Getting to Know the Beehive Collective
Insects such as locusts or wasps are morphed with modern military apparatus, while blood-sucking mosquitoes represent corporations drilling for oil.
Mural painting, or public art, is one of the oldest and most important forms of artistic, political, and social expression. From prehistoric cave paintings to the frescos of ancient Greece, humanity has demonstrated that art, in its true essence, is a communal enterprise. Picasso used the technique in 1937 to express his intense anti-war sentiment in the masterpiece ‘Guernica’. Mural paintings were used to communicate the political ideals of the Russian Revolution in 1917, and to promote China’s new cultural direction following the 1919 May Fourth Movement. Among the most famous political muralists of the 20th century were the Mexican social realist painters, Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco who portrayed their vision of social justice in the 1920’s through fresco painting. Presently, a group of activists based in rural Eastern Maine known as the Beehive Collective have reinvented this form of visual imagery to create intricate, anti-copyright murals which communicate the dilemmas of corporate globalization. […]
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Tags: Features · Mural · Paintings
With 71 percent of its surface area covered in water and its atmosphere wrapped in clouds of water vapor, the Earth is a unique oceanic realm. Besides containing the proper balance of chemicals and compounds necessary for the development of life, the oceans serve many functions essential for the survival of land-dwelling creatures. They absorb harmful radiation from the sun and distribute heat around the world via a system of underwater currents, working to maintain a stable climate. Scientists today still don’t fully understand the workings of the deep. We know more about the lifecycle of stars and the surface of Mars than we do about our own ocean floor. Until the 1990s the general populace assumed that our rampant destruction of nature couldn’t possibly affect the immensity of these vast interconnected ecosystems. In reality they aren’t faring any better than the land. […]
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Tags: Essays · Nonfiction · Oceans · Pollution
Extinction via merging with AI brings the promise of immortality.
“Artificial Intelligence,” quipped one Stanford engineer,” is the science of how to get machines to do the things they do in movies.”
Let us hope that is not the case. Given the inherent unpredictability of the forthcoming emergence of AI, perhaps it was fitting creative artists-rather than technological gurus-were the first to offer an opinion on what the arrival of artificial intelligence might mean to the world. But instead of being treated to imaginative predictions, audiences were subjected to twenty years of adulterated AI, bastardized to justify hours of senseless violence.
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Tags: Philosophy · AI · Science
You might think people would find it disturbing that George W. Bush’s political “Architect” grew up idolizing Richard Nixon.
Or, that one of his favorite tricks to play in his college republican days was to steal Democratic campaign stationary and direct mail the entire country invitations to a fictitious Democratic keg party.
But the world of politics is a sordid place. It’s to be expected that someone hailed as the most influential advisor to a sitting president would grow up with a fondness for dirty tricks.
On a long enough timeline, however, everyone’s survival rate drops to zero. Even Karl Rove.
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Tags: Current Events · Corruption · Karl Rove · Politics
The Emerging Hyper-Surveillance State
Three decades ago, an investigation was led by Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho) which shed light on the US government’s murky history of domestic spying operations. After conducting hundreds of interviews and examining thousands of documents, the Church Commission discovered that a myriad of government agencies — including the FBI and CIA — had used extensive amounts of surveillance […]
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Tags: Essays · Nonfiction · Surveillance · Technology
