All posts tagged: landscape

A.I. Shakes Up China’s Entertainment Landscape

A.I. Shakes Up China’s Entertainment Landscape

Published by Sam Flores

new video loaded: A.I. Shakes Up China’s Entertainment Landscape transcript Back transcript A.I. Shakes Up China’s Entertainment Landscape New A.I. tools are changing China’s entertainment industry and transforming one of its most popular genres: the microdrama. A.I. is changing China’s entertainment industry, and transforming one of its most popular genres: the microdrama. Microdramas are short, serialized shows made for the phone, that use rapid plot developments to hook viewers. The addictive bite-sized videos have become increasingly popular, creating a 14 billion dollar industry in China. Powerful new A.I. tools are making it faster and cheaper to create episodes. But as A.I.-generated dramas take off, some feel that they’re being left behind. This actress and director shared videos with The New York Times of their experiences in a changing industry. Xing Enran has been a microdrama actress since 2023, taking on supporting roles, and often playing the seductress. She said every day was busy, but rewarding. Wang Yushun started his career as an independent filmmaker. But he struggled to find an audience for his work. So …

Cathy Newman on embracing our new political landscape with new show

Cathy Newman on embracing our new political landscape with new show

Published by Daniella Wilson

This article first appeared in Radio Times magazine. I cut my journalistic teeth as a political correspondent in the 1990s and 2000s, first on newspapers and then on television. I remember those years of Cool Britannia, with the Spice Girls and Noel Gallagher traipsing into Number 10. Even when that New Labour honeymoon soured, the TB-GBs (the nickname for Tony Blair, the then prime minister, and his arguments with his chancellor Gordon Brown) seem somehow quaint compared with the existential turbulence of recent administrations. Returning to Westminster to launch The Cathy Newman Show, a new flagship nightly show airing on Sky News and streaming on YouTube, the mood couldn’t be more different. Politics feels shoutier, more bitter. The bit of green carpet that divides government from opposition looks like a chasm. It’s undeniable that politics has changed dramatically and the world has, too. Just days before the local elections, the two party political system that has reigned supreme throughout my professional life appears shattered. And the media landscape has been upended as well. The 2026 …

A new Welsh electoral landscape puts Plaid Cymru within reach of power

A new Welsh electoral landscape puts Plaid Cymru within reach of power

Published by Sam Flores

Plaid Cymru’s electoral hopes for May’s Senedd election are high. Polls suggest the party is competing with Reform UK to emerge as the largest group in the next Welsh parliament, putting it, for the first time, within reach of leading a government in Wales. This marks a striking shift in Plaid’s electoral fortunes. At the first election to what was then the National Assembly for Wales in 1999, the party won 28.4% of the vote. That remains its strongest performance to date in what was widely described at the time as a “quiet earthquake” in Welsh politics. Since then, Plaid has struggled to match that breakthrough in devolved elections. From 2011 onwards it has consistently been the third-largest party in the Senedd, behind Welsh Labour – which has led every government since devolution – and the Conservatives. Even so, the arithmetic of Welsh politics has occasionally worked in Plaid’s favour. The party entered government in coalition with Labour between 2007 and 2011, and more recently struck a co-operation agreement from 2021 to 2024. But if …

Country diary: A tree can define a landscape – even when it has fallen | Trees and forests

Country diary: A tree can define a landscape – even when it has fallen | Trees and forests

Published by Sam Flores

How quickly something that defines a landscape for centuries becomes the absence that redefines it – so it is with ancient trees. The trunk snapped like a carrot at the roots and crashed, its bony branches splintered. Now it lies like a shipwreck stranded in an open field, its hulk of twigs an animal pelt stilled. A day before, looking at its 300-year-old architecture of mostly dead wood yet so vividly alive, admiring its form and persistence through years and trouble, standing alone with spring coursing through the land and its timbers, I wondered how long, in tree time, it had left. Storm Dave answered quickly: “None.” This fallen tree is a common lime, Tilia x europaea, a hybrid of our native small-leaved lime, T. cordata, and large-leafed lime, T. platyphyllos; probably of natural origins, probably introduced, but certainly common since 17th- and 18th-century plantings. Back then it was called the Dutch lime because so many were planted from Dutch nurseries in parks, avenues, gardens and streets in the baroque style throughout Europe. This common …

Sky Hopinka Reframes the American Landscape at the Barnes Foundation

Sky Hopinka Reframes the American Landscape at the Barnes Foundation

Published by José Betancourt

Editor’s Note: This story is part of Newsmakers, an ARTnews series where we interview the movers and shakers who are making change in the art world. Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) has spent the last year and a half photographing the American landscape. That journey across the United States has culminated in the new site-specific installation, titled Red Metal Dust, at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia. For it, the multidisciplinary Native American artist constructed 11 panels that layer landscape photography and copper sheets and filter American histories and landscapes from an Indigenous perspective. Related Articles These meditative photographic landscapes reference the Ho-Chunk tribe’s name for copper, a surface metal that takes on the effects of its surroundings and wear-and-tear through physical contact. On view through next January, Red Metal Dust asks viewers to consider the cycles of time—past, present, future—via copper itself. ARTnews spoke with Hopinka to discuss the impacts of time and human presence on the American landscape in this new body of works. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and concision. ARTnews: How …

What Taiwan’s imprisonment of opposition figure Ko Wen-je means for its political landscape

What Taiwan’s imprisonment of opposition figure Ko Wen-je means for its political landscape

Published by Sam Flores

A Taipei court on Thursday sentenced former mayor and presidential candidate Ko Wen-je to 17 years in prison on corruption charges, along with the deprivation of civil rights for six years, dealing a major blow to both the opposition figure and his fledgling Taiwan People’s Party (TPP).  The ruling bars Ko from running in the 2028 presidential election, effectively derailing his ambitions to position himself as a “third way” alternative in Taiwan’s deeply polarised political landscape.  Ko, one of three front-runners in the 2024 presidential election, finishing third with 26.46 percent, was convicted on charges including bribery, misappropriation of political donations and breach of trust. Prosecutors had sought a sentence of more than 28 years, but the court handed down a combined term of 17 years.  Ko has maintained his innocence throughout the investigation and trial. Following the verdict, the ex-mayor of Taipei denounced the case as politically motivated, declaring he would “never surrender”.  The case  At the centre of the case is the “Core Pacific City” redevelopment project in Taipei, where prosecutors alleged that Ko accepted bribes in exchange for approving an increase in building density.  The court found him …

The CISO Struggle: How AI is Changing the Data Security Landscape

The CISO Struggle: How AI is Changing the Data Security Landscape

Published by skeptic

Generative AI (GenAI) is expanding so quickly that security professionals are struggling to track its impact. Right now, employees are drafting their emails and reports using ChatGPT as their writing assistant, and sales teams are piping customer relationship management (CRM) data directly into AI assistance tools. Some developers are even connecting their code repositories to Copilot. Many teams are embedding GenAI into their daily operations before they’ve even figured out how to govern it. The main issue with all of this is the speed at which companies have latched onto GenAI but ignored the development of good security and governance. Chief Information Security Officers, or CISOs, are facing a growing data-security crisis, one that their legacy systems were not built to manage because they were designed in a time when the framework for taking these new concerns into consideration didn’t even exist yet.  And while businesses are eager to harness the productivity that GenAI promises, their security teams are often left scrambling to make certain that things like proprietary data, intellectual property, and private or …

‘You’d be pushed to find a more soul-stirring landscape in Scotland’: walking in Beinn Eighe | Highlands holidays

‘You’d be pushed to find a more soul-stirring landscape in Scotland’: walking in Beinn Eighe | Highlands holidays

Published by Sam Flores

The waymarked quartzite path glimmers in the sun, flanked by amber-gold grassland. Beyond, one of Scotland’s finest landscapes opens up before me, a woodland of ancient Caledonian pines leading my eye to the metallic glint of Loch Maree. On the other side of the water, a winding river separates the steep, stacked rocks of Beinn a’Mhùinidh from Slioch, one of the great mountains of Wester Ross, rising to a knuckle ridge of Torridonian sandstone. I’m walking the four-mile mountain trail looping through Beinn Eighe national nature reserve (NNR), Britain’s first NNR, which celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. In a crowded list, you’d be hard pushed to find a more soul-stirring landscape in all of Scotland. “The mountain path gives you a real flavour for Beinn Eighe,” the reserve manager, Doug Bartholomew, told me earlier. “It takes you right through the heart of the ancient Caledonian pinewood, then you climb steeply up to this rocky upland with views of Beinn Eighe mountain itself.” When I reach the high point, at about 550m (1,805ft), I’m awed …

Can Tinder Fix The Dating Landscape It Helped Ruin?

Can Tinder Fix The Dating Landscape It Helped Ruin?

Published by skeptic

Tinder made Lauren Grauer feel like a delinquent dater. While watching videos on YouTube last month, the New York talent marketer was served an ad for “Double Date,” a new feature the dating app launched that lets users pair their profiles with friends to swipe on other paired matches. Grauer was shocked by the news. Four years ago, she’d essentially thought to do the same thing by making a double date profile of her and a friend. The idea got her kicked off the app. “The reason I got banned from Tinder is what they’re advertising now,” Grauer says in a TikTok video. “I don’t want to be back. You don’t need to un-ban me—it’s fine. But you made me feel like a criminal.” (The company’s community guidelines prohibit account sharing.) Double Date is one of more than a dozen features Tinder has announced as part of its ongoing rebrand under its latest chief executive, Spencer Rascoff, who wants to create a fresh identity for the world’s most popular dating app around social, low-pressure connections. …

Rivals of the Landscape | Jenny Uglow

Rivals of the Landscape | Jenny Uglow

Published by Jenni Sidey

J. M. W. Turner and John Constable were born fourteen months apart, Turner in April 1775, Constable in June 1776, and the exhibition “Turner and Constable: Rivals and Originals” at Tate Britain celebrates their 250th birthdays. A friend who was wondering whether to go finally said, “I think I’ll give it a miss—I sort of feel I’ve seen them.” Many of us feel the same. To people growing up in Britain, Turner and Constable seemed to be everywhere: in history texts and guidebooks, on greeting cards, jigsaw puzzles, and biscuit tins, on the walls of pubs and dentists’ waiting rooms. We thought we knew them. But how wrong we were. Far from being familiar or reverential, the Tate show, curated by Amy Concannon, is a revelation. This is partly due to the cumulative power of the works. Dark streams of paint are hurled as rainstorms over mountains, whirling vortices pull the viewer in, sunsets blaze and rainbows arch, so that one almost feels the physical force of Constable’s scumbling brushwork and Turner’s swaths of color. At the …