Pop-up art show opens this week in Duluth – Duluth News Tribune

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Embassy 35, according to its event page on Facebook, is a space for off-beat designers, musicians, and visual artists to freely collaborate and dream up a next generation venue that caters to emerging art and technology; a place where we can redefine AWEsome (sic), a place where we can play with the future.

Its a test concept for what could evolve into a larger idea, said Troy Rogers, a science-minded musician who performs as Robot Rickshaw. For now, its a work and play space and also a place where were inviting other creators to come in and do something.

Rogers and Daniel Benoit are behind the concept. The latter has worked in theater in addition to site-specific projections, including one that played across the Blacklist building during Homegrown Music Festival. The music lineup includes The Crunchy Bunch on Friday, Oct. 11, and Zeb or Zeke and the Run Away Screamings on Saturday, Oct. 12.

Embassy 35 is among a handful of local art exhibitions currently showing at local galleries/studios/spaces, ranging from Art In Conflict: An Exhibition by the Museum of Russian Art at the Tweed Museum to Swedish Folk Painting at the Nordic Center.

AICHO

202 W. Second St.

Pat Kruse and Rabbett Before Horses Strickland, both from the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, are the featured artists in Mniidoos and Wiigwaas, an exhibition that opens at 5:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11.

The show has paintings by Strickland. His work, influenced by European Renaissance and Baroque artists, tells the story of Nanabozho. Kruse is an award-winning birchbark and quillwork artist who creates basketry and also teaches. Exhibition runs through October.

"Minnesota Black Fine Art Show" courtesy of the Duluth Art Institute

506 W. Michigan St.

Now showing in the John Steffl Gallery at the art institute: Minnesota Black Fine Art Show, a juried traveling collection of pieces by new and emerging artists of African descent, including local favorites like Carla Hamilton (mixed media), Ivy Vainio (photography) and Terresa Moses (graphic design). This is on display through Jan. 2, 2020. Its Minnesota stops include Austin, Mankato, St. Cloud and Minneapolis.

Meanwhile, the George Morrison Gallery has Jean: The Inspiration Behind the Birkenstein Arts Movement. The works by the teacher-activist range from drawings to portrait work. Claudia Faiths Family, in the Corridor Gallery, has colorful paintings of farm life.

Rachel Hayes and Eric Sall's exhibition "Affinities" is on view at the Joseph Nease Gallery. Image courtesy of Joseph Nease Gallery

23 W. First St.

Its Rachel Hayes work in the window of the Joseph Nease Gallery, a multicolored draped piece that throws stained-glass like shadows on the floor when the sun is just right. Hayes and her husband, Eric Sall, have Affinities, a two-artist show, now at the privately owned gallery at 23 W. First St. Affinities is on display through Nov. 30.

Hayes and Sall live in Tulsa, Okla., with their children. Both are described as nationally-recognized, mid-career artists, and both are big, bold and bright with their work. Salls work is abstract and textured and unpredictable; Hayes is known for her installations, fabrics and layers that create light, shadow and movement.

Chris King's work is part of "Born to Kill" at UWS. Image courtesy of Kruk Gallery

University of Wisconsin-Superior

Holden Fine Arts Center, Belknap and Catlin, Superior

Humor and art are on display during at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, with Born to Kill, an exhibition by John Sebelius and Chris King. The former is a nationally recognized artist whose reach has included Details magazine and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. He was named Best Artist of 2017 by the people of Lawrence, Kan., and the Kansas City Chiefs made him featured artist for My Cause My Cleats in back-to-back years. King, meanwhile, is a Louisanna-based artist who works in painting, sculpture, performance and video. The artists will host a public workshop geared toward veterans from 2-4 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10, at the Kruk Gallery. The opening reception is 5-7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11. There will be a participatory comedy club as part of the installation.

Exhibition runs through Nov. 9.

The Nordic Center has a three-artist show of folk art. Image courtesy of the Nordic Center

23 N. Lake Ave.

Three regional artists known for their Scandinavian aesthetic will show off Swedish folk paintings at an exhibition that has its opening at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11, at the Nordic Center.

Judith Kjenstad, Pieper Fleck Bloomquist and Alison Aune are described as taking traditional Swedish art motifs and using them in contemporary work.

Kjenstad is behind a mural outside Ingebretsens Nordic Marketplace in Minneapolis. Bloomquist and Aune learned the traditional style in Sweden.

Swedish Folk Painting: A Revival is open weekends through Nov. 8.

"Collective Farm Harvest" is among the pieces at the Tweed Museum of Art. Photo courtesy of the Tweed Museum of Art

University of Minnesota Duluth

1201 Ordean Ct.

Art in Conflict is a collection of 34 pieces, on loan from the Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis, made between Stalins death in 1953 to the end of the Soviet era in 1991. The paintings, sculptures, etc., are a mix of political and social: So much Gorbachev, but also women at work. There is also a hammer and sickle sculpture and a touch of humor. This exhibition opens at 6 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 10, and includes curator talks by Maria Zavialova and Mark Meister, director of the Museum of Russian Art. Runs through Aug. 9, 2020.

Zeitgeist Arts Building

222 E. Superior St.

Moira Villiard, among the most recognizable regional artists, has a show Rights of the Child now showing in the Zeitgeist Atrium. The paintings and posters consider the rights of children right now and the idea of doublethink holding contradictory beliefs about an issue. Villiard is behind a bunch of public art, including the crosswalks project from this past summer and the mural of Chief Buffalo at Gichi-ode' Akiing, the former Lake Place Park.

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Pop-up art show opens this week in Duluth - Duluth News Tribune

How New Musical The Wrong Man Made It to New York With Help From the Hamilton Team – Playbill.com

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The year is 2010, and singer-songwriter Ross Golan is playing his one-man acoustic show The Wrong Man in a friends Hollywood Hills living room.

The music, which Golan had been working on sporadically since 2004, tells the story of a man wrongfully accused of murder who is convicted and sentenced to death.

I've always thought it was weird that people tend not to believe someone who says theyre innocent, and I wanted to tell a story from the perspective of somebody who has to convince the listener that hes not the one who did it, Golan tells Playbill.

Long before the Serial podcast and Netflixs Making a Murder brought the conversation around wrongful convictions into the cultural zeitgeist, Golan played the show in his friends living rooms, everywhere from Los Angeles to Sydney, Australia.

Now, 15 years since Golan wrote the shows title track, the underground musical has captured the attention of a much wider audience thanks to first a concept album produced by Grammy-nominated Ricky Reed and now an Off-Broadway staging at MCC Theater. Hamilton alum Tommy Kail came on board to direct the staging, after bumping into a music industry exec in the subway who was familiar with The Wrong Man.

When I heard the music I responded to my instinct, which was to go with the music. You have to listen to those things because they dont happen often, Kail says.

It felt like essential storytelling, and used contemporary music, which I really respond to.

To round out the creative team, Kail called Travis Wall, a two-time Emmy winning choreographer, and fellow Hamilton Tony winner Alex Lacamoire, marking a reunion for the pair.

Tommy had given me a demo of the score, I listened to the whole thing through and I was on board. I loved the way the story unfolded, I couldnt wait to hear the next track, Lacamoire says.

We have such a long history together, we read each other and its a constant faith. If Tommy calls you, you say yes because it's going to be a high quality project no matter what I get to work with one of my greatest friends in the world.

The Wrong Man is a sung-through musical, packed with catchy pop ballads, high energy hip-hop numbers and folksy tracks, a reflection of Golans songwriting rsum, which features chart-topping collaborations with the likes of Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber, Maroon 5, and Selena Gomez.

It is also a dance-heavy show, with the seven ensemble members onstage for most of the 90-minute run time, using movement to communicate pivotal plot points

Wall, of So You Think You Can Dance fame, says he knew he was the right person for the job within five minutes of listening to the score.

This story is heartbreaking and passionate and a lot of it needed to be told through movement to help the audience along the journey, he tells Playbill.

[The music] is new, it's fresh, I haven't heard it before. It's something that I felt like I would have a home in, and not feel like I was coming out to New York and just getting plugged into a musical theatre piece.

Three-time Tony nominee Joshua Henry, most recently seen in Carousel on Broadway, was brought in for a reading in 2018, and has been with the show in the lead role of Duran ever since.

Ryan Vasquez, who also participated in the reading, left the company of Hamilton (he is the first and only actor to portray the roles of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, George Washington, Hercules Mulligan/James Madison, and Marquis de Lafayette/Thomas Jefferson) to join the project.

I heard the music about a year ago when Josh and I did a reading of it. Afterwards I was so in love with the score I emailed the whole creative team and said, 'Even if there's a way to sing some oohs on this, anything you need I'll be there, Vasquez says.

Then out of the blue I got the call that we were doing it at MCC. It's cool to create something that's your own, and that's uniquely yours.

Henry says he was looking for a new musical sound when he came across The Wrong Man.

I was looking for something new, I didn't want to do another revival, he says.

I remember hearing this music for the first time the melodies are incredible, the emotional journey of the story is so well constructed. It's a very current sound, he continued.

The process of working on this show was so incredible, hopefully there's a next time I mean, [Broadway] is just a couple of streets away.

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How New Musical The Wrong Man Made It to New York With Help From the Hamilton Team - Playbill.com

BFI London Review: ‘White Riot’ is a Thrilling, Incendiary Look at Punk’s Influence on Politics – The Film Stage

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BFI London 2019 ReviewIndependent; 80 minutes

Director: Rubika Shah

There was a time when it seemed music might have the power to change the worldor at the very least, move the needle. The knee-jerk reaction to such a statement is to think of the protest songs of the 1960s. While that music certainly impacted the zeitgeist, the real sonic boom was caused by a group of artists, activists, and musicians in mid-1970s England. Their efforts led to the birth of Rock Against Racism (RAR), a cultural movement founded to fight back against the brutal, ugly, violent, and pervasive racism of the neo-Nazi organizations like the National Front.

However, as filmmaker Rubika Shahs thrilling, incendiary documentary White Riot shows, prejudice was not limited to members of the NF. It was ingrained in British society, abetted by law enforcement, and cheerfully brought to TV screens on BBC minstrel shows. Our job, explains RAR founder Red Saunders, was to peel away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika. The methods were more cultural than political think concerts and fanzines and eventually paid off.

The RAR story is well-known to many, and that familiarity will be a negative for those viewers. But for those who may not be steeped in 70s punk history, the effect of seeing this spirit in action is downright inspiring. Making its world premiere at the 2019 BFI London Film Festival and based on her own short film, Shahs White Riot is a stunning film. The archival footage is often terrifying; seeing legitimately large crowds of NF supporters marching through London is shocking. (It is hard not to wonder where all of these folks are today.) The interviews, with the passionate Saunders and other RAR figureheads, are ever-compelling.

And the music, of course, is gloriousshrapnel-filled punk from the Clash, x-Ray Spex, Tom Robinson, and a fascinating, short-lived Asian punk band called Alien Kulture. Shahs film opens with violent footage from a Sham 69 gig, and this air of intense provocation exists all through White Riot. Much of this, of course, was due to the existence of the National Front. Graffiti (ITS OUR COUNTRY LETS WIN IT BACK) was backed by attacks in the street. Even major musicians backed the words of politicians like Enoch Powell; you may never look at Eric Clapton the same way again. It was against this backdrop that Rock Against Racism began. Guerilla-style, hands-on activities were the order of the day, but it was not easy. Saunders and others face death threats as they battled the lingering stench of colonialism.

Those expecting a deep focus on the Clash (based on the films title) may be disappointed; Joe Strummer and company are mainly represented near end of White Riot. An RAR concert featuring the band, dubbed the Carnival Against the Nazis, provides Shahs film with a suitable ending. It began with a thousands-strong march starting at Trafalgar Square, and closed with a concert at Victoria Park. The march, and the cacophony of noise that accompanied it, makes for a joyous conclusion. Its a reminder of the power of positive energy in the face of racial division, and a suitable middle-finger to the politicians and everyday racists who still haunt the land.

Whats most unsettling and provocative about White Riot is how current it feels. Because of this, perhaps White Riots greatest achievement is that it takes something that can cause sneers and eye-rollingcommitted cultural and political actionand make it feel both necessary and triumphant. As Saunders states at films end, one of the messages of Rock Against Racism was its lesson for ordinary people. It showed that we can do things, Saunders says. We can change the world. Its a wondrous thought. And Rubika Shahs White Riot shows that it is, indeed, possible.

White Riot premiered at the BFI London Film Festival.

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BFI London Review: 'White Riot' is a Thrilling, Incendiary Look at Punk's Influence on Politics - The Film Stage

Former Dance Theatre of Harlem star Chyrstyn Fentroy is leaping up the ranks at Boston Ballet – The Boston Globe

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She has been tremendous, said Mikko Nissinen, artistic director of Boston Ballet. Shes moving forward like a tornado.

Fentroys interest in dance began with her parents, who were also her teachers. Her father coached a dance team in hip-hop and jazz, and her mother, who performed with regional companies in California and at the Cairo Opera House, trained her in classical ballet. Fentroy can describe the studio where her parents taught, the Peninsula School of Performing Arts in Palos Verdes, Calif., in vivid detail she practically grew up there.

My parents would be teaching, and I would be stuck there, especially Saturdays. Id be there all day, Fentroy recalled. When she wasnt in class, she passed the time by riding her scooter around the parking lot and sneaking into a utility closet to watch movies. I would eventually wander off, but I never went far.

Fentroys parents divorced when she was about 7. Her father remained her teacher for a few years, but the budding dancer was primarily raised by her mother. Ruth Fentroy said she ate, slept, and breathed ballet through Chyrstyns childhood, though she declined several contracts so as not to interfere with her daughters schooling.

But Fentroy wasnt certain dance was her passion until she left home. As the teachers daughter, it was easier for me to slip through the cracks and get away with not pointing my toes, goofing around at the back of the room, she said.

Still, Fentroy was stung by the remarks she overheard in the studio some peers suggested she got desirable parts and solos only because the teachers were her parents.

Leaving California after high school for the Joffrey Ballet School in New York marked a shift for Fentroy: She was beginning to define herself as an artist on her own terms. Her craft, she realized, could be about more than just flashy tricks.

Fentroys time at the Joffrey, while formative, was challenging. She was rattled by insecurities had she fallen behind her peers by goofing off in her mothers classes? I was so angry all the time, she recalled. I had to learn how to love myself through my flaws.

After two years at the Joffrey, Fentroy joined Dance Theatre of Harlem, and a different realization unfolded: She started to recognize herself as an artist of color.

At the time, the Harlem company founded for black dancers during the civil rights movement was rebuilding after an eight-year hiatus. In a 2017 interview with Kinfolk magazine, artistic director Virginia Johnson said the closure had meant there was a generation of little girls who didnt see brown ballerinas.

Fentroy had grown up hearing about the Dance Theatre of Harlem from her mother, who is white. The family owned one of the companys signature shows, Creole Giselle, on VHS. But Ruth Fentroy, who said she doesnt see color, didnt raise her daughter to think of race as a major part of her identity.

In the studio, Ruth Fentroy said, I never felt that there was a problem with that or that she was overlooked for anything.

As a dance student in New York, though, Fentroy had begun to hear a new kind of snide remark: She only got the part because shes the black girl.

Still, she didnt seriously reckon with the lack of diversity in ballet and her own position as a black ballerina until she was at Dance Theatre of Harlem, surrounded by other dancers who werent white.

Its kind of funny, Fentroy said. I didnt focus on being a dancer of color until I joined that company. It didnt become such a big thing in my head until it was the thing. And even then, it felt foreign for a while.

She said she owes much of her personal and artistic growth to her time at the Dance Theatre of Harlem. I started to learn how to put me into dancing instead of just doing exactly what I was told.

A choreographers dancer, in the words of Darrell Grand Moultrie, one of the companys choreographers, Fentroy was one of the most prominent performers at Dance Theatre of Harlem.

She knows how to remove herself from the real world and put herself in the world of choreography, Moultrie said. To watch the dancer get lost in your movement, its the most exciting moment for a choreographer because you know the dancer is free.

Virginia Johnson considered Fentroy an important collaborator in reviving the company. When I was thinking about ballets Id want to bring to the company, Id think, Chyrstyn would be great in that, Johnson recalled.

Fentroy caught the attention of New York Times dance critic Brian Seibert, who praised her as the most consistent performer in Moultries dance, Vessels, in 2015. As the company rushes forward, Seibert wrote, Ms. Fentroy was a reminder of qualities it should not leave behind.

After a few seasons with the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Fentroy began to feel restless. The company didnt usually run the full-length story ballets she dreamed of performing. The touring schedule was onerous, and as a principal dancer at a small company, Fentroy was onstage more than most: I was always doing three or four ballets.

She also felt that her growth had plateaued. Where I was, I was sort of at the top, and I had no one to look up to, she said.

So she and Jorge Villarini a dance partner at the company who had also become her boyfriend started looking elsewhere, auditioning at several companies as a couple. Then Fentroy got an offer from Boston Ballet.

The moment she got this contract, I said, you go there, Villarini said. Ill be right behind you.

For Fentroy, the decision to leave the Dance Theatre of Harlem was fraught. The company had given her so much, and she felt committed to its mission, but she was hungry for something more.

They did not hesitate to express that they didnt want me to go, she said.

It was very difficult to lose my best dancer, Johnson said. And it was difficult to feel like I was building something with someone who was no longer there.

At Boston Ballet, Fentroy would be one of just a few black dancers. The experience could be frustrating, she said, especially during her first year with the company.

In the dressing room, Fentroy recalled, some peers laughed at the way her hair the thing that makes me look most ethnic sprang out when she loosened it from her ballet bun.

That was hurtful for a while, she said, but it allowed me to teach people that its not OK to make comments [even if] they dont mean any harm by it.

Being able to withstand the feeling of isolation makes me stronger, Fentroy said. So far, she said, her colleagues at Boston Ballet have been receptive to teaching moments like those in the dressing room.

I dont think Ive ever encountered a person here who isnt open to hearing what I have to say.

Since she started at Boston Ballet in 2017, Fentroy has performed as the Snow Queen in the Nutcracker and worked with formidable choreographers like William Forsythe. She has wowed audiences, critics, and choreographers with her musicality and precision. Her performance in Forsythes Playlist (EP), a ballet set to contemporary pop music, earned her more praise in the New York Times: Seibert described her as relaxed, charming, infectiously joyful.

Ruth Fentroy is ecstatic beyond words that her daughter is dancing at a prestigious company with a bigger focus on classical ballet. Though she didnt pursue performance in the same way her daughter has, shes thrilled and blessed that [Chyrstyn] has attained the level I always wanted.

Chyrstyn has delivered and delivered and delivered, said Nissinen. The cream rises to the top.

Hours before the Friday evening performance at Jacobs Pillow, Fentroy managed to get some alone time at the Southfield Pub, reading a weathered copy of Wally Lambs I Know This Much Is True, which she picked up in New York years ago.

I find my zen when Im alone, Fentroy said. She was sharing a hotel room with another dancer, and the dressing room at Jacobs Pillow a rustic campus in the Berkshires wasnt especially spacious.

Fentroys one-bedroom apartment in Medford had been crowded lately, too. After a brief hiatus from dance, Villarini was hired at Boston Ballet in July, and moved in with Fentroy. At around the same time, Ruth Fentroy relocated to Massachusetts to be closer to her daughter, and stayed in the apartment with her two cats before moving into her own new home in Swampscott.

With Fentroys dog, Rupert, in the mix, it was like a zoo at my house for two weeks, Fentroy said.

Though Fentroy and Villarini were partners at the Dance Theatre of Harlem, the two are now in different ranks at Boston Ballet: Shes a soloist, and hes a corps member.

She has a lot more on her plate than I do, said Villarini. While he tends to take a patient approach to dance, Fentroy is such a go-getter. He added, She cant leave the studio unless she gets it right.

Does he ever feel competitive with her? Our hopes and aspirations are not the same, Villarini said. We have to give each other room to fulfill that.

Villarini and Fentroy have matching tattoos. (The ink has to be covered for performances, of course.) The design is a line drawing originally sketched by John Lennon a minimalist portrait of himself and Yoko Ono.

Have you heard the music they created together? Its weird, Fentroy said with a laugh. He definitely brought out something for me that I didnt know was there, which is a parallel to them.

At the Friday evening show at Jacobs Pillow, Fentroy performed a playful duet with Desean Taber to Khalids Location an excerpt from Forsythes Playlist (EP). Her movements were crisp and energetic, embodying the digital zeitgeist of the song. She grinned earnestly through the brief performance, and let out a tiny giggle or two.

During an after-show talk, she said she likes to show the audience her joy: I love to make myself laugh.

Ruth Fentroy, who was moving into her new home in Swampscott at the time, wasnt in the Berkshires to watch the Jacobs Pillow performances. But seeing her daughter dance is usually a priority: Even when she lived in California, she frequently flew across the country for shows.

The proud mother often watches from backstage, though she gets a special thrill out of sitting in the audience and hearing strangers react to her daughters dancing.

From the neighboring seats, she can hear them saying, Oh my gosh, that girl, that girl, that girl.

Marella Gayla can be reached at marella.gayla@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter@marellagayla.

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Former Dance Theatre of Harlem star Chyrstyn Fentroy is leaping up the ranks at Boston Ballet - The Boston Globe

Review: Robyn Doolittle’s new book Had It Coming is an unflinching look at the #MeToo era – The Globe and Mail

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Every year new zeitgeist-y words are added to the dictionary recently it was the Bechdel Test but in 2019, I wish we could take some words out, specifically nuance, a word that seems to have lost its meaning from sheer overuse. When used in marketing copy for book promotion, the word nuanced is meant to soothe the average reader and signal that the book is not a polemic. Its no surprise that its overuse is happening during an epidemic of journalistic both-sides-ism, and a time when books about the whirlwind #MeToo era are proliferating.

So when I read it on the jacket copy of Had It Coming: Whats Fair in the Age of #MeToo, the excellent new book by reporter Robyn Doolittle, my heart sank a little. Was it going to suffer from a watering-down of the issues, or build on the groundbreaking work she accomplished with the Unfounded investigative series, one of the most read stories in The Globe and Mails history, which created real administrative change in police departments across Canada? Luckily, the jacket also promises it will be informed and thats exactly what it is how is it that Canada has the most progressive sexual-assault laws on the books, but so few people with power understand it or use it properly?

Doolittle writes in the introduction that it would be cathartic to write a book about why women are feeling such fury in the wake of #MeToo, but its been done. Its true that literary treatises by Rebecca Solnit or Rebecca Traister and others have that ground well covered. And its also true that perhaps readers want fewer confessions or emotions, and more solutions or in-depth explorations. Doolittle explains that she wont shy away from the tough questions and offers us a glimpse of what women really say when theyre talking to their friends.

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Looming over the introduction is the spectre of woke Twitter and cancel-culture, which is a false set-up, given that there are few actual consequences for strangers being momentarily mad at you on social media Ive lived it; its humbling, but hardly the end of the world. The systems of power are still very much the same no matter how uncomfortable you might feel for a social-media misstep. What Doolittles book does do is take a good hard look at the systems we do have and offer us the undisputed facts about them, and, for that, its a valuable addition to the canon of #MeToo texts coming out this year. Thats just not what the introduction sets us up for.

Doolittle is an excellent reporter. She goes to the experts and then uses the expansive nature of a book to go deeper into the factual material they offer her, and then evaluates how things have and havent changed post-Weinstein, with a few, carefully-selected and only-when-necessary personal anecdotes peppered in.

The book begins with an admission one familiar to anyone who was a teenager 15-20 years ago recounting how after hearing about the Kobe Bryant case, she did not believe the complainant. Its sometimes difficult to remember that when we were the age of the young women spearheading consent culture in 2019, many of us, myself included, were making Monica Lewinsky jokes.

She realizes as an adult how misguided she was and also why this was a common way for women to react what did Bryants complainant expect, going to his hotel room? This sections placement at the start of the book is a generational framing that helps us understand where the author comes from, and how her views shifted before and during the writing of the Unfounded report. The rest of the book contains fewer personal anecdotes and relies more on factual accounts, which is where Doolittles natural strengths are as a writer.

She asks the important questions and looks at each essay topic from a variety of angles. Some chapters start off looking a bit controversial, like the one on the Aziz Ansari debacle, a case that seems cleanly split along generational lines; or why the popular Tea and Consent PSA (developed by the Thames Valley Police, it explains the concept of consent using the metaphor of offering others a cup of tea) isnt useful or realistic for teens; and the redemption of Justice Robin "couldnt you keep your knees shut Camp, a federal judge who was removed from the bench for his mishandling of a sexual-assault case. But each section is carefully considered, and offers balanced takes that still use basic feminist principles as their starting point and a given. You may not agree with everything she says, but Id be surprised if any reader will end a chapter feeling as though she didnt consider and take seriously their point of view.

The Camp chapter, for example, is a stand-out, in part because it is a rare example of someone in power who was willing to look at his own biases and shift his point of view, and a reporter who was willing to push him in the right directions to tell those uncomfortable truths. It makes an interesting companion text to books like Sarah Schulmans Conflict is Not Abuse, or Kai-Cheng Thoms I Hope We Choose Love, books that ask us to look beyond systems of punishment for answers to how society should deal with abuse.

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The chapters I appreciated the most were the ones near the end where Doolittle examined the feminist generational divide and interviewed both Germaine Greer and Susan Brownmiller, once iconic feminists whose texts are now considered problematic by many on issues of race, sexuality and gender identity. She goes to great lengths to humanize them, despite disagreeing with them on several key points. Whats missing, though, are interviews with 2019s Greers and Brownmillers. She does interview teenagers, but the absence of interviews with say, Jessica Valenti, Lindy West, Roxane Gay, remains a glaring omission, when giving so much space to two leaders in the second-wave feminist movement.

The chapter on the neurobiology of trauma is particularly strong, dealing with how police often discredit complainants who react in ways that dont seem logical. She examines what critics of the neurobiology of trauma say and comes to her own conclusions. Again and again, she takes thorny, divisive issues and lays them plain on the examining table.

The book is emerging in the middle of what the Guardian calls an unprecedented wave of books on the #MeToo era. Some wont feel relevant in even two years time, but Had It Coming will because its a decisive snapshot of this moment in history that considers where we were, and sets the stage for where we might go, and will no doubt be used to describe this moment long after weve moved on to a new normal.

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Review: Robyn Doolittle's new book Had It Coming is an unflinching look at the #MeToo era - The Globe and Mail

Alan Dershowitz and the wheel of pain – Columbia Journalism Review

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Attorney Alan Dershowitz speaks during a news interview outside of Manhattan Federal Court on March 6, 2019, in New York. AP Photo/Frank Franklin II 1: A Man Accused

Alan Dershowitz wont hang up the phone. Hes breathing heavily into the receiver. Its August 10, the morning Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his jail cell. At first Dershowitz wants to go off the record, and I agree. He doesnt say anything interesting, just the same protestations that hes made on Twitter and television for years. But when I start asking questions, he begins to berate me. Were on the record now, I tell him. You dont get to insult me off the record.

So he begins breathing into the phone. He will not hang up. He does not know what to say.

If you dont want to talk, you can hang up, I say. But I am not going off the record if you are just going to call me fifth rate.

Silence. Breathing. I wont have it written that I hung up on a reporter! Hes shouting. We do this a couple more times. I take notes. Hes livid that I wont go off the record. He threatens to sue me. Tells me I am a nobody. My tape recorder is somewhere at the bottom of my purse.

I am talking to Dershowitz because Michael Sitrick, a crisis PR guy who has worked with Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly, thought I should. Sitrick is a fixer who has made a name for himself cleaning up the messes of rich and powerful men (and some women, too).

Dershowitz is the high-profile lawyer who worked for Epstein. He has also been accused of having sex with an underage girl at Epsteins mansion. Dershowitz is outraged by that allegation and has been asserting his innocence for more than five years, to anyone who will listen. Two days before Sitrick reached out to me, New York magazine ran a story about Dershowitz, Alan Dershowitz Cannot Stop Talking.

But its worse now, because Sitrick and Dershowitz are convinced that the New Yorker, which published a damning profile of Dershowitz in late July, is targeting him because of his pro-Israel views. He says the reporter on the story, Connie Bruck, is after him.

Mike, am I the lead steer? Id asked Sitrick when he called. The lead steer is Sitricks idea that all it takes to change the direction of a media stampede is for one journalist to take a contrarian view of the story. Its a theory that holds well for ranchers trying to redirect a stampede. And its worked for Sitrick, who has orchestrated positive press for some odious clients.

When I asked Sitrick if I am the lead steer a laugh was his only answer.

ICYMI:The #MeToo story BuzzFeed, NYT and more didnt want to publish

One of the reasons Dershowitz is so scared is that the New Yorker has come to dominate the #MeToo story. Investigations by Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer about Harvey Weinstein marked a turning point. Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey at the New York Times were first, technically, but the New Yorker helped catch the zeitgeist. After Weinstein went down, it felt like man after man followed. There were stories about Matt Lauer, Kevin Spacey, and Louis CK, among dozens of others. The New Yorker shared a Pulitzer with the Times for its work.

No walk of life was untouched. There was the Shitty Media Men list, where Moira Donegan codified the whisper network and sparked a lawsuit that continues to drag on. (The lawsuit was filed by Stephen Elliott, someone I used to work with and for at The Rumpus. I tweeted about his horrible treatment of me and I felt like I had shown the whole world the throbbing mangled mess of my insides.)

It was a black hole of pain that sucked us all in. Either we were complicit or we were victims. Either we had been groped by bosses or furtively worried wed done the groping. Or maybe worse, that we had seen it and done nothing. Or maybe we had, as Farrow reported in his piece on Joi Ito at the MIT Media Lab, willfully ignored the facts in pursuit of money. In group text messages and in private groups on Facebook, women shared repressed memories of childhood, college, abusive partners. A media man I dated once told me he and his friends had plans if they were ever #MeTooed.

Why would you need a plan? Just dont harass people, I said.

He shrugged. You never can tell what will happen.

It didnt take long for people to say, Weve gone too far. In fact, I heard the phrase, #MeToo has gone too far from a powerful person in publishing at a party in Washington, DC in October 2017, the same month that the Weinstein stories broke. Thats how long it didnt take. The cry of cancelled men was that they supported #MeToo, its just that the movement got things wrong in their case.

ICYMI:Meet the 26-year-old who has been laid off three times

The first time I talked to Alan Dershowitz was July 29, the day the New Yorker published its piece. The story was damning. It outlined darker points of Dershowitzs career: rhetorically advocating sex with minors, his relationship with and vigorous defense of Epstein against allegations of rape and sex trafficking. The story also noted that Virginia Roberts Giuffre accused Dershowitz of participating in Epsteins sexual cabal. Dershowitz responded by attacking Giuffre in the press. In April, Giuffre had filed a defamation suit against Dershowitz.

Giuffre told the New Yorker, Jeffrey got away with it, basically. And Dershowitz was one of the people who enabled that to happen Dershowitz thinks hes a tyrant and can get away with anything. And I wanted to say, I might be as meek as a mouse, but Im going to hold you accountable.

On that day in July, Dershowitz seems subdued over the phone. He just wants a fair chance. What he really wants is vindication. But he wont get that, he suspects, because hes bold, hes a liberal who supports Donald Trump. He supports Israel. Hes a victim here. The real victim.

He accuses Bruck of using a conspiracy website, Rense.com, as her source for some of the allegations in her piece. (The New Yorker declined to make Bruck available to speak on the record, but the magazine did say she had a more authoritative source than Rense.com.)

Dershowitz then tries to poke holes in Giuffres motivations. He says that she wants money. Dershowitz brings up the fact that he believes he is being targeted by David Boies, a lawyer who himself has been accused in the New Yorker of contracting a private investigative firm called Black Cube in an effort to block the magazines reporting on Weinstein.

Dershowitz lobs a series of details. Did I know that another woman who claims that she was forced to have sex with Dershowitz at Epsteins command, Sarah Ransome, lied and said she had a sex tape with the Clintons?

I did know that, because its in the New Yorker profile. In fact, so are the details about Dershowitz filing a complaint with the New York bar against Boies and the fact that the complaint was dismissed. Its an old tactic, lobbing detail after detail after detail at the media until they are overwhelmed. Sitrick does this, too. He calls it the wheel of pain.

In the world according to Dershowitz, he is a victim. But how can he be a victim when he has the power and the money and the platform. Media outlets cover his every tweet. He has a book which will be out on November 19, proclaiming his innocence and blaming instead the #MeToo movement for his trials. And I am covering this story now because a powerful man called me about his powerful friend. How many stories are made like this? A cycle of media and power, we listen because he yells. He yells because we listen. And whoever gets to shout the loudest is the winner.

You have power and money, I point out to him. You have media coverage, how are you the victim?

If a powerful woman were raped and she had powerful friends, would they say its hard to conceive of you as a victim? I mean, this is an attempt to destroy my life and my career and my family. Of course Im a victim. Of course Im a victim. Im a victim with resources, and thats exactly the kind of victim who should fight back.

Are you comparing yourself to a rape victim?

Im not making that comparison.

You just said that if a powerful woman was raped

Im saying that anybody whos a victim of a crime should be speaking out. Let me tell you, if you havent experienced four and a half years of being falsely accused of the most heinous crimes imaginable, then its very, very hard to be sympathetic, and I understand. But whats happened to me over the past four and a half years, Im not comparing it to rape, Im not comparing it to murder. Im not comparing it to any other crime. Im saying it is an extraordinarily serious crime, and a crime that victims should speak out about.

Dershowitz later threatens to sue me if I use information he insists is off the record. He will have a lawyer email my editor. They will have a phone call.The lawyer will argue that I am a liar. It doesnt workthis time.

In 2011, Michael Sitrick sued Jeffrey Epstein, over an unpaid bill for PR services. In that lawsuit is a detailed outline of services rendered.

Its a plan that shows a comprehensive outline of reporters who were contacted about stories and who reached out for interviews. The idea was this: connect with reporters, offer access, overwhelm them with data, threaten their access if things go sideways, go over their heads. That is how men like Epstein went unchallenged for years. How a journalist can know something, but never be able to say it. On August 22, NPRs David Folkenflick detailed how Epstein allegations went unreported by Vanity Fair. The story alleges that Epstein pressured the magazines editor, Graydon Carter, and that Carter caved.

If #MeToo is a conspiracy, as Dershowitz and so many other cancelled men suggest, the question is, who is conspiring? Carter was once quoted as saying,You think youve arrived I hate to break it to you, but youre only in the first room. Its not nothingdont get me wrongbut its not that great, either. Believe me, there are plenty of people in this townhe means New Yorkwho got to the first room and then didnt get any further.

So who is in the room? In my first call with Dershowitz, he denies knowing Sitrick, even though Sitrick set up the call. I point out that theyd worked on two cases together that I knew of: Sholom Rubashkin, a jailed meat packing executive, and Harvey Weinstein. Later, Dershowitz says in an email that he and Sitrick were work acquaintances, nothing else. When I ask Sitrick about that, he mentions that maybe theyd hung out socially once or twice, but Dershowitz was just a friend.

I find most conspiracies to be intellectually lazy. My father likes to say, when faced with a conspiracy theory, I have a hard time believing all those idiots could agree on something so complicated.

But the more I read about Dershowitz, and talk to him, the more I begin to think about how power is exercised. How would someone feel if they were suddenly kicked out of one of those special rooms, after being inside for so long?

F. Lee Bailey is one of the names that recurs in my research. He and Dershowitz worked together on the O.J. Simpson defense team. Bailey is now disbarred. I call him and ask him what he thinks about Dershowitz. Is there a conspiracy? He doesnt talk long and wont commit to a full-conspiracy theory for either side, but he notes that sexual assault allegations are one of the arrows they shoot at you to bring you down. Who is they?

He has to go and cant answer.

One week after I talk to Bailey, Epstein commits suicide in jail. A whole new host of conspiracy theories emerge. There doesnt seem to be an end.

Fact-checking a story is reporting in reverse. Its the checkers job not only to follow up with sources, but also to help find new ones. Its a crucial step. The New Yorker explains that a lot of reporting happens in the process of checking. That process with Dershowitz was off the record.

At first, Dershowitz says, he will show me emails that prove the fact-checking process on Brucks piece was faulty. None of the documents arrive. But there is more, he tells me, tiny little details that he questions, elements of the story that he says werent given enough time. What about his work for charity? Hes throwing everything at me and, eventually, a call with my editor.

Its all sound and fury. Of course, reporting is not infallible. Trial by media is a chaotic scramble of piecing facts together. All you need is one person influential enough to believe you. One steer.

In our first conversation, I ask Dershowitz why he wants to talk. What is he going to tell me that hasnt already been said before over and over? What is the point? I will keep talking, he says, until I die, and then my children will do it for me!

Thats the point.

Its a Trumpian ethos. A constant cry of victimhood from the highest echelons of power. The never ceasing voice, shouting and shouting. If you listen youll forget the point. If you listen and always react, its hard to hear anything at all.

ICYMI:Why the left cant stand The New York Times

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Alan Dershowitz and the wheel of pain - Columbia Journalism Review

Good Money Week: Will ethical investing ever go mainstream? – The Independent

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Next week is Good Money Week, an annual campaign designed to raise awareness of sustainable and ethical options for our finances from bank accounts to pensions.

The movement wants Britons to wake up to the relationship between that benign little bank account or fledgling pension pot and the funding behind fossil fuel exploration and forest destruction, and to take charge of where their money ends up.It can be one of the most effective ways to force big shifts

None of this is a new idea though. Ethical funds, for example, have been available for 30 years. And yet such funds under management still account for only 1.6 per cent of the UK industry total, according to data from Schroders.

From 15p 0.18 $0.18 USD 0.27 a day, more exclusives, analysis and extras.

It would be easy to roll out the same old argument that we worry investing ethically means sacrificing performance. But thats not whats going on any more.

A global research report from BofA Merrill Lynch last week, which called for investors to care more about ethical, social and governance (ESG) criteria, showed that a strategy of buying stocks that rank well on ESG metrics would have outperformed the S&P 500 every year for the last five years, for example.

In fact, the reasons behind the (ironically) glacier-slow uptake so far could be the reasons ethical investing could be about to explode, according to research out this week that challenged some of the UKs wealthiest investors on the stark contrast between their personal and portfolio ethics.

Among those with more than 250,000 in investable assets those who could really put pressure on the worlds biggest businesses to make real and lasting change there is, seemingly, a huge appetite for ethical investing.

More than 80 per cent of the UKsHigh Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) are interested in investing their money ethically, according to a survey by Rathbone Greenbank Investments.

And yet three-quarters of these investors are knowingly investing in stocks and shares that conflict with their values.

They claim to care most about climate change and plastic waste reduction and yet more than a third continue to invest in fossil fuels and/or mining companies.

Why? Mostly because of a lack of choice, they say. And that is changing fast.

In a short space of time, ethical concerns from the environment to social injustice have gone from the fringe to part of the zeitgeist, says John David, head of Rathbone Greenbank Investments.

It has become normal for people to make conscious decisions about their impact on the planet, with awareness growing every day. The fact that 81 per cent of HNWIs care about their money being invested for good, aligned to their ethical beliefs, suggests we are on the right track. However, there is still work to be done.

Even some of the shrewdest investors still believe the myths about ethical investing, thinking they have no alternative other than stocks and funds that go against their values. The truth is there is a huge choice of ethical stocks and funds offering good diversity to spread risk across a portfolio, even in an uncertain economic environment. And most importantly, this money makes a huge difference to companies attitudes, and the way companies conduct their business.

For Juliet Schooling Latter, research director at FundCalibre, theres little doubt that ethical investing is about to go mainstream.

From David Attenboroughs Blue Planet II to Greta Thunbergs school climate strikes and speech at the UN Climate Action Summit, there is no denying that public awareness of climate change and pollution are increasing, she says. Not only this, but public tolerance of bad corporate practice, maltreatment of employees and communities, and many other environmental, social and governance issues is lower today than it has arguably ever been in the past. As the public and the consumer start to demand more from companies and governments, practice is starting to change.

This isnt driven solely by millennials either. Schroders found Generation X investors typically in their 40s are equally if not more motivated to invest sustainably than their younger counterparts.

A growing body of evidence points to demand across a range of demographics, including those HNWIs.

While 1.6 per cent of all UK funds under management may not seem much, net retail inflows into ethical funds are on the up, says Schooling Latter.

In July, they were 248m a 50 per cent increase on this time last year and beating all other assets, bar fixed income and mixed assets.

Looking more widely at the institutional market, more and more pension funds, in particular, are integrating ESG into their strategies. According to EdenTree, ESG funds under management in the UK now total over 1.2 trillion.

All of these factors mean that more and more fund management companies are offering sustainable investment choices and are starting to incorporate ESG factors into their core investment processes. Professional investors are seeing that good practices generally result in good long-term investments.

Yes, theres the danger of succumbing to the me tooofferings out there, but for investors hunting out returns for their own portfolio, as well as the planet, there is a growing number of real choices.

Schooling Latter points to the ASI UK Ethical Equity fund, which she says operates a no compromisesapproach to ethical screening, and the BMO Responsible Global Equity fund, which invests in growth companies around the world with a focus on sustainability.

Elsewhere, the Pictet Global Environment Opportunities fund invests in companies that actively contribute to solving environmental challenges and that operate within a safe operating spaceacross nine environmental areas, such as ocean acidification, climate change and biodiversity.

Or theres Rathbones Ethical Bond fund, she suggests, which has a high-income target and its ethical rules are very simple: no mining, arms, gambling, pornography, animal testing, nuclear power, alcohol or tobacco. All investments must also have at least one positive environmental, social or corporate governance quality.

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Good Money Week: Will ethical investing ever go mainstream? - The Independent

All Good Things – The Collage Art of Greg Lamarche – whitehotmagazine.com

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Greg Lamarche, Life of the Party 2, 2018

By PAUL LASTER, October 2019

A native New Yorker, Greg Lamarche expresses the vitality of urban living in everything he creates. One of the citys legendary graffiti artists, Lamarche is now best known for his cut paper collages, which regularly appear in gallery exhibitions, news editorials and brand campaigns.

Blurring the boundary between fine art and graphic design,his collagesemploy some of the same inventive techniques as his graffiti once did. Through the use of bold color, movement, fragmentation, layering, rhythmic repetition and negative space, he creates crisp, clean artworks that speak to multiple audiences.

Greg Lamarche, Summer in the City, 2014

Born in 1969 to parents who had a serious interest in art, Lamarche started writing graffiti and making collages at age 11. Inspired by the tags he saw on the graf-covered walls behind his elementary school and the flyers his mother made for neighborhood events, he began developing the dual artistic interests that he continues to pursue in different ways today.

One of Lamarches earliest memories of experiencing contemporary art was a viewing of Red Grooms popularRuckus Manhattanexhibition in 1975. A public art project, it recreated such famous landmarks as the Staten Island Ferry, Brooklyn Bridge and the 14thStreet Subway Station with painted and sculpted models that comically captured the daily hustle-and-bustle of the city.

By the time Lamarche started making his own urban art in 1981, his parents were taking him to museums and galleries like Graffiti Above Ground for inspiration and soon carving out a studio space for him to make art at home. Before long he was visiting the East Villages radical Fun Gallery and the edgy SoHo gallery spaces of Tony Shafrazi and Gabrielle Bryers to meet graffiti writers on his own.

Greg Lamarche, Bushwick, 2014

His first graffiti tag was Spankey, which he later reduced to Spy. But he soon settled on Sp.One, which he continuously drew toperfecthis style and started tagging in the subways and streets while attending the High School of Music & Arts. After graduating, he studied fine art and graphic design at Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, traveled across the States with spray paint in hand and then moved to Boston in 1992, where he founded the graffiti magazineSkills, which he published for the next three years.

Produced in a completely analog manner,Skillswas a visual montage of contributed snapshots of graffiti-bombed trains, trucks and vans and was peppered with interviews of up-and-coming graf artists of the day. It was the golden age of graffiti art, and while Lamarche was honing his skills on the streetmoving from just bombing his tag to building a brand with the production of complex wall pieceshe was also sharpening his style of cut-and-paste collage, which paralleled the energy and motion of the street.

Some of my earliest letter collages are based on my tag, but then they evolved to collages of related phrases, Lamarche toldJuxtapoz Magazinein 2007. We clearly see the artists tag in the 2005 collageUntitled (Sp.One Series)and can chart an evolution of his phrasing in such cut paper pieces asAh Yes(2005),Develop-Destroy(2005),Old Habits Die Hard(2008) andThe New Hustle(2008), as well as in the wooden letter assemblageW.T.F.I.G.O.(2012).

Greg Lamarche, Untitled (Sp_One series), 2005

Graffiti made me look at letters and think about them in a totally different way. Color, composition, movement, layering and repetition all play huge parts to developing letters and the creative possibilities are endless, Lamarche toldGhettoblaster Magazinein 2011.

Although he had started to show his collages in galleries in Boston, he decided to move back to New York in 1995. Getting a job as an art handler, he found himself looking at fine art as often as he was spending time in the graffiti and developing street art worlds. The collages of the German Dada artist Kurt Schwitters and American Surrealist Joseph Cornell, who spent most of his life making work in Queens, had long been an influence, but Lamarche was also drawn to the minimalist canvases of Ellsworth Kelly and maximalist hybrid paintings of Frank Stella.

Kellys command of color and simple geometric forms can be seen as inspiring Lamarches collages likeCorner Cluster(2005) andCut Corners(2010), while Stellas dynamic mix of bold paint and cut metal shapes in hisExotic Bird Seriescould be pegged as impacting LamarchesUntitled(2013) andSummer in the City(2014) works on paper.

Greg Lamarche, Hot and Heavy, 2011

Further exhibitions of the collages in galleries led to Lamarche getting commercial work. He established his art and design practice in 2000spending part of his time on graphic design work and as many studio hours as possible making letter and colored shape collages. The collages would often get scaled-up to make big paintings and murals, even as he additionally experimented with assemblage and other forms of torn paper collage.

Over the past two decades, he has produced cut paper designs for everything from t-shirts, posters and skateboard decks to book and album covers, wrapping paper and shopping bags for such companies as J. Crew, Shake Shack and Bloomingdales, while creating illustrations for major media outlets likeNew York MagazineandThe New York Times.

Greg Lamarche, Double O Joy 2, 2006

His mural projects have also been in demand. Since painting his iconic Coney Island mural for Creative TimesThe Dreamland Artists Clubin 2004, Lamarche has created colorful murals for Facebook, Nike, IBM and numerous galleries and art fairs. His clever use of the wordsThinkandOutThinkmade for playful wall paintings related to IBMs longstanding Think campaign, while his massive painting for the Mural Arts Philadelphia is a lively attraction in the citys burgeoning Brewerytown neighborhood.

Lamarches torn paper collages, includingHouston Street Station(2006),Hot and Heavy(2011) andCity to City(2013), are inspired by chipped paintand ripped postersin New Yorks decaying subway stations. He photographs and collects the crude chips, which he poetically sees as indicators of the passage of time from when he tagged the trains to his life as an artist now, and then studies them before making new works. Equally rich in art historical precedent, these painterly pieces recall the decollage works of the Nouveau Ralist artists Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella and Jacques Villegl.

Greg Lamarche, Develop-Destroy, 2005

Never standing still, Lamarche continues to capture the zeitgeist of New York in new puzzle-like pieces, such asLife of the Party(2018). An accumulation of letters that he hand-cut from colored papers with an X-acto knife, the composition moves across a field of white paper like a diverse crowd of people. Mixing existing fonts with newly invented ones, he uses color and form to encapsulate a sense of moving through the citys subways and streets while catching glimpses of fashions, cell phones and graffiti.

Graffiti is the foundation and I am very much into expanding on it and not trying to be only one-dimensional, Lamarche further shared withGhettoblaster. I know a lot of former graf writers will say, I was young and stupid; I dont do that anymore. I think that one should not deny or make excuses for the past but rather embrace your experience and build off of it. To me it is the spark that set you off and makes life exciting so even though I dont get down like I used to I still get down. WM

Greg Lamarche, Vestige 2, 2012

Greg Lamarche: All Good Things is on view at Trustman Art Gallery, Simmons University, Boston through November 1, 2019

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All Good Things - The Collage Art of Greg Lamarche - whitehotmagazine.com

ANALYSIS | Does the West want out? Not really, but the rallying cry needs to be heard – CBC.ca

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There's been no end of headlines about western alienation and separation.

While the sentiment exists across the Prairies, Alberta is ground zero, and it's the Alberta premier who has been chief among those sounding the alarm.

Jason Kenney, who is quick to assure Canadians he's an avowed federalist, often uses the "unity crisis" rallying cry to pivot to partisan politics.

In this Aug.3 video posted to social media, Kenney's core message is clear: "Rather than focusing on Alberta separating from the Canadian federation, I'd like to focus on separating Justin Trudeau from the Prime Minister's Office".

Similar exhortations from Kenney, specifically citing a separatist surge, have dwindled after several months of a steady theme.

In fact, there has been a perceptible shift, with Kenney now talking more about Alberta's nation-building role and the province's integral place within Confederation.

There's no mystery as to why.

There is a danger that whatever frustration and anger is out there could be inflamed further and become politically explosive.

Kenney knows this.

Keep stirring it up and soon an ember is a fire.

However, Alberta-based pollster Janet Brown argues it's his job to reflect a sentiment that is deep and abiding in many Albertans.

"There is really a sense of frustration here," Brown says.

"When people talk about separation, mostly it's just an expression of frustration, rather than a clear desire to separate."

If anyone understands how that frustration can grow and fester, it's the man who turned "The West Wants In" into a movement that challenged political orthodoxy.

Preston Manning, the founding leader of the Reform Party, offers a warning.

"The challenge, I think, is to try to channel that energy and that anger and disillusionment into some constructive change, rather than just tearing things apart. And that's going to be a challenge for the next Parliament, no matter who ends up winning the next election," Manning says.

Brown thinks the winner does matter.

"Western separatism ebbs and flows depending on who is in government, and I think the fact there is a Liberal government federally is one of the things that's sort of driving that frustration," she says.

The Western Canada Concept Party managed to elect Gordon Kesler in a provincial byelection in 1982. It was the first and only electoral win by a separatist outside of Quebec.

Just months later, the party won close to 12 per cent of the vote in the provincial election, but that support didn't translate into seats including Kesler's.

This was the National Energy Program (NEP) era, so anger at Ottawa was visceral and profound in Alberta.

Former Reformand later CPC MP and cabinet minister Monte Solberg wrote about western alienation earlier this year.

He says, despite today's grievances over pipelines and equalization, "nothing, but nothing, approaches the damage done by the NEP."

So a separatist resurgence is possible, but not probable.

In fact, Brown says based on her scanning of the various polls on alienation and separation in recent months, while there is a clear sentiment favouring separation that garners substantial support, it should be viewed with caution.

"When you dive even deeper (into the polls)... those people are saying I'm going to answer this way on the poll because I want somebody to hear me and I want somebody to hear how frustrated I am," Brown says.

Solberg writes that "western separation is not many people's first choice, it's also not very realistic."

But he also argues that years of policies which have stymied Alberta's prime industry means "the only dignified response is righteous anger the West didn't pull away until it was pushed away."

A nascent group dubbed Wexit says its slogan is"The West Wants Out."

We brought together members of a focus group, assembled by Brown as part of a poll commissioned by CBC Calgary, to hear directly from voters about this. They largely echo Solberg's view.

Stephen Carlton spent a career in the resource sector. He says, "I'm not a separatist. I'm a Canadian first and foremost. But, you know, with the continued aspect that we feel powerless here, separation, is that a viable plan B if we can't work this out?"

That's the question being asked by many, including James Vy, who also makes his living in oil and gas.

"You know. I don't think it'd be a good idea. I don't know what it looks like after Alberta does separate," Vy says.

Carla Paradis, an entrepreneur with rural roots, says she wants "to get back on the same page as the rest of Canada."

Kenney's message has evolved from angry and stark warnings about a burgeoning unity crisis a few months ago, to a pitch arguing that the Constitution is on the side of Alberta.

This is directly linked to his stumping for Andrew Scheer and his challenges to the federal carbon tax and Bills C-48 and 69; one a B.C tanker ban, and the other a new assessment process he argues blocks future pipelines.

It's also true that there is an inherent danger in stirring up separatist sentiment.

This week, when asked about the re-election of a Trudeau government, he replied, "Honestly, I think that frustration will go off the charts." But he didn't characterize that frustration in the context of unity or separatist sentiment.

What is also very telling is his response to a question about equalization a formula he's railed against as being profoundly unfair.

When a reporter asked whether he'd raised the subject with any federal leaders and, further, if any of them had made any commitments to changes, the reply was a curt "no and no" and on to the next question.

No question, many Albertans are angry. They're also anxious, fearful, bewildered and, in some cases, feeling defeated.

Brown explains the zeitgeist Kenney is channelling is rooted in a perceived "hypocrisy in the way Alberta is dealt with."

She goes on to explain, "The rest of Canada is happy to take equalization from Alberta. They're happy to benefit from the prosperity that Alberta has. But then at the same time, they're going to turn around and try and block Alberta's key industry."

Of course that conclusion can be rebutted and rejected, but as Manning says, it needs also to be acknowledged. "The populist dimension of western alienation can't be ignored; it has to be addressed."

"I think the challenge for others is to recognize the validity of the concerns and don't dismiss them and don't tell people you've got no right to be angry or mad but to try to provide a constructive alternative," Manning says.

Whether that can be accomplished at the ballot box on Oct.21 is anyone's guess.

West of Centre is an election-focused pop-up bureau based out of CBC Calgary that features election news and analysis with a western voice and perspective.

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ANALYSIS | Does the West want out? Not really, but the rallying cry needs to be heard - CBC.ca

Brook Andrew: The first artist and Indigenous man to lead the Biennale of Sydney – Sydney Morning Herald

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Brook Andrew stands at the centre of a scrum of curators in the small, elegant vestibule of the Art Gallery of NSW. Its a funny little jewel box of a place, all carved sandstone, mosaic floors, bronzes on marble pedestals.

Among the latter are copies of two allegorical works by 18th-century French sculptor Antoine Coysevox. One, Fame, blows her trumpet on a rearing steed. The other, similarly mounted, is the Roman messenger god Mercury, whose portfolio spanned travellers, boundaries, divination, luck and trickery, in addition to bread-and-butter eloquence and communication.

More pedestals cluster in an alcove across the room, topped with busts this time. The work is Melbourne artist Andrew Hazewinkels 12 Figures after Niccol, part of the temporary multi-venue exhibition of new Australian art, The National, which describes it as antique heads that turn out to be masks failing to conceal underlying collective anxiety.

You couldnt invent a more appropriate chorus than Fame, Mercury or those failing masks as Andrew outlines his plans for something newer and more expansive still to the posse of AGNSW curators: his six-venue, city-wide 22nd Biennale of Sydney, which will run from March to June next year.

Titled NIRIN edge in Wiradjuri, the language of his mothers people it will showcase 98 artists, creatives and collectives from 47 countries. As the title underlines, NIRIN is about putting art from the edge at the centre, or showing how all those edges come together to make a centre, as Andrew puts it. Many of the artists are people of colour, gay, queer or non-binary. Nor are all artists.

Andrew is also charting where art collides with science, ceremony, food, with contributors ranging from environmental researchers Drift Labs to cook Kylie Kwong and South Africas Breaking Bread collective. In other words, its a show about travellers, thresholds and boundaries. Stories and who gets to tell them, how. First and foremost, its about the tenor of our times: anxiety in all its myriad forms. All that underlies it, and how that can be brought to light.

Brook Andrew on shaking up the Biennale: Whats not at stake? Everythings at stake. Things need to shift dramatically. And theyre going to shift anyway.Credit:Tim Bauer

With his impassive face, wide blue eyes and greying curls, Andrew, 49, is a game-changer for Australias oldest and largest biennale, which started in 1973. Not only is he the first Indigenous artistic director, hes also the first to be an artist. And the latter is at least as important as the former. His friend Marcia Langton calls him one of the definitive Aboriginal provocateurs in the Australian art world, known for reinterpreting colonial and modern history and offering alternative perspectives, as the National Gallery of Victoria said of the career survey it held of Andrews work in 2017, The Right to Offend is Sacred.

As the Biennale of Sydney enters adulthood and at an interesting time for big art shows and museology generally Andrew is very consciously positioning his on the faultlines of now, such as gender, sexuality and race, the environment and what art and biennales are and do, where old definitions are breaking down and being reformed. Or inside those faultlines, as he tells Good Weekend, where the real action is taking place and the partys happening. He is doing so, his NIRIN online statement of curatorial intent says, because, the urgent states of our contemporary lives are laden with unresolved past anxieties and hidden layers of the supernatural.

This meeting with the AGNSWs curatorial team eight months out, in mid-July, is to start to nail down how those anxieties and supernatural layers might surface at Sydneys oldest gallery. Andrew has earmarked the vestibule for Lismore artist Karla Dickens. Shes been making these wild cages with artworks in them, he says. I imagine she will be hanging things? one AGNSW curator asks. Are they light? Theyre not massive steel structures, are they? Someone else chimes in: Its a heritage building. We have to work with what we have.

Andrew looks thoughtful. Im going to talk to her about hanging some textiles, he says, surveying the rooms hard surfaces. This is a very special place. It can be a bit cold, the curator says. Well, its about transforming it, Andrew muses. So that it feels more womb-like, a bit like a cuddle. Its about creating new narratives and perspectives.

The old narrative and perspective are, of course, written across the other side of the vestibule wall. Along the left flank of the AGNSWs neoclassical facade, bronze relief panels begin to depict what were seen at the time as the major art periods: Assyrian, Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance. Two world wars and their associated metal shortages intervened, however, leaving the last two blank. Andrews Biennale will more than compensate.

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has been commissioned to wrap the front of the gallery, a choice that underlines how close Andrew is to the art-world pulse. In April, Mahama, who is famous for what one reviewer called his monuments to the anonymous reflecting on trade, migration and globalisation, wrapped Milans historical Porta Venezia tollgates in a loosely sewn camouflage of jute sacks from home, as he had done to the historic watch gates in Kassel, central Germany, for the last Documenta exhibition in 2017.

A month later, his bunker-like, mesh installation of found objects became one of the star turns at Mays Venice Biennale. As Andrew tells the curators: Its about the strength of that facade, which is the sort of statement of colonial strength and legacy you see in cities like this around the world. What I love about Ibrahim is the way he makes things disappear and reappear differently. Its about what comes forward and what falls back and then what you walk into all kinds of thresholds.

From the front, visitors will cop that cuddle from Karla before proceeding to the gallerys central hall, which connects the Grand Courts, designed like the facade by turn-of-last-century government architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, to both the Captain Cook Wing, commissioned to commemorate the explorers bicentenary in 1970, and the 1988 extension opened for the national bicentenary, both by then NSW Government Architect Andrew Andersons.

As that underlines, the entry court is a collision of eras and intents. Entering it, you realise just how rich this territory is for a man like Brook Andrew. A man who in addition to his sprawling Biennale is completing both a PhD at Oxford University on the power of objects to transform inherited histories, and an Australian Research Council project on Australias frontier wars. A man whose CV states his home base as Melbourne, Oxford and Berlin; who has for years now been in perpetual motion, forging the international connections and reputation he is leveraging for this Biennale. A man, too, for whom the reference to layers of the supernatural is anything but casual. I believe in ghosts, because I see them, he tells Good Weekend. I believe in spirits, because I talk to them. It helps me. It just helps guide me through life.

Andrew plans to fill the entry court with screen-printed texts from the work of the man he describes as one of the grandfathers of the land rights movement, the late Pitjantjatjara artist Kunmanara Williams. And glimpsed through his eyes, every inch of this place does indeed become almost radioactive with meaning. Not only are we standing in the seam between eras of the gallery, usually commissioned as statements of statehood, but were doing so in the moment before it all changes again, with work about to begin on the AGNSWs $344 million Sydney Modern expansion, staking its claim in the competitive global game that contemporary art has become since the opening of Londons Tate Modern in 2000.

As AGNSW director Michael Brand tells a group of Biennale donors the next day, the gallery has always reflected the eras of its city, from our links to London in the late 19th century to being the first museum to buy and exhibit Aboriginal works as art and then turning to Asia in the late 70s and 80s. As it will again with NIRIN. Its one of those global moments, Brand says. I dont think anyone else from Australia has made it to some of the places Brook has, so his insertions really make sense when you think of [the AGNSW] as a place that represents a particular society and a particular world view.

"A man like Brook Andrew isnt just a turn of phrase. For the purposes of this Biennale, the man himself matters more than usual. By definition, such shows are about capturing the zeitgeist. But Andrew seems to be capturing a very particular moment of fluidity and flux in his butterfly net. And to many, its a job he was born for.

Everyone on the panel that selected him for the job with whom Good Weekend speaks including Michael Brand, Powerhouse Museum CEO Lisa Havilah, Museum of Contemporary Art director Elizabeth Macgregor and M+ Hong Kong art museum head Suhanya Raffel is clear: Andrew was the only possible choice. That is in part because it was high time for an Indigenous curator. But in larger part its because it was time for Brook Andrew, says Havilah, who met him more than 20 years ago when she was working at Casula Powerhouse in Sydneys west and he was an art student at the University of Western Sydney (now Western Sydney University).

Brook is perfectly placed to push forward this historical model of the Biennale, which has been operating for more than 40 years, she says. He comes out of this incredibly suburban context, but he has this ability to think in multiple dimensions. And to bring forward histories and stories and represent them in very contemporary ways, but at the same time challenge those narratives.

Andrews international reputation not only as an artist but as a curator also shifts the relevance and importance of the Biennale internationally, Havilah says. And as a gay man, of mixed Wiradjuri (on his mothers side) and Scottish (on his fathers) descent, and also the father of an 11-year-old son, he brings various other identities in addition to his Indigeneity, says Raffel.

The faultlines are intensifying and polarising on so many issues around the globe, regardless of which position you take. The world is facing all kinds of big questions: existential questions, environmental questions, sustainability issues, issues of identity and belonging. And Brook captures that complexity. As Macgregor puts it: We wanted a Biennale that projected some critical ideas, a Biennale that investigated what art means in a time of globalisation, refugees, Trump, populism, and that engaged meaningfully with First Nations.

The man of the moment, then. But hardly a household name, despite a distinguished 25-year career. Certainly not a safe choice in a town dedicated to safety, from its lockout laws to its hardly edgy annual light show, Vivid. The panel members may be unanimous the institutions they represent bending over backwards to help Andrew realise his vision, if the AGNSW is any indication but word is there were rumblings in the clouds above their heads, though none of them will be drawn on the subject. Would the international art world come to a Biennale with an Indigenous artistic director? Would Andrew be able to pull it off?

The latter is a live question, given the scale of both Andrews ambitions and the expectations riding on his shoulders. But those who have worked with him for years have no doubt. Hell knock it out of the park, says MCA curator Anne Loxley, who compares his appointment to the announcement in March that the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa would be the first Asian curators of Documenta, the worlds most prestigious contemporary art show, in 2022. Its deeply important, Loxley says. They are going to change the rules and I think that is what Brook is going to do, too.

It comes back to what a biennale is meant to be, Andrew says. For me, its still [redolent of] the great expositions of the 18th and 19th centuryshowing off exotic colonial wealthTo me, this is an opportunity to help redress all thator allow for new things to happen. NIRIN is about shining a light on parts of the world that arent so European or North American. And its the first time the Biennale has had such a high number of people of colour, non-binary and queer artists. I think those stories are so urgent, and to have them all together is just so powerful.

Andrew has been building to NIRIN for years. Even if you just take the tranche of work he has done for the MCA in the past 15 years, from Blakatak, the ground-breaking talk and performance series he curated in 2005, to the exhibition and talks program TABOO seven years later. Then theres Warrang, his installation on the facade of the MCAs 2012 extension. It features a giant LED arrow, filled with the black-and-white zigzag a reworking of traditional Wiradjuri dendroglyph or tree-carving patterns that is a constant motif in his work. The arrow points to the remains of the colonial naval docks below, the heritage purpose for which it was commissioned. But its more than that. Those docks also mark where the First Fleet landed in Sydney Harbour. His arrow is a giant piece of wayfinding to all that has gone before or is just gone.

Andrews career, too, has always combined curation, collaboration and ranged across disciplines and media. His practice is a research practice but its also a printmaking practice, a painting practice, a photography practice, says Havilah. What really drives him is the storytelling and the disruption of history the engagement with ideas from multiple perspectives. Making work is just part of that practice.

TABOO was an interesting lesson for him in how you negotiate your practice as an artist with your practice as a curator, adds Macgregor. Brook wanted it to be like an artistic installation, with colour and shape and painted walls and no labels. He brought his over-arching aesthetic to bear on the material. Fortunately, those artists were happy with that but you could have had artists who disagreed. As Loxley says: Give an artist a curatorial job and hell give you an artwork.

Andrew asks, Whats not at stake? Everythings at stake. Things need to shift dramatically. And theyre going to shift anyway.

Brook Andrew unveils his portrait of Professor Marcia Langton at Canberras National Portrait Gallery in 2010. Credit:Glen McCurtayne

Brook Andrew was 15 when he got his first real inkling of just how much the picture had to change. It was the mid-1980s and his biology teacher at Cambridge Park High School in western Sydney decided to bring the class up to speed on the first Australians. He was hysterical, Andrew remembers. He wore Hawaiian shirts and Stubbies, long socks, often thongs. And he stood out the front and pointed to his thumb and said, Real Aboriginal people have swirls on their thumbs and theres only a few of them left in the Central Desert.

Andrew was flabbergasted. Unmoored, he says, by the image conjured. It took a while for the full implications to sink in. I went home and I remember discussing it with Mum and she was rolling her eyes and having a giggle about it. I didnt really understand the gravitas until days and years went by. It made me think a lot more about the lack of visibility and representation. As if half of my body felt missing.

Andrew was growing up in the years leading up to the bicentenary. In the suburbs, where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker raising four children. While there was a strong sense of his culture at home and in his extended family, for Andrew it had no wider context. I mean, there were about six Aboriginal kids in my year, and a lot of them were big footballers, so there wasnt much racism. But there was also no history of Aboriginal Australia or the frontier wars at school, for instance.

Another corresponding eureka moment came when he was 19. By then Id become very active in arts and Indigenous issues, he says. And one day my Aboriginal grandmother, who I was living with at the time, turned around to me and said, Brook, youre also white, you know. And it hit me like a ton of bricks, because she was very important to me and she was proud of her father, who was Scottish and Irish. She always kept me in balance. Its interesting, because even Aboriginal people say that white person, this white person and I just didnt grow up with that black against white, because all the white people in my family were allies. As my mother always said, We are a salt-and-pepper family.

Brook Andrews Jumping Castle War Memorial was so popular among 2010 Biennale of Sydney visitors, bouncing on it had to be banned.Credit:Brook Andrew

It is one reason humour and fun loom so large in his work, from Warrang to his zigzag-patterned inflatable objects, or the Jumping Castle War Memorial he made for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney, an actual jumping castle that so many adults took to in the first few days that jumping had to be banned for the pieces survival. Black humour is vital when were dealing with conflicted and traumatic histories, he says. Humour and having a lightness and balance is important for healing. Its important for letting a breath out, its important for truth-telling.

In the years that followed his big biology lesson, Andrew began to dig even toying with becoming an archaeologist. The first ethnographic photos I found were at Sydneys Mitchell Library in 1995, he recalls. They were so devoid of our lives. Its weird how somebody else owns the history of your peoples bodies and that representation.

Years later, he would come across the much larger hoard at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London that would inspire his 2007 series Gun-metal Grey, which conjure and conceal by turn their anonymous subjects, like lenticular lenses, a technique he says he laboured mightily to perfect. As he told Marcia Langton in an interview for a 2014 essay: I find it a complete and utter mystery. Because theyre from a time and a place that I myself, and my immediate family dont have any recollection ofitslike disappeared history.

Just a year after finding that first cache of pictures in the Mitchell, Andrew would create the work that made his name, 1996s Sexy and dangerous, a highly coloured rendering of a sepia photograph of a young Aboriginal warrior. The work became as immediately iconic as the lushly ironic Something More series by Tracey Moffatt, an artist Andrew cites as an early influence. And not just in Australia.

Andrews breakthrough work Sexy and dangerous (1996).Credit:

For a while there, it was on every bus stop in Tokyo, Langton says of Sexy and dangerous. If you look up the original, its just one of those horrible ethnographic photos. And in just a few moves, he makes that young man so handsome, so human, and the very colonial intent of dehumanising and turning him into a scientific experiment is almost entirely shed, but not so much that you dont recognise that its there.

Sexy and dangerous nailed all eyes, as if something that had needed to be expressed had finally found form. That message, We are sexy and dangerous and what gaze does not allow us this power, was a message that we needed and we still need, says MCA curator Anne Loxley. So obsessed did the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) become with the work, says director Tony Ellwood, that it bought two of an original edition of 20 to ensure it could keep it on permanent display.

The speed with which Andrew had arrived was remarkable, particularly as hed taken his time getting started. After finishing school, he had studied marine biology in central Queenslands Rockhampton for a year. His parents, who had always encouraged him to follow his clear artistic bent, thought he was crazy. I needed to get away from the western suburbs, he says. Because even though theyre thriving, Im a gay man and I was growing up in [an area] that was homophobic and where Aboriginal people were football heroes.

Loxley first met Andrew just after this time, when she had her first curatorial job at Sydneys S.H. Ervin Gallery and he was doing a placement prior to studying art at university. He was quite contained and enigmatic, she recalls. But he always had charm. He was a proud Aboriginal man, but it wasnt just his cultural identity. He was interesting. He had a sense of his own intellect. There was something fascinating about him.

Charged with keeping Andrew occupied, Loxley asked him to re-cover the offices shabby chaise longue. It was a very average job, she says. Lets just say there were no signs of the phenomenal talent to come. That changed when she saw a work in his 1993 art graduation show, White Word I, now in the MCA collection. There had been something unreachable about him and then I saw that and I thought, Oh my god, hes not only talented but hes smart and hes brave.

Loxley and fellow curator Felicity Fenner included Andrew in their 1994 show of emerging artists, Fresh Art. That was when I got to know him deeply, she says. He can be as silly as me and so much fun mad fun the most fun. Just two years later, Sexy and dangerous landed. I dont think any of his works have passed into the canon in the same way, Loxley says. It has a communicability about it. You dont have to know much at all to get what is going on there.

As the sheer scope and range of work on show at last years NGV career survey demonstrated, Andrew has roamed across media and moods, from Gun-metal Grey to his neon and inflatable works. He goes from the absolute spectacular to the quite cerebral, miniature, detailed, conceptual, Ellwood says. I find him incredibly intriguing. There is always a slightly dangerous edge to his work. But its cloaked in this beauty. That is something very clever about him and its something I think all great artists do.

That beauty is anything but incidental. As Langton points out, it redeems all that is lost, much as his use of light is resurrectionary. Every bit as political as everything else about his work. And for all the immediacy of that first 1996 image, his subsequent work has been much more nuanced, Loxley says. Thats why hes one of the very top Australian artists for me. I like my art to mean something and to keep giving me stuff. His work always deals with something really important and something I didnt know and it always tells me in a way that is poetic rather than didactic. And the range of media he has mastered and his craftsmanship are out of this world. I like my art beautiful and he makes beautiful things.

Hes just got that artists eye, right? Which doesnt turn off, says Langton. Sometimes we come across people in art who have a special vision, and special talents. Hes just one of those very special people. With an extraordinary vision and awareness and capacity to work hard.

Not that Andrew is without detractors. Over the years, some artists and curators have accused him of being insufficiently respectful of aspects of the history that is his subject matter, which Andrew says is a complicated history to unpack. The fluency and fluidity of his work, its chameleon quality, has also perhaps meant he has not crystallised in the popular consciousness on the scale he may have had, had he stuck to one medium, theme, style.

Sometimes we come across people in art who have a special vision, and special talents. Hes just one of those very special people. With an extraordinary vision and awareness and capacity to work hard.

Hes certainly become ubiquitous, though, even in his variety. As the AGNSWs Brand points out, the first works that greet visitors to Sydneys main art museums are two very different Andrew creations: Warrang at the MCA and, at the AGNSW, the recently acquired AUSTRALIA VI, a large, coppery canvas based on an etching by the 18th-century German artist Gustav Mtzel of a corroboree he never saw.

That may have something to do with the currency of what Brand sees as Andrews overriding characteristic: curiosity. Theres certainly a political element in him, no question. But more than that, Brook is curious. Which is exactly what museums need most now. Curiosity is what you should enter a museum with, Brand says. Not to go see one work you know you like and then leave again, but with a sense of curiosity.

Brook Andrews Warrang arrow (2012) features a pattern derived from markers used by his mothers Wiradjuri ancestors.Credit:Brook Andrew

The zigzag motif that runs across Andrews career isnt confined to his art. A tiny blue-and-black version appears when he calls, where a photo might be. The pattern, ancient and modern, is both his sword and his shield. For a provocateur, Andrew is also fiercely guarded. He is happy to talk about his parents, who now live in Queensland and both of whom, inspired by their sons example, went back to study. His mother, Veronica, took a bachelor of visual arts and his father, Trevor, studied writing, journalism and social sciences. Theyre both dedicated community people, Andrew says. My father helps run the Shed Happens mens mental health group in Deception Bay and my mother belongs to the Yinna Yarnan womens group. I am so lucky to have them.

But his three siblings, like his son, are entirely off-limits because, he says, Im private. It is hardly surprising if you think of Andrews career as a decades-long investigation of what it means to be seen and not seen, forgotten or framed. Of who gets to look, and for what purpose. I refuse to be fixed, he says. No one should be. Theres so much to navigate especially for Aboriginal artists, who have to look a certain way or have certain politics. People are always being fixed by other people. Why do we do it to each other?

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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The End of the Chinese Miracle Is in Sight. What’s Next? – Singularity Hub

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Governments around the world are rushing to keep up with emerging technologies. No one wants to be left behind as more industries and facets of life are impacted by the transition from analogue to digital, manual to automated, and authentic to synthetic.

One of the countries at the front of the pack is China. Its government is aiming to lead the world in AI by 2030. Tech giants Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent are rivaled in size and clout only by the likes of Amazon and Google. Its pouring huge amounts of venture capital into tech. And its scientists are moving forward with gene editing even as other countries grapple with its ethical concerns.

This all points to likely success for China as a tech superpower. But as it moves swiftly into the future, it can be easy to forget that, in terms of development, much of the worlds most populous country hasnt yet left the past behind.

Last week world leaders convened in New York for the 74th session of the UN General Assembly, which included a summit on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Much of the focus for the SDGs falls on the African continent, home to the countries with the highest poverty ratesand highest birth ratesin the world. Having reduced its extreme poverty rate from 88 percent in 1981 to less than 2 percent in 2013in whats been aptly dubbed the Chinese MiracleChina doesnt get mentioned as often in global development conversations anymore.

But its still an important player in the field, not least because of its massive population, which at nearly 1.5 billion outnumbers all African countries put together. Its size gives it a huge weight in overall global statistics, and we should still be keeping close tabs on its progress.

In a recent paper published in Science Advances, a research team examined regional divisions, gaps between urban and rural populations, social inequality, and other factors to evaluate where Chinas development progress measures up and where its falling short.

Even in the worlds richest countries, wealth is by no means evenly distributed across geographic lines. 2018 average per capita income in the US, for example, was $74,561 in Connecticutand $37,994 in Mississippi. People who live in or near big cities tend to have greater access to opportunity and wealth creation.

China is no exception; significant gaps exist between coastal and inland regions and between urban and rural areas, not just in wealth and employment, but also in access to education and healthcare. According to the paper, though these gaps have narrowed, they havent yet closed.

The widest gap is in education between urban and rural areas. The good news is that across the board, people are getting more years of educationbut urbanites are still getting 3 more years on average and are 7 times more likely to go to college.

The figures for healthcare are less stark. The infant mortality rate as of 2016 was 0.4 percent in urban areas and 0.9 percent in rural areas. The disparity in maternal mortality has disappeared, standing at 2 per million across the board.

Rural residents overall mortality rate used to be almost double that of urbanites, but theres been a leveling effect with the explosive growth of Chinese cities. While moving to cities has upped peoples incomes and educational attainment, its also exposed them to the ills of urban livingnamely, more pollution, less cardiovascular activity, and a less healthy diet, all contributing to higher rates of illnesses like cancer and heart disease.

Its important to note that while the paper details death and disease rates, it doesnt include information about access to care or quality of care, which are more indicative of equity.

Chinas urban migration between 19882015 was so massive that its been called not just the biggest human exodus in history, but the biggest migration of any type of mammal. A 2015 estimate put the number of migrant workers at 277 million. According to the paper, both urban and rural incomes increased more than 10-fold since the early 1990sbut the income gap increased even more. Factory and office workers in cities make on average three times more than agricultural workers in the countryside, and people working in coastal areas have by far the highest per capita disposable incomes.

While millions in China are no longer extremely poor, millions are still poor; 43 million people were estimated to be living below the poverty line in 2018. The governments main strategy in its declared war on poverty consists of moving rural residents to cities. But big cities are already sprawling and overcrowded, and plunking farmers down in high-rise apartments doesnt guarantee a better life, especially if they dont have the skills to get a city job.

The conditions that enabled the Chinese Miraclean authoritarian government, a huge working-age population, and population control via the one-child policycan only keep on giving for so long. In particular, the working population is aging, and as millions of workers approach retirement, the ranks available to take their placeand to fund the countrys pension systemarent as plentiful.

In short, China is approaching a fascinating (and potentially treacherous) inflection point. In the wake of its incredible 30 years, its path to sustained progress will likely be more complex. If its going to produce a second miracle and eradicate poverty across the country, its commitment to becoming a tech superpower may be an apt starting point. And its lax approach to privacy and the powerful tools already in place to collect data on multiple aspects of its citizens lives will give China a technological edge over its Western counterparts.

Whether Chinas ambitions will pan out remains to be seen, but its got its work cut out for it on multiple fronts.

For one, its economic growth has come with a hefty environmental price tag. As the paper put it, growth has been achieved at the expense of natural resources and the environment, which has led to excessive emissions including wastewater, waste gas, solid waste, and carbon dioxide that extended from the developed east region to the undeveloped west region. Though its already begun to take drastic measures to improve its environmental recordand safeguard the health of its land and peopleChinas size and clout mean it should be aiming to be a world leader in caring for the planet, rather than reactively combating an abysmal environmental record.

Its human rights record also leaves much to be desired. International outcry has grown over the CCPs treatment of Uighurs in the north-west Xinjiang province, and tensions have been building for months in Hong Kong. On the business side, a trade war with the US has escalated, and telecoms giant Huawei was banned from US communications networks in May (though theres since been a reprieve).

China has set its sights high, and the hurdles it will have to clear to reach its goals arent small. A country that can reduce poverty by 86 percent in 30 years has some experience solving tough problemsbut unlike 30 years ago, China is now at the center of the world stage, and the world should thus hold it to a high standard. Well soon see if it has another miracle up its sleeve.

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Russia Could Take the Lead on Human Gene Editing – Singularity Hub

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Theres broad consensus that genetically modifying humans isnt a good idea, at least not anytime in the near future. But it seems Russia has less qualms about the idea, which could leave it to determine the future of the technology.

After Chinese geneticist He Jiankui announced he had used CRISPR to genetically edit two human embryos there was widespread outrage from both the scientific community and authorities at home and abroad. But it took less than a year for Russian scientist Denis Rebrikov to announce his desire to carry out similar experiments that edit germline DNA, which refers to changes that will be passed on to future generations.

Condemnation from the international community was again swift, but it appears Rebrikov may be finding a more receptive audience at home. Bloomberg reports that a secret meeting of top Russian geneticists and health officials was convened over the summer to discuss the proposals.

And the meeting had a significant guest: Maria Vorontsova, an endocrinologist and daughter of the man likely to make the final call on Russias position on gene-editing President Vladimir Putin.

Bloomberg reports there was a back and forth between opponents and proponents of the idea, but Vorontsova said scientific progress cant be stopped and suggested such research should be controlled by state-run institutions to ensure oversight.

While thats a long way from an official endorsement, the Russian governments response to Rebrikovs plans has certainly been tepid compared to those in the US, where politicians recently renewed a ban on germline editing, and in China, where Hes work quickly led to a tightening of regulations around human gene editing.

Rebrikovs proposal potentially has more merit than Hes. Rebrikov initially planned to target the same gene as He, which is believed to determine susceptibility to HIV. Switching this gene off was criticized for being an unnecessarily complicated and dangerous way of ensuring the disease wasnt passed from parent to child.

Now he plans to use CRISPR to switch off a rare gene that leads to deafness. He is working with couples who are both deaf due to the condition, but dont want to pass it on to their children. Theres still very little understanding of what the potential side effects of this kind of intervention could be, which has led many to call for a moratorium on the technology.

Both the World Health Organization and an international commission set up by the US national academies and the UKs Royal Society are trying to develop guidelines for human gene editing technology, but scientists leading these efforts admit theres little they can do to prevent this kind of research at present.

And while Rebrikovs proposals may sound fairly benign, the way he talks about the technology should give serious cause for concern. In the Bloomberg article he openly discusses starting small and the prospect of parents genetically enhancing their children, while seeming to invoke the Soviet Unions pursuit of nuclear weapons as a justification for developing a technology that can be used for both good and evil.

So far, most of the discussion around germline editing has been focused on safety. But writing in Scientific American Mildred Solomon, president of bioethics institute The Hastings Center, says we need to start tackling questions that go beyond safety before its too late.

That will inevitably include discussions around the ethics of genetic enhancement, but its becoming increasingly clear that there also needs to be consideration of the geopolitical ramifications of the technology.

Putin has already voiced his concerns about genetically-engineered soldiers, and in todays hostile international climate its easy to see the worlds great powers worrying about being left behind by their adversaries. Rebrikov alluded to this train of thought in his comments to Bloomberg, saying hes sure embryo gene-editing is happening in clandestine dark sites.

Despite Chinas forceful public response to Hes research, theres evidence the government was actually funding it, and bioethicist James Giordano told National Defense that its highly unlikely the scientist was a rogue actor in a country where government, academia, and industry are so deeply entwined.

Were still a long way from the kind of capabilities required for doomsday scenarios like super-soldiers or genetically-targeted biological weapons, but recent developments suggest theres a real danger of a genetic arms race developing. Exactly what can be done to stop it remains far from clear, but there needs to be a major push to ensure the fundamental basis of our humanity doesnt end up being governed by realpolitik.

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Addressing the Scientific Reproducibility Crisis with Singularity – insideHPC

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Michael Bauer from Sylabs.IO

In this video from the Perth HPC Conference, Michael Bauer from Sylabs presents: Addressing the Scientific Reproducibility Crisis with Singularity.

Containers provide the means to encapsulate an application, its dependencies, data, and configurations, that allows for full mobility and reproducibility of the software stack. Containers have disrupted the Linux scene within the last few years because they have created a paradigm shift in what it means to package up and move applications and data.

Sylabs is the leader in secure, trusted, performance focused container solutions. The capabilities that we have created are revolutionary and unique within the industry purposely built to address some of the shortcomings and flaws within the current container technologies. On top of that, we have created a series of commercially accessible value adds for traditional simulation, artificial intelligence, edge computing, on-ramping to the cloud, multi-cloud, edge, and core infrastructure management.

Michael Bauer is a senior software engineer at Sylabs, whos an expert in Linux container technologies. At Sylabs, hes the lead engineer of the core services team, providing technical oversight and direction over products such as Singularity, SingularityPRO, and various Kubernetes integrations. Michael has been involved with the Singularity open source project for almost three years, first as a contributor and now as a project lead and maintainer. Hes given talks about Singularity and Linux containers around the world at conferences such as ISC, SC, FOSDEM, and many others. Recently, hes been exploring novel approaches to machine learning via container technology.

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Addressing the Scientific Reproducibility Crisis with Singularity - insideHPC

Newton’s Arc – The Good Men Project

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Newtons First Law of Motion: A body at rest will remain at rest unless an outside force acts on it, and a body in motion will remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.

Newtons first law, in part, states: that a body in motion will remain in motion. As first principles go, I see a parallel to my experience.

A body in emotion also desires to stay in emotion. That emotion for me, right now, is love. I am not gifted at the letting go of it.

I do not know how to feign indifference for the love of a life deeply shared. I like being a plural unity singularity does not suit me and the hollowness of separation from a love, not yet fully savored, is an agony almost beyond description.

But that must be the Arc of Growth. In order to salvage the lesson that is bathed in the anguish, first must come a finding. For we are bodies acted upon by outside forces at least we were meant to be. It is the outside forces that create the Arc of us.

In life, there is either an Arc along which we travel or there is a flat line. The flat line is without pulse it is a kind of unbending death. An un-creativity. It is de-evolution at the level of apathy.

But not only Life and Growth have their Arc, Evil has its Arc as well. It is vital that I, as an outside force, change the motion of Evils Arc. I must remove from evil its inertia. Thus, I can help diminish the impact and the ancillary damage and the growing ripples of Evils victimhood.

Oddly enough it is the ripples of the Holocaust that have unsettled my world.

I was born into the Dutch Reform Church. I attended a Catholic Kindergarten. Went to a Lutheran 1 8, and then a Baptist High School. After High School, I attended a Pentecostal college where I roomed with a blind Buddhist I have heard the many nuanced voices of Deity.

Yet last week I found myself in the healing emotional embrace of a Rabbi as I was bluntly impacted by a deeper understanding of the holocaust and its horrors. A subset of humanity that suffered inhuman scarring as a result of a demonic evil that has claimed victims beyond themselves. Acts that have affected emotions past through lineage, and they now affect me.

The absolute soul-wrenching anguish perpetrated on these people did not end with individual souls. It had to have affected the way they were able to be loved and the way they loved others. It afflicted the way love was expressed and how they taught loving relationships to their children. It has infected the manor, in which a son or daughter is able to accept anothers committed love the ripples radiate outward and spread instability and pain across generations and decades.

My grief was over the unimaginable impact crater that the Holocaust inflicted on a particular man. He and the expanding circle of victims that radiate from the inhuman evils perpetrated on his life. But I know it is not just his life.

The ramifications are magnified by the millions of souls who have not actually crossed my path but the evil of it has! It still does. It has changed the way a generation was able to love. It changed the next generation, whom it raised with the brokenness It tried to love through.

Each of us can be the outside force that stops the momentum of that evil. We can be the inside force that dynamically enhances the impact of the positive emotional arc of healing. I can be that at a personal level.

It was Noahs Ark where two by two the creatures came and rose above the floods of destruction. They emerged as changed creatures onto a different world. Unified at a new level. Made one by the bonding between them. It is between the two where we find God. But also life and growth and glory!

Within me is a multi-chambered organ that pulsates with a dynamic force that acts to pump life through me. Each of us can be a multi-leveled dynamic force that can radiate a peace and a health and a repair that is vital to our world. Together we must accept that a love that flows beyond us honors our world and deity and our lineage.

Do not misunderstand it is no easy thing for me to set aside a love. My heart is bruised, that bruised part desires to shelter and hide. The separation of a unity, that at its core felt divine, is a raw and racking force.

But if not for the act of that force upon the somebody of who I am, and the lessons offered through that force, the remnant is just pain and scarring. Not growth, Not Redemption. Not insight. Not Healing (for me and my world).

Evil is a black hole. In the center of a black hole is a gravitational singularity, a one-dimensional point which contains a huge mass in an infinitely small space. Acting against that emotional black hole there must be another force in play, A place where the laws of physicality cease to operate. It is not easy if the gravitational force of a people is apathy. Within the infinitely small space of prejudice there is so little room to turn around in. To find momentum. And yet as a loving person I must.

Whether it is Apartheid or Racial Bigotry or Religious Persecution or the Economic snobbery of us vs. them I must choose to rise against the momentum of evils and to understand the ripples of hurt and to daily choose to be an outside force to bring a healing within.

Within my heart is a hollow place where the love of an imminently precious soul was pried from me by the momentum of inhumanities past. But there needs not be only cost, instead a growth and understanding and the willingness to turn, in that infinitely small space, and push back against the density of that darkness that hovers and wants its destruction, its impact, its craters and victims, The Hollow Cost of that ends with each of us.

The Hollow Cost of it ended, in part, with me.

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Newton's Arc - The Good Men Project

Theres an enormous black hole lurking in this Nasa photo can you find it? – The Sun

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SUPERMASSIVE black holes are such a huge force in the universe that you'd think they'd be easy to spot from a distance.

However, an image released by Nasa proves this is not the case as the black hole in the photo below can be hard to pinpoint.

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The black hole in this image is within the bright elliptical galaxy called Messier 87 (M87).

If you look really closely to the upper left-hand side of the picture you should be able to spot jets of brightness sprouting from the centre of a cloud-like glow.

These jet-like strands are gas and dust particles being pulled into the black hole, which give off heat during the process and can be captured by an infrared camera.

Earlier this year, a close up image of this black hole was captured by the Event Horizon Telescope for the first time ever.

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The infrared image above was taken by the Spitzer Space telescope, which was focusing on M87 with its bright blue hues.

The jets of light sprouting from it are thought to spread for thousands of light-years.

Nasa annotated the image so it was easier for people to imagine the black hole in context.

The black hole, described by scientists as a "monster", is 24billion miles across - 3million times the size of the Earth.

Sitting about 300 million trillion miles away from our planet, it was photographed up close by a network of eight telescopes across the globe known as the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT).

When used together, the telescopes combine with the power of a single telescope "the size of our planet", scientists said.

The black hole is so far away, that taking the up close photo of it was equivalent to snapping a DVD on the surface of the moon.

Black holes are technically invisible because no light escapes from them but in certain circumstances, like in a bright galaxy, an outline of a black hole and the light it's swallowing can be seen.

What is a black hole? The key facts

Here's what you need to know...

What is a black hole?

What is an event horizon?

What is a singularity?

How are black holes created?

In other space news, a cannibalistic nearby galaxy has devoured several of its neighbours and scientists think our Milky Way is next.

Aplanet so massive it should not existhas been found by baffled astronomers in a nearby star system.

SKY LIGHT How to spot the Draconids meteor shower in the UK tonight

PORKING 'ELL Newly discovered 'mould pigs' are the ancient species baffling scientists

CURSE WORDS Ancient tablet deciphered to reveal 1,500-year-old 'demon curse' to hurt rivals

DEATH OF THE DINOS How asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs devastated Earth

ASH-MAZING Stunning photo of 2,300-foot volcano erupting taken from space by ISS astronaut

BURIED TERROR Mystery ancient remains of 'frightened' child with 'crushed skull' found

And, distant planets may host even more life than we have here on Earth,according to one shock study.

Did you spot the black hole? Let us know in the comments!

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Theres an enormous black hole lurking in this Nasa photo can you find it? - The Sun

Mysterious cosmic web that sticks the universe together pictured for first time – The Sun

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THE COSMIC web responsible for 'gluing' the far-flung galaxies of the universe together has been directly observed for the first time ever.

Scientists using the European Southern Observatorys Very Large Telescope were able to spot an ancient cluster of galaxies 12billion light years away that are linked together by a network of gas filaments.

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The cosmic web theory is central to current explanations of how the universe formed after the Big Bang.

However, until this observation, there had only been indirect evidence to suggest it existed.

Prof Michele Fumagalli, an astrophysicist at Durham University and co-author of the work, said: It is very exciting to clearly see for the first time multiple and extended filaments in the early universe.

"We finally have a way to map these structures directly and to understand in detail their role in regulating the formation of supermassive black holes and galaxies.

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The research team were able to directly detect the web by using intensive equipment designed to pick up the faintest of structures.

Galaxy clusters are known for being the most tightly gravitationally-bound structures in the universe.

They can contain hundreds of thousands of galaxies.

It has been predicted that 60% of the hydrogen created during the Big Bang can be seen as long filaments strung out across space in the cosmic web.

By mapping out some of the light emitted by hydrogen within a galaxy cluster called SSA22, the team were able to identify individual filaments of gas that make up a web-like structure between galaxies.

Erika Hamden, an astrophysicist at the University of Arizona said: "These observations of the faintest, largest structures in the universe are a key to understanding how our universe evolved through time, how galaxies grow and mature, and how the changing environments around galaxies created what we see around us."

It is thought that the cosmic web is the scaffolding of the cosmos and provides the framework for galaxies to form and evolve.

The latest observations support this theory by revealing supermassive black holes, starbursting galaxies and lots of active stars all at the intersections between the filaments.

First author of the research Hideki Umehata said: "This suggests very strongly that gas falling along the filaments under the force of gravity triggers the formation of starbursting galaxies and supermassive black holes, giving the universe the structure that we see today."

The cosmic web has been observed before but only as short blobs of gas beyond galaxies.

Umehata noted: "Now we have been able to clearly show that these filaments are extremely long, going even beyond the edge of the field that we viewed.

"This adds credence to the idea that these filaments are actually powering the intense activity that we see within the galaxies inside the filaments."

The findings have been published in the journal Science.

What is a black hole? The key facts

Here's what you need to know...

What is a black hole?

What is an event horizon?

What is a singularity?

How are black holes created?

In other space news, acannibalistic nearby galaxyhas devoured several of its neighbours and scientists think our Milky Way is next.

Aplanet so massive it should not existhas been found by baffled astronomers in a nearby star system.

SKY LIGHT How to spot the Draconids meteor shower in the UK tonight

PORKING 'ELL Newly discovered 'mould pigs' are the ancient species baffling scientists

CURSE WORDS Ancient tablet deciphered to reveal 1,500-year-old 'demon curse' to hurt rivals

DEATH OF THE DINOS How asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs devastated Earth

ASH-MAZING Stunning photo of 2,300-foot volcano erupting taken from space by ISS astronaut

BURIED TERROR Mystery ancient remains of 'frightened' child with 'crushed skull' found

And, there's an enormous black hole lurking in this Nasa photo can you find it?

What do you think about this cosmic web revelation? Let us know in the comments...

We pay for your stories! Do you have a story for The Sun Online Tech & Science team? Email us at tech@the-sun.co.uk

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Mysterious cosmic web that sticks the universe together pictured for first time - The Sun

Fortnite is teasing a big Season 10 ending event with countdown clocks all over the island – GamesRadar

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It's been a controversial tenth season for Fortnite, what with the introduction of giant mechs called Brutes into the battlefield and the subsequent backlash and buffing that ensued. So when Epic announced that it was delaying the end of Season 10 by one week, players were a bit confused.

The official Epic post read, "Season X has been extended one week to conclude on Sunday, October 13. This also means an additional week to complete your Battle Pass, so jump in and lock down all those Season X rewards!" Now it's looking like the delay is to help Epic cook up something, well, epic for the end of the season. Countdown clocks have appeared all over the island, on TV screens and above the rocket at Dusty Depot. Right now there are six more days left on the countdown, coinciding with the day Season 10 ends: October 13.

Fortnite Season 9 ended with a Polar Peak monster and a Brute battling it out, the results of which led into the events of Season 10 - a singularity caused a time warp that sent the island back to the state it was in at the end of Season 3. The Visitor's Rocket appeared in Dusty Depot along with multiple rifts, which ushered in a bunch of crossovers like Batman and Borderlands.

Data miners are suggesting that Season 11 could usher in an entirely new map, in a move not unlike Apex Legends' recent map change for the game's own third season.

Another data miner found information to suggest that the event will transport players to a zone between Loot Lake and Dusty Depot, where they may be trapped in a time loop.

No word yet on when Fortnite Season 11 will start - new seasons usually begin the Thursday after a season-ending event, but this is the first time an event has been held on a Sunday. We could be seeing Season 11 a little earlier than expected...

Prepare yourself for the next season with our Fortnite tips to help you get that elusive Victory Royale.

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Fortnite is teasing a big Season 10 ending event with countdown clocks all over the island - GamesRadar

Investigative Report Digs Into the Strange Story of a YouTuber Who Founded a Religion – Kotaku UK

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People Make Games, a YouTube channel founded by former Eurogamer video maker Chris Bratt and animator Anni Sayers, has concluded a year-long investigation into Bachir Athene Boumaaza, a YouTuber who got his start with troll-y video game antics but went on to form a pseudo-religion called Neuro-Spinozism and is now the face of an organisation called The Singularity Group.

The investigation alleges that Boumaaza is responsible for manipulation, misogyny, emotional abuse, and a lack of accountability at the top of the organisation. Anonymous ex-members of the group discussed emotional manipulation and gaslighting behind the scenes, while Boumaaza made statements like girls have evolved to be emotional manipulation machines with cameras rolling.

The video culminates with a lengthy conversation between People Make Games and Boumaaza, in which the latter calls the investigation a hit piece among other things, denies some of the allegations, and offers his view of others.

The investigation is an extremely compelling piece of reporting. The full video is lengthy, complicated, and at times deeply frustrating, but well worth a watch.

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Investigative Report Digs Into the Strange Story of a YouTuber Who Founded a Religion - Kotaku UK

IIT-H brings out historical narrative of Begum Hayat Bakshi with virtual reality – BusinessLine

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Virtual Reality (VR) and animation film techniques have been fused to bring alive the story of Hayat Bakshi Begum, the most known and powerful women of the Golconda Kingdom of the Medieval Deccan.

The 360 degrees VR animation film titled Ma Saheba-The queen of Hyderabad, made by the Indian Institute of Technology, Hyderabad (IITH), will be presented at the upcoming Design Week in the HICC during October 11-12.

The IITH has created a VR Experience for an oral historical narrative of Begum Hayat Bakshi, who has contributed to three generations of the Qutb Shahi dynasty. Its a story reflecting women empowerment too.

Virtual Reality (VR) is one of the latest technologies in filmmaking. An advantage of VR is its 360-degree immersive experience. Using the premier technology in immersion, IIT Hyderabad has developed a virtual exploratory landscape which lets the user experience the historical monuments of Qutb Shahi like never before, say the makers of the film.

The use of virtual reality-based technology to preserve and explore history is a method that provides results with almost lifelike experiences.

According to Deepak John Mathew, Head, Dept of Design at the IIT, The objective is to create a Visual Model of the monuments in India. This is the first attempt in this series. It will be exhibited at the airport as well as HICC during the Conference. This is a fusion of art and technology.

The technology enables the viewer to visit the majestic tombs of the Qutb Shahi from the comfort of their own location, interacting with the landscape as if almost they were physically present there. The installation aims at raising awareness about the intricate history of Hyderabad, while it also helps in encouraging virtual tourism.

Explaining the making of the film, he said the Department of Design undertook a high-resolution scan of the Qutub Shahi tomb complex. Using the VR headset at the airport, one would be able to experience the architectural magnificence of the tombs, which include that of the founder of Hyderabad, Mohammed Quli Qutb Shah.

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IIT-H brings out historical narrative of Begum Hayat Bakshi with virtual reality - BusinessLine

Oculus and PlayStation VR Jockey Atop the Virtual Reality Market – PCMag

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The virtual reality (VR) headset market has been chugging along at a steady if uninspiring pace over the past few years as manufacturers work out the kinks standing between the still-developing technology and wide mainstream adoption.

According to marketing intelligece firm Trend Force, global VR headset shipments grew 25 percent between 2017 and 2018, to 4.65 million units, and are expected to grow by 29 percent in 2019. Sony's PlayStation VR still leads the market, but Facebook's growing line of Oculus headsets is close behind.

According to Trend Force and Statista, Sony's estimated market share has dropped from 43 percent in 2018 to 36.7 percent in 2019. Conversely, Facebook's has risen from 19.4 percent to an estimated 28.3 percent as popular new Oculus products like the Oculus Go, Oculus Rift S, and Oculus Quest enter the market.

Facebook has big plans for VR in 2020, announcing a multiplayer VR interface linking various Oculus devices in a VR world where they can explore, play games, and socialize with friends. Facebook Horizon will enter a closed beta next year.

Sony and Facebook combined accounted for 63 percent of VR shipments last year, a figure set to rise to 70 percent in 2019. In a distant third is HTC, which remains relatively static from 12.9 percent market share in 2018 to an estimated 13.3 percent this year. HTC just released the new HTC Vive Cosmos headset to add to its VR hardware line.

Statista also mentioned Microsoft, which had a 3.2 percent market share in 2018; the firm couldn't provide 2019 estimates. In addition to the enterprise-focused HoloLens 2 on the augmented and mixed reality end of the market, Microsoft supports a broad ecosystem of VR headsets from manufacturers including Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Samsung through its Windows Mixed Reality platform.

As VR players finally figure out how to go untethered without losing high-fidelity graphics and processinga complex problem that manufacturers have been tackling for yearsthe VR market may be ready for the kind of big jump Facebook is betting on. The other X-factor is the eventual rollout of 5G networks, which will finally give not only wireless VR headsets, but the explosion of cloud gaming services, the infrastructure to flourish.

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Oculus and PlayStation VR Jockey Atop the Virtual Reality Market - PCMag