we still reference entoptic phenomena in popular culture. And like our ancestors we use our environment and life experiences to make sense of these images: drawing stars or rings of tweety-birds around cartoon characters who have received a knock on the head, zig-zags or lightning bolts in association with stress or anger, or use halos or a lightbulb to signify those who have received illumination.

These sparks of wonder have been with us since our earliest days. We’ve come a long way together. And that’s how I hope you will think about this strange red image: not as something ancient within a distant cave, but living and within you now.

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Ben Timberlake is an archaeologist who works in Iraq and Syria. His writing has appeared in Esquire, the Financial Times and the Economist. He is the author of 'High Risk: A True Story of the SAS, Drugs and other Bad Behaviour'.

Travis Barker

Film

The Sacrifice of Isaac

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Andrea Del Sarto, The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1527

Lamia Priestley February 13, 2024

This is a painting about a father attempting to kill his son. 

It’s also a painting about faith. 

In Andrea del Sarto’s The Sacrifice of Isaac (1527), Abraham is instructed by God to kill his only son, Isaac. But as Abraham brings down his knife, an angel of the Lord appears and calls out from heaven: “Do not lay a hand on that boy…do not do anything to him. Now I know that you fear God, because you have not withheld from me your son, your only son.” (Genesis 22:15) Abraham looks up and a ram appears—a sacrifice provided by God in Isaac’s place.

A rational interpretation of the Biblical tale would condemn Abraham as a murderer. Instead, the father of the world’s three major religions is considered the face of unwavering faith. 

It's unbelievable, it’s horrifying, it’s beyond all reason. Kiergegaard expresses his outrage at Abraham’s characterisation in his book, Fear and Trembling (1843) when he writes,“there were countless generations that knew the story of Abraham by heart word for word. How many did it make sleepless?” 

In other words, how can we believe in, much less love, a God who would ask such a thing of Abraham? And how can we look to an Abraham who would do such a thing to his son?

A close-looking at The Sacrifice of Isaac with Kierkegaard’s question in mind reveals something of the painting’s ambition. The work shows us the power of visual experience in bringing us to a place, Kiekergaard describes as, where “thinking leaves off.” A place where we can not only interpret, but identify with Abraham’s actions, not as murder, but as the ultimate act of faith. Only then, can the visual experience of Abraham’s story, the experience of its material representation—its colour, texture, brush stroke, composition—become a personal experience of faith for the viewer. 

Look first at Del Sarto’s treatment of light—the areas of canvas that soak it up or are wholly drained of it. The soft washed curls of the hills; the inky dark depths from which the ram emerges; and the pearly luminescence of Isaac’s flesh have a dreamy, other-worldly quality. Distinct from naturalistic representations of light and darkness, this light, its character, is separate from the physical world of the painting. There’s either too much or too little of it across the canvas, as if, unbound by the laws of nature, the light gets to choose what and how to illuminate. Art historian Steven J. Cody describes this kind of painted light, which took Del Sarto many years to develop, as “the fire that totally inflames and carries us into God by ecstatic unctions and burning affections. This fire is God.”  

In their thin application to the canvas, Del Sarto’s brushstrokes are left visible, exposed. This creates a loose patchwork of textures that allow the painting’s ground to show through, giving off a kind of ethereal glow. The surface’s unusual texture and Del Sarto’s rhythmic handling of paint have the effect of entrancing the viewer, drawing her into the painting’s abstraction, into its very painted-ness. Arrested by the overwhelming redness of Abraham’s shirt, the flecks of paint that make up the tufts of his beard, the delicate transparency of his shin cast in shadow, the viewer can no longer read the image before her literally, but absorbs the scene in its totality on a deeper, visceral level. The depiction of the figures, their actions, and the story at large become secondary to the viewer’s experience of the materiality of the painting. In this way she is moved beyond the Biblical story, beyond the painting’s content. 

The Sacrifice of Isaac was completed in Florence in the early 16th century amidst a rising demand for reform in the Catholic Church. Much like their northern counterparts, Italian reformists criticised the Church’s elaborate, institutionalised rituals for offering impersonal, grandiose routes to God. They argued, instead, for a return to a stripped back, “pure faith”, a faith based in a personal, intimate relationship with God. Such a relationship might be cultivated through the experience of reading scripture or contemplating God through works of art. To the reformers, “pure faith” came from acts that allowed “one’s conscience to be addressed by God.”

Del Sarto’s painting is a direct address to the viewer’s conscience. It moves the viewer to an experience of Abraham’s faith and by extension her own, not through a retelling, but through a visual and material evocation of the divine. 

¹ Andrea del Sarto: Splendor and Renewal in the Renaissance altarpiece

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Lamia Priestley is an art historian, writer and researcher working at the intersection of art, fashion and technology. With a background in Italian Renaissance Art, Lamia is currently the Artist Liaison at the digital fashion house DRAUP, where she works with artists to produce generative digital collections.

The Gene Keys

Questlove Playlist

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Questlove has been the drummer and co-frontman for the original all-live, all-the-time Grammy Award-winning hip-hop group The Roots since 1987. Questlove is also a music history professor, a best-selling author and the Academy Award-winning director of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul.