Visit the Largest Collection of Frida Kahlo’s Work Ever Assembled: 800 Artifacts from 33 Museums, All Free Online

Some films achieve the rare feat of being both col­or­ful escapist fan­ta­sy and art­ful means of recon­nect­ing us with our imper­iled human­i­ty. Pixar’s won­der­ful, ani­mat­ed Coco is such a film, “an explo­ration of val­ues,” writes Jia Tolenti­no at The New York­er, “a sto­ry of a multi­gen­er­a­tional matri­archy, root­ed in the past—whereas real life, these days, feels like an atem­po­ral, struc­ture­less night­mare ruled by men.” Cen­tral to its fic­tion­al­ized cel­e­bra­tion of Mex­i­can cul­ture and his­to­ry is a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure every grown-up view­er knows—that fore­moth­er of Mex­i­can mod­ernism, Fri­da Kahlo, an artist who seems as nec­es­sary to remem­ber now as ever.

Not that Fri­da Kahlo is in dan­ger of being for­got­ten. She is adored around the world, an icon for mil­lions of peo­ple who see them­selves in the var­i­ous inter­sec­tions of her iden­ti­ty: Mex­i­can, mes­ti­za, queer, dis­abled, fem­i­nist, uncom­pro­mis­ing­ly rad­i­cal, etc….

Kahlo’s iden­ti­ties mat­ter, and she made them mat­ter. She would not be erased or let her edges be planed away and sand­ed down. Like oth­er con­fes­sion­al artists to whom she is often com­pared, Kahlo turned her trag­i­cal­ly painful, joy­ous­ly vibrant life into endur­ing art. To crib Audre Lorde’s descrip­tion of poet­ry, her work is a “rev­e­la­to­ry dis­til­la­tion of expe­ri­ence.”

But the con­fes­sion­al under­stand­ing of Kahlo can present a crit­i­cal prob­lem, name­ly the emer­gence of what Stephanie Mencimer calls “the Kahlo Cult.”

…her fans are large­ly drawn by the sto­ry of her life, for which her paint­ings are often pre­sent­ed as sim­ple illus­tra­tion…. But, like a game of tele­phone, the more Kahlo’s sto­ry has been told, the more it has been dis­tort­ed, omit­ting uncom­fort­able details that show her to be a far more com­plex and flawed fig­ure than the movies and cook­books sug­gest.

In any case, we may not need more hagiog­ra­phy of Fri­da. We find her life, flaws and all, in her work. From the rav­ages of child­hood polio and a hor­rif­ic traf­fic acci­dent at 18 (depict­ed in the draw­ing below but nev­er in a paint­ing), from love affairs, a deep immer­sion in Mex­i­can folk art, and a com­mit­ment to social­ism and the Mex­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion, Kahlo cre­at­ed an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal oeu­vre like no oth­er. That said, Kahlo her­self is so unde­ni­ably fas­ci­nat­ing a char­ac­ter that “no one need appre­ci­ate art to jus­ti­fy being a Kahlo fan or even a Kahlo cultist,” as Peter Schjel­dahl once wrote. “Why not? The world will have cults, and who bet­ter mer­its one?”

For the art appre­ci­a­tors and Kahlo cultists alike, Google Arts & Cul­ture has cre­at­ed a project that brings togeth­er her life and work in ways that illu­mi­nate both, with bio­graph­i­cal and crit­i­cal essays, and a thor­ough exhib­it of her work from muse­ums all over the world, includ­ing many lit­tle-known pieces like her sketch­es, draw­ings, and ear­ly works; a look at her let­ters and many pho­tographs of her through­out her life; an online exhi­bi­tion of her famous wardrobe; sev­er­al fea­tures of her influ­ence on LGBTQ artists, musi­cians, fash­ion design­ers, and much, much more. It’s “the largest Kahlo cura­tion ever assem­bled,” notes My Mod­ern Met. “The best part? No need to pay a muse­um fee—it’s avail­able online for any­one to enjoy for free.”

A col­lab­o­ra­tion “between the tech giant and a world­wide net­work of experts and 33 part­ner muse­ums in sev­en coun­tries,” notes Hyper­al­ler­gic, Faces of Fri­da con­tains 800 arti­facts, “includ­ing 20 ultra-high res­o­lu­tion images… nev­er dig­i­tized till now.” Some of these arti­facts are extreme­ly rare, such as “ear­ly ver­sions of her work, sketched and etched onto the backs of fin­ished paint­ings, unseen by any­one with­out the abil­i­ty to touch them.” You can also see the places that most influ­enced her career through five Google Street view tours, “includ­ing the famous Blue House in Mex­i­co City in which she was born and died.”

This com­pre­hen­sive online gallery seeks to encom­pass every part of Frida’s life, but rarely takes the focus from her work. “Of the 150 or so of her works that have sur­vived,” notes Mencimer, “most are self-por­traits. As she lat­er said, ‘I paint myself because I am so often alone, because I am the sub­ject I know best.’” Work­ing out­ward from her­self, she also paint­ed the spe­cif­ic res­o­nances of her time and place, and explored human expe­ri­ences that tran­scend per­son­al­i­ty. “As with all the best artists,” says author Frances Borzel­lo in one of the Google Arts fea­tures, “Kahlo’s art is not a diary inge­nious­ly pre­sent­ed in paint but a recre­ation of per­son­al beliefs, feel­ings and events through her par­tic­u­lar lens into some­thing unique and uni­ver­sal.”

Though a super­star in the land of the dead, dur­ing her life Kahlo’s work was great­ly over­shad­owed by that of her famous hus­band Diego Rivera. She only had two shows in her life­time, one of them arranged by sur­re­al­ist Andre Bre­ton, who called her paint­ing “a rib­bon around a bomb.” After her death in 1954, she “large­ly dis­ap­peared from the main­stream art world.” There is a cer­tain irony in point­ing out that fas­ci­na­tion with Kahlo’s work some­times reduces down to inter­est in her biog­ra­phy, since it took a 1983 biog­ra­phy by Hay­den Her­rera to bring her back into the pub­lic con­scious­ness. “When it was pub­lished” Mer­cimer writes, “there wasn’t a sin­gle mono­graph of Kahlo’s work to show peo­ple what it looked like, but the biog­ra­phy, which could have been the basis for a Uni­vi­sion telen­ov­ela, sparked a Fri­da fren­zy.”

How things have changed. No read­er of Herrera’s book, or any of the many treat­ments of Kahlo’s life since then, will come to it sight unseen. Frida’s face—defiant, mus­ta­chioed, monobrowed—stares out at us from every­where. The Google exhib­it guides us through a com­pre­hen­sive con­tex­tu­al­iza­tion of that haunt­ing, yet famil­iar gaze. The let­ters and bio­graph­i­cal entries con­tain insight after insight into the artist’s pri­vate and pub­lic lives. But ulti­mate­ly, it’s the paint­ings that speak. As Borzel­lo puts it, when we real­ly con­front Frida’s work, we may be struck by “how help­less words are in the face of the strange rich­ness of those images.” She invent­ed new visu­al vocab­u­lar­ies of pain, plea­sure, pride, and per­se­ver­ance. Vis­it Faces of Fri­da here.

via Google’s blog

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fri­da Kahlo’s Col­or­ful Clothes Revealed for the First Time & Pho­tographed by Ishi­uchi Miyako

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Artists Fri­da Kahlo & Diego Rivera Vis­it Leon Trot­sky in Mex­i­co: Vin­tage Footage from 1938

The Fri­da Kahlo Action Fig­ure

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

Google Launches a Free Course on Artificial Intelligence: Sign Up for Its New “Machine Learning Crash Course”

As part of an effort to make Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence more com­pre­hen­si­ble to the broad­er pub­lic, Google has cre­at­ed an edu­ca­tion­al web­site Learn with Google AI, which includes, among oth­er things, a new online course called Machine Learn­ing Crash Course. The course pro­vides “exer­cis­es, inter­ac­tive visu­al­iza­tions, and instruc­tion­al videos that any­one can use to learn and prac­tice [Machine Learn­ing] con­cepts.” To date, more than 18,000 Googlers have enrolled in the course. And now it’s avail­able for every­one, every­where. You can sup­ple­ment it with oth­er AI cours­es found in the Relat­eds below.

Machine Learn­ing Crash Course will be added to our list of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

via Google Blog

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT

Google Launch­es Free Course on Deep Learn­ing: The Sci­ence of Teach­ing Com­put­ers How to Teach Them­selves

New Deep Learn­ing Cours­es Released on Cours­era, with Hope of Teach­ing Mil­lions the Basics of Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course

 

Google’s Free App Analyzes Your Selfie and Then Finds Your Doppelganger in Museum Portraits

Hav­ing the abil­i­ty to vir­tu­al­ly explore the his­to­ry, back sto­ries, and cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance of art­works from over a thou­sand muse­ums gen­er­ates nowhere near the excite­ment as a fea­ture allow­ing users to upload self­ies in hopes of locat­ing an Insta­gram-wor­thy dop­pel­gänger some­where in this vast dig­i­tal col­lec­tion.

On the oth­er hand, if this low-brow inno­va­tion leads great hordes of mil­len­ni­als and iGen-ers to cross the thresh­olds of muse­ums in over 70 coun­tries, who are we to crit­i­cize?

So what if their pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion is snap­ping anoth­er self­ie with their Flem­ish Renais­sance twin? As long as one or two devel­op a pas­sion for art, or a par­tic­u­lar muse­um, artist, or peri­od, we’re good.

Alas, some dis­grun­tled users (prob­a­bly Gen X‑ers and Baby Boomers) are giv­ing the Google Arts & Cul­ture app (iPhone-Android) one-star reviews, based on their inabil­i­ty to find the only fea­ture for which they down­loaded it.

Allow us to walk you through.

After installing the app (iPhone-Android) on your phone or tablet, scroll down the home­page to the ques­tion “Is your por­trait in a muse­um?”

The sam­pling of art­works fram­ing this ques­tion sug­gest that the answer may be yes, regard­less of your race, though one need not be a Gueril­la Girl to won­der if Cau­casian users are draw­ing their match­es from a far larg­er pool than users of col­or…

Click “get start­ed.” (You’ll have to allow the app to access your device’s cam­era.)

Take a self­ie. (I sup­pose you could hedge your bets by switch­ing the cam­era to front-fac­ing ori­en­ta­tion and aim­ing it at a pleas­ing pre-exist­ing head­shot.)

The app will imme­di­ate­ly ana­lyze the self­ie, and with­in sec­onds, boom! Say hel­lo to your five clos­est match­es.

In the name of sci­ence, I sub­ject­ed myself to this process, grin­ning as if I was sit­ting for my fourth grade school pic­ture. I and received the fol­low­ing results, none of them high­er than 47%:

Vic­to­rio C. Edades’ Moth­er and Daugh­ter (flat­ter­ing­ly, I was pegged as the daugh­ter, though at 52, the resem­blance to the moth­er is a far truer match.)

Gus­tave Courbet’s Jo, la Belle Irlandaise (Say what? She’s got long red hair and skin like Snow White!)

Hen­ry Inman’s por­trait of Pres­i­dent Mar­tin Van Buren’s daugh­ter-in-law and defac­to White House host­ess, Angel­i­ca Sin­gle­ton Van Buren (Well, she looks ….con­ge­nial. I do enjoy par­ties…)

 and Sir Antho­ny van Dyck’s post-mortem paint­ing of Vene­tia, Lady Dig­by, on her Deathbed (Um…)

Hop­ing that a dif­fer­ent pose might yield a high­er match I chan­neled artist Nina Katchadouri­an, and adopt­ed a more painter­ly pose, unsmil­ing, head cocked, one hand lyri­cal­ly rest­ing on my breast­bone… for good mea­sure, I moved away from the win­dow. This time I got:

Joseph Stella’s Boy with a Bag­pipe (Maybe this wasn’t such a hot idea with regard to my self-image?)

Cipri­ano Efsio Oppo Por­trait of Isabel­la (See above.)

Adolph Tidemand’s Por­trait of Guro Sil­vers­dat­ter Tra­ven­dal (Is this uni­verse telling me it’s Babush­ka Time?)

Johannes Chris­tiann Janson’s A Woman Cut­ting Bread (aka Renounce All Van­i­ty Time?)

and Anders Zorn’s Madon­na (This is where the mean cheer­leader leaps out of the bath­room stall and calls me the horse from Guer­ni­ca, right?)

Mer­ci­ful­ly, none of these results topped the 50% mark, nor did any of the exper­i­ments I con­duct­ed using self­ies of my teenage son (whose 4th clos­est match had a long white beard).

Per­haps there are still a few bugs to work out?

If you’re tempt­ed to give Google Arts and Culture’s exper­i­men­tal por­trait fea­ture a go, please let us know how it worked out by post­ing a com­ment below. Maybe we’re twins, I mean, triplets!

If such folderol is beneath you, please avail your­self of the app’s orig­i­nal fea­tures:

  • Zoom Views — Expe­ri­ence every detail of the world’s great­est trea­sures
  • Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty — Grab your Google Card­board view­er and immerse your­self in arts and cul­ture
  • Browse by time and col­or — Explore art­works by fil­ter­ing them by col­or or time peri­od
  • Vir­tu­al tours — Step inside the most famous muse­ums in the world and vis­it icon­ic land­marks
  • Per­son­al col­lec­tion — Save your favorite art­works and share your col­lec­tions with friends
  • Near­by — Find muse­ums and cul­tur­al events around you
  • Exhibits — Take guid­ed tours curat­ed by experts
  • Dai­ly digest — Learn some­thing new every time you open the app
  • Art Rec­og­niz­er — Learn more about art­works at select muse­ums by point­ing your device cam­era at them, even when offline
  • Noti­fi­ca­tions — sub­scribe to receive updates on the top arts & cul­ture sto­ries

Down­load Google Arts and Cul­ture or update to Ver­sion 6.0.17 here (for Mac) or here (for Android).

Note: We’re get­ting reports that the app does­n’t seem to be avail­able in every geo­graph­i­cal loca­tion. If it’s not avail­able where you live, we apol­o­gize in advance.

via Good House­keep­ing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

Google Art Project Expands, Bring­ing 30,000 Works of Art from 151 Muse­ums to the Web

Google Cre­ates a Dig­i­tal Archive of World Fash­ion: Fea­tures 30,000 Images, Cov­er­ing 3,000 Years of Fash­ion His­to­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Google Launches Free Course on Deep Learning: The Science of Teaching Computers How to Teach Themselves

Last Fri­day, we men­tioned how Google’s arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence soft­ware Deep­Mind has the abil­i­ty to teach itself many things. It can teach itself how to walk, jump and run. Even take pro­fes­sion­al pic­tures. Or defeat the world’s best play­er of the Chi­nese strat­e­gy game, Go. The sci­ence of teach­ing com­put­ers how to do things is called Deep Learn­ing. And you can now immerse your­self in this world by tak­ing a free, 3‑month course on Deep Learn­ing itself. Offered through Udac­i­ty, the course is taught by Vin­cent Van­houcke, the tech­ni­cal lead in Google’s Brain team. You can learn more about the course via Van­houck­e’s blog post. Or just enroll here. (You will need to cre­ate an account with Udac­i­ty to get start­ed.)

The free course takes about 3 months to com­plete. It will be added to our list of Free Com­put­er Sci­ences cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion,  1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google’s Deep­Mind AI Teach­es Itself to Walk, and the Results Are Kooky, No Wait, Chill­ing

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

Take a Free Course on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy from Stan­ford Prof Marc Lev­oy

 

Google Creates a Digital Archive of World Fashion: Features 30,000 Images, Covering 3,000 Years of Fashion History

Both the fash­ion and art worlds fos­ter the cre­ation of rar­i­fied arti­facts inac­ces­si­ble to the major­i­ty of peo­ple, often one-of-a-kind pieces that exist in spe­cial­ly-designed spaces and flour­ish in cos­mopoli­tan cities. Does this mean that fash­ion is an art form like, say, paint­ing or pho­tog­ra­phy? Doesn’t fashion’s ephemer­al nature mark it as a very dif­fer­ent activ­i­ty? We might con­sid­er that we can ask many of the same ques­tions of haute cou­ture as we can of fine art. What are the social con­se­quences of tak­ing folk art forms, for exam­ple, out of their cul­tur­al con­text and plac­ing them in gallery spaces? What is the effect of tap­ping street fash­ion as inspi­ra­tion for the run­way, turn­ing it into objects of con­sump­tion for the wealthy?

Such ques­tions should remind us that fash­ion and the arts are embed­ded in human cul­tur­al and eco­nom­ic his­to­ry in some very sim­i­lar ways. But they are also very dif­fer­ent social prac­tices. Much like trends in food (both fine din­ing and cheap con­sum­ables) fash­ion has long been impli­cat­ed in the spread of mar­kets and indus­tries, labor exploita­tion, envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion, and even microbes. As Jason Daley points out at Smith­son­ian, “The craze for silk in ancient Rome helped spawn the Silk Road, a fash­ion for feath­ered hats con­tributed to the first Nation­al Wildlife Refuges. Fash­ion has even been wrapped up in pan­demics and infec­tious dis­eases.

So how to tell the sto­ry of a human activ­i­ty so deeply embed­ded in every facet of world his­to­ry? Expan­sive­ly. Google Arts & Cul­ture has attempt­ed to do so with its “We wear cul­ture” project. Promis­ing to tell “the sto­ries behind what we wear,” the project, as you can see in the teas­er video at the top, “trav­elled to over 40 coun­tries, col­lab­o­rat­ing with more than 180 cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions and their world-renowned his­to­ri­ans and cura­tors to bring their tex­tile and fash­ion col­lec­tions to life.” Cov­er­ing 3,000 years of his­to­ry, “We wear cul­ture” uses video, his­tor­i­cal images, short quotes and blurbs, and fash­ion pho­tog­ra­phy to cre­ate a series of online gallery exhibits of, for exam­ple, “The Icons,” pro­files of design­ers like Oscar de la Renta, Coco Chanel, and Issey Miyake.

Anoth­er exhib­it “Fash­ion as Art” includes a fea­ture on Florence’s Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo, a gallery ded­i­cat­ed to the famous design­er and con­tain­ing 10,000 mod­els of shoes he cre­at­ed or owned. Ask­ing the ques­tion “is fash­ion art?”, the exhib­it “analy­ses the forms of dia­logue between these two worlds: rec­i­p­ro­cal inspi­ra­tions, over­laps and col­lab­o­ra­tions, from the expe­ri­ences of the Pre-Raphaelites to those of Futur­ism, and from Sur­re­al­ism to Rad­i­cal Fash­ion.” It’s a won­der they don’t men­tion the Bauhaus school, many of whose res­i­dent artists rad­i­cal­ized fash­ion design, though their geo­met­ric odd­i­ties seem to have had lit­tle effect on Fer­rag­amo.

As you might expect, the empha­sis here is on high fash­ion, pri­mar­i­ly. When it comes to telling the sto­ries of how most peo­ple in the world have expe­ri­enced fash­ion, Google adopts a very Euro­pean, sup­ply side, per­spec­tive, one in which “The impact of fash­ion,” as one exhib­it is called, spans cat­e­gories “from the econ­o­my and job cre­ation, to help­ing empow­er com­mu­ni­ties.” Non-Euro­pean cloth­ing mak­ers gen­er­al­ly appear as anony­mous folk arti­sans and crafts­peo­ple who serve the larg­er goal of pro­vid­ing mate­ri­als and inspi­ra­tion for the big names.

Cul­tur­al his­to­ri­ans may lament the lack of crit­i­cal or schol­ar­ly per­spec­tives on pop­u­lar cul­ture, the dis­tinct lack of oth­er cul­tur­al points of view, and the intense focus on trends and per­son­al­i­ties. But per­haps to do so is to miss the point of a project like this one—or of the fash­ion world as a whole. As with fine art, the sto­ries of fash­ion are often all about trends and per­son­al­i­ties, and about mate­ri­als and mar­ket forces.

To cap­i­tal­ize on that fact, “We wear cul­ture” has a num­ber of inter­ac­tive, 360 degree videos on its YouTube page, as well as short, adver­tis­ing-like videos, like that above on ripped jeans, part of a series called “Trends Decod­ed.” Kate Lauter­bach, the pro­gram man­ag­er at Google Arts & Cul­ture, high­lights the videos below on the Google blog (be aware, the inter­ac­tive fea­ture will not work in Safari).

  • Find out how Chanel’s black dress made it accept­able for women to wear black on any occa­sion (Musée des Arts Déco­rat­ifs, Paris, France — 1925)
  • Step on up—way up—to learn how Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s sparkling red high heels became an expres­sion of empow­er­ment, suc­cess and sex­i­ness for women (Museo Sal­va­tore Fer­rag­amo from Flo­rence, Italy — 1959)
  • See design­er Vivi­enne West­wood’s unique take on the corset, one of the most con­tro­ver­sial gar­ments in his­to­ry (Vic­to­ria and Albert Muse­um, Lon­don, UK — 1990)
  • Dis­cov­er the Comme des Garçons sweater and skirt with which Rei Kawakubo brought the aes­thet­ics and crafts­man­ship of Japan­ese design onto the glob­al fash­ion stage (Kyoto Cos­tume Insti­tute, Kyoto, Japan — 1983)

Does the project yet deliv­er on its promise, to “tell the sto­ries behind what we wear”? That all depends, I sup­pose, on who “we” are. It is a very valu­able resource for stu­dents of high fash­ion, as well as “a pleas­ant way to lose an after­noon,” writes Marc Bain at Quartz, one that “may give you a new under­stand­ing of what’s hang­ing in your own clos­et.”

We wear cul­ture” fea­tures 30,000 fash­ion pieces and more than 450 exhibits. Start brows­ing here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Klee & Oth­er Bauhaus Artists Designed Inge­nious Cos­tumes Like You’ve Nev­er Seen Before

1930s Fash­ion Design­ers Pre­dict How Peo­ple Would Dress in the Year 2000

Punk Meets High Fash­ion in Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Exhi­bi­tion PUNK: Chaos to Cou­ture

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

Learn Python: A Free Online Course from Google

Google has cre­at­ed a free Python class designed for “peo­ple with a lit­tle bit of pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence who want to learn Python.” A for­tu­nate thing since Python is a com­put­er lan­guage that’s now strong­ly in demand. (By the way, did you know that Python takes its name from Mon­ty Python? A true sto­ry.)

Accord­ing to Google’s course descrip­tion:

The class includes “writ­ten mate­ri­als, lec­ture videos, and lots of code exer­cis­es to prac­tice Python cod­ing. These mate­ri­als are used with­in Google to intro­duce Python to peo­ple who have just a lit­tle pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence. The first exer­cis­es work on basic Python con­cepts like strings and lists, build­ing up to the lat­er exer­cis­es which are full pro­grams deal­ing with text files, process­es, and http con­nec­tions. The class is geared for peo­ple who have a lit­tle bit of pro­gram­ming expe­ri­ence in some lan­guage, enough to know what a “vari­able” or “if state­ment” is. Beyond that, you do not need to be an expert pro­gram­mer to use this mate­r­i­al.

This mate­r­i­al was cre­at­ed by Nick Par­lante work­ing in the engE­DU group at Google. Google’s Python class will be added to our list of Free Online Com­put­er Sci­ence Cours­es, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

For any­one inter­est­ed in an intro­duc­to­ry pro­gram­ming course that uses Python, see: Intro­duc­tion to Com­put­er Sci­ence and Pro­gram­ming: A Free Course from MIT.

Oth­er out­fits offer­ing free instruc­tion in Python include Udac­i­tyCodecad­e­my, and Cours­era.

If you’re look­ing for a gen­er­al­ly well-reviewed text­book, con­sid­er Learn­ing Python, 5th edi­tion (from O’Reil­ly Media.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Performing Arts, From the Royal Shakespeare Company to the Paris Opera Ballet

We’ve long been able to read books online. More recent­ly, the inter­net has also become a favored dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tem for movies, and cer­tain­ly we’ve all heard more than enough about the effects of down­load­ing and stream­ing on the music indus­try. No new tech­nol­o­gy can quite sub­sti­tute, yet, for a vis­it to the muse­um, but as we’ve often post­ed about here, many of the muse­ums them­selves have gone ahead and made their paint­ings, sculp­tures, and oth­er arti­facts view­able in great detail online. At this point, will the expe­ri­ence of any art form at all remain unavail­able to us on the inter­net?

Not long ago, I would have named any of the per­form­ing arts, but the brains at the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute have now got around to those most liv­ing of all forms as well. The New York Times’ Michael Coop­er writes of our new­found abil­i­ty, through a series of 360-degree videos, to “stand, vir­tu­al­ly, on the stage of the Palais Gar­nier, among the dancers of the Paris Opera Bal­let,” ” jour­ney to Strat­ford-upon-Avon, where you can try to keep up with a fre­net­ic Alex Has­sell of the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny as Hen­ry V, exhort­ing his troops to go ‘once more unto the breach,’ ” or “go onstage at Carnegie Hall, where the video places you smack in the mid­dle of the Philadel­phia Orches­tra as it plays a rous­ing ‘In the Hall of the Moun­tain King.’ ”

These come as part of a vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tion involv­ing “an inno­v­a­tive assem­blage of per­form­ing arts groups” that went live ear­li­er this month at the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute’s site. The orga­ni­za­tions, now more than 60 in total, include not just the Paris Opera, the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny, and Carnegie Hall, but the Berlin Phil­har­mon­ic, the Vien­na State Opera, the Amer­i­can Bal­let The­ater, the Amer­i­can Muse­um of Mag­ic, the Brook­lyn Acad­e­my of Music, the Coun­try Music Hall of Fame, the John F. Kennedy Cen­ter for the Per­form­ing Arts, the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera, and the Rome Opera. You can find the per­for­mances neat­ly divid­ed into cat­e­gories: Music, OperaThe­atre, Dance, and Per­for­mance Art.

Google’s blog describes some of the tech­nol­o­gy behind all this, includ­ing the 360-degree per­for­mance record­ings, the “indoor Street View imagery” of the grand venues where many of the per­for­mances hap­pen, and the “ultra-high res­o­lu­tion Gigapix­el” images avail­able for your scruti­ny. When you play the video above of the Philadel­phia Orches­tra, you can click and drag to view the per­for­mance from every pos­si­ble angle from your van­tage right there in the midst of the musi­cians. I can’t imag­ine what the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute will come up with next, but sure­ly it won’t be long before we can see things from the Black Swan’s point of view.

You can start explor­ing the 360s per­for­mances here.

via The New York Times/Google

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bal­let Dancers Do Their Hard­est Moves in Slow Motion

New Web Site, “The Opera Plat­form,” Lets You Watch La Travi­a­ta and Oth­er First-Class Operas Free Online

40,000 Art­works from 250 Muse­ums, Now View­able for Free at the Redesigned Google Art Project

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­maand the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future? Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Climb Virtually Up “El Capitan,” Yosemite’s Iconic Rock Wall, With Google Street View

Google has used its Street View tech­nol­o­gy to let you take vir­tu­al tours of some far-flung places — places like Shackleton’s Antarc­tic, Mt. Ever­est and oth­er high moun­tain peaks, The Ama­zon Riv­er, and The Grand Canyon. Now you can add to the list, El Cap­i­tan, the icon­ic rock wall in the mid­dle of Yosemite Nation­al Park.

Yes­ter­day, Google’s offi­cial blog declared, “Today we’re launch­ing our first-ever ver­ti­cal Street View col­lec­tion, giv­ing you the oppor­tu­ni­ty to climb 3,000 feet up the world’s most famous rock wall: Yosemite’s El Cap­i­tan. To bring you this new imagery, we part­nered with leg­endary climbers Lynn Hill, Alex Hon­nold and Tom­my Cald­well.” Above, you can see this trio in action, talk­ing about what makes El Cap a mec­ca for rock climbers every­where.

To cre­ate this Street View of El Cap­i­tan, Hill, Hon­nold and Cald­well worked with Google engi­neers to fig­ure out how to haul a cam­era up this sheer rock face. And what you ulti­mate­ly get are some amaz­ing 360-degree panoram­ic images. Accord­ing to Cald­well, these “are the clos­est thing I’ve ever wit­nessed to actu­al­ly being thou­sands of feet up a ver­ti­cal rock face—better than any video or pho­to.” Which, hat­ing heights, is good enough for me.

via Google Blog

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.