Daniel Temkin’s Dither studies are “A collaboration with Photoshop. I give the program an impossible task: to draw a solid color or gradient with a palette of incompatible colors, thus exposing the dithering algorithm’s complex, seemingly irrational patterns. These are exhibited as large-scale prints, or on screen.” (Daniel Temkin’s website via Art F City)

This week, the secret of the pyramids, morality of architects, bell hooks on Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘faux feminism,’ photographing ‘whiteness,’ Whitney Biennial on Charlie Rose, and more.

Some physicists believed they’ve discovered one of the secrets of the ancient Egyptian pyramids:

Physicists from the FOM Foundation and the University of Amsterdam have discovered that the ancient Egyptians used a clever trick to make it easier to transport heavy pyramid stones by sledge. The Egyptians moistened the sand over which the sledge moved. By using the right quantity of water they could halve the number of workers needed.

Shaunacy Ferro considers the moral responsibility of architects when dealing with dictators and other nefarious characters:

Architecture does not exist in a vacuum. Moral ambiguities can arise at every stage of the building process — from who you’re willing to take on as a client, to what kinds of structures you’re designing, to who will actually build it (and under what conditions). Would you build for a dictator? Would you design a prison? Would you build in a country that has exploitative labor laws?

And she asks a number of prominent architects their opinions:

“Our responsibility is to use architecture as an instrument of positive change,” Diller tells CoDesign. On the one hand, that means DS+R doesn’t build weapons factories or create designs that glorify dictatorship. Yet architecture can also serve as a critique, and Diller explains that “projects that appear morally dubious at first glance may be camouflaging radical, progressive ideas.”

Re/code’s take on the recent Silicon Valley Contemporary art fair is a fascinating view from inside the tech world and their perception of the event:

“Silicon Valley buyers don’t want something pretentious. They’re too smart for that. They don’t need that,” Glimcher said, slapping the temporary whitewashed wall next to Josef Albers’s 1967 painting “Homage to a Square.” “We’ve got a $450,000 Albers on plywood. That’s what you want here.”....Continue Reading

> via Hyperallergic