Articles
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An Art Historical Tour of JavaScript
May 2, 2024
The history of art is long and storied; we have been creating since the dawn of mankind. Art grew and transformed over the millennia, shaping us as we shaped it, becoming the discipline it is today. Humans have used art in religion, communication, business, expression … it’s permeating.
JavaScript is basically the same way. Hear me out.
The World Wide Web exploded onto the scene in 1995 - the dawn of the Information Age. As humans and the Internet intertwined, some smart people at Netscape saw the need for interactivity on the Web. The project was handed to developer Brendan Eich, and within six months JavaScript was released. We have grown together with the Internet and JavaScript. It’s the language driving our connections, our entertainment, our businesses, our neuroses.
With those weighty ideas set out, I can move to the actual article. This began as an assignment to create a presentation about a programming language. I chose JavaScript because I’m a web developer, and decided to match topics with pieces of historic art because I’m also an art historian. I had a blast finding some pretty esoteric connections, so now I’m writing them out to share. Note that this post is written off the top of my head, so please don’t cite it in your papers or anything.
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Creating Context in The Lord of the Rings: History in the Text and Films
July 7, 2023
J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a wildly successful fantasy novel known for its extensive worldbuilding. Tolkien, a linguist at Oxford University and a devout Catholic, spent decades developing Middle-Earth’s history, mythologies, and languages. The book has been adapted into other forms of media many times over the years: three radio plays, four film scripts (two of which were never produced), and one stage play. Of these adaptations, director Peter Jackson’s early-2000s trilogy of live-action movies is by far the best-known and best-received. Lord of the Rings and its adaptations present Middle-Earth’s history as the foundations upon which the story is built, and the quest of the Ring as a small chapter in the overall story. To accomplish this without overly reminding readers of history textbooks, both the original text and Jackson’s adaptation use a variety of methods. Both employ plot devices connected to history, real-world cultural references, and structure and style - Tolkien through language and Jackson through visuals. Though the two used very different forms of storytelling, both succeeded in evoking Middle-Earth’s deep history.
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History Painting, Prehistoric Subject: Charles Willson Peale’s Exhumation of the Mastodon
November 13, 2022
At the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States was a new country, and its citizens were struggling to find a national identity separate from the English from whom they had recently won independence. Events like the Enlightenment and the American Revolution had been changing fundamental aspects of Western culture, and Americans sought to anchor themselves amidst the currents of change. When Charles Willson Peale, a well-known artist, entrepreneur, and museum curator, excavated and placed on display a fossilized mastodon skeleton, the identity of the then-unknown creature – dubbed the incognitum – became a mystery of national interest. Peale’s painting The Exhumation of the Mastodon (Figure 1) depicts its namesake with the reverence of a history painting, and illustrates how Americans saw the mastodon as a symbol of national identity which was connected to ancient, primal power, the wilderness of the Western frontier, and the scientific progress in the new country.