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In ‘The Study of Mathematics’, Bertrand Russell wrote: ‘Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty.’ This is the idea underlying Ars Qubica by the Spanish 3D animator and illustrator Cristóbal Vila. A fluid sensory experience that unites music, mathematics, art and design, the video deconstructs patterns and motifs in art to reveal how beauty emerges from ‘geometric skeletons’.
Director: Cristóbal Vila
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Biology
Starlings swoosh like brushstrokes across the sky in this dazzling short
3 minutes
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Engineering
From simple motors to levitating trains – how design shapes innovation
23 minutes
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Home
How an artist transformed a dilapidated hunting lodge into a house made of dreams
8 minutes
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Animals and humans
Are zoos and natural history museums born of a desire to understand, or to control?
57 minutes
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Virtues and vices
Why Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith were divided on the virtues of vanity
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Ecology and environmental sciences
The tree frog die-off that sparked a global mystery – and revealed a dark truth
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Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
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Family life
One family’s harrowing escape from postwar Vietnam, told in a poignant metaphor
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Film and visual culture
Our world has very different contours when a millimetre is blown up to a full screen
8 minutes