Saturday, March 10, 2012

Saturday Sharing (My Finds Are Yours)

This week Saturday Sharing lets you play brain games online, oh-and-ah over a silk cape that took eight years and more than a million spiders to make, tour a Poem Forest in New York, make time for more than One Pause for poetry in audio and video, and turn your FaceBook profile into a Museum of Me. You can also experience a blast on a musical roller-coaster with Zurich Chamber Orchestra.

✦ Think you're a veteran at playing Rock-Paper-Scissors the traditional way? Put your experience to use against the computer here, then report back on how well you did. And if that's not enough of a challenge, try the Science Times Jigsaw Puzzle, where speed really matters. These and more brain teasers and testers can be found in this wonderful compilation from The Learning Network at The New York Times.

World RPS Society

✦ My friend Diane Walker, otherwise known as the "Contemplative Photographer", has been running a Lenten series featuring her beautiful artwork. See her work here.

✦ The Victoria & Albert Museum in London is displaying an embroidered cape made from the silk of 1.2 million Golden Orb spiders from the highlands of Madagascar. The project took eight years. Close-up images of the cape were published in The Guardian.

✦ Visit BMW Gugenheim Lab and take an audiovisual tour of Poem Forest, a creation of artist, author, and teacher Jon Cotner at the New York Botanical Garden, which last year celebrated with poetry the renovation of its 50 acres of old-growth forest. Cotner "installed" lines of poetry conceptually or physically related to specific marked locations along a trail through the forest; for his effort, he drew on the work of poets, writers, and philosophers as diverse as Gary Snyder, Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Fernando Pessoa, Pablo Neruda, William Carlos Williams, and Denise Levertov.

The NYBG's audio tours include a literary component. Poet Camille Rankine filmed a reading of the poem "Instructions on the Forest" in the rededicated forest.

Forest Walk in Images

Nature Poems (New Directions)

NYGB on FaceBook, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube

NYGB Blog Plant Talk

✦ Got a FaceBook profile? Let the Museum of Me turn it into a virtual exhibition.

Justin McGuirk, "Robot Cleaners and the Museum of Me: Intel's Vision of the Future", The Guardian, January 24, 2012

✦ I learned from the Poetry Foundation about a  wonderful new digital resource: One Pause Poetry, a mp3 project for teachers, students, readers, and listeners. A project of the nonprofit arts organization Copper Colored Mountain Arts (CCMA), One Pause Poetry aims "to make poetry accessible to all", offering both emerging and established writers, especially Michigan poets (readings and other events in the state are found here), opportunities for readings of and conversations about poetry. You'll find audio and video in the media libraryinterviews with and short essays or readings by, among others, Franz Wright, Anne Waldman, Jericho Brown, Ambrose Bye, Charles Olson, abd Michael Ondaatje (all the poets contributing to the project are listed here). The intuitive, easy-to-navigate site encompasses children's poetry, too.

One Pause on FaceBook, Twitter, and YouTube


CCMA and One Pause on Flickr

✦ Here's a wonderful visualization of music in the form of a roller coaster. Featured is the first violin of the Zurich Chamber Orchestra performing the fourth movement of the second symphony of Ferdinand Ries (1784-1838).


ZKO Rollercoaster // GREAT EMOTIONS from virtual republic on Vimeo.

(My thanks to On Being Blog, where I first learned of this video.)

YouTube Version

4 comments:

Louise Gallagher said...

That rollercoaster ride was enchanting!

And I too have fallen in love with Diane's Lenten poems and artwork.

Thanks for a gifted Saturday sharing.

Ruth said...

The golden orb spider silk is beyond beautiful. The craft and effort in the final garment blows me away.

I love the poetry forest walk too. I think I recognized Billy Collins as the first voice . . . maybe?

Anonymous said...

took a little walk over to diane walker's place.

S. Etole said...

I've been following Diane's lenten series and thoroughly enjoying it.

The roller coaster is just plain fun!