“I Saw the Future”: Rutger Hauer (RIP) Remembers His Most Memorable Role in Blade Runner

Rut­ger Hauer died last Fri­day at the age of 75, which means he enjoyed a life more than sev­en decades longer than that of Roy Bat­ty, the char­ac­ter he played in Rid­ley Scot­t’s Blade Run­ner. As a repli­cant, an arti­fi­cial human being engi­neered to per­form intense phys­i­cal labor, Bat­ty has immense strength but an exis­tence delib­er­ate­ly lim­it­ed to a few years. Seek­ing an escape from his immi­nent demise, he and a group of his fel­low repli­cants escape from their off-world min­ing colony to Earth, specif­i­cal­ly Los Ange­les, where they intend to seek out their cre­ator and demand an exten­sion of their lives. And so it falls to Har­ri­son Ford’s detec­tive Rick Deckard, trained as a repli­cant-hunt­ing “Blade Run­ner,” to hunt them all down.

Hauer’s per­for­mance is arguably the film’s most mem­o­rable, not least because of the man­ner in which Bat­ty final­ly accepts his own death even after spar­ing the life of the man tasked with ter­mi­nat­ing him. “I’ve seen things you peo­ple wouldn’t believe,” Bat­ty says. “Attack ships on fire off the shoul­der of Ori­on. I watched C‑beams glit­ter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.”

Hauer, as Indiewire’s Zack Sharf not­ed in a remem­brance, rewrote that short mono­logue him­self, hav­ing “believed the orig­i­nal speech was writ­ten in a way that was too oper­at­ic, a tone he felt a repli­cant would nev­er use.” He kept the scrip­t’s “attack ships” and “C‑beams,” sens­ing in them a kind of tech­no-poet­ry, and added the tears in the rain, an image visu­al­ly res­o­nant with the scene in which he deliv­ers it.

“It did­n’t come from me,” Hauer says of the “tears in the rain” line in the inter­view clip above. “It came from the poet in me, and there was a poet in Roy.” In using those words “to con­clude Roy’s quest,” he says, “I was also anchor­ing myself, as an actor, in my own inse­cure way. And for an audi­ence to car­ry that for 30 years was such love.” That audi­ence, he acknowl­edges, kept Blade Run­ner alive even after its fail­ure to per­form back in 1982: “When the film came out, it was out of the cin­e­ma, I think, in a week,” and some crit­ics dis­missed it as a waste of time. But Hauer under­stood its appeal as “a real­ly sexy, erot­ic, car­toon-opera inter­est­ing movie, but it was ahead of its time.”

Blade Run­ner has long since tak­en its place in the pan­theon of sci­ence fic­tion cin­e­ma, but Hauer’s fil­mog­ra­phy con­tains pic­tures of every oth­er sort of rep­u­ta­tion as well. A pro­lif­ic per­former giv­en to uncon­ven­tion­al choic­es and dis­tinc­tive turns of phrase, he was remem­bered on Twit­ter by pro­duc­er Jonathan Soth­cott as “one of those great actors who made rub­bish watch­able.” Though Hauer’s turns in pic­tures a var­ied as Lady­hawke, Blind FuryThe Hitch­er (in which hor­ror-mode Hauer, writes Stephen King, “will nev­er be topped”), Sin City, and Hobo with a Shot­gun won’t soon be for­got­ten, it will be as Roy Bat­ty — the repli­cant he has described as want­i­ng to “make his mark on exis­tence” — that he’ll be remem­bered. “At the same time I was doing this film, I saw the future,” he says of Blade Run­ner. And he lived to 2019, the once-dis­tant year in which Blade Run­ner is set, to see that future in real life.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Ver­sion of Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Made of 12,597 Water­col­or Paint­ings

Watch Tears In the Rain: A Blade Run­ner Short Film–A New, Unof­fi­cial Pre­quel to the Rid­ley Scott Film

How Rid­ley Scott’s Blade Run­ner Illu­mi­nates the Cen­tral Prob­lem of Moder­ni­ty

Blade Run­ner: The Pil­lar of Sci-Fi Cin­e­ma that Siskel, Ebert, and Stu­dio Execs Orig­i­nal­ly Hat­ed

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

The City in Cin­e­ma Mini-Doc­u­men­taries Reveal the Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner, Her, Dri­ve, Repo Man, and More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Why Should We Read Virgil’s Aeneid? An Animated Video Makes the Case

Maybe we take it for grant­ed that Virgil’s Roman epic, the Aeneid, is a sequel—long delayed—of Homer’s Ili­ad, a clas­si­cal adven­ture in verse, part leg­endary his­to­ry, part fan­ta­sy, part myth. It is all these things, of course, but it also served some very spe­cif­ic pur­pos­es for its time, the impe­r­i­al Rome of Augus­tus, Virgil’s patron, on whose insis­tence the Aeneid was pub­lished after the poet’s death. (Vir­gil him­self want­ed the man­u­script burned.) The Aeneid was also polit­i­cal and reli­gious pro­pa­gan­da.

Pla­to famous­ly railed against Homer and oth­er ancient poets for triv­i­al­iz­ing reli­gion by turn­ing the gods into venge­ful, pet­ty soap opera char­ac­ters. Vir­gil and Augus­tus, on the oth­er hand, explic­it­ly hoped the Aeneid would effect “a revival of faith in the old-time reli­gion,” as Clyde Pharr writes in the intro­duc­tion to his Latin edi­tion of the poem. “The edu­cat­ed Romans of the day were becom­ing quite blasĂ© and sophis­ti­cat­ed and were grad­u­al­ly los­ing the faith of their fathers with its sim­ple, unques­tion­ing reliance on the infal­li­ble wis­dom of the gods and their help­ful inter­fer­ence in human affairs.”

Roman reli­gion was, how­ev­er, not mys­te­ri­ous or remote but “intense­ly prac­ti­cal,” busy­ing itself “with the every­day life of the peo­ple.” By this token, the faith Augus­tus want­ed to pro­mote was also intense­ly polit­i­cal, encour­ag­ing strict patri­ar­chal hier­ar­chies and a sense of sacred duty, the chief hero­ic bur­den Aeneus must bear—his pietas. Vir­gil wrote his hero, Mark Robin­son argues in the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, as a mod­el for Augus­tus, who appears in the poem when Aeneus descends into the under­world and has a vision of the future of Rome.

Augus­tus is pre­sent­ed “as a vic­tor enter­ing Rome in tri­umph… expand­ing the Roman empire.” He is hailed as “only the third Roman leader in 700 years to shut the doors of the tem­ple of Janus, sig­ni­fy­ing the arrival of per­ma­nent peace. But there’s a twist.” Augus­tus did not read to the end, and appar­ent­ly did not notice Aeneus’s many flaws, dra­ma­tized, Robin­son sug­gests, as a warn­ing to the emper­or, or his sub­jects.

In sec­tions “that could be seen as crit­i­cal, if not sub­tly sub­ver­sive of the emperor’s achieve­ments,” Aeneus strug­gles to “bal­ance mer­cy and jus­tice.” The hero arrives as a refugee from the con­quered Troy, car­ry­ing his aging father on his back and lead­ing his young son by the hand. He ends, pro­lep­ti­cal­ly, by found­ing the great empire to come. But as many schol­ars have argued, through­out the poem “Vir­gil under­mined the sense of glo­ri­ous progress, or even over­turned it,” as Made­line Miller writes at Lapham’s Quar­ter­ly.

This mod­ern read­ing of the Aeneid may be con­tro­ver­sial, but the cel­e­bra­tion of Augus­tus was embraced not only by the emper­or him­self but by ambi­tious rulers “as dis­parate as Eliz­a­beth I, Louis XIV, and Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni,” not to men­tion “the Found­ing Fathers, who gen­er­al­ly pre­ferred Homer.” Per­haps the poem’s endorse­ment by those in pow­er and those posi­tioned to flat­ter them has long col­ored the recep­tion of the Aeneid as an uncrit­i­cal cel­e­bra­tion of empire.

The Aeneid is a foun­da­tion­al epic in the West­ern lit­er­ary tra­di­tion because of Virgil’s unde­ni­able poet­ic skill in adapt­ing clas­si­cal Greek forms into Latin, and because of its influ­ence on hun­dreds of poets and writ­ers for hun­dreds of years after. But per­haps, Robin­son sug­gests, “in want­i­ng the sto­ry pub­lished, Augus­tus had been fooled by his own desire for self-pro­mo­tion.” Maybe the poem has also “sur­vived to ask ques­tions about the nature of pow­er and author­i­ty ever since” it was first pub­lished, to instant acclaim, in 19 BC.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1,600-Year-Old Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­script of the Aeneid Dig­i­tized & Put Online by The Vat­i­can

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Rome Reborn: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 C.E.

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Deconstructing Brian Eno’s Music for Airports: Explore the Tape Loops That Make Up His Groundbreaking Ambient Music

Bri­an Eno debuted Music for Air­ports in 1978 and in terms of ambi­ent music he’s been remak­ing it ever since. This ground­break­ing album was both com­posed and left to chance. “Com­posed” in that for each piece Eno select­ed a num­ber of notes and sim­ple melod­ic frag­ments that would work togeth­er with­out dis­so­nance. And “left to chance” because each frag­ment was giv­en a tape loop of dif­fer­ent length. Once Eno set the loops in motion, the piece cre­at­ed itself in all sorts of per­mu­ta­tions and inter­sec­tions.

Eno no longer uses tape loops, but he still believes in “gen­er­a­tive music,” cre­at­ing albums that are hour-long cap­tures of ran­dom­ly gen­er­at­ed tones that could con­ceiv­ably go on for­ev­er.

Dan Carr over at his site Reverb Machine has writ­ten a decon­struc­tion of two of the four pieces on Music for Air­ports, reverse engi­neer­ing them to fig­ure out their orig­i­nal loops. And the best thing is, you can set the loops rolling and have your own ver­sion play out all day long if you wish.

The first, “2/1” is rec­og­niz­able from the choral voic­es used in the score. Each loop con­tains one note sung for a whole bar, but the note and the length of the tape con­tain­ing the bar changes. This is the most basic of all the four tracks, but there is some­thing quite mag­i­cal when all sev­en loops sync up.

The sec­ond “1/2” con­tains eight loops con­tain­ing either a sin­gle piano note, a melod­ic phrase, or a glis­san­do chord. (Although the arti­cle doesn’t men­tion it, it also con­tains the choral loops of “2/1”)

You can play the loops at Reverb Machine sim­ply by click­ing on the arrow beneath each bar, or at the bot­tom “play all” or “pause all.”

For musi­cians think­ing they’d like to make their own loops and fol­low Eno’s method­ol­o­gy, Dan includes some instruc­tions.

In the com­ments sec­tion, musi­cian Glenn Sogge notes that he took the loops and cre­at­ed his own decon­struct­ed take on Eno’s clas­sic, Blooms Engulf­ing Decon­struct­ed Air­ports, which you can play at the top of this post. As he explains, the piece start­ed with down­load­ing the WAV files from Reverb Machine’s post. Then:

Beside the 15 clips of voic­es and piano, 10 long loops were build from the 10 worlds of the Bri­an Eno & Peter Chil­vers gen­er­a­tive music app Bloom: 10 Worlds (Android Ver­sion). A mix­ture of impro­vised clip-launch­ing and more stuc­ture form result­ed in 25 audio files that then mixed & mas­tered. In keep­ing with the Oblique Strate­gies dic­tum, “Hon­our thy error as hid­den inten­tion,” even a ran­dom phone noti­fi­ca­tion sound has been left in.

What do you think of Sogge’s trib­ute to the mas­ter? Let us know in the com­ments.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Six-Hour Time-Stretched Ver­sion of Bri­an Eno’s Music For Air­ports: Med­i­tate, Relax, Study

The “True” Sto­ry Of How Bri­an Eno Invent­ed Ambi­ent Music

Bri­an Eno Explains the Loss of Human­i­ty in Mod­ern Music

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

The Jane Austen Fiction Manuscript Archive Is Online: Explore Handwritten Drafts of Persuasion, The Watsons & More

I first came to Jane Austen pre­pared to dis­like her, reared as I had been to think of good fic­tion as social­ly trans­gres­sive, exper­i­men­tal, full of heavy, life-or-death moral con­flicts and exis­ten­tial­ist anti-heroes; of extremes of dread and sor­row or alien­at­ed extremes of their lack. Austen’s char­ac­ters seemed too perky and per­fect, too cir­cum­scribed and whole­some, too untrou­bled by inner despair or out­er calami­ty to offer much in the way of inter­est or exam­ple.

This is an opin­ion shared by more per­cep­tive read­ers than myself, includ­ing Char­lotte Bron­tĂ«, who called Pride and Prej­u­dice “an accu­rate daguerreo­type por­trait of a com­mon­place face.” Bron­tĂ« “dis­liked [Austen] exceed­ing­ly,” writes author Mary Stolz in an intro­duc­tion to Emma. The author of Jane Eyre pro­nounced that “Miss Austen is only shrewd and obser­vant,” where a nov­el­ist like George Sand is “saga­cious and pro­found.”

A cur­so­ry read­ing of Austen can seem to con­firm Brontë’s faint praise. Con­sid­er the first descrip­tion of her hero­ine match­mak­er, Emma:

Emma Wood­house, hand­some, clever, and rich, with a com­fort­able home and hap­py dis­po­si­tion, seemed to unite some of the best bless­ings of exis­tence, and had lived near­ly twen­ty-one years in the world with very lit­tle to dis­tress or vex her.

No great, shock­ing dis­as­ters befall Emma. She is buf­fet­ed nei­ther by war nor pover­ty, crime, dis­ease, oppres­sion or any oth­er essen­tial­ly dra­mat­ic con­flict. She ends the nov­el join­ing hands in mar­riage with charm­ing gen­tle­man farmer Mr. Knight­ly, con­tent, maybe ever-after, in “per­fect hap­pi­ness.”

Rarely if ever in Austen do we find the tor­ments, spir­i­tu­al striv­ings, sub­lime and grotesque imag­in­ings, pro­to-sci­ence-fic­tion, and world-his­tor­i­cal con­scious­ness of con­tem­po­raries like William Blake, Samuel Tay­lor Coleridge, or Mary Shel­ley. Austen is “famous,” writes Stolz, “for hav­ing lived through the peri­od of the French Rev­o­lu­tion with­out ever men­tion­ing it in her writ­ings.”

To see this as a cri­tique, how­ev­er, is to seri­ous­ly mis­judge her. “She did not deal in rev­o­lu­tions of this order. Not a trav­eled woman, she wrote only of what she knew”: life in Eng­lish coun­try vil­lages, the tra­vails of “love and mon­ey,” as she put it, the every­day long­ings, cour­te­sies, and dis­cour­te­sies that make up the major­i­ty of our every­day lives.

We can see Austen doing just that in her own hand at the Jane Austen’s Fic­tion Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tal Edi­tion. A col­lec­tion of scanned man­u­scripts from the Bodleian, British Library, Pier­pont Mor­gan Library, pri­vate col­lec­tors, and King’s Col­lege, Cam­bridge, this project “rep­re­sents every stage of her writ­ing career and a vari­ety of phys­i­cal states: work­ing drafts, fair copies, and hand­writ­ten pub­li­ca­tions for pri­vate cir­cu­la­tion.”

This is pri­mar­i­ly a resource for schol­ars; much of this work has been pub­lished in print­ed edi­tions, includ­ing the Juve­nil­ia (read some of that writ­ing here) and unfin­ished drafts like The Wat­sons and her last, uncom­plet­ed, nov­el, San­di­ton. (One still-in-print 1975 edi­tion col­lects the three unfin­ished nov­els found at the dig­i­tal col­lec­tion). Each dig­i­tal edi­tion of the man­u­script includes a head note on the tex­tu­al his­to­ry, prove­nance, and phys­i­cal struc­ture, as well as a tran­scrip­tion of the text. There is also an option to view a “diplo­mat­ic edi­tion” that tran­scribes the text with all of Austen’s cor­rec­tions and addi­tions.

Yet any Austen fan will appre­ci­ate see­ing her wit­ty, inci­sive style change and take shape in her own neat script. In an age of super­heroes, his­tor­i­cal and fan­ta­sy epics, and dystopi­an fan­tasies, we are beset by “the big Bow-Wow strain,” as Wal­ter Scott self-effac­ing­ly called his own nov­els. In Austen’s writ­ing, we find what Scott described as an “exquis­ite touch which ren­ders com­mon­place things and char­ac­ters inter­est­ing from the truth of the descrip­tion and the sen­ti­ment.” She wraps her truths in wicked irony and a satir­i­cal voice, but they are truths we rec­og­nize as wise and com­pas­sion­ate in her domes­tic dra­mas and our own.

Austen knew well that her set­tings and char­ac­ters were lim­it­ed. She made no apolo­gies for it and clear­ly needn’t have. “Three or four fam­i­lies in a coun­try vil­lage,” she wrote to her niece Anna, “is the very thing to work on.” She also knew well the uni­ver­sal ten­den­cies that blind us to the vari­ety found with­in the every­day, whether our every­day is a sleepy coun­try vil­lage life or a tech-laden, 21st-cen­tu­ry city.

She almost seems to sigh weari­ly in Emma when she observes, “human nature is so well dis­posed toward those who are in inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tions” … so much so that we fail to notice what’s going on all around us all the time. She wrote nei­ther for mon­ey nor fame, and her work wasn’t even pub­lished with her name until after her death in July 1817, but she has since become fierce­ly beloved for the very qual­i­ties Bron­tĂ« dis­par­aged.

Austen didn’t miss a thing, which makes her nov­els as can­ny and insight­ful (and big-screen and fan-fic­tion adapt­able) as when they were first writ­ten over two-hun­dred years ago. Enter the Jane Austen’s Fic­tion Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tal Edi­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Jane Austen

Down­load the Major Works of Jane Austen as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Man­u­scripts: Before the Word Proces­sor & White-Out

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Why 1999 Was the Year of Dystopian Office Movies: What The Matrix, Fight Club, American Beauty, Office Space & Being John Malkovich Shared in Common

On August 11, 1992, the writer Dou­glas Cou­p­land made an appear­ance at the grand open­ing of Min­neapo­lis’ Mall of Amer­i­ca, the largest shop­ping mall on Earth. Against his inter­view­er’s expec­ta­tions, Cou­p­land deliv­ered a paean to the osten­si­bly hyper­con­sumeris­tic scene around him, claim­ing that “future gen­er­a­tions are going to look at images of today here in Min­neso­ta and see them as a sort of gold­en age of Amer­i­can cul­ture. The peace. The calm. The abun­dance. The bot­tom­less good­will of every­one here. I’m unsure if it’s going to last much longer and I think we should appre­ci­ate it while it’s here.”

What made the 90s the 90s? “Mon­ey still gen­er­at­ed mon­ey. Com­put­ers were becom­ing fast easy and cheap, and with them came a sense of equal­i­ty for every­one. Things were pal­pa­bly get­ting bet­ter every­where. His­to­ry was over and it felt great.” From the end of the Cold War until the fall of the Twin Tow­ers, North Amer­i­ca and Europe enjoyed a sta­bil­i­ty and pros­per­i­ty that, to many of us in the 2010s, now seems some­how implau­si­ble. But cin­e­ma remem­bers the 90s, espe­cial­ly the cin­e­ma of the decade’s final year, dif­fer­ent­ly. Unlike “mon­ster movies show­ing cold war anx­i­eties and 21st-cen­tu­ry hor­ror movies con­vey­ing fears of acts of ter­ror,” the films of 1999 “were not about sur­viv­ing the present, because the present was actu­al­ly going well. They were about being tired of that sta­ble present and look­ing for a rad­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent future.”

Those words come from “Why All Movies From 1999 Are the Same,” the video essay from Now You See It above. Those of us who were moviego­ing that year remem­ber The MatrixOffice SpaceFight ClubAmer­i­can Beau­tyBeing John Malkovich, and all of the oth­er major Hol­ly­wood releas­es fea­tur­ing “a main char­ac­ter tired of the sta­bil­i­ty, monot­o­ny, and unevent­ful­ness of their life,” almost always involv­ing a steady, dull cor­po­rate job. That era, recall, was also when Scott Adams’ com­ic Dil­bert reached the top of the zeit­geist by sat­i­riz­ing the ele­ments of office exis­tence: incom­pe­tent boss­es, slack­ing co-work­ers, and above all, cubi­cles.

Call­ing 1999 “the year of the cubi­cle movie,” this video essay describes its cin­e­mat­ic por­tray­al of office-work­er frus­tra­tions as “a per­fect mir­ror of what Amer­i­ca was like in the late 90s.” Not that those por­tray­als were lit­er­al­ly “the same”: the ter­mi­nal­ly bored men of Fight Club â€śgo to great lengths to man­u­fac­ture con­flict and chaos”; Office Space makes com­e­dy out of sus­penders and paper jams; Being John Malkovich “exag­ger­ates the oppres­sive cor­po­rate imagery in films like Office Space by cre­at­ing an absurd office with low ceil­ings” that “lit­er­al­ly bears down on its employ­ees”; Amer­i­can Beau­ty “crit­i­cizes the per­ceived sta­bil­i­ty of the era, sug­gest­ing that it’s sim­ply a mask that hides the true self.”

And in The Matrix, of course, that veneer of sta­bil­i­ty and pros­per­i­ty exist only to con­ceal the total enslave­ment of human­i­ty. Mod­ern human­i­ty may nev­er cast off its dystopias, but it’s fair to say the dystopi­an visions we enter­tain today look quite a bit dif­fer­ent than the ones we enter­tained twen­ty years ago, and it’s also fair to say that many of us enter­tain them while dream­ing of the rel­a­tive safe­ty, sta­bil­i­ty, and pros­per­i­ty — real or imag­ined — that we enjoyed back then, not to men­tion the secure desk jobs. But as the films of 1999 remind us, those very qual­i­ties could also dri­ve us into a kind of mad­ness. Cou­p­land may right­ly call the 90s “the good decade,” but even if we could return to that time, we’ve got good rea­sons not to want to.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Cringe-Induc­ing Humor of The Office Explained with Philo­soph­i­cal The­o­ries of Mind

The Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix: From Pla­to and Descartes, to East­ern Phi­los­o­phy

How to Rec­og­nize a Dystopia: Watch an Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to Dystopi­an Fic­tion

Char­lie Chap­lin Gets Strapped into a Dystopi­an “Rube Gold­berg Machine,” a Fright­ful Com­men­tary on Mod­ern Cap­i­tal­ism

David Fos­ter Wal­lace on What’s Wrong with Post­mod­ernism: A Video Essay

How Char­lie Kauf­man Goes Deep into the Human Con­di­tion in Being John Malkovich, Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind, and Oth­er Movies

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Can Artificial Intelligence Decipher Lost Languages? Researchers Attempt to Decode 3500-Year-Old Ancient Languages

Image by Olaf Tausch via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

We may not see warp dri­ves any time soon, but anoth­er piece of Star Trek tech, the uni­ver­sal trans­la­tor, may become a real­i­ty in our life­time, if it hasn’t already. Machine learn­ing “has proven to be very com­pe­tent” when it comes to trans­la­tion, “so much so that the CEO of one of the world’s largest employ­ers of human trans­la­tors has warned that many of them should be fac­ing up the stark real­i­ty of los­ing their job to a machine,” writes Bernard Marr at Forbes.

But the fact that AI can do things humans can does­n’t mean that it does those things well. One Google researcher put the case plain­ly in an inter­view with Wired: “Peo­ple naive­ly believe that if you take deep learn­ing and… 1,000 times more data, a neur­al net will be able to do any­thing a human being can do, but that’s just not true.” AI trans­la­tors have advanced sig­nif­i­cant­ly in the past few years, with Google’s Trans­la­totron pro­to­type (yes, that’s its real name), promis­ing to inter­pret “tone and cadence.” Still, AI trans­la­tions are often stilt­ed, awk­ward, and occa­sion­al­ly incom­pre­hen­si­ble approx­i­ma­tions that no human would come up with.

Does AI’s lim­i­ta­tions with liv­ing lan­guage hin­der its abil­i­ty to deci­pher very long dead ones, whose orthog­ra­phy, gram­mar, and syn­tax have been com­plete­ly lost? Yuan Cao from Google’s AI lab and Jiaming Luo and Regi­na Barzi­lay from MIT put machine learn­ing to the test when they devel­oped a “sys­tem capa­ble of deci­pher­ing lost lan­guages.” They took a very dif­fer­ent approach “from the stan­dard machine trans­la­tion tech­niques,” reports the MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review, using less data instead of more, a tech­nique they call “min­i­mum-cost flow.”

The researchers test­ed their trans­la­tion machine on both the 3500-year-old Lin­ear B and Ugarit­ic, an ancient form of Hebrew, both of which have already been deci­phered by peo­ple. Still, the AI was “able to trans­late both lan­guages with remark­able accu­ra­cy,” with a rate of 67.3% in the trans­la­tion of cog­nates in Lin­ear B. The far old­er Bronze Age Minoan script Lin­ear A, how­ev­er (see it at the top), “one of the ear­li­est forms of writ­ing ever dis­cov­ered… is con­spic­u­ous for its absence.” No human has yet been able to deci­pher it.

A lost lan­guage trans­la­tor machine that only works on lan­guages that have already been trans­lat­ed (it needs pre­ex­ist­ing data on the prog­en­i­tor lan­guage to func­tion) may not seem par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful. Then again, it could be one step in the direc­tion of what the authors call the “auto­mat­ic deci­pher­ment of lost lan­guages,” those that humans can’t already work out on their own. Read the paper “Neur­al Deci­pher­ment via Min­i­mum-Cost Flow: From Ugarit­ic to Lin­ear B” at arX­iv.

via MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for Every­one: An Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Cours­era

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Iden­ti­fies the Six Main Arcs in Sto­ry­telling: Wel­come to the Brave New World of Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

A 9th Century Manuscript Teaches Astronomy by Making Sublime Pictures Out of Words

Con­crete or visu­al poet­ry does not get much respect these days. Terse­ly defined at the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion as “verse that empha­sizes non­lin­guis­tic ele­ments in its mean­ing” arranged to cre­ate “a visu­al image of the top­ic,” the form looks like a clever but friv­o­lous nov­el­ty in our very seri­ous times. It has seemed so in times past as well.

When Guil­laume Apol­li­naire pub­lished his 1918 Cal­ligrammes, his major col­lec­tion of poems after he fought on the front lines of the first world war, he includ­ed sev­er­al visu­al poems. Crit­ics like Louis Aragon, “at his most hard-nosed,” notes Stephen Romer at The Guardian, “crit­i­cized it sharply for its aes­theti­cism and friv­o­li­ty.”

Apol­li­naire also wrote of war as a daz­zling spec­ta­cle, a ten­den­cy that “raised the hack­les of crit­ics.” One can see there is moral mer­it to the objec­tion, even if it mis­reads Apol­li­naire. But why should visu­al poet­ry not cred­i­bly illus­trate phe­nom­e­na we find sub­lime, just as well as it illus­trates pot­ted Christ­mas trees?

Indeed, the form has always done so, argues pro­lif­ic visu­al poet Karl Kemp­ton, until it took a “dystopi­an” turn after World War I. In his vast his­to­ry of visu­al poet­ry, Kemp­ton reach­es back into ancient Bud­dhist, Sufi, Euro­pean, and Indige­nous cul­tur­al his­to­ry. Forms of visu­al poet­ry, he writes, “are asso­ci­at­ed with ongo­ing tra­di­tions and numer­ous unfold­ing path­ways trace­able to humankind’s ear­li­est sur­viv­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tion marks.”

Not as ancient as the exam­ples into which Kemp­ton first dives, the pages here from a man­u­script called the Aratea nonethe­less show us a use of the form that dates back over 1000 years, and incor­po­rates “near­ly 2000 years of cul­tur­al his­to­ry,” writes the Pub­lic Domain Review. “Mak­ing use of two Roman texts on astron­o­my writ­ten in the 1st cen­tu­ry BC, the man­u­script was cre­at­ed in North­ern France in about 1820.”

The text that has been arranged into images wasn’t orig­i­nal­ly poet­ry, though one might argue that arrang­ing it thus makes us read it that way. Instead, the words are tak­en from Hygi­nus’ Astro­nom­i­ca, a “star atlas and book of sto­ries” of somewhat uncer­tain ori­gin. The poems in lined verse below each image are by 3rd cen­tu­ry BC Greek poet Ara­tus (hence the title), “trans­lat­ed into Latin by young Cicero.”

If this feels like hefty mate­r­i­al for a lit­er­ary pro­duc­tion that might seem more whim­si­cal than awe-inspir­ing, we must con­sid­er that the manuscript’s first—and nec­es­sar­i­ly few—readers would have seen it dif­fer­ent­ly. The text is a visu­al mnemon­ic device, the red dots show­ing the posi­tions of the stars in the con­stel­la­tions: an aes­thet­ic ped­a­gogy that threads togeth­er visu­al per­cep­tion, mem­o­ry, imag­i­na­tion, and cog­ni­tion.

“The pas­sages used to form the images describe the con­stel­la­tion which they cre­ate on the page,” the Pub­lic Domain Review writes, “and in this way they become tied to one anoth­er: nei­ther the words nor the images would make full sense with­out the oth­er to com­plete the scene.” We are encour­aged to read the stars through art and lit­er­a­ture and to read poet­ry with an illus­trat­ed mytho­log­i­cal star chart in hand.

The Aratea is a fas­ci­nat­ing man­u­script not only for its visu­al­ly poet­ic illu­mi­na­tions, but also for its sig­nif­i­cance across sev­er­al spans of time. Its phys­i­cal exis­tence is nec­es­sar­i­ly tied to the British Library where it resides. One of the institution’s first arti­facts, it was “sold to the nation in 1752 under the same Act of Par­lia­ment which cre­at­ed the British Muse­um.”

“Part of a larg­er mis­cel­lany of sci­en­tif­ic works,” includ­ing sev­er­al notes and com­men­taries on nat­ur­al phi­los­o­phy, as the British Library describes it, the medieval text uses clas­si­cal sources to con­tem­plate the heav­ens in a form that is not only pre-Chris­t­ian and pre-Roman, but per­haps, as Kemp­ton argues, dates to the ori­gins of writ­ing itself.

via The Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Fan­tas­ti­cal Illus­tra­tions from the 13th Cen­tu­ry Ara­bic Man­u­script Mar­vels of Things Cre­at­ed and Mirac­u­lous Aspects of Things Exist­ing

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

700 Years of Per­sian Man­u­scripts Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

The Velvet Underground Captured in Color Concert Footage by Andy Warhol (1967)

The Vel­vet Under­ground, the band with which Lou Reed and John Cale achieved artis­tic and cul­tur­al star­dom under the man­age­ment of Andy Warhol, sure­ly have more lis­ten­ers now than they did when they were active in the 1960s and 70s. But few self-described Vel­vet Under­ground enthu­si­asts ever had the chance to see the group per­form. Not in per­son, any­way: last month we fea­tured col­or footage from their 1969 Viet­nam War protest con­cert, and we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly offered oppor­tu­ni­ties to glimpse them play­ing a 1966 Warhol-filmed show that got bro­ken up by the cops, com­pos­ing “Sun­day Morn­ing,” the open­ing track from that same year’s album The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico, and reunit­ing in 1972 to do an acoustic set on French tele­vi­sion.

But what would it feel like to actu­al­ly be at a Vel­vet Under­ground con­cert? The 1967 film above pro­vides a view of the band per­form­ing, but even more so of their fans tak­ing it in — not that they had many in those days. But what fans they had turned up over and over again to their shows at a club called The Boston Tea Par­ty, which had opened the same year.

Shot by Warhol, one descrip­tion says, it makes use of “sud­den in-and-out zooms, sweep­ing pan­ning shots, in-cam­era edits that cre­ate sin­gle frame images and bursts of light like paparazzi flash bulbs going off” that “mir­ror the kines­thet­ic expe­ri­ence of the Explod­ing Plas­tic Inevitable” — Warhol’s series of mul­ti­me­dia events put on in the mid-60s — “with its strobe lights, whip dancers, col­or­ful slide shows, mul­ti-screen pro­jec­tions, lib­er­al use of amphet­a­mines, and over­pow­er­ing sound.”

As “one of only two known films with syn­chro­nous sound of the band per­form­ing live,” as well as the only one in col­or, this half-hour of the Vel­vet Under­ground expe­ri­ence cap­tured on 16-mil­lime­ter (which you can also find on the Inter­net Archive) con­sti­tutes an impor­tant and vivid piece of the band’s record­ed his­to­ry. Today, any lis­ten­er who has ever tak­en an inter­est in the Vel­vet Under­ground will have heard the clear-eyed drug song “Hero­in” on The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico and the epic of debauch­ery “Sis­ter Ray” on White Light/White Heat many times. But these Har­vard kids and oth­ers from more than half a cen­tu­ry ago were get­ting down to them — if that is indeed the term for the behav­ior Warhol has cap­tured here — well before most of today’s Vel­vets-inspired rock­ers were even born.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch The Vel­vet Under­ground Per­form in Rare Col­or Footage: Scenes from a Viet­nam War Protest Con­cert (1969)

Andy Warhol Explains Why He Decid­ed to Give Up Paint­ing & Man­age the Vel­vet Under­ground Instead (1966)

Watch Footage of the Vel­vet Under­ground Com­pos­ing “Sun­day Morn­ing,” the First Track on Their Sem­i­nal Debut Album The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico (1966)

A Sym­pho­ny of Sound (1966): Vel­vet Under­ground Impro­vis­es, Warhol Films It, Until the Cops Turn Up

Lou Reed, John Cale & Nico Reunite, Play Acoustic Vel­vet Under­ground Songs on French TV, 1972

Hear Lost Acetate Ver­sions of Songs from The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico (1966)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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