art
When she understood Russian troops were advancing in the region of Zaporizhzhia, Natalya Chergik helped to fill a truck with a ton of paintings, antique firearms and 17th-century ceramics. "We drove 1,000 kilometres (620 miles) in five days. The trip was awful, planes were flying over us and we did not even know if they were Ukrainian or not," she recounts. "The hardest part for us was to convince people at checkpoints not to search the artwork and to let the truck through as quickly as possible." Chergik is a curator at Khortytsia, a museum-island in the Dnipro river of around 30 square kilom...
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Handmade in jail, the Chinese characters on Hong Kong's old road signs have a distinct style that a group of enthusiasts has painstakingly documented and turned into a new digital font -- "Prison Gothic". Their leader, Gary Yau, says he became interested in them when he was a boy, even learning to write some characters by copying them from road signs. As signs with computer-generated text began to replace the old ones, Yau launched a personal quest in 2016 to record the handmade characters, imperfections and all. "I want to preserve this local, visual culture," Yau, now 24, told AFP. "The sear...
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A million people eager to dabble with a new artificial intelligence tool that lets them create images simply by describing them with words will soon get their wish, its creators said Wednesday. Artificial intelligence research firm OpenAI is conducting a wide-scale beta test of DALL-E, a cutting-edge software that creates images from textual descriptions. Although the arrival of AI has led to fears of humans being replaced by machines in fields from customer care to journalism, enthusiasts see the technology more as an opportunity than a threat. A video showcasing the tool on the company's web...
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As well as threatening natural ecosystems, climate change can also threaten history's relics. The upheaval caused by the rise in the Earth's surface temperature is affecting archaeological remains in Norway, a new study reveals. Many archaeological sites located in Norway could disappear in the next few years because of global warming. Yet the north of the country and the millennia old glaciers that it harbors are particularly propitious territories for discoveries. There, archaeologists have found a 6,100-year-old arrow shaft, a 3,000-year-old leather sandal and a perfectly preserved bird cor...
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Visiting an art museum can have a multitude of health benefits. But what about virtual exhibitions? A team of European researchers recently studied their therapeutic virtues and found that they could be on par with those of real-world art experiences. The idea of going to a museum for health benefitsmay sound surprising, but it is a concept that's gaining ground -- and for good reason. Numerous scientific publications have highlighted the multiple benefits of art on our physical and mental wellbeing. Contact with works of art can help relieve chronic pain and alleviate stress and anxiety. Howe...
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If some missing masterpieces -- like the Mona Lisa, stolen in 1911 -- have been recovered, others have never resurfaced. Now, art lovers can discover some of these works in virtual reality thanks to an application called "The Stolen Gallery of Art." This app was designed by the Brazilian start-up Compass to give a new lease of (virtual) life to works by Caravaggio, Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh and Rembrandt. Users can discover digital versions of missing paintings by these artists and learn more about their history through audio descriptions, reminiscent of museum audio guides. In the interest of ...
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Harumichi Shibasaki was nearly 70 when he began making YouTube art tutorials from his quiet home in the Japanese countryside. Five years on, he has 1.4 million subscribers. Unlike the attention-grabbing antics of most top YouTubers, the grandfather has won hearts with his calm, soothing manner, which fans say makes them feel "warm and peaceful". He has also built a global following thanks to the English subtitles on his videos demonstrating painting and sketch techniques, which sometimes feature his grandchildren and two cats. "Hello. Shibasaki here. How's everyone doing?" the grey-haired art ...
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Lydia Wood sits opposite The Atlas pub in west London, meticulously adding detail to her drawing of the building and pausing only occasionally to sharpen her pencil. The 28-year-old artist has built up a sizeable TikTok and Instagram following with her detailed sketches of well-loved London pubs. She has set an ambitious but, she thinks, not impossible, goal -- drawing all 3,500 of them. So far she has managed "a few hundred", many of them near to her home in Catford, southeast London, she told AFP. The project came about during the coronavirus pandemic when lockdown meant she was unable to wo...
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Many of Ukraine's historic monuments have been destroyed in the three months since Russia invaded, but cultural experts are working to conserve their memory using cutting-edge technology and 3D scans. One of them is volunteer French engineer Emmanuel Durand, a specialist in 3D data acquisition, who is assisting a bevy of architects, engineers, historic building experts and a museum director to record buildings in Kyiv, Lviv, Chernigiv and Kharkiv. Durand steps over a jumbled pile of beams and crunches over the rubble that was once Kharkiv's 19th-century fire station. He plants his laser scanne...
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To reach the only place in the world where cave paintings of prehistoric marine life have been found, archaeologists have to dive to the bottom of the Mediterranean off southern France. Then they have to negotiate a 137-metre (yard) natural tunnel into the rock, passing through the mouth of the cave until they emerge into a huge cavern, much of it now submerged. Three men died trying to discover this "underwater Lascaux" as rumours spread of a cave to match the one in southwestern France that completely changed the way we see our Stone Age ancestors. Lascaux -- which Picasso visited in 1940 --...
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