The Time Machine... Rendezvous point

Timothy Anderson x The People’s Printshop.

Ant mill: a continuously rotating spiral of blind army ants that have lost track of their colony. They will follow each other in a circle until they eventually die of exhaustion.

And that mountain in the middle is the pile of ants that already died.

Tiffany Chung

Her drawings investigate how political and environmental traumas alter landscapes, and her subjects include Iraqi state railways in 1930, Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the demilitarized zones of the Korean and Vietnam wars, and even the flooding projections for 2050 of Ms. Chung’s adopted hometown. (She was born in the central Vietnamese city of Da Nang and attended college and graduate school in California before relocating — with a long stop in Japan — to Ho Chi Minh City.)

Each artwork is typically inspired by weeks of meticulous research, and Ms. Chung’s captions can be intensely specific. For example, one that accompanies a drawing of San Francisco before the devastating earthquake of 1906 quotes an 1895 blurb on a map from the United States Geological Survey: “distribution of apparent intensity based on Rossi-Forel scale, the known faults, and the routes examined.”

However, the drawings usually venture beyond the literal and into pseudo-abstract territory. And despite their weighty subject matter, they are dazzlingly beautiful.

Sponsoring Supersonic this week is the online artist teaching resource Drawing Academy and they’re offering several free, online video drawing classes for Supersonic readers (Plus more to come, stay tuned).  The free classes also come with other valuable materials such as free eBooks, guides and art albums.

Captain Phasma—a towering, armor-clad captain of the First Order—is a true rarity in Hollywood. She’s a female villain who is neither a femme fatale nor a foil for a female hero. Even her appearance is revolutionary.

“I don’t think many female actors get the opportunity to play a part where they’re not having to think about the way their face looks,” said actress Gwendoline Christie.

Even in supposedly gritty action movies, attractiveness often outweighs authenticity for female characters. One of the most egregious examples is Elizabeth Olsen’s turn as Scarlet Witch in Avengers: Age of Ultron, for which Joss Whedon told Olsen to keep her face calm during action sequences. Scarlet Witch is fueled by anger and grief throughout the movie, but her facial expressions were deemed too unattractive for slow-motion shots.

In a similar vein, Jessica Alba admitted that she was told to cry less realistically in Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. “The director was like, ‘It looks too real. It looks too painful. Can you be prettier when you cry?’”