TED-Ed
TED-ED: Distorting Madonna in Medieval art - James Earle
After Rome was destroyed, people were wary of attachment to physical beauty. As Christianity gained traction, Romans instead began to focus on the metaphysical beauty of virtue, and art began to follow suit. James Earle discusses how...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Visualizing complex ideas
How can animation convey complex, intangible concepts? A visual metaphor, or an idea represented through imagery, can take an idea as massive as Big Data and tie it to the familiar depiction of a growing tree. TED-Ed animators explain...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The evolution of the book - Julie Dreyfuss
What makes a book a book? Is it just anything that stores and communicates information? Or does it have to do with paper, binding, font, ink, its weight in your hands, the smell of the pages? To answer these questions, Julie Dreyfuss...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why is this painting so captivating? - James Earle and Christina Bozsik
On first glance, the painting Las Meninasc (The Maids of Honorc) might not seem terribly special, but it's actually one of the most analyzed pieces in the history of art. Why is this painting by Diego Velazquez so captivating? James...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The world's most mysterious book - Stephen Bax
Deep inside Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library lies a 240 page tome. Recently carbon dated to around 1420, its pages feature looping handwriting and hand drawn images seemingly stolen from a dream. It is called the Voynich...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Corruption, wealth and beauty: The history of the Venetian gondola - Laura Morelli
It's hard to imagine Venice without the curious, banana-shaped gondolas that glide down the canals. How did these boats come to be the trademark transportation of Venice? Laura Morelli details the history of the gondola, explaining why...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Inside a cartoonist's world - Liza Donnelly
From cave drawings to the Sunday paper, artists have been visualizing ideas -- cartoons -- for centuries. New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly walks us through the many stages every cartoon goes through, starting with an idea and turning...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: How to take a great picture - Carolina Molinari
Have you ever looked at your camera and wondered what all of those buttons actually do? For manual photography, the aperture, shutter speed and ISO sensitivity can all be manipulated to get just the right amount of light. Carolina...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The many meanings of Michelangelo's Statue of David - James Earle
We typically experience classic works of art in a museum, stripped of their original contexts, but that serene setting can belie a tumultuous history. Take Michelangelo's statue of David: devised as a religious symbol, adopted as a...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The complex geometry of Islamic design - Eric Broug
In Islamic culture, geometric design is everywhere: you can find it in mosques, madrasas, palaces, and private homes. And despite the remarkable complexity of these designs, they can be created with just a compass to draw circles and a...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The secrets of Mozart's "Magic Flute" - Joshua Borths
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's "Die Zauberflote" ("The Magic Flute") is widely regarded as one of the most influential operas in history. And while it may seem like a childish fairytale at first glance, it's actually full of subversive...
TED Talks
Milton Glaser: Using design to make ideas new
From the TED archives: The legendary graphic designer Milton Glaser dives deep into a new painting inspired by Piero della Francesca. From here, he muses on what makes a convincing poster, by breaking down an idea and making it new.
TED-Ed
TED-ED: What is abstract expressionism? - Sarah Rosenthal
If you visit a museum with a collection of modern and contemporary art, you're likely to see works that sometimes elicit the response, _My cat could make that, so how is it art?" But is it true? Could anyone create one of Jackson...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Dissecting Botticelli's Adoration of the Magi - James Earle
The scene of the three wise men offering gifts to a newborn Jesus was widely painted during the Renaissance era, so how did painter Sandro Botticelli create a version that's still well known today? James Earle describes who and what set...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The poet who painted with his words - Genevieve Emy
Among the great poets of literary history, certain names like Homer, Shakespeare and Whitman are instantly recognizable. However, there's an early 20th century great poet whose name you may not know: Guillaume Apollinaire. Genevieve Emy...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why is Vermeer's "Girl with the Pearl Earring" considered a masterpiece? - James Earle
Is she turning towards you or away from you? No one can agree. She's the subject of Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer's "Girl with the Pearl Earring," a painting often referred to as the 'Mona Lisa of the North.' But what makes this painting...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: The unexpected math behind Van Gogh's "Starry Night" - Natalya St. Clair
Physicist Werner Heisenberg said, "When I meet God, I am going to ask him two questions: why relativity? And why turbulence? I really believe he will have an answer for the first." As difficult as turbulence is to understand...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Eye vs. camera - Michael Mauser
Your eyes don’t always capture the world exactly as a video camera would. But the eyes are remarkably efficient organs, the result of hundreds of millions of years of coevolution with our brains. Michael Mauser outlines the similarities...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Illuminating photography: From camera obscura to camera phone - Eva Timothy
The origins of the cameras we use today were invented in the 19th century. Or were they? A millenia before, Arab scientist Alhazen was using the camera obscura to duplicate images, with Leonardo da Vinci following suit 500 years later...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: What cameras see that our eyes don't - Bill Shribman
Our eyes are practically magical, but they cannot see everything. For instance, the naked eye cannot see the moment where all four of a horse's legs are in the air or the gradual life cycle of plants -- but cameras can capture these...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Who decides what art means? - Hayley Levitt
There is a question that has been tossed around by philosophers and art critics for decades: how much should an artist's intention affect your interpretation of the work? Do the artist’s plans and motivations affect its meaning? Or is it...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Who built Great Zimbabwe? And why? - Breeanna Elliott
Stretched across a tree-peppered expanse in Southern Africa lies the ruins of Great Zimbabwe, a medieval stone city of astounding wealth. Located in the present-day country of Zimbabwe, it's the site of the second largest settlement...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: The mathematics of sidewalk illusions - Fumiko Futamura
Have you ever come across an oddly stretched image on the sidewalk, only to find that it looks remarkably realistic if you stand in exactly the right spot? These sidewalk illusions employ a technique called anamorphosis - a special case...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Gyotaku: The ancient Japanese art of printing fish - K. Erica Dodge
How did fishermen record their trophy catches before the invention of photography? In 19th century Japan, fishing boats were equipped with rice paper, sumi-e ink, and brushes in order to create gyotaku: elaborate rubbings of freshly...