Isaac Asimov’s 1964 Predictions About What the World Will Look 50 Years Later

asimov throne

Paint­ing of Asi­mov on his throne by Rowe­na Morill

When New York City host­ed The World’s Fair in 1964, Isaac Asi­mov, the pro­lif­ic sci-fi author and pro­fes­sor of bio­chem­istry at Boston Uni­ver­si­ty, took the oppor­tu­ni­ty to won­der what the world would look like 50 years hence — assum­ing the world sur­vived the nuclear threats of the Cold War. Writ­ing in The New York Times, Asi­mov imag­ined a world that you might part­ly rec­og­nize today, a world where:

  • “Gad­getry will con­tin­ue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs. Kitchen units will be devised that will pre­pare ‘automeals,’ heat­ing water and con­vert­ing it to cof­fee; toast­ing bread; fry­ing, poach­ing or scram­bling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on. Break­fasts will be ‘ordered’ the night before to be ready by a spec­i­fied hour the next morn­ing.”
  • “Com­mu­ni­ca­tions will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the per­son you tele­phone. The screen can be used not only to see the peo­ple you call but also for study­ing doc­u­ments and pho­tographs and read­ing pas­sages from books. Syn­chro­nous satel­lites, hov­er­ing in space will make it pos­si­ble for you to direct-dial any spot on earth, includ­ing the weath­er sta­tions in Antarc­ti­ca.”
  • “[M]en will con­tin­ue to with­draw from nature in order to cre­ate an envi­ron­ment that will suit them bet­ter. By 2014, elec­tro­lu­mi­nes­cent pan­els will be in com­mon use. Ceil­ings and walls will glow soft­ly, and in a vari­ety of col­ors that will change at the touch of a push but­ton.”
  • “Robots will nei­ther be com­mon nor very good in 2014, but they will be in exis­tence.”
  • “The appli­ances of 2014 will have no elec­tric cords, of course, for they will be pow­ered by long- lived bat­ter­ies run­ning on radioiso­topes.”
  • “[H]ighways … in the more advanced sec­tions of the world will have passed their peak in 2014; there will be increas­ing empha­sis on trans­porta­tion that makes the least pos­si­ble con­tact with the sur­face. There will be air­craft, of course, but even ground trav­el will increas­ing­ly take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”
  • “[V]ehicles with ‘Robot-brains’ … can be set for par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tions … that will then pro­ceed there with­out inter­fer­ence by the slow reflex­es of a human dri­ver.”
  • “[W]all screens will have replaced the ordi­nary set; but trans­par­ent cubes will be mak­ing their appear­ance in which three-dimen­sion­al view­ing will be pos­si­ble.”
  • “[T]he world pop­u­la­tion will be 6,500,000,000 and the pop­u­la­tion of the Unit­ed States will be 350,000,000.” And lat­er he warns that if the pop­u­la­tion growth con­tin­ues unchecked, “All earth will be a sin­gle choked Man­hat­tan by A.D. 2450 and soci­ety will col­lapse long before that!” As a result, “There will, there­fore, be a world­wide pro­pa­gan­da dri­ve in favor of birth con­trol by ratio­nal and humane meth­ods and, by 2014, it will undoubt­ed­ly have tak­en seri­ous effect.” [See our Walt Dis­ney Fam­i­ly Plan­ning car­toon from ear­li­er this week.]
  • “Ordi­nary agri­cul­ture will keep up with great dif­fi­cul­ty and there will be ‘farms’ turn­ing to the more effi­cient micro-organ­isms. Processed yeast and algae prod­ucts will be avail­able in a vari­ety of fla­vors.”
  • “The world of A.D. 2014 will have few rou­tine jobs that can­not be done bet­ter by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will there­fore have become large­ly a race of machine ten­ders. Schools will have to be ori­ent­ed in this direc­tion.… All the high-school stu­dents will be taught the fun­da­men­tals of com­put­er tech­nol­o­gy will become pro­fi­cient in bina­ry arith­metic and will be trained to per­fec­tion in the use of the com­put­er lan­guages that will have devel­oped out of those like the con­tem­po­rary “For­tran.”
  • “[M]ankind will suf­fer bad­ly from the dis­ease of bore­dom, a dis­ease spread­ing more wide­ly each year and grow­ing in inten­si­ty. This will have seri­ous men­tal, emo­tion­al and soci­o­log­i­cal con­se­quences, and I dare say that psy­chi­a­try will be far and away the most impor­tant med­ical spe­cial­ty in 2014.”
  •  “[T]he most glo­ri­ous sin­gle word in the vocab­u­lary will have become work!” in our “a soci­ety of enforced leisure.”

Isaac Asi­mov was­n’t the only per­son who peered into the future dur­ing the 60s and got it right. You can find a few more on-the-mark pre­dic­tions from con­tem­po­raries below:

Arthur C. Clarke Pre­dicts the Future in 1964 … And Kind of Nails It

Wal­ter Cronkite Imag­ines the Home of the 21st Cen­tu­ry … Back in 1967

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

Mar­shall McLuhan Announces That The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

via Buz­zfeed

The Art of Fugue: Gould Plays Bach

Between 1979 and 1981, the Cana­di­an pianist Glenn Gould col­lab­o­rat­ed on a series of doc­u­men­tary films with the French vio­lin­ist, writer and film­mak­er Bruno Man­sain­geon. In the scenes pre­sent­ed here, Gould plays a pair of move­ments from Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach’s The Art of Fugue.

Gould was near­ing the end of his life when he gave these per­for­mances. He died of a stroke on Octo­ber 4, 1982, only a few days after his 50th birth­day. Sim­i­lar­ly, The Art of Fugue was one of Bach’s final projects. He worked on it over the last decade of his life, and the unfin­ished man­u­script was pub­lished after his death, per­haps also from a stroke, in 1750 at the age of 65.

The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080, is made up of 14 fugues and 4 canons, each explor­ing the con­tra­pun­tal pos­si­bil­i­ties of a sin­gle musi­cal sub­ject. Gould plays “Con­tra­punc­tus I” in the video above. Below, he plays “Con­tra­punc­tus IV.”

via @SteveSilberman

Relat­ed con­tent:

Glenn Gould Explains the Genius of Johann Sebas­t­ian Bach (1962)

The Genius of J.S. Bach’s “Crab Canon” Visu­al­ized on a Möbius Strip

A Big Bach Down­load: The Com­plete Organ Works for Free

Seamus Heaney Reads His Exquisite Translation of Beowulf and His Memorable 1995 Nobel Lecture

seamusheaney

We were among mil­lions deeply sad­dened to learn today that Sea­mus Heaney had passed away at age 74. Called the great­est Irish poet since Yeats, Heaney was not only a nation­al trea­sure to his home coun­try but to the glob­al poet­ry com­mu­ni­ty. The 1995 Nobel lau­re­ate worked in a rich bardic tra­di­tion that mined myth­ic lan­guage and imagery, Celtic and oth­er­wise, to get at primeval human ver­i­ties that tran­scend cul­ture and nation.

One promi­nent theme in Heaney’s work—connected to the Irish strug­gle, but acces­si­ble to anyone—is the per­sis­tence of trib­al­ism and its dam­ag­ing effects on future gen­er­a­tions. In one of his dark­er poems, “Pun­ish­ment,” one I’ve often taught to under­grad­u­ates, Heaney’s speak­er impli­cates him­self in the exe­cu­tion of a woman found buried in a bog many cen­turies lat­er. In the last two stan­zas, the speak­er betrays empa­thy clothed in help­less recog­ni­tion of the trib­al vio­lence and hypocrisy at the heart of all sys­tems of jus­tice.

I who have stood dumb
when your betray­ing sis­ters,
cauled in tar,
wept by the rail­ings,

who would con­nive
in civ­i­lized out­rage
yet under­stand the exact
and trib­al, inti­mate revenge.

The theme of trib­al vio­lence and its con­se­quences is cen­tral to the Old Eng­lish poem Beowulf, which Heaney famous­ly trans­lat­ed into a rich new idiom suit­ed for a post-colo­nial age but still con­so­nant with the dis­tinc­tive poet­ic rhythms of its lan­guage. You can hear Heaney read his trans­la­tion of Beowulf online. Above, we have the Pro­logue. (Apolo­gies in advance for the irri­tat­ing ad that pre­cedes it.) The remain­der of the read­ing appears on YouTube — lis­ten to Part 1 and Part 2Plus find more of Heaney’s work at the Poet­ry Foun­da­tion.

Final­ly, you can also lis­ten to his Nobel lec­ture deliv­ered on 7 Decem­ber 1995. It was post­ed on YouTube today, and we thought it worth your while. It’s pre­sent­ed in full below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1930s Audio: W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems

Hear James Joyce Read From his Epic Ulysses, 1924

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

Learn to Make Borscht with Neko Case and Get a Taste of Her New Album

What’s the dif­fer­ence between borscht and alt-coun­try music?

Uh, pret­ty much every­thing, except for singer-song­writer, Neko Case, the most recent in a long list of celebri­ties to share Ukrain­ian beet soup recipes with an ador­ing pub­lic.

Filmed at the behest of Rook­ie, an online mag­a­zine by and for teenage girls, Neko’s video­taped les­son is both basic and refresh­ing­ly unex­act­ing. Her sta­tus as the child of Ukrain­ian immi­grants affords her the street cred to tell view­ers they should take it as a sign they’re on the right track should some­one of east­ern Euro­pean extrac­tion insist they’re doing it wrong. (Her on-cam­era ver­sion is gluten-free, and—prior to the addi­tion of sour cream and chick­en stock—lactose-free and veg­an, as well.)

Inter­est­ed in sam­pling her ver­sion? Put the lap­top on the counter. You won’t miss any­thing if you com­mence chop­ping right away. The demo is as casu­al as her lack of styling, clock­ing in at near­ly twen­ty min­utes, includ­ing tips for tear-free onion cut­ting, cel­ery leaf usage, and the mak­ing of mire­poix.

You’ll also get a tiny taste of “Man,” the first sin­gle from her soon-to-drop new album,The Worse Things Get, The Hard­er I Fight, The Hard­er I Fight, The More I Love You, though keep your ears peeled for the song that plays as the cred­its roll. In an age defined by such pres­sure cook­er shows as Top Chef, Hel­l’s Kitchen, and Chopped, the phrase “If I puked up some son­nets, would you call me a mir­a­cle” is odd­ly alt-appe­tiz­ing.

Neko Case’s new album is still stream­ing for free at NPR’s First Lis­ten site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Allen Ginsberg’s Per­son­al Recipe for Cold Sum­mer Borscht

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day just dis­cov­ered kvass. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Watch Big Time, the Concert Film Capturing Tom Waits on His Best Tour Ever (1988)

Here at Open Cul­ture, we’ve often fea­tured the many sides of Tom Waits: actor, poet­ry read­er, favored David Let­ter­man guest. More rarely, we’ve post­ed mate­r­i­al ded­i­cat­ed to show­cas­ing him prac­tic­ing his pri­ma­ry craft, writ­ing songs and singing them. But when a full-fledged Tom Waits con­cert does sur­face here, pre­pare to set­tle in for an unre­lent­ing­ly (and enter­tain­ing­ly) askew musi­cal expe­ri­ence. In March, we post­ed Bur­ma Shave, an hour-long per­for­mance from the late sev­en­ties in which Waits took on “the per­sona of a down-and-out barfly with the soul of a Beat poet.” Today, we fast-for­ward a decade to Big Time, by which point Waits could express the essences of “avant-garde com­pos­er Har­ry Partch, Howl­in’ Wolf, Frank Sina­tra, Astor Piaz­zol­la, Irish tenor John McCor­ma­ck, Kurt Weill, Louis Pri­ma, Mex­i­can norteño bands and Vegas lounge singers.” That evoca­tive quote comes from Big Time’s own press notes, as excerpt­ed by Dan­ger­ous Minds, which calls the view­ing expe­ri­ence “like enter­ing a sideshow tent in Tom Waits’s brain.”

Watch the 90-minute con­cert film in its entire­ty, though, and you may not find it evoca­tive enough. In 1987, Waits had just put out the album Franks Wild Years, which explores the expe­ri­ence of his alter-ego Frank O’Brien, whom Waits called “a com­bi­na­tion of Will Rogers and Mark Twain, play­ing accor­dion — but with­out the wis­dom they pos­sessed.” The year before, the singer actu­al­ly wrote and pro­duced a stage play built around the char­ac­ter, and the Franks Wild Years tour through North Amer­i­ca and Europe made thor­ough use of Waits’ the­atri­cal bent in that era. Its final two shows, at San Fran­cis­co’s Warfield The­atre and Los Ange­les’ Wiltern The­atre, along with footage from gigs in Dublin, Stock­holm and Berlin, make up the bulk of Big Time’s mate­r­i­al. As for its sen­si­bil­i­ty, well, even Waits fans may feel inse­cure, and hap­pi­ly so, about quite what to expect. (Fans of The Wire, I should note, will find some­thing famil­iar indeed in this show’s ren­di­tion of “Way Down in the Hole.”)

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tom Waits, Play­ing the Down-and-Out Barfly, Appears in Clas­sic 1978 TV Per­for­mance

Tom Waits Reads Charles Bukows­ki

Tom Waits and David Let­ter­man: An Amer­i­can Tele­vi­sion Tra­di­tion

Tom Waits Shows Us How Not to Get a Date on Valentine’s Day

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture and writes essays on lit­er­a­ture, film, cities, Asia, and aes­thet­ics. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­lesA Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Satirist R. Crumb

Today, coun­ter­cul­tur­al car­toon­ist Robert Den­nis Crumb, bet­ter known as R. Crumb, turns 70. As a founder of the “under­ground comix” move­ment in the 1960s, Crumb is either revered as a pio­neer­ing satirist of Amer­i­can cul­ture and its excess­es or reviled as a juve­nile pur­vey­or of painful­ly out­mod­ed sex­ist and racist stereo­types. Crumb doesn’t apol­o­gize. He keeps work­ing, and his fans are grate­ful. He has par­layed his sex­u­al obses­sions and out­sider rela­tion­ship to black cul­ture into an intrigu­ing vision of the coun­try that reflects its own fix­a­tions as much as those of the artist/author of comics like Zap and Weirdo.

But Crumb’s work—permeated by drug use, pop-cul­ture ref­er­ences, skirt-chas­ing over­sexed men, very specif­i­cal­ly-shaped (and always sex­u­al­ly-avail­able) women, and all sorts of creepy under­ground characters—has anoth­er side: an almost sen­ti­men­tal attach­ment to purist Amer­i­cana from the late-nine­teen­th/ear­ly-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Most notably Crumb is an anti­quar­i­an col­lec­tor of old-time music—country, jazz, rag­time, the blues—as well as a musi­cal inter­preter of the same. One of my favorites of his books col­lects a series of trad­ing cards he made into R Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Coun­try, a rev­er­en­tial set of illus­tra­tions of folk musi­cians, accom­pa­nied by a CD of Crumb-curat­ed music.

Crumb’s love for sim­pler times is more than the pas­sion of an afi­ciona­do. It is the flip side of his satire, a genre that can­not flour­ish as a cri­tique of the present with­out a cor­re­spond­ing vision of a gold­en age. For Crumb, that age is pre-WWII, pre-indus­tri­al, rural—a time, as he has put it in a recent inter­view, when “peo­ple could still express them­selves.” His expe­ri­ence with the slop of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture was decid­ed­ly less idyl­lic. Ian Buru­ma writes in The New York Review of Books:

Crumb, like his broth­ers, soaked up the TV and comics cul­ture of the 1950s: Howdy Doo­dyDon­ald DuckRoy RogersLit­tle Lulu, and the like. While on LSD, in the 1960s, Crumb thought of his mind as “a garbage recep­ta­cle of mass media images and input. I spent my whole child­hood absorb­ing so much crap that my per­son­al­i­ty and mind are sat­u­rat­ed with it. God only knows if that affects you phys­i­cal­ly!”

Crumb’s com­ic art—which he has described in almost ther­a­peu­tic terms as an emp­ty­ing of his “garbage recep­ta­cle” unconscious—is bal­anced by his more sober and nos­tal­gic illus­tra­tions, the coun­ter­weight to the “crap” of his child­hood media expo­sure. One might even think of Crumb’s con­sump­tion of old-time music and imagery as a kind of cul­tur­al health food diet. One of the most pop­u­lar of his nos­tal­gic works is “A Short His­to­ry of Amer­i­ca” (1979) a series of pan­els show­ing the shift from open coun­try­side, to the town set­tle­ments brought by the rail­roads, to the gross overde­vel­op­ment of the late-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. The only text besides the title (and the bur­geon­ing bill­boards and street signs) is a coda at the bot­tom-right-hand of the last pan­el ask­ing, “What next?!!!” You can see the com­ic ani­mat­ed above (top), set to an old-time piano piece. Anoth­er fit­ting ver­sion of his vision of the country’s growth (or ruina­tion) is above, in col­or, scored by Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yel­low Taxi.” See the full series of images here and here, and be sure to check out Crum­b’s three epi­logue spec­u­la­tions on what’s next.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

R. Crumb Shows Us How He Illus­trat­ed Gen­e­sis: A Faith­ful, Idio­syn­crat­ic Illus­tra­tion of All 50 Chap­ters

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

The Con­fes­sions of Robert Crumb: A Por­trait Script­ed by the Under­ground Comics Leg­end Him­self (1987)

Record Cov­er Art by Under­ground Car­toon­ist Robert Crumb

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

Philosopher Portraits: Famous Philosophers Painted in the Style of Influential Artists

Lud­wig Wittgenstein/Piet Mon­dri­an:

Ludwig Wittgenstein & Piet Mondrian

What do the Aus­tri­an-British philoso­pher Lud­wig Wittgen­stein and the Dutch painter Piet Mon­dri­an have in com­mon? For philoso­pher and artist Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger, the two have sim­i­lar beliefs about the log­ic of space.

“Many of Mon­dri­an’s pieces explore the rela­tion­ships between adja­cent spaces,” says Bolinger “and in par­tic­u­lar the for­ma­tive role of each on the bound­aries and pos­si­bil­i­ties of the oth­er. I based this paint­ing [see above] off of Wittgen­stein’s Trac­ta­tus, in which he devel­ops a the­o­ry of mean­ing ground­ed in the idea that propo­si­tions have mean­ing only inso­far as they con­strain the ways the world could be; a mean­ing­ful propo­si­tion is thus very like one of Mon­dri­an’s col­or squares, form­ing a bound­ary and lim­it­ing the pos­si­ble con­fig­u­ra­tions of the adja­cent spaces.”

A sec­ond-year PhD stu­dent in the phi­los­o­phy pro­gram at the Uni­ver­si­ty of South­ern Cal­i­for­nia, Bolinger stud­ied paint­ing a Bio­la Uni­ver­si­ty before mak­ing phi­los­o­phy her sec­ond major. “I actu­al­ly came to phi­los­o­phy quite late in my col­lege career,” Bolinger says, “only adding the major in my junior year. I was for­tu­nate to have two par­tic­u­lar­ly excel­lent and philo­soph­ic art teach­ers, Jonathan Puls and Jonathan Ander­son, who con­vinced me that my two pas­sions were not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, and encour­aged me to pur­sue both as I began my grad­u­ate edu­ca­tion.”

Bolinger now works pri­mar­i­ly on the phi­los­o­phy of lan­guage, with side inter­ests in log­ic, epis­te­mol­o­gy, mind and polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy. She con­tin­ues to paint. We asked her how she rec­on­ciles her two pas­sions, which seem to occu­py oppo­site sides of the mind. “I do work in ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy,” she says, “but it’s only half true that phi­los­o­phy and paint­ing engage oppo­site sides of the mind. The sort of real­ist draw­ing and paint­ing that I do is all about ana­lyz­ing the rela­tion­ships between the lines, shapes and col­or tones, and so still very left-brain. Nev­er­the­less, it engages the mind in a dif­fer­ent way than do the syl­lo­gisms of ana­lyt­ic phi­los­o­phy. I find that the two types of men­tal exer­tion com­ple­ment each oth­er well, each serv­ing as a pro­duc­tive break from the oth­er.”

Bolinger has cre­at­ed a series of philoso­pher por­traits, each one pair­ing a philoso­pher with an artist, or art style, in an intrigu­ing way. In addi­tion to Wittgen­stein, she paint­ed ten philoso­phers in her first series, many of them by request. They can all be seen on her Web site, where high qual­i­ty prints can be ordered.

G.E.M. Anscombe/Jackson Pol­lock:

G.E.M. Anscombe & Jackson Pollock

Bolinger says she paired the British ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher Eliz­a­beth Anscombe with the Amer­i­can abstract painter Jack­son Pol­lock for two rea­sons: “First, the loose style of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ing fits the argu­men­ta­tive (and orga­ni­za­tion­al) style of Wittgen­stein’s Philo­soph­i­cal Inves­ti­ga­tions, which Anscombe helped to edit and was instru­men­tal in pub­lish­ing. Sec­ond, her pri­ma­ry field of work, in which she wrote a sem­i­nal text, is phi­los­o­phy of action, which has obvi­ous con­nec­tions to the themes present in any of Pol­lock­’s action paint­ings.”

Got­t­lob Frege/Vincent Van Gogh:

Gottlob Frege & Van Gogh

Bolinger paired the Ger­man logi­cian, math­e­mati­cian and philoso­pher Got­t­lob Frege with the Dutch painter Vin­cent Van Gogh as a tongue-in-cheek ref­er­ence to Van Gogh’s famous paint­ing The Star­ry Night and Frege’s puz­zle con­cern­ing iden­ti­ty state­ments such as “Hes­pe­rus is Phos­pho­rus,” or “the evening star is iden­ti­cal to the morn­ing star.”

Bertrand Russell/Art Deco:

Bertrand Russell & Art Deco

Bolinger paint­ed the British logi­cian and philoso­pher Bertrand Rus­sell in the Art Deco style. “This pair­ing is a bit more about the gestalt, and a bit hard­er to artic­u­late,” says Bolinger. “The sim­pli­fi­ca­tion of form and reduc­tion to angled planes that takes place in the back­ground of this Art Deco piece are meant to cohere with Rus­sel­l’s locial atom­ism (the reduc­tion of com­plex log­i­cal propo­si­tions to their fun­da­men­tal log­i­cal ‘atoms’).”

Kurt Gödel/Art Nou­veau:

Kurt Godel & Art Nouveau

Bolinger paired the Aus­tri­an logi­cian Kurt Gödel with Art Nou­veau. “The Art Nou­veau move­ment devel­oped around the theme of mech­a­niza­tion and the rep­e­ti­tion of forms,” says Bolinger, “and cen­tral­ly involves a del­i­cate bal­ance between organ­ic shapes — typ­i­cal­ly a fig­ure that dom­i­nates the por­trait — and schema­tized or abstract­ed pat­terns, often derived from organ­ic shapes, but made uni­form and repet­i­tive (often seen in the flower motifs that orna­ment most Art Nou­veau por­traits). I paired this style with Kurt Gödel because his work was ded­i­cat­ed to defin­ing com­putabil­i­ty in terms of recur­sive func­tions, and using the notion to prove the Com­plete­ness and Incom­plete­ness the­o­rems.”

To see more of Renée Jor­gensen Bolinger’s philoso­pher por­traits, click here to vis­it her site. And if you like them all, the PhilPor­traits Cal­en­dar might be per­fect for you.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed Con­tent:

10 Famous Philoso­phers in Words and Images

Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Released by Archives at Cam­bridge

Phi­los­o­phy: Free Cours­es

Iconic Photographs Re-Created in Play Doh: Man Ray to Nan Goldin

photosrenderedplaydohPoints for cre­ativ­i­ty go to Eleanor Mac­nair, who recent­ly launched the “Pho­tographs ren­dered in Play-Doh” Tum­blr. Giv­en the name of the Tum­blr, I prob­a­bly don’t have to explain the con­cept. I think you get it. Above we have “Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Den­nis Stock holds a cam­era in front of his face, 1955” — the orig­i­nal by Andreas Feininger (right), and the recre­ation by Ms. Mac­nair (left). Also on the Tum­blr you’ll find, among oth­ers:

  • “Nan and Bri­an in Bed, New York City, 1983” by Nan Goldin (orig­i­nal — play doh)
  • “Dovi­ma with ele­phants, evening dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, August 1955” by Richard Ave­don (orig­i­nal — play doh)
  • “Helen Tamiris, 1929” by Man Ray (orig­i­nal — play doh)

Stay tuned, there’s hope­ful­ly more to come.

H/T goes to James Estrin, co-edi­tor of The New York Times Lens Blog

Pho­to above via DVAfo­to

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Two Scenes from Stan­ley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Recre­at­ed in Lego

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

Pho­tog­ra­phy of Lud­wig Wittgen­stein Released by Archives at Cam­bridge

David Lynch Talks About His 99 Favorite Pho­tographs at Paris Pho­to 2012

 

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Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.