Back with some art and music

Hi everyone!

This was a loooong hiatus! I'm so sorry to have abandoned the blog for so long, but let's hope we can revive it a little bit!

This post is all about art, and I'm starting to notice a pattern here... It tends to be the topic I choose when I want to get back to the blog. So I hope you all join in and get back on track with me, using art as our inspiration.

Here's a longish gap-filling activity to track the origins of psychedelic music posters that flooded the San Francisco area in the 1960s. What do they remind you of?

Both aesthetic movements capture the feeling of their changing times, even if the periods don’t _____________ each other perfectly.

If you’ve never heard of the bands _____________ you’d be able to guess what kind of music they play.

The style, which includes curly, _____________lettering, has become synonymous with the psychedelic ‘60s, even if it was created earlier.

The style that resulted from the rejection of industrialization’s “ugliness” _____________ many different names in different languages.

Art Nouveau often features flat, _____________ patterns, feminine figures, and organic motifs _____________ with fluid, abstract forms.

Art Nouveau creators married aesthetics with utility, and believed that no object was _____________ to be beautiful.

Like the late 1800s, the 1960s were a time of cultural _____________, with San Francisco as its _____________ in the US.

To advertise new bands, it was clear that posters with regular _____________ and grayscale photos just were not going to _____________.

By the mid-60s, Art Nouveau was already living a _____________, particularly in textiles. For the posters, the artist took some Art Nouveau staples and turned _____________.

The style the artists picked up on was one full of feminine figures, often nude and with a _____________ glance.

They often pulled images directly from the Art Nouveau posters, replacing their soft pastels with a vibrant _____________.

The idea of softening edges of the fonts to make them barely legible actually

_____________: to hold your attention, at least until you made out what was written.

The posters were an easy way of spreading this aesthetic, and the artists behind them became celebrities _____________.

Enjoy it! And give us your answers in the comments, even if they can be easily checked with the video's closed captions.

Fake News

Hi everyone!

I'm not as active on the blog as I'd like, but in any case I'm glad I can take a little while from time to time to share an activity with you here.

The topic I've chosen is fake news and the impressive advancement of technology that can enable us to create false impressions. Someone once said that, if it's technology that the general public knows about, then it's probably already obsolete! Don't doubt that what we can see in a video like this one is much less advanced than what the actual cutting-edge software can do.

It's still quite shocking that we can manipulate images and sounds in real time, and even if fakes are easy to spot at the moment, the effect that it can have on public opinion is quite unpredictable-- regardless of whether it is finally disproved or not.

So let's go for a bit of sentence completion to accompany this short BBC report:

1. Green screen or __________________ can give us virtual backdrops to interact with.

2. We’re only years away from creating realistic environments: in real time, we can manipulate voices, facial expressions and __________________ .

3. Some software operates by taking take one person’s facial expressions and __________________ on to another person’s features.

4. The development of these technologies requires ethical frameworks that could __________________ the implications they may have on society.

5. A new tool to manipulate voice __________________  by Adobe, the company who invented PhotoShop.

6. To spot a fake, the resulting altered audio would be __________________ , but that wouldn’t stop it from spreading.

7. Fakes can be debunked in __________________ , but this doesn’t stop people from believing them or from becoming viral.

8. One possible consequence of the dissemination of fakes is that solid evidence could be dismissed as __________________  by those who try to deceive us.

9. If there is a high level of distrust in institutions, a term like fake news is deployed in many ways, even to describe what is __________________ and __________________ .

10. This fast-paced technological advancement means we will have to refine how we __________________  from our senses.

Share your answers and your ideas on the topic in the comments section. Key here. Enjoy!