And Yet… Life Is Stronger
“Life is stronger!” Stronger than everything that piles up on us every day, than the coronavirus, than the measures against it, than the battles against the measures… than everything. Because while we wander between the extremes of a confused present, while we work ourselves up and turn bitter against one another… life simply goes on. That is exactly what the icon painter Dian Kostov wants to remind us of. Drawing on his rare art, he and like-minded friends created a project by that name, and thanks to it more than 150 children, born in these last years that have been so hard on all of us, smile down at us from tall silos in the middle of the grayness.
42“I Have the Feeling the Internet Is Erasing Our Memories”
Theater lovers know her from “Nice to Meet You, Iva!”. Iva Todorova’s singular debut one-woman show became an undisputed hit, and now “Iva Is Online” at Theatre 199, a story that is, of course, digital. Is there freedom online, are our Facebook friends really friends, and what jokes will AI tell us? Iva answers in her trademark dizzying style.
43The Beauty Who “Invented” Wi-Fi
They called Hedy Lamarr “the most beautiful actress in Hollywood.” And also… “the inventor who made Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS possible.” Was her invention really so important that it… could have ended World War II sooner, and how did she find time for it between six marriages and a dazzling Hollywood career? A story like a film from the analog age that turned out to matter for the digital one.
44Robot Pavlovich Chekhov: Artificial Intelligence as a Writer
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” said Hemingway. Can we teach artificial intelligence to create gripping literature, and how will the cultural world change if we do? Here are the most exciting projects and the arguments of the two extremes: that the robot writer will become reality, or that algorithms will never reach the human emotion of a text.
45Boris Georgiev: The Art of Living and Art as Life
The life of the painter Boris Georgiev reads like a condensed history of the whole contradictory 20th century. He met some of the great figures of his time, among them Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Tagore. He left us his original paintings and something even more precious: an impressive, wise worldview in which life cannot be separated from art.
46Munch, The Scream, and a Short History of the Selfie
A century before the selfie became the pandemic before the pandemic, one of the most famous artists of our era, Edvard Munch, discovered photography and began producing a series of striking self-portraits. What could that possibly have to do with today's selfie mania? And how did our own face become our favorite image as mobile phones advanced?
47Snap, Post, Forget: How the Camera Phone Is Eating Our Memories
Today photography is more accessible than we ever imagined it could be. We snap constantly, whatever and wherever we happen to be, post it on social media and… forget. All of this has changed not only our attitude toward photography, but also the way we perceive the places we visit. The world around us. And in the process, it has robbed us of many precious details.
48“They Just Have to Live…”
Photographer Sandro Arabyan shows the first seconds of life of 70 newborns. “I have photographed the end before, but photographing the beginning was a deeply philosophical question for me. And the two actually turned out to be very close…,” the photographer says.
49Artificial Art: Are Computers Learning to Create?
Is it mostly a marketing trick, or will artificial intelligence soon paint like a master? Can we teach a computer program to create music, or literature? For a long time we were certain that this is one of the things that set people apart from machines—the lack of imagination, of artistry, of the ability to express oneself through art. But is that really so?
