With good friends, as with great art, our sense of the world is challenged and transformed.
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Tag Archives: Creativity
It Doesn’t Take Genius to Understand Basketball. But It Helps.
For his book, “How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius,” Nick Greene spoke to the best in ballet, magic and astrophysics for a fresh perspective on the sport.
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Daydreaming Can Be Good for You
Far from a waste of time, daydreaming might be one of the best things you can do with your free time.
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Can Exercise Make You More Creative?
To spur innovation and ideas, try taking a walk.
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What Do Lars Ulrich and A.O. Scott Have in Common? A Lot, It Turns Out
The Metallica musician and our film critic have both spent their careers thinking about the creative process and how it’s received. They compared notes.
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The Year of Telfar
A queer Liberian-American designer became the success story of the pandemic. Now he wants to smash the old fashion system to bits.
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Meet GPT-3. It Has Learned to Code (and Blog and Argue).
The latest natural-language system generates tweets, pens poetry, summarizes emails, answers trivia questions, translates languages and even writes its own computer programs.
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Facebook launches E.gg, an experimental collage making app
Facebook’s internal R&D group, NPE Team, has today officially launched its latest app, E.gg, to a broader audience. The app, a freeform creation tool described as a “GIF collage bonanza,” was announced earlier this year, but was only onboarding users via a waitlist until now. Today, it’s available in the App Store for anyone to download.
The app allows users to create and share canvases, which are basically mixed media “artsy” collages created using a combination of text, images, and/or GIFs. The latter leverages Facebook’s acquisition of the GIF repository Giphy from May. Anything you make in E.gg can be given its own unique URL, allowing others to view your content even if they don’t have the app installed themselves.
Image Credits: Facebook
However, if you do use E.gg, you can browse through other people’s work directly in the app. And when you discover something on their pages you like, you can easily reuse that content on your own pages with attribution.
When first introducing E.gg this summer, Facebook Product Manager Jason Toff described it as an “experimental new platform for weird and wonderful expressions of who you are and what you love,” adding that the inspiration for the project was the “raw and exploratory spirit on the early Interwebz.”
In other words, the early days of the web resulted in a lot more weird and offbeat creativity, because users were experimenting with what was possible — from dancing baby GIFs to awful font choices to tacky website backgrounds.
The question E.gg aims to answer is whether a more low-pressure, creative tool can help give people the power to express themselves more freely.
With https://t.co/q199YLQgMH, you can create zine-like, free form pages from your phone
pic.twitter.com/fQZ2nEmSQO
— Jason Toff (@jasontoff) November 18, 2020
Facebook says that during its beta testing phase, people used E.gg to create create fan pages, guides, tributes, profiles, collages, recipes and more.
Unfortunately, the app during its beta period had also been met with complaints from artists who claimed it was stealing their work. They said the tool had pulled in their GIFs without permission or credit. Facebook responded at the time to acknowledge the issues and noted that the reason the app was still in a beta testing phase was to get feedback about the sort of problems it needed to correct before going live. The company said it would hold off on expanding E.gg until it fixed these problems.
Presumably, Facebook has addressed the attribution issues, as the app is now live.
E.gg is available as a free download from the iOS App Store in the U.S. Users can also browse others’ creations via http://e.gg.
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Ken Robinson, Who Preached Creativity in Teaching, Dies at 70
Dance, he said, is just as important as math. He was knighted for his work, and his TED Talk on schools and the arts was the most viewed of all time.
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Is Virtual Burning Man the Internet’s Ultimate Test?
The cyberdelic extravaganza is online for the first time because of the pandemic. But maybe that’s not as strange as it might seem.
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Welcome to the Covid-19 Mental Health Struggle
An artist with schizoaffective disorder shares her strategy for self-care.
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The Unschooled Artists
Taking lessons in creativity from my kids.
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How to Dress for the Protest
“On a daily basis I think about what I’m wearing.”
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An Artist Captures 4 Months of Sidewalk Chalk Drawings
The next messages are yours for the making.
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Anti-Racism Books and Resources for Kids
A school counselor and a children’s book author offer advice for talking to children about racism and George Floyd.
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‘Big Bang Theory’ Writer on Human Creativity
It permeates life, and, like love, it can break your heart.
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Gucci and the Future of Fashion Shows and Gender
The Italian brand is reducing its runway schedule. Your Instagram is about to change.
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Art Is How We Justify Our Existence
Our technologies are tools. But our creative works carry the wisdom of the world.
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What I Miss During the Coronavirus Pandemic? Swimming.
Immersion, even just thinking about it, is the balm we need right now.
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You Can’t Spell Creative Without A.I.
Advances in software applications that process human language lie at the heart of the debate over whether computer technologies will enhance or even substitute for human creativity.
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