From Esther Inglis-Arkell at io9.com (image credit: Mysid)…

It seems that the brain, in specific situations, literally gets bored and starts scaring you. The easiest way to prove this is to perform the simple experiment of looking steadily into a mirror, for a few minutes at a time. Soon, you’re very likely to see a monster. That monster is a combination of your face and your brain. Does that make it better or worse?

There are a lot of creepy situations that start happening when you look in the mirror. Low light and a fearful mood certainly help, but the primary reason why people have so many mirror related freak-outs, and why it’s become such a big game at slumber parties, is straight biology. The brain doesn’t have the energy or the processing power to notice everything all the time. Sitting at your computer now, you’re probably unaware of the feel of the seat under you, your clothes against your skin, and any lingering smells you might have noticed (no judgement) when you walked into the room. Your mind mostly tunes them out. But the sense that most of us rely on almost all the time, sight, has also been narrowed down. You are probably unaware of anything outside of the range of the computer screen, and you probably haven’t noticed minor changes to that. That is why most updates on computers come with a sound or a blinking light. More…

Ann Freedman had come to Knoedler one last time.

On a mid-February day, she approached the mansion at 19 East 70th Street, where New York’s most venerable art gallery used to be, before its sudden, shocking closing last fall amid forgery allegations. “It’s amazing to think that this institution never stopped for 165 years,” she said. “It didn’t stop during the Civil War, World War I, World War II … I kept it open on 9/11.”

Now the doors were locked, the building cleaned out. The new owner was about to take possession. Knoedler’s former director had wangled a walk-through: a chance, as she put it, to be the last one in and the last one out of this gallery that had once sold Raphaels and Vermeers to Mellons and Fricks. She seemed not to wonder whether she was part of the reason these rooms were now empty.

Freedman is 63 now; tall and gaunt, with silver corkscrew curls and round wire-rimmed glasses, she is given to stylish pantsuits and dramatic belts. She’s genial but somehow remote, the sort who seems to talk mostly to control the airspace. More…

From Martin Filler at The New York Review of Books (Image credit: Pedro E. Guerrero)…

The ever growing recognition of mid-twentieth-century architectural photography has elevated the reputations of Julius Shulman, Ezra Stoller, and Balthazar Korab from that of workaday chroniclers of America’s postwar building boom to co-inventors of the High Modernist mystique. The strongly composed images of these three photographers—typified by such classics as Shulman’s crepuscular poolside view of Richard Neutra’s Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, Stoller’s penetrating exploration of Eero Saarinen’s nautilus-like TWA Terminal at JFK airport, and Korab’s soaring evocations of Saarinen’s aerodynamic Dulles Airport near Washington, DC—have come to define a veritable school of photography. United in the emphasis on high-contrast clarity, bold graphic impact, and linear dynamism, these photographs were often superior to the buildings they glamorized.

Yet there is a fourth member of their generation whose remarkable work on modernism has been far less widely known: Pedro E. Guerrero, who will turn 95 later this year, and who for many years was Frank Lloyd Wright’s favorite lensman. He got the gist of the architect’s communal work ethic right off the bat, with an initial series of photos that depicted Taliesin Fellowship interns slaving away on desert construction sites like WPA-mural workers brought to life. And this Arizona-born photographer’s ability to mitigate the blinding daylight of Taliesin West, the architect’s winter base of operations in Scottsdale from 1937 onward, remains unparalleled. More…

From Chris Velazco at TechCrunch…

After weeks of speculation and rumors, Google has officially pulled back the curtain on what they have come to call Project Glass — a pair of augmented reality glasses that seek to provide users real-time information right in front of their eyes.

“We think technology should work for you — to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t,” wrote Babak Parviz, Steve Lee, and Sebastian Thrun, three Google employees who are part of the Google X skunkworks. “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input.”

Something tells me that they won’t be hurting for feedback.

To call these things glasses may be a bit of a stretch — early rumors noted that glasses bore a striking resemblance to a pair of Oakley Thumps, but the demo images on Project Glass’s Google+ page (one of which can be seen above) don’t look a thing like them. Rather, they appear to be constructed of a solid metal band that runs across the brow line, with a small heads-up display mounted on the right side. More…

From Sue Hubbard at 3quarksdaily.com…

When is a painting not a painting? When it’s a photograph. Many of Thomas Ruff’s images might, at first glance, be paintings by an American abstract expressionist. There is an irony that while so much contemporary painting aims to look hyperreal much current photography has the gestural appearance of painting. The old chestnut that the camera never lies is stood on its head by Ruff’s work. “A photo journalist has to be really honest. The artist does not”, he says. “The difference between my predecessors and me is that they believed to have captured reality and I believe to have created a picture.”

Ruff has been taking photographs for more than thirty years and is one of those responsible for photography’s enhanced status; its shift from the twilight zone of the art world to high priced commodity. His studies at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the 1970s coincided with the political terrorism waged by the anarchic Red Army Faction and his ensuing Portraits made during this period reflect a preoccupation with surveillance. It is as if his subjects had been shot by Big Brother’s camera. No emotion is shown, no flicker of a thought is revealed. More…

From Imaging a Shattering Earth: Contemporary Photography and the Environmental Debate…

Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison have been collaborating for years in creating artistic photographs. Their work has been displayed in 18 solo exhibitions and over 30 group shows presented worldwide in places such as Japan, Canada, and Italy. In addition, their work can be found in over 20 prestigious art collections, including the National Museum of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and the George Eastman House. The ParkeHarrisons also lecture extensively on art and human influences on the environment.

In The Architect’s Brother, named in 2000 as one of “the Ten Best Photography Books of the Year” by the New York Times (DeCodorva), the couple portrays our environmentally shattering world in starkly poetic monochromatic photographs. These photographs are not simply taken; rather they are fabricated by the artists using photomontage and painting techniques. Each of the resulting images is metaphorical. They feature Robert ParkeHarrison as an “Everyday Man” performing various tasks in symbolic attempts to save our polluted planet. More…

From J. Hoberman at The New York Review of Books…

A lone lean figure strides purposefully through a dark tunnel, maybe a highway underpass. There’s no fear. A familiar husky voice whispers that “it’s half time—both teams are in their locker rooms, discussing what they can do to win this game in the second half.” One needn’t be a genius like Karl Rove to catch the drift of the two-minute Clint Eastwood-narrated Chrysler spot shown mid-Super Bowl last Sunday and everywhere else ever since. But get it Rove did.

First thing Monday morning, America’s preeminent propagandist was on Fox & Friends to whine that “the president of the United States and his political minions are, in essence, using our tax dollars to buy corporate advertising.” What he meant was that a grateful automobile industry was engaging in some sneaky subliminal payback, hiring no less than Clint Eastwood as the mouthpiece for Barack Obama’s reelection bid. Well before the Giants edged out the Patriots, Obama adviser David Axelrod had wiped his boss’s fingerprints off the spot. “Powerful spot,” he slyly tweeted to his followers. “Did Clint shoot that, or just narrate it?” More…

Credit: Robert Polidori

From Pico Iyer at Vanity Fair…

A picture-perfect replica of the Hollywood sign shines in the clear, cool sunlight, a helicopter beside it and, down below, a city of fake fronts with signs advertising “Greg’s Pistol Ship,” “Bala’s Inn Bed and Breakfast,” and “Yogi Bear Bounty Hunters.” Not far away, in a square that’s closed to the public, a mob of children dressed in school uniforms is dancing and lip-synching furiously behind a pair of pouting lovers as cameras roll.

I’m surrounded by 11 Indian men in matching white baseball caps, five young women in saris, and a screeching child. We’re seated in a minivan with whirring fans above every row, offering the “air-conditioning” that is part of the $25 V.I.P. “Ramoji Star Experience” tour. In the past few minutes we’ve seen a “Sun Fountain” that would fit in at Versailles, a Japanese “Sayonara Garden,” and an intricate hedge maze; at this moment we’re passing an “Arizona Cactus Garden” across from a town that could sit in the shadow of the Himalayas. Now, in the bright late-monsoon-season morning, I watch young women in shalwar kameezes—and black cowboy hats—sauntering toward the “Wild Western Days Shooting Gallery.” An Islamic woman clad from head to toe in a burka is approaching the Gunsmoke restaurant. More…

From Edward Moyer at c|net news…

Apparently Superman isn’t the only one with X-ray vision.

During his nearly two-decade career, British photographer Nick Veasey has been using his own superpowers to peer inside everything from insects to MP3 players to jumbo jets–and create stunning images of their innards.

And like any accomplished superhero (or artist), Veasey makes it look easy.

To view one of his X-ray photos is to think the trick was simply in choosing the proper-size machine for the job and rather lazily pushing the button. In this scenario, the insect and the MP3 player were no-brainers. As for the passenger plane, the difficulty was just in locating an X-ray machine big enough to use on the thing (or–a more imaginative viewer might think–to shrink the plane, complete with a crew member or two, down enough to fit into a doctor’s office).

To some extent the assumption about finding the right machine is correct. For an arresting X-ray of a bus (and its newspaper-reading passengers), Veasey employed the sort of cargo-scanning X-ray machine that’s used at border crossings. The device examines vehicles for hidden bombs, drugs, or stowaways–one slice at a time, like a CT scanner. More…

From openculture…

Last month we brought you some little-known soap commercials by Ingmar Bergman. Today we present a series of lyrical television advertisements made by the great Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini during the final decade of his life.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Fellini agreed to make a miniature film featuring Campari, the famous Italian apéritif. The result, Oh, che bel paesaggio! (“Oh, what a beautiful landscape!”), shown above, features a man and a woman seated across from one another on a long-distance train. The man (played by Victor Poletti) smiles, but the woman (Silvia Dionisio) averts her eyes, staring sullenly out the window and picking up a remote control to switch the scenery. She grows increasingly exasperated as a sequence of desert and medieval landscapes pass by. Still smiling, the man takes the remote control, clicks it, and the beautiful Campo di Miracoli (“Field of Miracles”) of Pisa appears in the window, embellished by a towering bottle of Campari. More…