unforum

[Curlytek]

As an aside from a scientist with very little art knowledge; this 'Homage', while done in glass (perhaps the specialty of the acclaimed artist in question) could be refering to any sort of Earth artist (painter, sculptor, musician etc.).

[lillyplop]

Could the flowers be Birds of Paradise? I know they dont look exactly like that but there is a similarity.

They are looking for an actualy 'piece' so it could be a sculpture or painting or anything really thats classed as 'art'.

Lets face it, at the moment we have many many many 'pieces of art' that are little more than crap out of our bins.

I can see flowers (possibly ones that bloom at night?)
Moon over mountains reflected in a still lake
Reeds

Was kinda hoping a new silver card would be easier to answer and therefore restore my faith in my own intelligence.

Not happening!

[lillyplop]

Heres a question. Could it be a 'piece' of music? A music 'atist'?

I have just seen a piece of music discribed as or having a description of

Outside in the night sky, the moon shone brightly and sent its radiant beams glistening into the room ... How Great Thou Art History of this great hymn plus ...


Could it be music? Like Moonlight Sonata?

[bertyb]

Hey people,

Been looking at this card and the only thing I have picked up on that doesnt seem to be mentioned so far is if you turn the card upside down the picture actually looks like a wine glass with the shape of it.

I was just wondering whether that would have anything to do with them playing on the word glass. Could be way off the mark - but thought I would add it into the mix.

I think there is a play on the twins as well - with the letters being grouped into 2's and all the other pairs in the picture.

Can anybody think of famous painting alcoholic twins?

[bertyb]

Hey,

Different thought pattern going through now.

Going back to Von's clue.

[lillyplop]

Thought I had it there guys. Was searching on Google and found a summary of the ballet Swan Lake. Summary below.

It concerns a prince, called Siegfried, who falls in love with a princess called Odette, who is in human form at NIGHT, but has been turned into a swan by day by the evil magician Von Rothbart. She has a retinue of other swan-maidens to attend her. The prince while out hunting sees her dancing in a MOONLIGHT GLADE by the LAKE.

The Swan Lake was formed by the tears of Princess Odette's parents when Von Rothbart kidnapped her. When he appears and Siegfried threatens to kill him, Odette intercedes. Only when someone sacrifices their life for the Swan Queen will his power be destroyed.

The spell on her may be broken if a prince pledges eternal fidelity to her. Von Rothbart insinuates his own daughter Odile into the court, making her seem IDENTICAL to Odette. The prince dances with her, and proclaims to the court that he wants to make her his wife.

Not the answer though, damn, thought I had it there.

[ramsfan]

Got excited when I found Philip Glass had colaborated with Aphex Twin, but the piece, Icct Hedral I haven't heard of. Also looked up the Liverpool twins Rabindra and Amrit Singh's work but nothing obvious.

[spugmeistress]

i reckon von's clue relates to the two letter code thing around the frame, which may or may not help towards identifying the artist, it may be hiding some other bit of information for us...

as for the picture, i think you are right about calla lilies, georgia o'keefe seemed to like them, and also painted lakes, but i couldn't find any pictures that combined the two.

edit: i need to go to bed, but here is a handy link if anyone wants to keep trucking, the witcombe.sbc.edu site in the internet resources section seems to be particularly resourceful

rach =)

[cassandra]

I too am going to sleep now. final thoughts for the day - my first instinctive linguistic response is Mona Lisa. (though Old French & Anglo-Saxon aren't really congruent). but that really would be a bit easy and not require the code.

The letters around the edge do belong to a specific alphabet. but I'm not going to elaborate on that until I study the patterns further..

[Curlytek]

Regarding the code, and following the notation of PuzzledPineapple, there seems to be an interesting pattern if you look at the first or second letters consectively:

First letters:
ppppbbppppbbpppp hububbbbbhububbbbb ha ubbbbbubbbbbubbbbbubbbbb

Second letters:
zueuzzbpzpbbarbr azazzazazbarprprpu pa zzbpzzuprupzzbpzzuupruzz

The spaces are just to break up the little repeating patterns for the first letters. It reads to me kind of like musical beats (1234,12,1234,12,1234 ; 12,22, 12345, 12, 22, 12345; ha?; 1-12345, 1-12345, 1-12345, 1-12345). Probably irrelevant, but seems interesting to me that these patterns are there.....

[Hituro]

I was wondering if the letter pairs could identify some other letters in a grid, or something similar. I am sure the twin clue is a reference to the letter pairs, either telling us they are two bits of information per pair that together give a meaning, or that they need to be broken apart (as Curlytek just did) to get two separate meanings.

[doublecross]

Thoughts: the letters look roughly like the first few letters of the Greek alphabet - an old version perhaps?

The a is like alpha, the B beta, the 'r' gamma, the 'p' delta, the e epsilon, the z zeta, the h eta, but then the u doesn't look much like theta. This means that the characters could go 1...8, or perhaps the u corresponds to 0, so 0...7.

In the 1...8 case the sequence, starting at bottom left, is

46 48 45 48 26 26 42 44 46 44 22 22 41 43 42 43 71 / 86 21 86 21 26 21 26 22 71 83 24 83 24 23 24 28 24 71 16 86 22 24 / 26 26 28 88 24 23 28 24 26 86 22 24 26 26 28 88 24 23 28 26 26

In first position, there are 36 2s, 12 4s, 9 8s, 3 7s and 1 1. In second position there are 18 6s, 11 4s, 9 8s, 7 1s, 7 2s, 7 3s and 1 5.

[PuzzledPineapple]

For the record, I tried the longshots listed in all the posts above, namely Mona Lisa, Moonlight Sonata and Icct Hedral. None were accepted, but I needed to use up my three attempts today somehow.

I don't really see how the letters could be Greek. I didn't study Ancient Greek for too long, but I never saw letters used like that. The letter a appears just like that with curly bit on top (although straight), whereas alpha in either lowercase or uppercase doesn't look at all like that, and what I call a p does have a downwards stroke, a tail, that wouldn't appear on a delta. You'd have to be generous to allow the h as an eta. And there's no way the u could be anything other than an upsilon. Sorry, that wasn't very helpful, was it. It could still be strangely transliterated Greek, or just stylishly designed, but that would be very obscure, even for a silver.

I would guess that the clue refers to the method of coding used for the letters, and we're looking for something where bb in one position doesn't necessarily mean the same thing as bb in another position. Nothing springs to mind, but there's plenty of research to do.

Do you think it's fair to say from the wording of the card that this piece was created at the time of the discovery of earth, or was it later for some anniversary event? If the former is true, then we're looking for something not recently created (although I don't think we know the exact time). That doesn't really narrow it down much.

[beglee]

[cassandra]

It's not Coptic.