The March of Intellect: Newspaper Cartoons Satirize the Belief in Technological Progress in 1820s England

Before the Industrial Revolution, few had occasion to consider the impact of technology on their lives. A few decades in, however, certain segments of society thought about little else. That, in any case, is the impression given by the debate over what the English press of the early nineteenth century called the “March of Intellect,” a label for the apparently polarizing discourse that arose from not just the development of industrial technology but the dissemination of “useful knowledge” that followed in its wake. Was this sort of education an engine of progress, or simply of disorder?

The March of Intellect’s most vivid legacy consists of a series of newspaper cartoons published in the eighteen-twenties. They depict a world, as Hunter Dukes writes at the Public Domain Review, where “extravagantly dressed ladies window-shop for pastel finery and forgo stairwells in favor of belt-driven slides” while “a child is moments away from being paved into the road by a carriage at full gallop”; where “men gorge themselves on pineapples and guzzle bottles at the Champagne Depot” and “postmen flit around with winged capes”; where “even convicts have it better: they embark for New South Wales on a gargoyle zeppelin, but still have panoramic views.”

So far, so Victorian. One could argue more or less in favor of the world described above, as rendered by artist William Heath. But in the future as envisioned in the cartoon at the top of the post by Robert Seymour (now best known as the original illustrator of Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers), the March of Intellect takes on a flamboyantly malign aspect.

In it “a jolly automaton stomps across society,” writes Dukes. “Its head is a literal stack of knowledge — tomes of history, philosophy, and mechanic manuals power two gas-lantern eyes. It wears secular London University as a crown.” It sweeps away “pleas, pleadings, delayed parliamentary bills, and obsolete laws. Vicars, rectors, and quack doctors are turned on their heads.”

Nearly two centuries later, most would side instinctively with the participants in the March of Intellect debate who saw the provision of technical and scientific knowledge to then-less-educated groups — women, children, the working class — as an unambiguous good. Yet we may also feel trepidation about the technologies emerging in our own time, when, to name a current example, “artificially intelligent chatbots have fueled ongoing anxieties about the mechanization of intellectual labor.” Every day brings new apocalyptic speculations about the rise of powerful thinking machines running roughshod over humanity. If no artist today is illustrating them quite so entertainingly as Heath and Seymour did, so much the worse for our time.

via Public Domain Review

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 or on Facebook.

Watch 13 Levels of Drumming, from Easy to Complex, Explained by Snarky Puppy Drummer Larnell Lewis

Above, Snarky Puppy drummer Larnell Lewis explains drumming in 13 levels of difficulty, from easy to complex, showing how “drum techniques build upon each other as the easiest levels incorporate the hi-hat, bass and snare drums, and more difficult levels include polyrhythms, the floor tom, ride cymbals, syncopation and much more.” It’s fun to watch. In another video from the same series produced by Wired magazine, musician Jacob Collier explains the concept of harmony with increasing difficulty to five different people– a child, a teen, a college student, a professional, and jazz legend Herbie Hancock. Enjoy…

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Amélie Was Really a KGB Spy: Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet Re-Edits His Beloved Film, Amélie, into a New Comedic Short

No French film of this century is more beloved than Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie. Or rather, no protagonist of a French film in this century is more beloved than Audrey Tautou’s eponymous Amélie. Hence, no doubt, why the movie is best known by that short version of its title rather than by the long version, Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain. Now, more than twenty years after the release of Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain, Jeunet has followed it up with La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain, which you can watch (with optional French or English subtitles) just above.

“After all this time,” Jeunet says in a brief introduction, “I felt the moment was right to tell you, at long last, the real story of Amélie Poulain.” She turns out, according to his voice-over narration that follows, not to be a simple Montmartre waitress who dedicates herself to surreptitiously enriching the lives of those around her.

In fact she works as a spy for the KGB, having first been recruited in childhood with the promise of candy bars. That may sound far-fetched, but Jeunet supports every detail of Amélie’s double life, and of the story of her re-entry into espionage after the fall of the Berlin Wall, using the very same scenes and involving the very same characters we remember from Amélie.

On one level, La véritable histoire d’Amélie Poulain testifies to the enduring playfulness that keeps Jeunet from taking his own work — even the work that became a global phenomenon — too seriously. (Indeed, that spirit is on display in the original movie’s exaggeration of whimsical-French-film tropes.) Much like the Hollywoodified Kubrick trailers we previously featured here on Open Culture, this new short also constitutes a demonstration of how the meaning and impact of cinema are created not by the images themselves, but rather by their context and juxtaposition. And so, with characteristic cleverness, Jeunet has reinvented Amélie as a Soviet agent by employing the principles of Soviet montage.

via Kottke

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 or on Facebook.

Behold an Astonishing Near-Nightly Spectacle in the Lightning Capital of the World

Extreme weather conditions have become a topic of grave concern. Are floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and catastrophic storms the new normal?

Just for a moment, let’s travel to a place where extreme weather has always been the norm: Lake Maracaibo in northwestern Venezuela.

According to NASA’s Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission‘s lightning image sensor, it is the lightning capital of the world.

Chalk it up to the unique geography and climate conditions near the confluence of the lake and the Catatumbo River. At night, the moist warm air above the water collides with cool breezes rolling down from the Andes, creating an average of 297 thunderstorms a year.

Watching photographer Jonas Piontek‘s short film documenting the phenomenon, above, it’s not surprising that chief among his tips for shooting lightning at night is a pointed warning to always keep a safe distance from the storm. While viewable from as far as 400 kilometers away, the area nearest the lightning activity can average 28 strikes per minute.

More than 400 years before Piontek shared his impressions with the world, Spanish poet Lope de Vega tapped Catatumbo lightning in his epic 1597 poem La Dragontea, crediting it, erroneously, with having  thwarted Sir Francis Drake‘s plans to conquer the city of Maracaibo under cover of night. His poetic license was persuasive enough that it’s still an accepted part of the myth.

The “eternal storm” did however give Venezuelan naval forces a genuine natural assist, by illuminating a squadron of Spanish ships on Lake Maracaibo, which they defeated on July 24, 1823, clearing the way to independence.

Once upon a time, large numbers of local fishermen took advantage of their prime position to fish by night, although with recent deforestation, political conflict, and economic decline decimating the villages where they live in traditional stilted houses, their livelihood is in decline.

Meanwhile the Eternal Storm has itself been affected by forces of extreme weather. In 2010, a drought occasioned by a particularly strong El Niño, caused lightning activity to cease for 6 weeks, its longest disappearance in 104 years.

Environmentalist Erik Quiroga, who is campaigning for the Catatumbo lightning to be designated as the world’s first UNESCO World Heritage Weather Phenomenon warns, “This is a unique gift and we are at risk of losing it.”

See more of Jonas Piontek’s Catatumbo lightning photographs here.

– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

Explore the Hereford Mappa Mundi, the Largest Medieval Map Still in Existence (Circa 1300)

If you wanted to see a map of the world in the fourteenth century, you could hardly just pull up Google Earth. But you could, provided you lived somewhere in or near the British Isles, make a pilgrimage to Hereford Cathedral. There you would find the shrine of St. Thomas Cantilupe, the main attraction for the true believer, but also what we now know as the Hereford Mappa Mundi, a large-scale (64″ x 52″) depiction of the entire world — or at least entire world as conceived in the pious English mind of the Middle Ages, which turns out to be almost unrecognizable at first glance today.

Created around 1300, the Hereford Mappa Mundi “serves as a sort of visual encyclopedia of the period, with drawings inspired by Biblical times through the Middle Ages,” write Chris Griffiths and Thomas Buttery at BBC Travel.

“In addition to illustrating events marking the history of humankind and 420 cities and geographical features, the map shows plants, animals, birds and strange or unknown creatures, and people.” These include one “‘Blemmye’ — a war-like creature with no head, but with facial features in its chest,” two “Sciapods,” “men with one large foot,” and “four cave-dwelling Troglodites,” one of whom feasts on a snake.

Amid geography we would now consider severely limited as well as fairly mangled — Europe is labeled as Asia, and vice versa, to name only the most obvious mistake — the map also includes “supernatural scenes from classical Greek and Roman mythology, Biblical tales and a collection of popular legends and stories.” As such, this reflects less about the world itself than about humanity’s worldview in an era that drew fewer lines of demarcation between fact and legend. You can learn more about what it has to tell us in the Modern History TV video below, as well as in the video further down from Youtuber ShūBa̱ck, which asks, “Why are Medieval Maps so Weird?”

The intent of the Hereford Mappa Mundi, ShūBa̱ck says, is to show that “the Bible is right.” To that end, “east is on top, as that’s where they said Jesus would come from on the day of judgment. Jerusalem is, of course, at the center.” Other points of interest include the site of the crucifixion, the Tower of Babel, and the Garden of Eden — not to mention the locations of the Golden Fleece and Mount Olympus. You can examine all of these up close at the Hereford Cathedral’s site, which offers a detailed 3D scan of the map, viewable from every angle, embedded with explanations of all its major features: in other words, a kind of Google Medieval Earth.

via Aeon

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 or on Facebook.

David Byrne Picks Up His Big Suit from the Dry Cleaners and Gets Ready for Stop Making Sense to Return to Theaters

First released in 1984, Jonathan Demme’s acclaimed concert film Stop Making Sense featured the Talking Heads at the height of their creative and musical powers. The film starts with David Byrne, alone on a bare stage, with a boombox and his big white suit, performing “Psycho Killer.” Then, with each new song, he’s joined by different bandmates and an assemblage of gear and lights, all showing, step-by-step, how a concert gets made. It’s an inventive film. And it’s coming back to theaters this August, restored no less in 4K resolution.

Above, in the official trailer, watch Byrne retrieve his oversized suit from the dry cleaners some 40 years late, then try it on for size. Turns out, it still fits….

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New Order’s 1983 Classic “Blue Monday” Played with Obsolete 1930s Instruments

Released 40 years ago this week, New Order’s “Blue Monday” (hear the original EP version here) became, according to the BBC, “a crucial link between Seventies disco and the dance/house boom that took off at the end of the Eighties.” If you frequented a dance club during the 1980s, you know the song.

The original “Blue Monday” never quite won me over. I’m much more Rolling Stones than New Order. But I’m taken with the adaptation above. Created by the “Orkestra Obsolete,” this version tries to imagine what the song would have sounded like in 1933, using only instruments available at the time— for example, writes the BBC, the theremin, musical saw, harmonium and prepared piano. Quite a change from the Powertron Sequencer, Moog Source synthesizer, and Oberheim DMX drum machine used to record the song in the 80s. Enjoy this little thought experiment put into action.

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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, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

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Behold the Fantastical, Uncannily Lifelike Puppets of Barnaby Dixon

Barnaby Dixon‘s incredible two-piece creations redefine the notion of hand puppets, by moving and responding in highly nuanced, realistic ways.

The pinkie and index finger of one hand slip into the creature’s arms, leaving the thumb free to operate the tiny controls that tilt head and mouth movements.

The pinkie and index finger of one hand slip into the creature’s legs, an attribute few hand puppets can claim.

A waistline magnet joins the puppet’s top half to its bottom.

His goal is for viewers to “forget the mechanisms and forget the process that’s gone into making it so they can just enjoy the motions.”

Each character has a unique set of motions and a custom-designed plastic, silicone and metal assembly, informed by many hours of anatomical observation and study. Their structures speak to Dixon’s early years as a stop motion animator, as do his fabrication methods.

His frustration with the glacial pace of achieving the end product in that realm spurred him to experiment with puppets who could be filmed moving in real time.

His first puppet, Dab Chick, below, holds a special place in his heart, and is also one of his mouthiest.

Dab Chick’s tiny head cocks on spectacle hinges and a hand-wound spring wrapped in silicone. The mechanism that opens and closes his beak is a miniature spin on bicycle hand brakes.

While many of Dixon’s recent puppets thrive in a Day-Glo, synth-heavy environment, Dab Chick is a crowd-pleasing curmudgeon, spouting opinions and repartee. He even plays drunk… a hard assignment for any performer to pull off, but Dixon nails it.

Phil the fish is operated with two rods. He performs best in water, appropriately enough, highlighting his talent for blowing bubbles, as well as Dixon’s for using physics to his advantage.

Many puppeteers match their breathing to that of their puppet’s in an effort to get into the zone. Dixon takes it to the next level by streaming real time video of his mouth to a tiny screen embedded below the nose of the puppet he is operating.

In addition to creating and directing original work, he puppeteered the True History of Thra, The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance‘s play within a play and designed the origami-inspired, animal-shaped demon puppets for the Bridge Theatre production of Book of Dust – La Belle Sauvage.

The Guardian lauded the latter as “gorgeous,” a “marvel (that) seem like Jungian projections rather than airy, fantastical creatures.”

Watch more of Barnaby Dixon’s puppet videos here.

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– Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto and Creative, Not Famous Activity Book. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

A Visit to the World’s Oldest Hotel, Japan’s Nisiyama Onsen Keiunkan, Established in 705 AD

Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot-spring hotel in the mountains of Japan’s Yamanashi Prefecture, has been in business for over 1,300 years, more than five times as long as the United States has existed. Nevertheless, it feels considerably more modern than the average American motel, to say nothing of the longer-established lodgings of England. “I assumed that I’d be staying in something like a living museum here,” says Youtuber Tom Scott, vlogging from his very own room at Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, “because that’s what I’ve come to expect from the sort of historical attractions you’ll find in Britain,” where preservation ideology holds that “everything must be held at a certain point in time, funded by tourists who want to visit the old thing and see history.”

Not so in Japan, whose notions of new and old have never quite aligned with those of the West. “There’s still tradition here,” Scott hastens to add. “It’s not a Western-style hotel. You sleep on futons; dinner is served at a low Japanese-style table.” But the actual complex in which guests now stay “has only been a hotel in the English sense for a few decades. Before that, it was just a place to stay and take the waters. Now there’s very fast wi-fi and, of course, a gift shop.”

The movement and replacement of its buildings over the centuries brings to mind Mie prefecture’s Ise Grand Shrine, freshly rebuilt each and every twenty years, or even the tendency of existing Japanese homes to be torn down rather than occupied by their buyers.

Though Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan has long shunned excessive publicity — its current president Kawano Kenjiro explains that the Emperor of Japan’s stay there, in his days as Crown Prince, was kept quiet for that reason — it has lately become irresistible to Youtubers. We’ve featured it before here on Open Culture, and just above you can see another take on it in the House of History video above, which explains how it has managed its continuity. Kawano, who’d worked at the hotel since the age of 25, chose not to go the standard route of being legally adopted into the family that had always owned the place. And so, instead of inheriting it, he created Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan Limited, a technically new corporate entity, but one that ought to be good for at least another millennia or two.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 or on Facebook.

A Student Writes a Rejection Letter Rejecting Harvard’s Rejection Letter (1981): Hear It Read by Actor Himesh Patel

The documentary filmmaker and sports editor Paul Devlin has won five Emmy awards, but he may well be better known for not getting into Harvard — or rather, for not getting into Harvard, then rejecting Harvard’s rejection. “I noticed that the rejection letter I received from Harvard had a grammatical error,” Devlin writes. “So, I wrote a letter back, rejecting their rejection letter.” His mother then “sent a copy of this letter to the New York Times and it was published in the New Jersey section on May 31, 1981.” In 1996, when the New York Times Magazine published a cover story “about the trauma students were experiencing getting rejected from colleges,” she seized the opportunity to send her son’s rejection-rejection letter to the Paper of Record.

It turned out that Devlin’s letter had already run there, having long since gone the pre-social-media equivalent of viral. “The New York Times accused me of plagiarism. When they discovered that I was the original author and they had unwittingly re-printed themselves, they were none too happy. But my mom insists that it was important to reprint the article because the issue was clearly still relevant.”

Indeed, its afterlife continues even today, as evidenced by the new video from Letters Live at the top of the post. In it actor Himesh Patel, well-known from series like EastEnders, Station Eleven, and Avenue 5, reads aloud Devlin’s letter, which runs as follows:

Having reviewed the many rejection letters I have received in the last few weeks, it is with great regret that I must inform you I am unable to accept your rejection at this time.

This year, after applying to a great many colleges and universities, I received an especially fine crop of rejection letters. Unfortunately, the number of rejections that I can accept is limited.

Each of my rejections was reviewed carefully and on an individual basis. Many factors were taken into account – the size of the institution, student-faculty ratio, location, reputation, costs and social atmosphere.

I am certain that most colleges I applied to are more than qualified to reject me. I am also sure that some mistakes were made in turning away some of these rejections. I can only hope they were few in number.

I am aware of the keen disappointment my decision may bring. Throughout my deliberations, I have kept in mind the time and effort it may have taken for you to reach your decision to reject me.

Keep in mind that at times it was necessary for me to reject even those letters of rejection that would normally have met my traditionally high standards.

I appreciate your having enough interest in me to reject my application. Let me take the opportunity to wish you well in what I am sure will be a successful academic year.

SEE YOU IN THE FALL!

Sincerely,
Paul Devlin
Applicant at Large

However considerable the moxie (to use a wholly American term) shown by the young Devlin in his letter, his reasoning seems not to have swayed Harvard’s admissions department. Whether it would prove any more effective in the twenty-twenties than it did in the nineteen-eighties seems doubtful, but it must remain a satisfying read for high-school students dispirited by the supplicating posture the college-application process all but forces them to take. It surely does them good to remember that they, too, possess the agency to declare acceptance or rejection of that which is presented to them simply as necessity, as obligation, as a given. And for Devlin, at least, there was always the University of Michigan.

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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities, 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 or on Facebook.

Artificial Intelligence, Art & the Future of Creativity: Watch the Final Chapter of the “Everything is a Remix” Series

From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released “Everything is a Remix,” a four-part series (watch here) that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials into something beautiful and new. In the initial series, Ferguson focused on musicians, filmmakers, writers and even video game makers. Now, a little more than a decade later, Ferguson has resurfaced and released a fifth and final chapter in his series, with this episode focusing on a different kind of artist: artificial intelligence. Responding to the rise of AI-generated art, Ferguson delves into the ethics of art generated by machines, particularly when they’re trained with human-created art. Is AI-generated art a form of piracy? Or is it another kind of creative remix? And what does AI mean for the future of art and creativity? These are just some of the weighty questions Ferguson tackles in his final installment. Watch it above.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newsletter, please find it here.

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, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks!

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