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

in Art, Museums, Technology | June 12th, 2013

stripedshirt

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured the Nation­al Gallery of Art’s site NGA Images, where you can down­load 25,000 high-qual­i­ty dig­i­tal images of that muse­um’s works of art. Today, why not have a look at Google Art Project? Though we’ve post­ed about it before, you’ll want to check out its slick new redesign — not to men­tion its expand­ed col­lec­tion, which now includes more than 250,000 works of art from over 250 muse­ums. TechCrunch’s Fred­er­ic Lar­de­nois writes that the lat­est iter­a­tion of Google Art Pro­jec­t’s “improved search tools now make it sig­nif­i­cant­ly eas­i­er to fil­ter any list of art­works by artist, place, data and relat­ed events. [ … ] Some of the most impor­tant art­works are also avail­able as gigapix­el images. Many muse­ums also allow you to browse their gal­leries using Google Street View.”

The col­lec­tions new­ly added to Google Art Project come from insti­tu­tions as far- and wide-rang­ing as Kuwait­’s al Sabah Col­lec­tion, Japan’s Kawabara Memo­r­i­al DIC Muse­um of Art, Den­mark’s Statens Muse­um for Kun­st, and Aus­trali­a’s Art Gallery of New South Wales. At the top, we have an image of Sunkwan Kwon’s “A Man in Stripe Shirt Who is Drop­ping His Head for a Long Time After Phone Call,” made avail­able in the Kore­an Art Muse­um Asso­ci­a­tion col­lec­tion. But don’t look at the image in this post; look at the piece’s entry in Google Art Project, which lets you scroll and zoom as you please. And you will want to zoom, since Kwon’s very large-for­mat pho­tog­ra­phy demands close atten­tion to detail. At such a high res­o­lu­tion, you can pay that atten­tion, look­ing right into the win­dows and observ­ing the peo­ple behind them. View­ers, as the work’s descrip­tion says, “should keep hav­ing tena­cious ques­tions that ask who the char­ac­ters are, why they show tense expres­sions on their face and what their sit­u­a­tions are.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nation­al Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Art­work Freely Avail­able Online

Down­load Hun­dreds of Free Art Cat­a­logs from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

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 Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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What Happens on the Internet in 60 Seconds

in Technology, Web/Tech | June 12th, 2013

Chances are in the past week you’ve read some argu­ment about how the inter­net has destroyed the mid­dle class, democ­ra­cy, cul­ture, etc, or a rebut­tal of one of the above. I can’t add much to these debates. They some­times sound like argu­ments over whether tele­pho­ny is a boon or a curse. These technologies—as long as the grid’s up and running—we shall always have with us.

Soci­o­log­i­cal spec­u­la­tion notwith­stand­ing, the expo­nen­tial­ly increas­ing com­put­ing pow­er that push­es our online inter­ac­tions to ever-dizzy­ing speeds is sure­ly some­thing to pause and mar­vel at, if not to fear. The short video above from Buz­zfeed takes us on a wild ride through the mil­lions of trans­ac­tions that occur online in a sin­gle minute. Here we learn that in six­ty-sec­onds, there will be 2,000,000 Google search­es, 27,800 uploads to Insta­gram, 278,000 Tweets, 1,875,000 Face­book likes, a “low esti­mate” of 200,000 peo­ple stream­ing porn….

Actu­al­ly, it does start to seem like all this online activ­i­ty is pret­ty nar­row­ly focused, or maybe that’s a lim­i­ta­tion of the sur­vey. Anoth­er video from 2011 (below) and info­graph­ics here and here offer some com­par­a­tive ana­lyt­ics.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Three Uni­ver­si­ty Projects Use Twit­ter to Under­stand Hap­pi­ness, Hate and Oth­er Emo­tions in Amer­i­ca

How Brew­ster Kahle and the Inter­net Archive Will Pre­serve the Infi­nite Infor­ma­tion on the Web

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

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Hear A Young Bob Dylan Sing 11 Songs and Tell Tall Tales on a 1962 Radio Show

in Music, Radio | June 12th, 2013

In Feb­ru­ary of 1962, less than a month before the release of his debut album, an obscure young folk singer named Bob Dylan record­ed some songs and an inter­view for a local New York City radio show called Folksinger’s Choice.

The show was broad­cast on WBAI and host­ed by Cyn­thia Good­ing, an estab­lished folk singer 17 years old­er than Dylan. As it hap­pened, both Good­ing and Dylan were native Min­nesotans. Good­ing had first met Dylan in Min­neapo­lis in late 1959, not long after he grad­u­at­ed from high school.

As the inter­view gets rolling, the 20-year-old Dylan wastes lit­tle time before launch­ing into some tall tales about his past. He says he moved to Min­neapo­lis from South Dako­ta, because Min­neapo­lis was “about the only place you did­n’t have to go too far to find the Mis­sis­sip­pi Riv­er.” Before that, he says, he trav­eled with a car­ni­val, “off and on for about six years.” When Good­ing asks whether that might have inter­fered with his school­ing, Dylan does­n’t miss a beat. “Well,” he says, “I skipped a bunch of things, and I did­n’t go to school a bunch of years and I skipped this and that.” He says he wrote a song for the “ele­phant lady” in the car­ni­val and called it “Won’t You Buy A Post­card?” But he quick­ly adds that he for­got how it went.

To fol­low along with the inter­view, click here to open the full tran­script in a new win­dow. And while you won’t hear Dylan’s ode to the ele­phant lady, if you lis­ten to the com­plete one-hour pro­gram you will be treat­ed to 11 songs from his ear­ly reper­toire.  They include sev­er­al that Dylan wrote, along with some old folk and blues songs:
  1. “(I Heard That) Lone­some Whis­tle” (Hank Williams/Jimmie Davis)
  2. “Fix­in’ to Die” (Buk­ka White)
  3. “Smoke­stack Ligh­n­ing” (Howl­in’ Wolf)
  4. “Hard Trav­elin’ ” (Woody Guthrie)
  5. “The Death of Emmett Till”  (Bob Dylan)
  6. “Stand­ing on the High­way” (Bob Dylan)
  7. “Roll on John” (Rufus Crisp)
  8. “Stealin’ ” (tra­di­tion­al)
  9. “It Makes a Long Time Man Feel Bad” (tra­di­tion­al)
  10. “Baby, Please Don’t Go” (Big Joe Williams)
  11. “Hard Times in New York Town” (Bob Dylan)

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Times They Are a‑Changin’: 1964 Gives a Rare Glimpse of the Ear­ly Bob Dylan

Two Leg­ends Togeth­er: A Young Bob Dylan Talks and Plays on the Studs Terkel Pro­gram, 1963

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Listen to Freddie Mercury’s Wondrous Piano and Vocal Tracks for “Bohemian Rhapsody” (1975)

in Music | June 12th, 2013

bohemian rhapsodyMaybe you liked hear­ing Fred­die Mer­cury and David Bowie belt out the vocal track for the 1981 hit, ‘Under Pres­sure.’ Well, here’s anoth­er one for you: Fred­die Mer­cury’s piano and vocal tracks for the Queen clas­sic, “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody.” Although the song was released on the 1975 album A Night at the Opera, Fred­die Mer­cury first began work­ing on the epic song dur­ing the late 1960s, often using his piano at home.

Accord­ing to the 2011 doc­u­men­tary Queen: The Days of Our Lives (watch it here), Mer­cury took ideas for three songs and knit­ted them into one com­plex oper­at­ic bal­lad. It was long enough (almost six min­utes) that it seemed unlike­ly to get any radio play. The music execs begged Mer­cury to sim­pli­fy things, to pare things down, but he did­n’t relent. It was all or noth­ing. And the record­ing process equaled the com­plex­i­ty of the song. Six dif­fer­ent stu­dios were used along the way, with Mer­cury try­ing to help the band record the sprawl­ing song he had mapped out in his mind.

The first video above fea­tures Mer­cury’s piano track that forms the back­bone of “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody.” On it, Mer­cury plays a Bech­stein con­cert grand piano, which oth­er­wise appears in the famous video that pro­mot­ed the song. The sec­ond video above fea­tures the iso­lat­ed vocal parts. Dur­ing the gru­el­ing record­ing ses­sions, Mer­cury, Bri­an May and Roger Tay­lor spent 10–12 hours each day work­ing on the vocals. And final­ly, for good mea­sure, we’ve added below a fresh reminder of what a beau­ti­ful thing Queen cre­at­ed almost 40 years ago. Filmed just last week, the clip fea­tures a crowd of 60,000 singing along to “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody” before the start of a Green Day con­cert in Lon­don. I’ll just leave it with that.

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The National Gallery Makes 25,000 Images of Artwork Freely Available Online

in Art, Music, Technology | June 11th, 2013

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No sur­prise that in “Mas­ter­works for One and All,” an arti­cle about how muse­ums have begun to offer free, high-qual­i­ty down­load­able images of works from their col­lec­tions, the New York Times’ Nina Sie­gal brings up Wal­ter Ben­jamin. The pre­oc­cu­pa­tions of the philoso­pher behind “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechan­i­cal Repro­duc­tion” may seem more rel­e­vant than ever in these days of not just mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion, but uni­ver­sal, devel­oped-world own­er­ship of the means of mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion — and near­ly instan­ta­neous, effort­less mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion at that. Many rights-hold­ers, includ­ing cer­tain muse­ums, have effec­tive­ly decid­ed that if you can’t beat the mechan­i­cal repro­duc­ers, join ’em. “With the Inter­net, it’s so dif­fi­cult to con­trol your copy­right or use of images,” Sie­gal quotes the Rijksmu­se­um’s direc­tor of col­lec­tions as say­ing. “We decid­ed we’d rather peo­ple use a very good high-res­o­lu­tion image of [Ver­meer’s] ‘Milk­maid’ from the Rijksmu­se­um rather than using a very bad repro­duc­tion.” (See our pre­vi­ous post: The Rijksmu­se­um Puts 125,000 Dutch Mas­ter­pieces Online, and Lets You Remix Its Art.)

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Sie­gal goes on to men­tion the efforts of Wash­ing­ton’s Nation­al Gallery of Art, which has so far made super high-res­o­lu­tion images of 25,000 works freely avail­able on NGA Images, a site that describes itself as “designed to facil­i­tate learn­ing, enrich­ment, enjoy­ment, and explo­ration.” You can browse the images by col­lec­tion — French gal­leries, self-por­traits, music — view the most recent addi­tions, or pull up the works of art most fre­quent­ly request­ed by oth­ers. Leonar­do’s por­trait of the Flo­ren­tine aris­to­crat Ginevra de’ Ben­ci, seen up top, has proven par­tic­u­lar­ly pop­u­lar, as has Claude Mon­et’s The Japan­ese Foot­bridge just above. But does all this bear out Ben­jam­in’s con­cerns about mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion cheap­en­ing the orig­i­nal aura of a work? “I don’t think any­one thinks we’ve cheap­ened the image of the ‘Mona Lisa,’” an NGA spokes­woman said to Sie­gal. “Peo­ple have got­ten past that, and they still want to go to the Lou­vre to see the real thing. It’s a new, 21st-cen­tu­ry way of respect­ing images.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Launch­es a New “Art Talks” Series: Tune in Tonight

Down­load Hun­dreds of Free Art Cat­a­logs from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

Free: The Guggen­heim Puts 65 Mod­ern Art Books Online

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 Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

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World Records: New Photo Exhibit Pays Tribute to the Era of Vinyl Records & Turntables

in Art, Music | June 11th, 2013

KindofBlue_MilesDavisJust yes­ter­day, The New York Times ran a piece declar­ing that vinyl is back. Once a casu­al­ty of the CD, vinyl records are now sell­ing at a steady clip, and not just to nos­tal­gic sex­a­ge­nar­i­ans. Younger music fans are embrac­ing old-school records, frankly because they deliv­er a bet­ter sound than com­pressed MP3s. When Daft Punk released its lat­est album Ran­dom Access Mem­o­ries last month, 19,000 vinyl copies were sold, rep­re­sent­ing about 6% of over­all sales. And that may be a low­ball num­ber.

There is, of course, a nos­tal­gic com­po­nent to the vinyl revival. We fond­ly rem­i­nisce about the days when music had oth­er tan­gi­ble and aes­thet­ic dimen­sions. Remem­ber when you could feel the weight of the records, study the cov­er designs, rev­el in the lin­er notes, then slip the discs onto the turntable and watch them spin? Those mem­o­ries get cap­tured by a new pho­to exhib­it — “World Records” — being held at Kopeikin Gallery in Los Ange­les from June 8 to July 13. It fea­tures the work of Kai Schae­fer, who has pho­tographed over 100 clas­sic albums on an array of turnta­bles. Above, you’ll find a copy of Miles Davis’ jazz clas­sic, Kind of Blue, sit­ting on a Rekokut B‑12GH. Oth­er favorites of ours include Lon­don Call­ing by The Clash on a B&O Beogram 4004, The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street on a Dual1010, and VU’s The Vel­vet Under­ground & Nico on a Thorens TD 124II. You can vis­it a larg­er online gallery of pho­tos here.

via Slate and Coudal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Neil Young on the Trav­es­ty of MP3s

Neil Young Busts a Music Store for Sell­ing a Boot­leg CSNY Album (1971)

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Do You Drink Soda, Pop or Soft Drinks?: 122 Heatmaps Visualize How People Talk in America

in English Language, Maps | June 11th, 2013

RegionalTerms

Click each map for larg­er image

Amer­i­cans use words dif­fer­ent­ly in dif­fer­ent regions of the country—a “moot” or “mute” point? There’s a gram­mat­i­cal argu­ment to be made here for sure, but for a sim­ple yes or no answer check out a series of new maps released by sta­tis­ti­cian Joshua Katz.

The maps are of the con­ti­nen­tal Unit­ed States (Alas­ka and Hawaii are not includ­ed for geo­graph­i­cal prox­im­i­ty pur­pos­es) and they reveal delight­ful­ly quirky trends. Some relate to things you might think of your­self: How do you pro­nounce aunt? (most respon­dents would say “ant” while those in New Eng­land would say “ahnt.”) Oth­er ques­tions get at more obscure (and ques­tion­able) region­al dif­fer­ences, like dri­ve-through liquor stores.

RegionalTerms2

When most of the peo­ple on tele­vi­sion sound like they’re from some gener­ic Amer­i­can city with no accent or idioms, it’s easy to lose track of local dialect. How would you pro­nounce “caramel”? Dif­fer­ent­ly, accord­ing to Katz’s maps, if you’re from the East­ern Seaboard than if you’re from the West or Mid­west. And “pecan” has at least four dif­fer­ent region­al pro­nun­ci­a­tions.

It turns out that many Amer­i­cans would call a bug that flies around in the sum­mer and has a rear sec­tion that lights up a “fire­fly.” Many would also call it a “light­ning bug” and per­haps just as many would use the two words inter­change­ably.

I’m not sure I’d want to be in either Michi­gan or New Jer­sey on the night before Hal­loween.

Katz is a grad­u­ate stu­dent at North Car­oli­na State Uni­ver­si­ty. He designed the maps to reflect respons­es to 122 ques­tions about pro­nun­ci­a­tion and word usage based on research orig­i­nal­ly con­duct­ed by Pro­fes­sor Bert Vaux at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Eng­lish Lan­guage in Ten Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Speak­ing in Whis­tles: The Whis­tled Lan­guage of Oax­a­ca, Mex­i­co

Steven Pinker Explains the Neu­ro­science of Swear­ing (NSFW)

Kate Rix writes about dig­i­tal media and edu­ca­tion. Vis­it to see more of her work or fol­low her on Twit­ter @mskaterix.

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Listen to T.S. Eliot Recite His Late Masterpiece, the Four Quartets

in Poetry | June 11th, 2013

Here is a com­plete record­ing of T.S. Eliot read­ing the mas­ter­piece of his lat­er years, the cycle of poems called Four Quar­tets.

Eliot con­sid­ered the Four Quar­tets his great­est work. “I’d like to feel that they get bet­ter as they go on,” he told Don­ald Hall in a 1959 inter­view for the Paris Review. “The sec­ond is bet­ter than the first, the third is bet­ter than the sec­ond, and the fourth is the best of all. At any rate, that’s the way I flat­ter myself.”

The Four Quar­tets are per­haps the most mys­ti­cal and reli­gious of Eliot’s poems. Each one is a med­i­ta­tion on time, mix­ing Chris­t­ian and Hin­du imagery with per­son­al and his­tor­i­cal events. “In The Waste Land the waste was place, the ‘Unre­al City,’ ” writes Eliot’s biog­ra­ph­er, Lyn­dall Gor­don; “here, the waste is time–time unre­deemed by a sense of the time­less.”

As in The Waste Land, Eliot uses the four clas­si­cal ele­ments as a struc­tur­al device in the Four Quar­tets. The first poem, “Burnt Nor­ton,” is asso­ci­at­ed with the ele­ment of air. It is named for an Eng­lish manor house Eliot vis­it­ed in the 1930s. The poem was first pub­lished in 1936. “East Cok­er” (which begins above at 10:46) is asso­ci­at­ed with Earth, and takes its name from the vil­lage in Som­er­set, Eng­land, from which the poet­’s ances­tor, Andrew Eliot, set out for Amer­i­ca in 1669. The third poem, “The Dry Sal­vages,” (begin­ning at 24:17) is asso­ci­at­ed with Water and is named for a treach­er­ous clus­ter of rocks off Cape Ann that was among the haz­ards Andrew Eliot’s ship need­ed to avoid in order to safe­ly reach the coast of Mass­a­chu­setts. The final poem, “Lit­tle Gid­ding,” (39:08) was pub­lished in 1942. Its under­ly­ing theme is one of pur­ga­to­r­i­al Fire. The poem is named for a vil­lage in Cam­bridgeshire, Eng­land, which was the site of a 17th cen­tu­ry Angli­can com­mune that based its dai­ly life around the Book of Com­mon Prayer.

The Four Quar­tets were first pub­lished as a uni­fied whole in 1943. Despite their ini­tial appear­ance as four sep­a­rate poems, the themes are tight­ly inter­wo­ven and each poem is com­posed of five par­al­lel parts. You can hear Eliot read­ing the Four Quar­tets above. To fol­low along as you lis­ten, click here to open the full text in a new win­dow. The first poem begins:

Time present and time past
Are both per­haps present in time future,
And time future con­tained in time past.
If all time is eter­nal­ly present
All time is unre­deemable.
What might have been is an abstrac­tion
Remain­ing a per­pet­u­al pos­si­bil­i­ty
Only in a world of spec­u­la­tion.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Foot­falls echo in the mem­o­ry
Down the pas­sage which we did not take
Towards the door we nev­er opened
Into the rose-gar­den. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

T.S. Eliot Reads His Mod­ernist Mas­ter­pieces “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Rare 1959 Audio: Flan­nery O’Connor Reads ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’

Rare Record­ing: Leo Tol­stoy Reads From His Last Major Work in Four Lan­guages, 1909

Nabokov Reads Loli­ta, Names the Great Books of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

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