Khaleda Khan

cmf-fmc.ca — Akashi premiered at the Vancouver International Film Festival earlier this year, where it won the audience award in the Northern Lights series. We talk with the film’s writer, director and star Mayumi Yoshida about making her feature-film directing debut with this very personal story.

rockandart.org — Can AI software truly be creative, or is it just mimicking human imagination? From accessibility breakthroughs to ethical dilemmas, AI-generated art is challenging long-held notions of authorship and originality. This article explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping visual expression, sparking both innovation and debate across the creative world.

rockandart.org — Digital art galleries are transforming how we experience art, making it more accessible, immersive, and personal. Rooted in the resurgence of Dark Academia during the pandemic, these virtual spaces preserve and celebrate culture in innovative ways. From 3D exhibitions to curated digital archives, discover five standout platforms redefining the art world online.

The Varsity — At U of T, artifacts of cultural diversity are everywhere: from laptop stickers with Japanese kanji characters to good luck messages etched in Urdu on desks. On campus, I have seen U of T students use a wide variety of expressions to reflect the diverse array of languages and cultures. While our campuses hum with culturally diverse energy, I believe many of our university media outlets often fail to reflect this diversity.

The Varsity — First-year UTM student Riyam Ojaimi launches Space Point, an astronomy publication

The Varsity — Highlights from Grace L. Dillon's anthology renew sci-fi beyond Western technoculture Walking the Clouds is a 2012 anthology of Indigenous science fiction that Dillon edited. It contains short story excerpts and prose from writers that confront postmodern, postcolonial Indigenous experiences in a struggle for survival against colonization across terrains — “whether geopolitical, psychological, sexual, [or] otherwise,” as Dillon says in the introduction.

The Varsity — Why colour and line drawing may not be as black-and-white as you think

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) — The Canadian South Asian Literary Festival will take place from Aug. 26-27 in Brampton, Ont., featuring writers of South Asian descent from across the country.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) — The winner for the annual literary award will be announced on Sept. 16.

thevarsity.ca — beholder to draw you in and move you. The effect beauty provokes in the viewer or reader is a feeling of wonder, a kind of trembling awe that pulls you in and traps you. To know when a work of art or a film is beautiful, we rely on our own aesthetic sense, which is partly inherent and partly conditioned. Our sense of aesthetic helps us shape our reality, whether in abstract or in evolution. The idea of a definable, objective beauty and aesthetic sense is generally controversial — especially when we apply it to animals. The reason behind the controversy is that we don’t fully understand beauty as an idea, so we cannot yet investigate its evolutionary purpose. Even though biologists have sought to explain the purpose of an intrinsic aesthetic sense for decades, they agree that, to have an aesthetic sense, the onlooker needs to have an ability to assess, evaluate, and even rank choices. In some developments of natural selection in evolutionary theory, humans and animals evaluate ornaments subjectively and cognitively. In nature, Charles Darwin used the term ‘ornaments’ to describe physical displays to court and attract mates — characteristics seen in animals that are more decorative than critical to survival. He called this process ‘sexual selection.’ But for a long period of time, this theory was dismissed because it put too much evolutionary credit on the female animals’ selectiveness in choosing a mate.

The Toronto Observer — Satire is a potent tool for social commentary as it provokes public discussion and raises awareness. Satire is a powerful tool to reflect on the health of a democracy, whether through social commentary or political campaigns.

globalsummitryproject.com — Angela Minyi Hou enjoys learning languages, reading, and listening to music from different cultures. She is also passionate about global summitry, trade and sustainable development, and was recently introduced as the Head Delegate for the Young Diplomats of Canada at this year's Youth 20 (Y20) summit in Varanasi, India in August.

torontoobserver.ca — Historians usually get current events wrong, but ‘the temptation is always to go back and look for parallels,’ she says. Historians aren’t good at predicting the future, and usually get it wrong, celebrated historian Margaret MacMillan said during a live conversation for The Paul Wells Show in downtown Toronto. During their wide-ranging conversation, she also provided her analyses of the Russia-Ukraine war to parallels in history, the post-COVID-19 world, progress on her new book, and love of tennis.

youtu.be — This is a video I edited for my Mobile and Social Journalism assignment in Fall 2022, featuring footage of the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra. Footage collected by Alex Varoutas, a former student at Centennial College.

datawrapper.de — This chart is on the most common age groups that experienced fatal collisions as pedestrians in Etobicoke York from 2015 to 2019. These statistics show that pedestrians tended to be above 45 years of age.

artshelp.com — In recent years, artificial intelligence (otherwise known as AI) has rapidly improved in traditional domains of art, which complicates our understanding of creativity and aesthetics. DALL-E 2 is an AI image-generating machine released in early November this year that has gained tremendous popularity among artists and non-artists. It makes realistic images from descriptions in a text box or essentially from its captions. The visuals are named from their captions.

artshelp.com — William Butler Yeats, a 20th-century Irish poet and writer, describes stamps and coinage to tell a nation's history as "silent ambassadors of the state." While in some cases these messages were political, like propagating certain political movements that align well with state propaganda (as well as allusions to national identity/mythologies), stamps were also used for their “soft power.”

artshelp.com — The city standard never applied to Thota Vaikuntam, an artist from Hyderabad, and it never inspired him. Vaikuntam’s artworks are distinct because it shows how his relationship with his mother impacted his way of thinking. The female energy present in his village went on to influence his art style, enabling him to depict women as a central force and figure in almost all his paintings. His paintings of women are similar to traditional depictions of women and female deities from Indian mythologies, epics and folklore in sculptures and carved in architectural ruins.

artshelp.com — Yoshida (1876-1950) is renowned for painting and exhibiting Japanese and non-Japanese sceneries—particularly by travelling to those places rather than painting from imagination. He produced artworks with landscapes and architecture from all around the world, including the United States, Singapore, India and Afghanistan to name a few, in traditional Japanese woodblock painting styles.

artshelp.com — Coke Studio features various influences in music that range from traditional folk music to classical, Sufi, ghazals, bhangra and qawwali songs. The show is prominent for promoting multiculturalism in the country, as the artists are based in various regions and sing in different languages for their musical collaborations. Also known as the Sound of the Nation, in an interview with Dawn News, Pakistan’s oldest and most widely-circulated English newspaper, original producer Rohail Hyatt says, “Coke Studio is about a meeting place—you meet there and go to where you came from.”

artshelp.com — From Old Celtic to Chinese writing systems, calligraphy has an ancient role as a writing technology turned into an art form. Islamic calligraphy, in particular, has evolved alongside Islam and with the Arabic language. The calligraphy is aligned with traditional elements of spirituality in Islamic art rather than figural representation. Nature, geometry and abstract design are characteristic of this art because of Islam’s connections with monotheism.

thevarsity.ca — Depending on how you define it, music has existed long before humans and will probably continue to exist long after. Once we began to differentiate between sound and music, we attached ourselves to it, going as far as to give ourselves an identity through music and a time and community to belong to. Trends in study and focus music have gained more importance in recent years. Classical music has always been the traditional study music, but today’s trends in lo-fi, study ASMRs and binaural beats have gained popularity, too. But to what extent is new-age music the ideal study buddy?

artshelp.com — To most of the Internet, Rumi is fondly attributed to inspirational life quotes on Pinterest boards and social media captions. To those who take the extra step to Google him, he is also a 13th-century Iranian poet and a Sufi philosopher beloved by all for his holistic humanism. But when

artshelp.com — In a world where the rate of global consumption is increasing dramatically, it's imperative that we strive for economically efficient strategies to conserve energy. Individuals and companies alike shouldn't have to involve a lot of money in changing lives for the better. Instead of looking at energy-saving tips