Five Bullets 9.6.24
Computer games, Non-AI art, San Juan Hill & more
Good morning and Happy Friday!
This morning is cool and cloudy here in New York City and fall feels like it’s creeping forth every day.
Now that summer seems to be over, I wrote about what I worked on over the summer and some projects I’m still hoping to complete.
In today’s newsletter, I’m excited to share a new Stanley Nelson documentary forthcoming about San Juan Hill, a NYC neighborhood which was razed to build Lincoln Center. I write about my connection to this place and the work I’ve been doing with the New York City Department of Records.
What projects are you working on this month?
Five Bullets:
Art: Send artist Pablo Delcan a prompt to draw and he’ll quickly send a sketch back to you. Delcan’s project Prompt-Brush 1.0 is ‘non-A.I. generative art’ which mimics the quick production of an artificially-generated image while keeping the “human friction” Delcan says “add warmth and depth to simple sketches”. Delcan writes that the project is “an effort to find meaning in and understand the purpose of human creativity”.
Music: Jonathan Scales Fourchestra at Aspen Ideas Festival. Back in January I shared a performance by this group but I didn’t end up going deep on their music and now I’m hooked! Scales brings a totally new voice to the steelpan by taking the instrument out of it’s usual musical context and exploring jazz. It’s a trip to hear the melodies and rhythms Scales plays as he breaths new life into the instrument.
NYC: Premiering at the New York Film Festival this October, San Juan Hill: Manhattan’s Lost Neighborhood documents the destruction of an entire neighborhood to build Lincoln Center and Fordham University’s midtown campus. Filmmaker Stanley Nelson spoke with residents of the vibrant neighborhood where Josephine Baker and Thelonious Monk once lived. [My grandfather also grew up in San Juan Hill, which was my main motivation in interviewing New York City residents across the five boroughs to document the city’s rapid changes through the stories of our neighbors.]
Science: How did wolves evolve into dogs? Ever think about how your cute and harmless dog’s ancestors were once wolves? Researchers examining DNA from ancient and modern dogs estimate that dog domestication occurred between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago. Fossils from this period indicate that wolf-dog hybrids were showing signs of developing into domesticated dogs. Ancient dog fossils found in an Alaskan burial site dating to 10,000 years old is related to a canine which lived in Siberia 23,000 years ago, suggesting that people and their dogs made their way to North America much earlier than previously thought. There are still lots of questions when it comes to how, when, and where wolves became man’s best friend but finding out the answer may help us to understand our own history as well.
Technology: Mabel Addis helped to create the first educational computer game in the 1960s. When the Westchester County school district partnered with IBM to try a new teaching method using computers, Addis, a teacher in the county, signed on to write the Sumerian Game which taught economics to schoolchildren. Addis is the first woman to design a video game and her narrative-driven writing for the Sumerian Games laid the groundwork for future games. When Addis passed in 2004 her daughter described her “as a playful educator who made history come alive”.