It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, kids. On Monday, at noon California time, Twitch will start a marathon airing of Mister Roger’s Neighborhood, streaming all 886 episodes of the classic children’s TV show. If you have 17 free days, you can watch the marathon from start to finish. During this time, Twitch will also be running a fundraiser for PBS, which faces stiff funding cuts if “He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named” has his way.
Enjoy the epic broadcast, and don’t miss some classic Mister Rogers scenes in the Relateds below.
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In the 21st century, most of us have tried our hand at making some kind of digital art or another — even if only touching up cellphone photos of ourselves — but imagine the task of producing it 50 years ago. To make digital art before the world had barely heard the term “digital” required access to a mainframe computer, those hugely expensive hulks that filled rooms and printed out reams and reams of paper data, and the considerable technical know-how to operate it.
But the achievement also, to go by the very early example of Hiroshi Kawano, required a background in philosophy. A graduate of the University of Tokyo majoring in aesthetics and the philosophy of science before becoming a research assistant at that school and then a lecturer at the Tokyo Metropolitan College of Air-Technology, Kawano marshaled his knowledge and experience to create these “digital Mondrians,” so described because of their computer-generated resemblance to that Dutch painter’s most rigorously angular, solidly colored work.
Kawano had drawn inspiration, according to a Deutsche Welle article on his donation of his archives to Germany’s Center for Media Art, from “the writings of the German philosopher Max Bense, who proposed (among other things) the idea of measuring beauty using scientific rules. At the same time, Kawano heard that scientists were using computers to create music. Putting the two together, he decided to explore the possibility of using a computer to program beauty.”
Doing so required “writing programs in complex computer languages, then laboriously punching these programs into hundreds of cards before feeding them into the machine.” And “while the design of his works produced during the 1960s might look simple — they’re not. They are the result of complex mathematical algorithms programmed so that, although Kawano sets the rules for how the picture could look, he can’t determine exactly what will appear on the printer.”
Just before Kawano passed away in 2012, the ZKM (or Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe), celebrated his pioneering digital art with the exhibition “The Philosopher at the Computer,” some of which you can see in this German-language video clip. “The retrospective emphasizes Kawano’s special role in the circle of pioneers in ‘computer art,’ ” says its introduction. “He was neither artist, who discovered the computer as a new production medium and theme, nor engineer who came to art via the new machine, but a philosopher, who left his desk for the computer center to experiment with theoretical models.”
Can computers create art? Can they even be used to create art? These questions now have practically obvious answers in the affirmative, but back in 1964 when Kawano produced the first of these pieces, working through trial and error with the advice of the curious staff of his university’s computer center, the questions must have sounded impossibly philosophical. Today, writes Overhead Compartment’s Claudio Rivera, Kawano’s digital Mondrians “suggest themselves as an oddly ephemeral transition in the nexus of technology and art. The familiar colors and forms are flash-frozen in crystalline pixelation, almost as if seized up in the final, overheated throes of a suddenly-too-old computer.”
Pity the hedgehog. The freezing temperatures of winter compel them to cozy up to others of its kind, but the prickly spines covering their bodies prevent them from sustaining the easy, ongoing intimacy they so crave.
It’s a hell of a metaphor for human relationships, compliments of 19th-century philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. It certainly spoke to Sigmund Freud, who devoted his life trying to figure out why so many of us resort to petty behaviors, spurning those we love, and sabotaging ourselves at every turn.
Popular representations would have us believe that the father of psychoanalysis was a detached sort of know-it-all, emotionally superior to the basket cases sniveling on his couch. Not so. As he noted in 1897:
I have been through some kind of neurotic experience, curious states… twilight thoughts, veiled doubts… The chief patient I am preoccupied with is myself… my little hysteria… the analysis is more difficult than any other. Something from the deepest depths of my own neurosis sets itself against any advance in understanding neuroses…
We feel ya’, doc, and so does The School of Life, the London-based organization for developing emotional intelligence, co-founded by philosophical essayist, Alain de Botton:
… consulting a psychotherapist should be as accessible and as normal as developing your career, getting help for a physical problem, or going to the gym to get healthy. Just as we take care of our bodies and physical health, a vital element of self-care is devoting focused time and energy to exploring and understanding our thoughts and feelings.
It’s not for everyone. There are those who are determined to pursue the path to contentment and self-knowledge solo, impervious to Freud’s belief that “No one who disdains the key will ever be able to unlock the door.”
The therapy-averse can still learn something from the video above. Narrator de Botton charms his way through an easily digested overview of Freud’s personal and professional life, and the resulting tenets of psychoanalysis.
And filmmaker Mad Adam ensures that this brief trip through the infant phases—oral, anal, phallic—will be a jolly one, replete with droll, mostly vintage images.
Most healthy people practice at least some form of what we call these days “self-care,” whether it be yoga, meditation, running, writing, art, music, therapy, coloring books, or what-have-you. And if you’re functioning tolerably well in the madness of our times, you’re probably dipping regularly into the well of at least one restorative discipline, in addition to whatever larger beliefs you may hold.
But perhaps you feel at loose ends—unable to find the time or money for yoga classes or painting, feeling too restless to sit motionless for half an hour or more a day.… The activities that sustain our psyches should not feel unattainable. One need not be a yogi, Zen monk, marathoner, or Impressionist to find regular fulfilment in life. Perhaps regular, ordinary activities have the power to make us just as happy.
Recent research suggests that tasks such as “knitting, crocheting and jam-making” can “work wonders for wellbeing,” writes Tom Ough at The Telegraph, as can other creative practices like “cooking, baking, performing music, painting, drawing, sketching, digital design and creative writing.” All may have profound effects on emotional health. This list might expand indefinitely to include any hands-on activity with measurable results, from woodworking to beekeeping.
A 2016 study of 658 students at New Zealand’s Otago University found that engaging in small creative pursuits on a daily basis produces enthusiasm and feelings of “flourishing”—“a mental health term describing happiness and meaning.” The results of, say, making a loaf of bread or a scarf, don’t simply benefit us in the moment, but carry over into the future. As the study’s lead author Tamlin Connor notes, “engaging in creative behaviour leads to increases in well-being the next day, and this increased well-being is likely to facilitate creative activity on the same day.”
The more we bake, the more we’ll want to bake, the happier we’ll feel.
Does focusing our attention on small, achievable daily tasks lead to the kind of metaphysical fulfilment most people seem to crave—what Viktor Frankl called “man’s search for meaning”? Not necessarily, no. “Recent research suggests,” notes Daisy Grewal at Scientific American, “that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways.” Frankl may not be wrong about the need for meaning, but even he admitted that seeking it out is not identical to the pursuit of happiness.
In a 2013 study published in The Journal of Positive Psychology, Roy Baumeister, Kathleen Vohs, Jennifer Aaker, and Emily Garbinsky found that happiness, “flourishing,” or emotional well-being correlate strongly with “satisfying one’s needs and wants” as well as with “being a giver rather than a taker.” Philosophy, politics, religion, and art may seek truth or coherence, but while “concerns with personal identity and expressing the self contributed to meaning,” they have little lasting effect on happiness, as many a philosopher, priest, or poet may tell you. On the other hand, while having comfortable economic means does measurably improve happiness, it does not contribute significantly to a sense of larger purpose (that which, Frankl argued strenuously, can save our lives in times of crisis).
Baumeister and his colleagues obtained their findings by surveying around 400 American adults over a period of three weeks, during which time the participants monitored a variety of daily activities. In one reading of the Otago University study, Daisy Meager at Vicefocuses specially on baking as a means to ward off a “shitty mood.” It may be a matter of taste—some may prefer making sauces to cakes. The effects are the same, “a common cure,” writes Danny Lewis at Smithsonian, “for stress or feeling down.”
Further arguing, however, for baking as a special form of “flourishing,” Julie Thomson at HuffPodescribes the act as “a productive form of self-expression and communication” and consults with experts like Ohana and Donna Pincus, associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Boston University, who told Thomson, “Baking has the benefit of allowing people creative expression.” People who may not be natural artists, writers, or musicians. Yet baking is also a kind of problem-solving as well as a creative act, and “actually requires a lot of full attention.”
You have to measure, focus physically on rolling out dough. If you’re focusing on smell and taste, on being present with what you’re creating, that act of mindfulness in that present moment can also have a result in stress reduction.
The reference to mindfulness is apt. (Go ahead and read about a course on “Breaditation,” make fun of it, then try it at home.) I know not a few people who swear they cannot meditate to save their lives, but who will happily spend a couple hours on a Saturday evening baking brioche or plates of cookies. But there’s more to it than the meditative absorption that comes from mindful activity. Baking, says Pincus—and cooking in general—is a form of altruism. “The nice thing about baking,” she ways, “is that you have such a tangible reward at the end and that can feel very beneficial to others.”
So the research suggests that—whatever activities one gravitates toward—finding happiness on a daily basis involves more than using Pinterest boards and magazines to craft a cozy, stylish new life. Though any sustained creative activity may do the trick, we approach closer to lasting happiness as well as greater fulfillment—to meaning—when we direct activity to a “connection with other people” through generosity.
Right now, Machine Learning and Data Science are two hot topics, the subject of many courses being offered at universities today. Above, you can watch a playlist of 18 lectures from a course called Learning From Data: A Machine Learning Course, taught by Caltech’s Feynman Prize-winning professor Yaser Abu-Mostafa. The course is summarized as follows:
This is an introductory course in machine learning (ML) that covers the basic theory, algorithms, and applications. ML is a key technology in Big Data, and in many financial, medical, commercial, and scientific applications. It enables computational systems to adaptively improve their performance with experience accumulated from the observed data. ML has become one of the hottest fields of study today, taken up by undergraduate and graduate students from 15 different majors at Caltech. This course balances theory and practice, and covers the mathematical as well as the heuristic aspects. The lectures follow each other in a story-like fashion.
A real Caltech course (it’s not watered down at all), the course assumes a familiarity with basic probability, matrices, and calculus.
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Last year, we flagged Bill Wurtz’s “History of Japan,” an idiosyncratic video that covered 40,000 years of Japanese history in 9 minutes–everything from the rise of technology and religion, to the influence of China on Japan’s language and brand of buddhism, the emergence of the samurai, the country’s vexed relationship with the West, and the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Although quantity isn’t everything, the video clocked more than 25 million views on YouTube–pretty impressive considering that Wurtz created the video as “a prototype to see if I could do a long video in the first place.”
Now comes his new, more expansive video–History of the World in 20 minutes. Released on Wednesday, the video has already surpassed 4.5 millions views (surely more by the time you read this), and it may teach you a thing … or two … about world history. Have fun with it. And if you’re looking for meatier media that covers the big sweep of history, check out the items in the Relateds below.
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Earlier this week, an organization called “Today Is Art Day” launched a Kickstarter campaign to produce the latest in a line of action figures. First came the Vincent van Gogh action figure. Now, joining him in the ‘Art History Heroes Collection,’ there will be a Frida Kahlo figure. (Yes, they’ve already raised $19,490, surpassing their $14,585 goal.) Standing 5 inches tall, made of high quality plastic, Frida will come with a monkey attached to her back, and a detachable surrealist heart. Expect delivery in September.
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In 1945 Alfred Hitchcock had to explain one of Hollywood’s unwritten rules to Salvador Dalí: No, you can’t pour live ants all over Ingrid Bergman! Hitchcock had approached Dalí for help with a dream sequence in his upcoming thriller, Spellbound, starring Bergman and Gregory Peck. He was unhappy with the fuzziness of Hollywood dream sequences. “I wanted to convey the dream with great visual sharpness and clarity–sharper than film itself,” Hitchcock recalled in a 1962 interview with François Truffaut. “I wanted Dali because of the architectural sharpness of his work. Chirico has the same quality, you know, the long shadows, the infinity of distance and the converging lines of perspective. But Dali had some strange ideas. He wanted a statue to crack like a shell falling apart, with ants crawling all over it. And underneath, there would be Ingrid Bergman, covered by ants! It just wasn’t possible.” The result you can watch below:
Note: This video first appeared on our site in 2011. Seeing that it’s Dali’s birthday today, we’re bringing it back!
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Everyone knows that if you want to make a movie, you first have to write down its story. Many of us have tried our hands at writing movie stories ourselves — as treatments, screenplays, or whichever other forms the industry has come up with — and some have made careers out of it. But even if a film begins on the page, it doesn’t, of course, remain there; up on screen, the final product has to tell its story visually as much as it does with words, and usually even more so. Lewis Bond, the video essayist behind the cinema-analyzing Youtube channel Channel Criswell, understands that better than most, hence his three essays dedicated to the three most important elements of visual storytelling, the first chapter of which, “Colour in Storytelling,” we featured a couple months ago here on Open Culture.
The second, “Composition in Storytelling,” explores the possibilities inherent in arranging people, places, and things within a shot. “Deciding the placement of subjects through the viewfinder of a camera isn’t merely a technical decision,” says Bond, “it’s an expressive one.”
Beyond showing the audience what they need to see to understand the story, filmmakers have relied on “tried and tested formulas to make an image pleasing to the eye” such as the rule of thirds, the golden ratio, and triangular composition. But beyond those basics opens up the vast creative space of composing images in order to carefully guide the audience’s attention, craft symbols and subtexts, and make the power of a scene felt — all as dependent upon what gets left out of the picture as what gets put in.
Finally, “Editing in Storytelling” covers the step of the filmmaking process widely considered one of the most important, even more so than writing the story in the first place. “Beyond the basic function of putting a film together,” says Bond, “the craftsmanship of editing can be dealt with such subtlety that it can be the foundation of a film’s pace, its atmosphere — it can even be the enriching ingredient to strengthen all the film’s themes, and you may not even notice.” Though the editor holds “total manipulation over our emotions,” deciding what we see, when we see it, and how we see it, they also labor under the responsibility of knowing the film will stand or fall on their skill. Watch Channel Criswell’s entire visual storytelling essay trilogy and you’ll notice all their techniques much more easily while watching movies — especially if you start watching them, as you might well find yourself inspired to do, with the sound off.
As a way of currying favor with a monarch, Johannes Klencke’s gift to Charles II (1630–1685) was one of the most audacious and beautiful objects ever offered. Klencke was a Dutch sugar merchant and knew that the king loved maps, and hoped that his gift would land him a favorable trading deal. (It did. He got knighted.)
The above video, which the British Library posted by way of Daniel Crouch Rare Books, shows a time-lapse of the multiple day shoot, which took several people, a very large room, several lights, and a specially designed stand to hold the heavy volume.
The public domain images are now part of the Library’s Picturing Places website, which holds many examples of rare maps, landscapes, and large scale technical drawings.
The book itself, as huge as it might be, is actually very fragile, so now the public and scholars can fully explore these maps at leisure while the original goes back into storage.
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.
Last year, Josh Baines at dance music site Thump revisited the 2004 video for “Call on Me,” a dancefloor anthem built around a highly recognizable loop from Steve Winwood’s 1987 hit, “Valerie.” Drawing on the song’s inherent nostalgia factor, the video—which Baines calls, without exaggeration, “the sexiest video of all time”—stages a ridiculously lewd, sweaty aerobics class, recalling the close association during the 1980s fitness craze between sexy aerobics videos and dance music, in advertisements, TV shows, MTV, movies like Hardbodies and its even more ludicrous sequel—and, of course, John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis’s hilarious Perfect, which directly inspired “Call on Me.”
The “Call on Me” video is so salacious, in fact, that it nearly caused then British Prime Minister Tony Blair to fall off his rowing machine while watching it, a scene that would fit right in to any 80s workout sex comedy. Might we imagine similar scenes of middle-aged Soviet ministers and apparatchiks losing their cool while sweating to Russian electro and watching fitness videos like “Rhythm,” at the top? Or perhaps even the far-less-sexy morning program above from 1987, with its synthpop soundtrack, baggy sweatsuits, and what look like futon mattresses for exercise mats?
In another example of Soviet aerobics and dance music, one must rely upon imagination to get the moves right. This record, Aerobic Exercises by a collection of obscure artists, was meant for more than just home workouts, as important as they are.
The record label Melodiya—the only record label in Soviet Russia—and the album’s artists managed to get 1984’s Aerobic Exercises certified by the “USSR Sports Committee,” who, writes Terry Matthew at 5 Magazine, “envisioned these records as a sort of robot replacing athletic trainers.” “I don’t know if bureaucrats dream,” writes Matthew, “but if they do, I can imagine them envisioning a whole nation of comrades in legwarmers, rhythmically jogging and touching their toes in time with some of the most fascinating Italo-sounding tracks of the era.”
There is a reason the music sounds so interesting, though some of it, Matthews admits, is “outright putrid.” Most of the artists were well-known engineers and producers recording under pseudonyms. These were people already working in a long tradition of Soviet music that stretched back to Leon Theremin but also drew influence from Europe and the U.S.—“a Funk movement in the Soviet Union, and one for Disco, and an electronic music movement too, both official & above ground and underground and somewhere in between.” Many of those artists only managed to get records made “through luck, through compromise and sometimes through subterfuge.” Records like Aerobic Exercise represent some combination of the last two categories, “ingeniously and absurdly” disguising short original tracks as fitness mood music.
You’ll notice that there’s little instruction on some of these tracks, and it’s in the vocal contributions that much of the music’s “Italo roots are exposed” notes Matthew, referring to the grand tradition of mostly nonsensical Italo-disco, a term for a variety of electronic dance music made in Italy throughout the late 70s and 80s. These tracks “abide and generally adhere to the superficial but abiding principle of Italo—that it’s less important what words mean compared to how they sound.” (Russian speakers will have to confirm this contention, though one doesn’t need to stretch to discern the commands “Left, Right, Left Right!”) If some of this music sounds strikingly hip, that’s because it draws from the same Euro-disco well as so many contemporary retro-electro acts. (I couldn’t help but think of Mira Aroyo’s Bulgarian contributions to Ladytron.)
Aerobic Exercise was apparently a success, such that Melodiya “launched an entire series of records in the style of the album called Sport and Music,” a four LP-collection with much less focus and quality control. Moving away from the aerobics theme, the second of these albums featured “some kind of competitive skateboarder on the cover” and some “pretty dreadful Hollywood Lite incidental music. By the third volume, former jazz musicians were beating out 3rd rate riffs with vaguely electronic-sounding overtones.” As with any fad, derivative copies over several generations will always be subject to serious aesthetic degradation. But for serious fans of Soviet dance music, of 80s fitness, or, ideally, of both, Aerobic Exercise represents something truly special.
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