Our wiki is a comprehensive encyclopedia of online and offline aesthetics! We are a community dedicated to the identification, observation, and documentation of visual schemata.
What is an aesthetic? Why does everyone always argue about what aesthetics should be on this wiki?
The short answer: A collection of visual schema that creates a "mood."
Some types of aesthetics include:
Aesthetics originated from Internet communities (Ex: Cottagecore, Dark Academia)
National cultures (Americana, Traditional Polish) Note: Most articles that try to describe a national culture will be deleted. These articles should have a higher quality and risk stereotyping a nation.
Genres of fiction with established visual tropes (Ex: Cyberpunk, Gothic)
Holidays with iconic imagery and colors (Ex: Christmas, Halloween)
Locations that have expected activities, components, and types of people (Ex: Fanfare, Urbancore)
Music genres with consistent visual motifs present in cover art, music videos, etc (Ex: City Pop, Emo)
This does not mean all music genres should be present. For example, Pop and Alternative bands' do not have shared visual traits.
Periods of history with distinct visuals (Ex: Victorian, Y2K)
Stereotypes (Ex: Brocore, VSCO)
Subcultures that share music genres and fashion styles (Ex: Raver, Skinheads)
The long answer:
The word "aesthetic" originated as the philosophical discussion about what beauty is, how we should approach it, and why it exists. However, Millennials and Generation Z started using that term as an adjective that describes what they personally consider beautiful. For example: "After Denise finished watching The Virgin Suicides, she said, 'Wow. That was so aesthetic.'"
Aesthetics have now come to mean a collection of images, colors, objects, music, and writings that creates a specific emotion, purpose, and community. It is largely dependent on personal taste, cultural background, and exposure to different pieces of media. This definition is not official and can be debated. There is currently no dictionary definition that captures the complexity of this phenomenon, which arose in the Internet youth. Rather, people who participate in the community "know it when they see it." These elements are constantly debated, as the opinion on whether or not some aesthetics exist or are valid is constantly debated. This is especially true since everyone's own personal life factors into their opinions.
Here is an example of a debate that is going on within the community. Whether or not Lolita is an aesthetic varies on what counts as visual elements. On one hand, lace, petticoats, and bows are valid elements of visual schema. Those elements combine to spark feelings of kawaii, de-sexualization, rebellion, and appreciation of antique. On the other hand, aesthetics are made up of elements other than fashion, such as home decor or music. Fashion is the visual element, rather than the components making up the coord/outfit. That element is part of broader schemas such as Goth and Victorian. What counts as an element and what qualifies as sparking an emotion is a complicated subject.
So right now, the subject is trying to be defined by the community. What either fits into a larger schema or is distinct enough to warrant its own aesthetic is difficult to say and would depend on who you are asking.
The Digital Curator application allows you to explore the art collections of Central European museums and search for artworks based on specific motifs.
Users of the application can build their combination of objects and reveal how often the subject has occurred across the centuries, view graphics, drawings, or paintings that represent it in different epochs, and compare data with other themes.
The Digital Curator offers a quantitative view of cultural history based on the frequency of symbols and iconographic themes in many artifacts, not on a detailed observation of individual items. This distant viewing can be especially useful if our interest is aimed at exploring a genre, rather than a specific work, to understand the overall social conditions, rather than the life of a particular artist, or to interpret the overall political situation, rather than the views of the selected author. Exploring big cultural-historical data may bring new insights into abstract social phenomena such as cultural and economic influence, canon issues, the relationship between the center and the periphery, or the functioning of the art market. It can also help us better observe the migration of motifs and their takeover across centuries and distant regions.
The Digital Curator database now contains 196 116 works from the collections of 91 museums from Austria, Bavaria, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. 71 410 of these works are available under an open license, so it is possible to view them online. Other works are used only as a basis for statistics, presenting the frequency of occurrence of motifs. The AI library for machine learning TensorFlow and the computer service Google Cloud including the tool Google Cloud Vision were used for the automatic detection of the depicted motifs. Data search and storage is performed using the ElasticSearch database and the operation of the application is provided by the Google App Engine service.
Implementation was carried out with the kind support of the UMPRUM, Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague , the Ministry of Education of the Czech Republic the Slovak National Gallery, and the BlueGhost digital agency. Thanks also go to many museums that made it possible to use their digitized collections, and to Richard Prajer, Radim Hašek, and Eva Škvárová who helped with the development of the application and the preparation of the database.
The project was designed by Lukas Pilka in 2019-22.
Kid Pix just became pubic domain, so the remade (but pretty much exactly the same) version is now available here.
Native Land Digital strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide. We strive to go beyond old ways of talking about Indigenous people and to develop a platform where Indigenous communities can represent themselves and their histories on their own terms. In doing so, Native Land Digital creates spaces where non-Indigenous people can be invited and challenged to learn more about the lands they inhabit, the history of those lands, and how to actively be part of a better future going forward together.
The Importance of Land
Land is something sacred to all of us, whether we consciously appreciate it or not — it is the space upon which we play, live, eat, find love, and experience life. The land is ever-changing and ever-shifting, giving us — and other creatures and beings on the earth — an infinite number of gifts and lessons.
For Native Land Digital, what we are mapping is more than just a flat picture. The land itself is sacred, and it is not easy to draw lines that divide it up into chunks that delineate who “owns” different parts of land. In reality, we know that the land is not something to be exploited and “owned”, but something to be honoured and treasured. However, because of the complexities of history, the kind of mapping we undetake is an important exercise, insofar as it brings an awareness of the real lived history of Indigenous peoples and nations in a long era of colonialism.
We aim to improve the relationship of people, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, with the land around them and with the real history and sacredness of that land. This involves acknowledging and righting the wrongs of history, and also involves a personal journey through the importance of connecting with the earth, its creatures, and its teachings.
Thus, while we make a strong effort to teach about colonialism and to bring forth Indigenous narratives, we also strive to integrate what is sometimes called an “Indigenous way of knowing” when it comes to the importance and sacredness of land in our daily lives. We hope to inspire people to gain a better understanding of themselves, their ancestors, and the world they live in, so that we can all move forward into a better future.
This is a chronological gallery of physical visualizations and related artifacts, maintained by Pierre Dragicevic and Yvonne Jansen.
https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.208.6726&rep=rep1&type=pdf
An interactive visualisation of climate model data across time and space.
The Voynichese project (VP) defines a simple syntax for querying words in the Voynich Manuscript. While this syntax is only used internally, by the VP's query processor, it's important to be aware of how it operates in order to effectively query the manuscript.
Note that, unlike most query languages, Voynichese queries are evaluated at the word level. As such, word delimiters like whitespace and punctuation are not allowed.
Voynichese queries may use the following characters:
a,c,d,e,f,g,h,i,k,l,m,n,o,p,q,r,s,t,v,x,y,z,*,^,$
The characters a-z each match the corresponding EVA character.
The wildcard character "*" matches one or more EVA characters. Note that the wildcard may also be represented as a dash "-", for example when used in an URL.
The "^" character matches the start of a word.
The "$" character matches the end of a word.
For example, the query ^daiin$ will exactly match the EVA word daiin, whereas the query daiin (excluding the ^ and $ symbols) will match any EVA word containing daiin, such as chodaiindy.
https://law.duke.edu/sites/default/files/centers/cspd/musiccomic/Theft.pdf
This comic lays out 2000 years of musical history. A neglected part of musical history. Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing—extensively borrowing—from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race—again and again, race—and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are.
The history in this book runs from Plato to Blurred Lines and beyond. You will read about the Holy Roman Empire’s attempts to standardize religious music with the first great musical technology (notation) and the inevitable backfire of that attempt. You will read about troubadours and church composers, swapping tunes (and remarkably profane lyrics), changing both religion and music in the process. You will see diatribes against jazz for corrupting musical culture, against rock and roll for breaching the color-line. You will learn about the lawsuits that, surprisingly, shaped rap. You will read the story of some of music’s iconoclasts—from Handel and Beethoven to Robert Johnson, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Ray Charles, the British Invasion and Public Enemy.
To understand this history fully, one has to roam wider still—into musical technologies from notation to the sample deck, aesthetics, the incentive systems that got musicians paid, and law’s 250 year struggle to assimilate music, without destroying it in the process. Would jazz, soul or rock and roll be legal if they were reinvented today? We are not sure. Which as you will read, is profoundly worrying because today, more than ever, we need the arts.
All of this makes up our story. It is assuredly not the only history of music. But it is definitely a part—a fascinating part—of that history. We hope you like it.
This timeline is the result of researching the origins of digital paint and draw software, and the tools that were developed to allow for hand manipulation (versus plotter drawn) drawing and painting - the mouse, light pen & drawing tablet. If we look at the software that has become commonplace today (such as adobe photoshop), which allows for painting, animation and photo manipulation in one, we can trace the roots of this software to the University and Corporate Labs that housed large computers with advanced capabilities for their time - MIT Lincoln Labs & Radiation Labs, DARPA & the Augmented Research Centre (ARC), Bell Labs, NYIT’s Computer Graphics Lab, Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (Xerox PARC), NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs (JPL). The artistic collaborations that grew out of these labs fueled the advent of Computer Graphics, Computer Art and Video Art from the 1960's to the 1990's.
This visual timeline starts by tracing the paint systems, frame buffers, and graphic user interfaces created out of these labs, with a focus on the first paint/draw software and the various drawing tools. I am interested in how the larger corporate, and often Military Funded laboratories, effected the dawn of the personal computer and the introduction of the personal computer to the home. This timeline continues through the 1980’s, with a focus on the software and hardware that was developed for the home market from late 1970's to the 1990's.
All The Tropes is a community-edited wiki website dedicated to discussing Creators, Works, and Tropes -- the people, projects and patterns of creative writing in all kinds of entertainment: television, literature, movies, video games, and more.
The Hidden Palace is a community dedicated to the preservation of video game development media
Table of Contents
Creative Coding History
Modern Creative Coding Uses
Graphics Concepts
Creative Coding Environments and Libraries
Communication Protocols
Multimedia Tools
Unique Displays and Touchscreens
Hardware
Other output options
More resources
Originally captured as the medium for Ed Ruscha’s creative work, the more than 65,000 photographs selected from this archive present a unique view of one of Los Angeles’ quintessential streets, Sunset Boulevard, and how it has changed over the past 50 years. Ed Ruscha, with help from Getty and Stamen Design, is making this amazing collection accessible to you: explore his images of Sunset and discover your own story of Los Angeles.
Explore the inventions, technology and ideas of science fiction writers
Date Device Name (Novel Author)
1634 Weightlessness (Kepler) (from Somnium (The Dream) by Johannes Kepler)
1638 Weightlessness in Space (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1638 Gansas (from The Man in the Moone by Francis Godwin)
1657 Moon Machine - very early description (from A Voyage to the Moon by Cyrano de Bergerac)
1705 Cogitator (The Chair of Reflection) (from The Consolidator by Daniel Defoe)
1726 Knowledge Engine - machine-made expertise (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Geometric Modeling - eighteenth century NURBS (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Bio-Energy - produce electricity from organic material (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1726 Laputa - a floating island (from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift)
1727 Androide - the original (from Cyclopaedia by Ephraim Chambers)
The new Collection online
From Dürer to the Rosetta Stone, explore 4.5 million objects.
The database is based on the British Museum's collection management tool, where we record what we know about our collection. It was created for the Museum to store information for its own use, and is therefore full of specialised terms, abbreviations and shorthand.
The Museum has been working on the database for more than 40 years and, even with more than two million records, we've only catalogued about half of the collection. We're adding and improving records every day but, even so, an object record may not have been checked. In many cases, the most recent research has not yet been added. There will be mistakes and omissions, but the Museum chooses to publish the data, rather than hold it until it is 'finished', as there will always be new information about an object. Only personal and sensitive information has been withheld.
The visualization shows the most used colors of 50 artists. Each artist has their individual color footprint. The shown colors are aggregated and size doesn't represent the actual usage of the particular color by the artist to reduce the complexity inside the application.
You can select each color to find related colors – ones that the artist often used together with that color or other artists frequently used together with that color. If you like a color, you can copy the tone or add it to a collection and export it later.
Writing Machines is a resource dedicated to various projects related to electronic literature/books/writing/art curated by Julia Garcia
And 5,000 years ago, in what is now southeast Turkey, a group of Bronze Age humans created an elaborate set of sculpted stones hailed as the world’s oldest gaming pieces upon their discovery in 2013. From Go to backgammon, Nine Men’s Morris and mancala, these were the cutthroat, quirky and surprisingly spiritual board games of the ancient world.