For her 2009 work In Ictu Oculi (“In the Twinkling of an Eye”), artist Greta Alfaro spread a table outside the Spanish village of Fitero and filmed a feast among 40 vultures.

“It was not easy to get them to jump on the table,” she told the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art. “I had to wait for one week, setting the table every morning and unsetting it at dusk. Vultures have extraordinary eyesight, and if one of them notices that there is food, it will draw circles in the air to let the others know. They approached the scene every day, but either my presence or the presence of the table prevented them from getting closer.”

“I think that it is important today to reflect on the impermanence of almost everything, and on the fact that life cannot be controlled.”

Artist Jason Shulman has an interesting exhibit this month at London’s Cob Gallery: Photographs of Films condenses the entirety of a given film into a single exposure.

“There are roughly 130,000 frames in a 90-minute film, and every frame of each film is recorded in these photographs,” Shulman says. “You could take all these frames and shuffle them like a deck of cards, and no matter the shuffle, you would end up with the same image I have arrived at. Each of these photographs is the genetic code of a film — its visual DNA.”

Some examples:

Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902):

The Wizard of Oz (1939):

Citizen Kane (1941):

Rear Window (1954):

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968):

The Shining (1980):

More at Shulman’s site. Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto was conducting similar experiments about 20 years ago, and Kevin L. Ferguson has assembled an impressive collection of his own.

The best dog breeds to sit for paintings, according to British artist Briton Rivière:

The best dog to sit is an animal which I am afraid I must admit I thoroughly dislike — an intelligent poodle. Many dogs are a long time before they grasp what is wanted of them, and one has to go through no small amount of patience to get them to behave themselves. The most restless sitters are the collie and the deerhound. Still, notwithstanding their restlessness, I am very fond of both, and have frequently painted them. Perhaps the dog I admire most is the bloodhound; but, as a matter of fact, I am fond of all short-haired dogs.

He also found greyhounds and fox terriers to be restless. “Some dogs are very difficult to manage, but however awkward and ill-tempered a dog may be, in time he gets used to the studio. I have watched a dog for hours at a time, until I have been able to get exactly what I wanted, for however troublesome an animal may be, it is only a question of waiting, when you will be sure to get what you want.”

(From The Strand, January 1896.)

A snob asked James McNeill Whistler, “Whatever possessed you to be born in a place like Lowell, Massachusetts?”

He said, “I wished to be near my mother.”

While working at a tedious job in the summer of 1963, Jerry Gretzinger began drawing a map of an imaginary city. He added to the map fitfully for 20 years, put it aside, and then took it up again when his grandson found it in his attic. He’s now been mapping the area around “Ukrania” for more than 30 years, working an average of 20 minutes a day.

The activity is not entirely in his own hands. He draws from a special deck of cards to determine the focus of each day’s work. A given card might tell him to add a new paint color, to shuffle the deck, or to add a new “void,” a region of blankness that obliterates part of the map and incubates a new world of its own. The Ukranians can fend off the void only with a retaining wall, which they are constantly constructing. But whether they can save themselves from oblivion not even Gretzinger knows. “That’s why I keep going,” he says.

The current map covers about 1,500 square feet, representing an area of 14,400 square miles. Here’s a zoomable version.

For what it’s worth, here’s a dance from the 1780s:

1. Glissade round (first part of tune).
2. Double shuffle down, do.
3. Heel and toe back, finish with back shuffle.
4. Cut the buckle down, finish the shuffle.
5. Side shuffle right and left, finishing with beats.
6. Pigeon wing going round.
7. Heel and toe haul in back.
8. Steady toes down.
9. Changes back, finish with back shuffle and beats.
10. Wave step down.
11. Heel and toe shuffle obliquely back.
12. Whirligig, with beats down.
13. Sissone and entrechats back.
14. Running forward on the heels.
15. Double Scotch step, with a heel Brand in Plase. [sic]
16. Single Scotch step back.
17. Parried toes round, or feet in and out.
18. The Cooper shuffle right and left back.
19. Grasshopper step down.
20. Terre-a-terre [sic] or beating on toes back.
21. Jockey crotch down.
22. Traverse round, with hornpipe glissade.

It’s “A Sailor Hornpipe — Old Style,” by John Durang, George Washington’s favorite dancer. Durang taught it to his son Charles, who reproduced it in a study of theatrical dancing published in 1855, which is how it comes down to us.

The terminology is influenced by French ballet, but already it incorporates innovations such as “shuffles”; in time the hornpipe would evolve into modern tap dancing. In Tap Roots, Mark Knowles writes, “It is believed that the ‘whirligig, with beats down’ is similar to a renversé turn such as the kind later done by the tap dancing film star Eleanor Powell.”

(From Julian Mates, The American Musical Stage Before 1800, 1962.)