Patti Smith, Umberto Eco & Richard Ford Give Advice to Young Artists in a Rollicking Short Animation

in Animation, Art, Creativity, Life | April 17th, 2017

Note: There are a couple brief not-safe-for-work moments in this film.

Patronizing, ponderous, well-meaning, self-aggrandizing, incoherent… young artists are subjected to a lot of unsolicited advice, and not just from their parents.

But what happens when a young artist actively seeks it out?

Daniella Shuhman turned to the Louisiana Channel’s series, “Advice to the Young,” feasting on the collected wisdom of such heavy hitters as performance artist Marina Abramovic, author Umberto Eco, artist Olafur Eliasson, and the multitalented Godmother of Punk, Patti Smith in preparation for her final project at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design.

Her resultant short film, above, appears to be the work of a deliriously aggro inner child, one with a keen bullshit meter and an anarchic sense of humor.

“The most important advice I have is to have fun,” counsels novelist Jonathan Franzen—a man who allegedly wrote The Corrections while wearing earplugs, earmuffs, and a blindfold, then busted on Oprah Winfrey when she chose it for for her Book Club.

Cue great spurts of animated arterial blood.

At least Franzen bothers to sound encouraging… much more so than Abramovic, or fellow novelist Richard “Talk Yourself Out of It If You Possibly Can Because You’re Probably Not Going to Be Very Good At It” Ford.

(Parents struggling to come up with tuition may be relieved to learn that Ford’s on leave from Columbia University this term.)

Meanwhile, Shuhman breaks for NSFW territory to visualize artist Eliasson’s advice, a move that would surely please another Louisiana Channel personality, cartoonist David Shrigley. Perhaps it can be his consolation prize for not making the cut.

The pulsating reproductive organs aren’t entirely inappropriate. Listen to Eliasson’s full interview to hear him equate making art with making the world. Now that’s the sort of advice that will put a young artist to work!

Some of the more generous advice:

Build a good name, keep your name clean, don’t make compromises, don’t worry about making a bunch of money or being successful.

Don’t be embarrassed about what excites you.

If you are doing something weird that everybody hates, that might be something worth looking into and worth investigating.

Make your own way in the world. Wrap up warm. Eat properly, sensibly. Don’t smoke and phone your mom.

We love imagining the sort of unfettered advice Shuhman will one day be in a position to dispense.

You can see some of her post graduation illustration work on her Flickr page.

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Watch Animated Introductions to 13 Classic Authors: Kafka, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens & Many More

in Animation, Literature | April 12th, 2017

Popular independent philosopher Alain de Botton has been providing mini-introductions to academic subjects for several years now through his School of Life. These take the form of animated précis of the life and work of a handful of prominent authors who might be considered representative, if not essential, to the discipline. In philosophy, we have such indispensable figures as Plato, Rene Descartes, and Immanuel Kant. In political theory, we have Adam Smith, John Rawls, Karl Marx. Wherever we land—conservative, liberal, or radical—we end up interacting with such thinkers. When it comes to the general category of “Literature,” however, it seems to me it should be a bit more difficult to choose only a few figureheads.

For a good part of European history, most people couldn’t read the languages they spoke, but even those who could were hardly considered literate. This distinction was reserved for elites with classical educations who read Latin and usually Greek. Literature meant Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Homer…. Even after the Reformation and the spread of literacy in “vulgar” tongues, the disdain for common tongues remained. The radicalism of Dante and later Cervantes was to write great literature in their national languages. During the 18th century, the novel was often considered primarily middle class women’s entertainment, and in much of the 19th, a popular diversion rarely worthy of the highest critical appraisal.

The 20th century brought not only modernist revolutions but social revolutions that opened doors for women voices and writers previously relegated to the margins. In our current age, a diversity of writers now firmly occupy the center of culture. The oughts were dominated by Junot Diaz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, for example. This year’s Pulitzer winners include Colson Whitehead and poet Tyehimba Jess. Nobel and Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison just swept up another award from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. This is not to mention multiple-award-winning international writers like Derek Walcott, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.… Venerable western literary traditions have become global in composition.

But in every period of literary history, international writers interacted, corresponded, influenced, and plagiarized each other. There is no single line of descent through the history of literature, no singular imperial story that dominates its production and reception. Its location varies from age to age, its families are massive and sprawling, loosely connected at the edges, but sometimes only very loosely. Perhaps it is a testament to the patrician conservatism of philosophy that it remains a field dominated by responses to dead great men. Literature has proven much more dynamic. De Botton’s choices in his introductory video series on literature do not quite reflect this dynamism. Why Voltaire and not, well, Cervantes, generally considered for centuries the father of the modern novel form? Why no Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Haruki Murakami, or Toni Morrison? No Allen Ginsberg, Margaret Atwood, James Baldwin?

These authors and many others may surely be to come. And we should bear in mind the source: not only is de Botton a pop philosopher first and critic secondarily, but he is also promoting a scholarly approach to self-help. The authors he chooses, therefore, all have life lessons to impart of the kind de Botton believes can help us be happier, nicer people who have better relationships. Charles Dickens, at the top, for example, teaches us to sympathize with others and to care about “serious things.” Jane Austen wanted us to be “better and wiser,” and her novels offer readers a course in personal development. From the existential bleakness of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, we can draw life lessons about hope and redemption in the midst of human failure. Even the claustrophobic nightmares of Franz Kafka have their utility as “redemptive, consoling art.” De Botton largely relies on biographical criticism and strays quite a ways from received interpretations.

His casual approach to literature as a didactic tool of personal betterment has the hallmarks of a very Victorian outlook, with both the drawbacks and the benefits such a view entails. While the School of Life series may have a narrow view of who produces art, culture, and philosophy, it also has a compelling argument to make that such things matter and matter greatly. The humanities need all the help they can get, and de Botton seems to argue that we need them more than ever as well. Most readers of Open Culture, I imagine, would surely agree. See de Botton’s full series, including such practical writers as James Joyce, Marcel Proust, George Orwell, and Leo Tolstoy, at the School of Life YouTube playlist.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

138 Short Animated Introductions to the World’s Greatest Ideas: Plato, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir & More

in Animation, Education, History, Philosophy, Politics | April 11th, 2017

The Open Culture audience, by my estimation, divides into two basic groups: those who’ve read the collected works of the likes of Simone de Beauvoir, Michel Foucault, and Plato, and those who’d like to. Whichever body of oft-referenced ideas you’ve been wanting to dig deep into yourself, getting a brief, concept-distilling primer beforehand can make the task easier, improving your understanding and ability to contextualize the original texts when you get around to them. Online education company Macat has produced 138 such primers in the form of animated videos freely available on YouTube which can put you in the right frame of mind to study a variety of ideas in literature, economics, sociology, politics, history, and philosophy.

De Beauvoir, in Macat’s analysis, argued in The Second Sex that “the views of individuals are socially and culturally produced. Femininity is not inherent,” but a societal mechanism long used “to keep men dominant.”

According to their video on Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, that famous book “explores the evolution of power since the Middle Ages,” culminating in the argument that “modern states have moved away from exploring their authority physically to enforcing it psychologically,” a phenomenon exemplified as much by late 18th- and early 19th-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as by modern closed-circuit television urban omni-surveillance (a technology now spread far beyond the infamously CCTV-zealous London all the way to Seoul, where I live). In The Republic, Plato asks more basic questions about society: “What would an ideal state look like, and how would it work?”

For that ancient Greek, says the video’s narrator, “the ideal society offered the guarantee of justice and would be ruled over not by a tyrant, but by an all-powerful philosopher-king.” Whether or not that strikes you as an appealing prospect, or indeed whether you agree with de Beauvoir and Foucault’s bold propositions, you stand to sharpen your mind by engaging with these and other influential ideas, including (as covered in Macat’s other three- to four-minute analyses) those of Machiavelli, David Hume, Edward Said, and Thomas Piketty. “Critical thinking is about to become one of the most in-demand set of skills in the global jobs market,” insists Macat’s marketing. “Are you ready?” Whether or not you’ll ever reference these thinkers on the job, preparing yourself to read them with an active mind will put you on the fast track to the examined life.

You can find the complete list of animations here.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Iggy Pop Sings Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” in an Artfully Animated Video

in Animation, Music | April 3rd, 2017

It’s been covered by everyone from Daffy Duck to Grace Jones, from Pascal of Bollywood to a ukulele-strumming Madonna…

It’s graced the soundtracks of dozens of films, and provided the title for at least two more: the recent Edith Piaf bio-pic and an award winning French feature about a pre-adolescent transgender girl…

Its title has been hijacked for rose-colored memoirs, beer bottle labels, an article about women in boardrooms…

And now the above love story, set on the Pont des Art, starring an anthropomorphic rose and a long tall stick of beef jerky bearing a suspicious resemblance to Iggy Pop.

The animated Iggy stalks across toward his lady love with the stiffness of a White Walker, but it’s undeniably moving when this biologically ill-matched couple begins to dance in a swirl of green and red leaves signifying… what?

The impermanence of romance? (The padlocks which starry eyed couples affixed to the Pont des Art were unceremoniously removed a few years ago…)

The impermanence of iconic pop stars?

The thorny persistence of visionary artists in a consumer driven economy?

Ah well, the lyrics have always been a bit open to interpretation, but the sentiment is eternal.

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Origins of Anime: Watch Free Online 64 Animations That Launched the Japanese Anime Tradition

in Animation, Film | March 30th, 2017

Japanese animation has a way of seeming perpetually new and daring, but it now goes back at least a century. Having carved out its own aesthetic and intellectual space in world culture, anime (even foreigners who’ve never watched so much as a minute of it know the Japanese term) continues to generate a distinctive kind of excitement in its viewers. That goes for relatively recent features that have already attained classic status, like the lush, simultaneously realistic and fantastical works of Hayao Miyazaki, the darker, deeper visions like Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, and the diversity of works in between. But how did those qualities manifest in the very earliest anime? We can now easily see for ourselves, thanks to the selection of 64 Japanese animated film classics made freely available online, as a celebration of the centenary of the form, by Japan’s National Film Archive.

“The most exciting of these are the two earliest extant anime The Dull Sword (Namakura Gatana, 1917) and Urashima Tarō (1918),” writes Nishikata Film Review’s Cathy Munroe Hotes, “films which were considered lost until copies were miraculously discovered in an antique shop in Osaka in 2008. As the vast majority of pre-war films have been lost due to natural disaster, war, and general neglect, each of these 64 films is an important glimpse into early anime history and early 20^th century Japanese culture.”

You can also browse the National Film Archive’s online collection of early animation by director. Watching the works of certain especially prolific ones like Noburō Ōfuji and Yasuji Murata (whose 1929 The Old Man’s Lump Removed, not available in the collection, appears above), you might come away convinced that, even in its first decades, Japanese animation had developed its auteur culture.

The movement (which sometimes barely qualifies as such) and sound (if any) in some of these shorts could hardly impress today, at least on a technical level. Nevertheless, those of us who’ve felt the excitement of the best of anime will recognize in the presentation of the images themselves — in its dynamism, its humor, its creativity — the special animating spirit, as it were, that first sparked our interest. Whether the sometimes slapdash likes of Speed Racer, Robotech, or Kimba the White Lion, which introduced generations of Westerners to anime in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, really marked that much of an improvement on crude production of, say, Murata’s My Ski Trip from 1930 remains open to debate, but through them all we can trace the development of the style and sensibility that, to this day, no animation but the Japanese variety has truly mastered.

Enter the National Film Archive anime collection here.

(NOTE: the National Film Archive assures us that the English version of the site “will be available in a month or two,” but you can find English-subtitled films there even now.)

via coudal.com

How the Films of Hayao Miyazaki Work Their Animated Magic, Explained in 4 Video Essays

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

The Philosophy, Storytelling & Visual Creativity of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Anime Film, Explained in Video Essays

in Animation, Film | March 29th, 2017

“Ghost in the Shell is not in any sense an animated film for children,” wrote Roger Ebert twenty years ago. “Filled with sex, violence and nudity (although all rather stylized), it’s another example of anime, animation from Japan aimed at adults.” Now, when no critic any longer needs to explain the term anime to Western readers, we look back on Ghost in the Shell (1995) as one of the true masterpieces among Japanese animated feature films, mature not just in its content but in its form. Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, takes a look at how it expresses its philosophical themes through its still-striking cyberpunk setting in his video essay “Identity in Space.”

Puschak first highlights the presence (in the middle of this “sci-fi action thriller” about the hunt for a wanted hacker turned self-aware artificial intelligence) of an action-free interlude: a “three minute and twenty-ish second-long scene” consisting of nothing but “34 gorgeous, exquisitely detailed atmospheric shots of a future city in Japan that’s modeled after Hong Kong.”

Its plot-suspending visual exploration of the film’s Blade Runner-esque urban space of “a chaotic multicultural future city dominated by the intersections of old and new structures, connected by roads, canals, and technology,” emphasizes that “spaces, like identities, are constructed. Though space often feels neutral or given, like we could move anywhere within it, our movements, our activities, our life, is always limited by the way space is produced.”

Just as all of Ghost in the Shell’s characters exist in space, the main ones also exist in cybernetic bodies, regarding their identities as stored in their effectively transplantable brains all connected over a vast information network. The half-hour-long analysis from AnimeEveryday just above gets into the philosophical dilemma this presents to the film’s protagonist, the cyborg police officer Motoko Kusanagi, examining in depth several of the scenes that — through dialogue, imagery, symbolism, or subtle combinations of the three that viewers might not catch the first time around — illuminate the story’s central questions about the nature of man, the nature of machine, and the nature of what emerges when the two intersect.

Film Herald’s briefer explanation of Ghost in the Shell (which contains potentially NSFW images) points to three main themes: identity, Cartesian dualism, and evolution, all concepts that come into question — or at least demand a thorough revision — when the boundary between the natural and the synthetic blurs to the film’s imagined extent. “My intuition told me that this story about a futuristic world carried an immediate message for our present world,” said director Mamoru Oshii, and now, more than two decades later, Hollywood has even got around to remaking it in a live-action version starring Scarlett Johansson in the Kusanagi role. That does provides a chance to update some of the now-dated-looking technology seen in the animated original, but there’s no improving on its artistry.

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

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The Famous Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Gets Brought to Life in an Off-Kilter Animation

in Animation, Physics | March 24th, 2017

Schrödinger’s Cat is one of the more famous thought experiments in modern physics, created by Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger back in 1935. The Telegraph summarizes the gist of the experiment as follows:

In the hypothetical experiment … a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison.

If the Geiger counter detects that the radioactive material has decayed, it will trigger the smashing of the bottle of poison and the cat will be killed.

The experiment was designed to illustrate the flaws of the ‘Copenhagen interpretation’ of quantum mechanics, which states that a particle exists in all states at once until observed.

If the Copenhagen interpretation suggests the radioactive material can have simultaneously decayed and not decayed in the sealed environment, then it follows the cat too is both alive and dead until the box is opened.

The University of Nottingham’s Sixty Symbols YouTube channel provides a more complete explanation. But with or without any further introduction, you can watch the off-kilter animation, above, which imagines the origins of the original experiment. It was created by Chavdar Yordanov for an animation show in London.

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by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

in Animation, Software, Video Games | March 20th, 2017

For a young person in an animation-based field, the opportunity to share new work with director Hayao Miyazaki must feel like a golden opportunity.

This may still hold true for Nobuo Kawakami, the chairman of Dwango, a Japanese telecommunications and media company, but not for the reasons he likely anticipated at the start of the above video.

The subject of their discussion is a computer generated animated model whose artificial intelligence causes it to move by squirming on its head. Its creators haven’t invested it with any particular personality traits or storyline, but its flayed appearance and tortuous movements suggest it’s unlikely to be boarding Miyazaki’s magical cat bus any time soon.

Even without an explicit narrative, the model’s potential should be evident to anyone who’s ever sat through the final-reel resurrection of a horribly maimed, presumed-dead terrorizer of scantily clad young ladies.

The model’s grotesque squirmings could also be an asset to zombie video games, as Kawakami excitedly points out.

Let us remember that Miyazaki’s films are rooted not in gross-out effects, but redemption, a reverence for nature, and respect for children and all living things.

The master watches the demonstration without comment, then dispenses with traditional Japanese etiquette in favor of some strongly worded medicine that leaves no doubt as to what he really thought of Dwango’s artificially intelligent wretch:

“I am utterly disgusted… I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself.”

(At this point, you really should watch the video, to hear Miyazaki’s opening statement, about a disabled friend for whom even a simple high-five is a painful physical exertion.)

Poor Kawakami-san! Unceremoniously shamed in front of his colleagues by a national treasure, he doesn’t push back. All he can offer is something along the lines of “We didn’t mean anything by it”—a statement that seems credible.

The American president may be into dehumanizing those with disabilities, but the Dwango crew’s heads were likely occupied with boyish visions of a thrillingly gruesome zombie apocalypse.

It’s a harsh, but important message for Miyazaki to have gotten across. Dwango is responsible for creating a lot of online games. In other words, they hold considerable sway over impressionable youth.

Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki grants Kawakami and his colleagues an opportunity to save face, asking what the team’s goals are.

“We’d like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do,” one shellshocked-looking young man responds.

What, like, Henri Maillardet’s automaton from 1810? While I can imagine such a contraption showing up in one of Miyazaki’s steam-punk-flavored adventures, the hush that greets this statement all but screams “wrong answer!”

What will this encounter lead to?

The release of an online game in which one scores points by hideously dismembering the animated form of director Hayao Miyazaki?

Or a newfound sensitivity, in which cool technological advances are viewed through a lens of actual human experience?

Only time will tell.

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 12 ) |

Patti Smith, Umberto Eco & Richard Ford Give Advice to Young Artists in a Rollicking Short Animation

Watch Animated Introductions to 13 Classic Authors: Kafka, Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens & Many More

138 Short Animated Introductions to the World’s Greatest Ideas: Plato, Michel Foucault, Simone de Beauvoir & More

Iggy Pop Sings Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose” in an Artfully Animated Video

The Origins of Anime: Watch Free Online 64 Animations That Launched the Japanese Anime Tradition

The Philosophy, Storytelling & Visual Creativity of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Anime Film, Explained in Video Essays

The Famous Schrodinger’s Cat Thought Experiment Gets Brought to Life in an Off-Kilter Animation

Hayao Miyazaki Tells Video Game Makers What He Thinks of Their Characters Made with Artificial Intelligence: “I’m Utterly Disgusted. This Is an Insult to Life Itself”

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