Tag: Views

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Entertainment

Three Views of ‘The Motherboard Suite,’ Indoors, Outdoor and On-line

Three Views of ‘The Motherboard Suite,’ Indoors, Outdoors and Online

“Does anyone out there know what Afrofuturism is?” Bill T. Jones asked on Saturday night in the middle of Times Square.

Jones is, among other things, Artistic Director of New York Live Arts, an experimental performing arts center in Chelsea. In that capacity, he performed on Saturday to discuss a free outdoor performance of “The Motherboard Suite,” a movement and musical work he directed for the center’s Live Ideas Festival.

I’m not sure anyone who watched this event got a much clearer sense of Afrofuturism, but the Saturday outdoor performance certainly sparked a renewed appreciation for live ideas and live art.

This year’s theme was “Changed Worlds: Black Utopia and the Age of Acceleration”. In keeping with a technology-related theme, the five-day festival was a mix of virtual and personal symposia and performances. In a virtual segment, Reynaldo Anderson, a co-curator, generally defined Afrofuturism as “the speculative product of the thinking of people in the African diaspora”.

He spoke of visions of the future, and the festival delivered them, although it also felt very timely as the city’s performing arts scene cautiously adjusts to new opportunities at this stage of the pandemic.

“The Motherboard Suite” is itself a hybrid: a 45-minute concert by the slam poet, who became musician Saul Williams, with titles from his albums “MartyrLoserKing” (2016) and “Encrypted & Vulnerable” (2019), published by six respected choreographers were interpreted in the flesh. I’ve experienced it in three ways. I saw its premiere on Thursday at the New York Live Arts theater. I stayed at home on Friday and met him virtually. On Saturday I ventured into Times Square for the outdoor show.

The Thursday show was a milestone, the first live performance in the theater since last March.

There were about 30 of us in the audience, taking up about one-sixth of the venue’s seats. Being there felt excitingly strange and dauntingly familiar, and also excitingly familiar and dauntingly strange.

For one set, the show had an installation by Jasmine Murrell with mirrored rock and soil formations in the form of hands or giant cacti. It reminded me of a desert planet on the original Star Trek. Murrell was also responsible for the headdresses some of the choreographers wore – who, with the exception of Shamel Pitts, performed their own works (Pitts was danced by Morgan Bobrow-Williams and Maria Bauman was accompanied by Samantha Speis). The headgear was eye-catching: one like a giant brain or a large afro, another like a cubist head made from shards of records.

But those theatrical elements (including flashing and neon lights from Serena Wong) felt superficial. Williams, charismatic in his sunglasses, delivered his compositions on a rear platform (along with multi-instrumentalist Aku Orraca-Tetteh), and each choreographer recorded a song or two, mostly alone. The more conspicuous among them, especially Jasmine Hearn, caught attention, but the connections between sections and cast seemed terribly constructed and unimaginative, with ensemble pieces on the order of “Now Everyone Freezes in One Pose”. Live is not always amazing.

The virtual option came through a platform called Interspace. Each visitor is represented by a kind of mobile nameplate, an avatar that you can press with the arrow key around a 3D diagram of a theater complex. You can go to a gallery and see an extensive visual art exhibition from the Black Speculative Arts Movement. You can chat, virtually meet other visitors, start a conversation, or overhear someone else’s before and after entering the digital theater for a digital show.

Watching the show this way was like watching another video of a live performance, only the stream was half frozen for me. Especially after experiencing the flawed but real thing the night before, the virtual version felt less like a utopian taste of the future than like an already half-outdated world that we hopefully won’t have to live in.

For much of prepandemic life, life returns, as attested by the exciting and frightening crowds the size of a prepandemic in Times Square. There “The Motherboard Suite” didn’t have its own sets or lighting on Saturday. It had a superior replacement: the Blade Runner electronic billboards. Sometimes the roar of motorcycles or the drumming and chanting of Hare Krishnas accidentally sounded with the score, but the energy of the place continuously weighed on the performance.

The performance took place in a cordoned off area of ​​Father Duffy Square. This time the choreographers did not sit up and down, but on the stage, observing and interacting with one another. And that change, along with the increase in audience (potentially large, if small in practice), changed everything. The show came to life.

Even mishaps were transformed. During Marjani Forté-Saunders’ solo, her headdress – a top hat draped in elephantine spools of cloth with a face – began to untangle. She dropped it and was freed into new powers. That accident opened connections in the choreography: the way Kayla Farrish exploded after taking off her cubist vinyl helmet, or the way Bobrow-Williams’s hands felt like he was having trouble getting himself off after taking it off for his missing giant brain to adapt to it could be without it.

Only d. Sabela Grimes seemed invigorated by his troublesome costume: a body-covering, sophisticated pony in purple and white with a ski mask framed by cowrie shells. But its popping isolations also drew a greater shamanic force from the street energy of Times Square. The show was less about cosplay and more about being together.

In a way, the elaborately costumed characters of “The Motherboard Suite” fit right in with the costumed tourist attractions of Times Square. But Williams’ sometimes profane texts – mostly words of opposition to the capitalist fantasy around him, the seductive status quo – played a much larger role than in the other, less public spaces. His final list of things to hack into (capitalism, sexuality, God) felt less like preaching to the choir. Location is important. If the show didn’t start a revolution, it was a good introduction to what New York Live Arts can be.

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World News

New World Map Tries to Repair Distorted Views of Earth

New World Map Tries to Fix Distorted Views of Earth

Most of the world maps you have seen in your life have passed their prime. The Mercator was designed by a Flemish cartographer in 1569. The Winkel Tripel, National Geographic’s preferred map style, dates back to 1921. And the Dymaxion map, hyped by architect Buckminster Fuller, appeared in a 1943 issue of Life.

Enter a new map of the world that vies for global supremacy. As with sports, the card game can get stale at times when top competitors stick to the same old strategy, said J. Richard Gott, a Princeton astrophysicist who previously mapped the entire universe. But then comes an innovator: think of Stephen Curry of the Golden State Warriors splashing 3-pointers out of areas of the court that the rest of basketball didn’t think were worth guarding.

“We have kind of reached the limit of what you can do,” said Dr. God. “If you wanted a major breakthrough, you had to use a new idea.”

Dr. God’s version of Steph Curry’s wait-you-could-shoot-from-there-3? Use the back of the page as well. Make the world map a double-sided circle, like a vinyl record. You can put the northern hemisphere on top and the southern hemisphere on the bottom, or vice versa. Or to put it another way: You could empty the 3D earth in two dimensions. And if you do, you can blow the accuracy of previous maps out of the water.

Of course, no flat map of our round world can be perfect. First you need to peel off the skin of the earth, and then nail it down. This mathematical taxidermy leads to distortions. For example, if you have a Mercator projection on the walls of your classroom, you might think Greenland is as big as Africa (not even close) or Alaska is bigger than Mexico (also no). This distorted worldview could even subconsciously lead you to underestimate most of the developing world.

Shapes also change in map projections. Distances vary. Straight curve. Some projections, such as Mercator, aim to solve one of these problems, which exacerbates other errors. Other cards compromise, like the Winkel Tripel, because it tries to strike a balance between three types of distortion.

From 2006, Dr. God and David Goldberg, a cosmologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, developed a scoring system that can summarize these different types of errors. The Winkel Tripel beat out other main competitors. One major source of the distortion remained, however: a mathematical cut that often runs from pole to pole in the Pacific. The resulting shape can never again be stretched and retracted into the unbroken surface of a sphere. “This is what makes the world violent,” said Dr. God.

His new type of double-sided card featuring Dr. Goldberg and Robert Vanderbei, a mathematician at Princeton, completely skips topological violence. The card simply continues over the edge. You could stretch a string across the side; An ant could go there. In a study draft, the team reports in a draft study that the card’s Goldberg-God distortion value blows all other cards currently in use out of the water without any reduction.

Cartographers who regularly study world maps – perhaps fewer than 10 people – now have time to react. “It never crossed my mind that it could be done this way,” said Krisztián Kerkovits, a Hungarian cartographer who works on developing his own projections.

While the new card works great against distortion, Dr. Kerkovits also introduced a new weakness. In contrast to Winkel Tripel and Mercator, you can only see half of the planet at a time. This undermines the basic requirement to hide the whole world for inspection on a single page or screen.

For Dr. God is no different from the 3D globe itself. But Dr. Kerkovits is not entirely sure: after all, you can always easily rotate a globe to see the neighbors of any point. But in the double-sided card, you may have to flip the whole thing over.

Ultimately, the success of a card depends on what applications it is used for and how its popularity grows over time. Dr. God, whose article also features double-sided projections of Jupiter and other worlds, envisions the new map style as a physical object that you can flip over in your hands.

You could cut one out of a magazine or keep a whole stack of them in a thin case that shows different planets or different layers of data. And he hopes that you may be tempted to use the appendix to his paper to try to print out and make your own.

“Tape it back to back with double-sided tape – I think that’s better than Elmer’s Glue, but you can use glue,” said Dr. God. Then cut it out. “Maybe use card stock,” he added.

Categories
Business

Company America Views Biden With Optimism and Skepticism

Corporate America Views Biden With Optimism and Skepticism

In the dwindling days of the Trump administration, the division between big business and Republican Party broke open.

While American corporations have made real profits over the past four years, including lower taxes and a looser regulatory environment, President Donald J. Trump routinely pissed off big business leaders. The January 6 uprising at the Capitol and the refusal of Mr. Trump and many Republicans in Congress to recognize the election result was the breaking point that culminated in many large corporations condemning Mr. Trump and cutting off support for his allies in Congress.

But just because big business is at odds with the Republican Party doesn’t mean it is ready to consider every aspect of the democratic agenda. As President Biden seeks to undo much of Mr Trump’s legacy, including some initiatives advocated by large corporations, executives approach the new administration with a mixture of optimism and concern.

At the most basic level, many executives seem grateful to move from the Trump administration, which routinely surprised companies with abrupt changes to trade policy, immigration rules, and more.

“Companies hate uncertainty, and we’ve had chaotic uncertainty for a while,” said Andrew Liveris, who stepped down as DowDuPont chief executive in 2018 and is now a board member at IBM. “Trying to navigate the company as a company was very difficult.”

However, the prospect of higher corporate taxes and new regulations that could detract from profits is unlikely to fit well with a business world struggling to recover from the pandemic. “The rubber will hit the streets when we look at taxes and climate tariffs,” said Liveris.

Mr. Biden began executing his political agenda on inauguration day, signing 17 executive orders and actions in the Oval Office.

One re-signed the United States to the Paris Climate Agreement, a move praised by business leaders, many of whom protested Mr Trump’s withdrawal from the pact in 2017. On Twitter, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates welcomed the move “The United States also has the opportunity to lead the world in preventing climate catastrophe.”

Other orders protected “dreamers” from deportation and appointed an official response coordinator for the pandemic.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, applauded on Twitter the “quick action against Covid aid, the Paris climate agreement and immigration reform” and said his company looks forward to “working with the new administration to help the US to recover from the US. ” Pandemic + growth of our economy. “

At least one early move by Mr Biden – his revocation of a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline – was quickly condemned by some business executives.

Jay Timmons of the National Association of Manufacturers, a group that a few weeks ago asked the cabinet to consider impeaching Mr Trump, criticized the move, arguing that the pipeline would have created 10,000 union jobs.

The Chamber of Commerce, another business group that had taken an increasingly hard line with Mr. Trump in the last few weeks of his presidency, also rejected the move, calling it “a politically motivated decision that is not based on science.”

The Biden Administration

Updated

Jan. 22, 2021, 1:25 p.m. ET

“It will harm consumers and leave thousands of Americans unemployed in construction,” said Marty Durbin, an executive with the chamber.

More skirmishes could be on the horizon. Mr Biden has signaled that he is ready to levy taxes on companies.

“I am sure there will be conflicts over the corporate tax issue,” said Richard A. Gephardt, Democrat and former majority leader of the House.

The prospect of higher individual taxes is also likely to be suppressed by wealthy executives. In New York, Governor Andrew M. Cuomo recently introduced a tax hike for high earners. Should the federal income tax rate rise as well, it could result in an effective tax rate of more than 60 percent for some well-paid New Yorkers.

“It’s pretty tough,” said Kathy Wylde, executive director of Partnership for New York City, a trade group that represents many large employers.

Ms. Wylde added that possible changes in property taxes, which Mr. Trump lowered, could be a concern among business executives as well. “There’s probably nervousness in the real estate community,” she said.

However, increasing the corporate tax rate is a price that companies may be willing to pay in exchange for managing with more predictable positions on critical issues like trade and tariffs.

“You may like the Biden administration more than Trump because he messed things up so much,” said Gephardt.

Right now there’s a palpable sense of relief in boardrooms across the country. After four years in which Mr. Trump’s unpredictable outbursts resulted in abrupt policy changes and sometimes targeted businesses, executives let out a breath.

“Markets are relieved to be on the other side of the turmoil and uncertainty that Donald Trump brought with it,” said Brad Karp, chairman of the law firm Paul, Weiss. “You woke up in the morning and saw the president introduce tariffs, close borders, or fight against a company. Businesses need predictability and security. “

And while Mr Biden works to get the coronavirus under control, businesses large and small will support the new administration. The pandemic has decimated the economy, weighed on sales and led to mass unemployment. Measures the Biden government is considering, including a new stimulus package and a large government infrastructure program, could help stimulate economic recovery.

“Bringing Covid under control will be good for business,” Karp said. “An economic stimulus plan will be good for economic recovery. Infrastructure spending will be good for the economy. “

Immigration is another topic that large companies have reason to be optimistic about. Mr Trump has restricted immigration and capped the H1-B visa program that allows foreigners to work in the US, which has been a headache for many companies.

“America First guidelines don’t work for global business,” said Ms. Wylde. “They won’t be missing.”

Mr. Biden signed an executive order requiring the wearing of masks on federal properties. In contrast, Mr Trump politicized the wearing of masks and continued to disappoint business leaders who watched in dismay as arguments about masks erupted in their stores.

“Trump has lost a large part of the business world through the mask material,” said Ms. Wylde. “Without a mask mandate, law enforcement officers became business. That was a big problem for retailers. “

Some executives who have endorsed Mr. Trump are already welcoming the Biden administration. Nick Pinchuk, the executive director of Snap-on, a toolmaker based in Kenosha, Wisconsin, said he was confident the federal government would support efforts to empower the working class, such as retraining efforts and investment in education.

“It remains to be seen, but it looks like this government can prioritize these things,” Pinchuk said. While not all of his staff were happy with the election result, they largely disapproved of Mr Trump’s interference in the democratic process and appeared ready to give Mr Biden a chance.

“The business community wants the Biden administration to be successful,” said Blair Effron, co-founder of Centerview Partners, a consulting firm that works with many large corporations. “People understand the urgency of the moment for this country, politically, economically, health-wise and socially.”