David Hockney Shows Us His Sketch Book, Page by Page

in Art | May 10th, 2021

Still work­ing and exhibit­ing in his eight­ies, and indeed seem­ing to grow more and more pro­duc­tive with age, David Hock­ney has become a liv­ing sym­bol of what it is to live as an artist. This entails not just mak­ing a lot of paint­ings, or even mak­ing a lot of paint­ings with an imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able style under a well-cul­ti­vat­ed image. It means con­stant­ly and instinc­tive­ly con­vert­ing the real­i­ty in which one lives into art, an activ­i­ty evi­denced by Hock­ney’s sketch­books. In the video above, the artist him­self shows his sketch­book from 2019, one of the sources of the work in the exhi­bi­tion Draw­ing from Life held last year at the Nation­al Por­trait Gallery. (To accom­pa­ny the exhi­bi­tion, Hock­ney pub­lished a book, also called Draw­ing from Life, which fea­tures 150 draw­ings from the 1950s to the present day.)

Focused on Hock­ney’s ren­der­ings of him­self and those close to him, Draw­ing from Life could run for only a few weeks before the NPG had to close due to the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. Though filled up the pre­vi­ous year, the artist’s sketch­book depicts a qui­et world of domes­tic spaces and unpeo­pled out­door scenes that will look odd­ly famil­iar to many view­ing it after 2020.

He even appears to have includ­ed in its pages an exer­cise in the style of Gior­gio de Chiri­co, whose aes­thet­ic pre­science about our locked-down cities we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. The Brad­ford-born Hock­ney’s Amer­i­can city of choice has long been Los Ange­les, and cer­tain of his sketch­es evoke its dis­tinc­tive pock­ets of near-pas­toral qui­etude amid urban mas­sive­ness.

As befits an inter­na­tion­al­ly renowned artist, Hock­ney lives in more than one part of the world. It was at home in the more thor­ough­ly pas­toral set­ting of his native York­shire that he cre­at­ed the draw­ings con­sti­tut­ing My Win­dow, a lim­it­ed-edi­tion artist book pub­lished by Taschen in 2019. Those images don’t come from his sketch­book, or rather, they don’t come from his ana­log sketch­book: he exe­cut­ed them all on his iPhone and iPad, devices whose artis­tic pos­si­bil­i­ties he’s been enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly explor­ing for more than a decade. In this readi­ness to use any medi­um avail­able, he shows more com­fort with tech­nol­o­gy than do many younger artists. And how­ev­er many of them have, under the lim­i­ta­tions of the past year and a half, got used to sketch­ing the view from their bed­room win­dow, Hock­ney was doing it long before.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Hock­ney on Vin­cent van Gogh & the Impor­tance of Know­ing How to Tru­ly See the World

Watch as David Hock­ney Cre­ates ‘Late Novem­ber Tun­nel, 2006

The Sketch­book Project Presents Online 24,000 Sketch­books, Cre­at­ed by Artists from 135 Coun­tries

29 Sketch­books by Renowned Artist Richard Diebenko­rn, Con­tain­ing 1,045 Draw­ings, Now Freely View­able Online

When Our World Became a de Chiri­co Paint­ing: How the Avant-Garde Painter Fore­saw the Emp­ty City Streets of 2020

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.

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Beautiful 19th-Century Indian Drawings Show Hatha Yoga Poses Before They Reached the West

in Art, Books, Health, Religion | May 6th, 2021

Yoga as an ath­let­ic series of pos­tures for phys­i­cal health came into being only about 100 years ago, part of a wave of gym­nas­tics and cal­is­then­ics that spread around the West­ern world in the 1920s and made its way to India, com­bin­ing with clas­si­cal Indi­an spir­i­tu­al­i­ty and asanas, a word which trans­lates to “seat.”  Yoga, of course, had exist­ed as a clas­si­cal spir­i­tu­al dis­ci­pline in India for thou­sands of years. (The word is first found in the Rig Veda), but it had lit­tle to do with fit­ness, as yoga schol­ar Mark Sin­gle­ton found when he delved into the roots of yoga as we know it.

Asana prac­tice was often mar­gin­al, even scorned by some 19th cen­tu­ry Indi­an teach­ers of high caste as the domain of “fakirs” and men­di­cant beg­gars. “The first wave of ‘export yogis,’” writes Sin­gle­ton, “head­ed by Swa­mi Vivekanan­da, large­ly ignored asana and tend­ed to focus instead on pranaya­ma [breath prac­tice], med­i­ta­tion, and pos­i­tive think­ing…. Vivekanan­da pub­licly reject­ed hatha yoga in gen­er­al and asana in par­tic­u­lar.”

In the 20th cen­tu­ry, yoga became asso­ci­at­ed with Indi­an nation­al­ism and anti-colo­nial resis­tance, and import­ed West­ern pos­es were com­bined with asanas for a pro­gram of intense phys­i­cal train­ing.

West­ern­ized yoga has obscured oth­er tra­di­tions around the world that devel­oped over hun­dreds or thou­sands of years. For his book with James Mallinson, Roots of Yoga, Sin­gle­ton con­sult­ed “yog­ic texts from Tibetan, Ara­bic, Per­sian, Ben­gali, Tamil, Pali, Kash­miri, Old Marathi, Avad­hi, Braj Bhasha, and Eng­lish,” notes the Pub­lic Domain Review, who bring our atten­tion to this ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry series of images from a text called the Joga Pradīpikā, made before clas­si­cal yoga became known in the west by adven­tur­ous thinkers like Hen­ry David Thore­au.

A few mil­len­nia before it was the prove­nance of lycra-clad teach­ers in bou­tique stu­dios, asana prac­tice com­bined rig­or­ous, often quite painful-look­ing, med­i­ta­tive pos­tures with mudras (“seals”), hand ges­tures whose ori­gins “remain obscure,” though yoga his­to­ri­an Georg Feuer­stein argues “they are undoubt­ed­ly the prod­ucts of inten­sive med­i­ta­tion prac­tice dur­ing [which] the body spon­ta­neous­ly assumes cer­tain sta­t­ic as well as dynam­ic pos­es.” The col­lec­tion of draw­ings in the 118-page book depicts 84 asanas and 24 mudras, “with explana­to­ry notes in Bra­ja-Bhasha verse,” notes the British Library, and one image (top) relat­ed to Kun­dali­ni yoga.

What­ev­er the var­i­ous prac­tices of yog­ic schools in both the East­ern and West­ern world, “the meth­ods and lifestyles devel­oped by the Indi­an philo­soph­i­cal and spir­i­tu­al genius­es over a peri­od of at least five mil­len­nia all have one and the same pur­pose,” writes Feuer­stein in his sem­i­nal study, The Yoga Tra­di­tion: “to help us break through the habit pat­terns of our ordi­nary con­scious­ness and to real­ize our iden­ti­ty (or at least union) with the peren­ni­al Real­i­ty. Indi­a’s great tra­di­tions of psy­chos­pir­i­tu­al growth under­stand them­selves as paths of lib­er­a­tion. Their goal is to lib­er­ate us from our con­ven­tion­al con­di­tion­ing and hence also free us from suf­fer­ing.”

Under a broad umbrel­la, yoga has flour­ished as an incred­i­ble wealth of tra­di­tions, philoso­phies, reli­gious prac­tices, and schol­ar­ship whose strands weave loose­ly togeth­er in what most of us know as yoga in a syn­the­sis of East and West. Learn more at the Pub­lic Domain Review, and have a look at their new book of his­toric images, Affini­ties, here, a curat­ed jour­ney through visu­al cul­ture.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Get Start­ed with Yoga: Free Yoga Lessons on YouTube

How Yoga Changes the Brain and May Guard Against Alzheimer’s and Demen­tia

Son­ny Rollins Describes How 50 Years of Prac­tic­ing Yoga Made Him a Bet­ter Musi­cian

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Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Introductions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picasso & More

in Art | April 30th, 2021

Can great art be explained? Isn’t it a lit­tle like explain­ing a joke? Yet this can be worth­while when the joke is in a for­eign lan­guage or an unfa­mil­iar idiom, a long-for­got­ten dialect or an alien idi­olect. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the most com­mon response to Mark Rothko’s mono­chro­mat­ic rec­tan­gles: “I don’t get it.”

Will per­plexed view­ers bet­ter under­stand Rothko’s Sea­gram murals when they learn that “he was found in a pool of blood six by eight feet wide, rough­ly the size of one of his paint­ings,” as James Payne writes, hours after he sent the nine can­vass­es to the Tate Mod­ern gallery in Lon­don in 1970? “His sui­cide would change every­thing and shape the way we respond to his work,” adding a dark­er edge to com­ments of his like “I’m inter­est­ed only in express­ing basic human emo­tions, tragedy, ecsta­sy, doom and so on.”

Last sum­mer, Payne launched his series Great Art Explained in Fif­teen Min­utes, “a bril­liant new addi­tion to YouTube art his­to­ry chan­nels,” Forbes enthused — “enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive short films [that] present a fresh look at famil­iar art­works.” There’s much more to Rothko than his trag­ic death at 66. We learn of his love for Mozart, a com­pos­er who was “always smil­ing through his tears,” the painter said.

An artist who seems to embody the oppo­site of Rothko’s trou­bled pas­sion, Andy Warhol gets an explain­er, above, in which Payne takes on the artist’s Mar­i­lyn Dip­tych. He opens with 30 sec­onds of audio from an inter­view with Warhol, who gives char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly dis­in­ter­est­ed yes or no respons­es: “Andy, do you think that Pop Art has reached the point where it’s becom­ing rep­e­ti­tious now?” “Uh, yes.”

Pop Art’s rep­e­ti­tions were the point. Warhol ele­vat­ed the unre­mark­able mass prod­uct to the lev­el of high art, becom­ing the biggest-sell­ing artist in the world. Payne draws a par­al­lel between Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s trans­for­ma­tion from “abused fos­ter child from the rur­al mid­west” to Hol­ly­wood roy­al­ty, and Warhol’s move from a shy, sick­ly child of immi­grants to an inter­na­tion­al art star.

Even if Payne is explain­ing things you already knew about famous art­works like Monet’s Water Lilies, you’ll still enjoy his pre­sen­ta­tion, with its clever edit­ing and com­pelling nar­ra­tion. “I want to present art in a jar­gon free, enter­tain­ing, clear and con­cise way,” he writes. Each video cov­ers one famous art­work, not all of them mod­ern. (We recent­ly fea­tured Payne’s take on Hierony­mus Bosch’s Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.)

Payne’s work as an art con­sul­tant, guide, “and art and film writer,” Forbes writes, “make him the ide­al pre­sen­ter of this excel­lent new art his­to­ry series.” Crav­ing some con­text on your lunch break? Head over the Great Art Explained in Fif­teen Min­utes and catch a few excel­lent mini-art his­to­ry lec­tures, each one 15 min­utes or less, for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

60-Sec­ond Intro­duc­tions to 12 Ground­break­ing Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hop­per, Pol­lock, Rothko & More

An Intro­duc­tion to 100 Impor­tant Paint­ings with Videos Cre­at­ed by Smarthis­to­ry

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

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

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Affinities, a Book of Images to Celebrate 10 Years of The Public Domain Review

in Art, Books | April 29th, 2021

In a sim­i­lar way to how Open Cul­ture aims to dis­till in one place the web’s high-qual­i­ty free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al media, so The Pub­lic Domain Review aims to help read­ers explore the vast (and some­times over­whelm­ing!) sea of pub­lic domain works avail­able online — like a small exhi­bi­tion gallery at the entrance to an immense net­work of archives and stor­age rooms that lie beyond. Cel­e­brat­ing curi­ous and beau­ti­ful pub­lic domain images is at the very heart of what we do, and so it seemed fit­ting to mark our 10th anniver­sary with a big and beau­ti­ful book of images. Ever since the project began back in 2011, read­ers have implored us to do one, and so final­ly here it is…  we are extreme­ly excit­ed to bring out into the world AFFINITIES.

Gath­er­ing over 500 prints, paint­ings, illus­tra­tions, sketch­es, pho­tographs, doo­dles, and every­thing in between, the book is a care­ful­ly curat­ed jour­ney explor­ing echoes and con­nec­tions across more than two mil­len­nia of visu­al cul­ture. Assem­bled accord­ing to a dream­like log­ic, the images unfurl in a sin­gle unbro­ken sequence, through a play of visu­al echoes and evolv­ing the­mat­ic threads.

While it’s tak­en the best part of a year to cre­ate (a true lock­down baby), this has real­ly been 10 years in the mak­ing — a book born from a decade of deep immer­sion in pub­lic domain archives.

A com­pelling object and expe­ri­ence in its own right, Affini­ties also acts as a launch­pad for fur­ther dis­cov­er­ies and inven­tive engage­ments with the com­mons. It’s metic­u­lous sourc­ing points to works, cre­ators, and col­lec­tions around the world, serv­ing as a gate­way for future for­ays into the dig­i­tal pub­lic domain.

As for the phys­i­cal book itself, we want­ed to cre­ate an object as stun­ning as the images with­in. It is large for­mat (28 x 21.5cm / 11 x 8.5”), boasts a cloth-bound hard­cov­er, with a foil stamped title and embossed inset image, and extends across a whop­ping 368 pages. To help get this beau­ty made and assure the high­est qual­i­ty pro­duc­tion, we are very hap­py to have teamed up with spe­cial­ist art book pub­lish­er Vol­ume, an imprint of Thames & Hud­son.

It’s being sold via a crowd­fun­der and deliv­ery will be ear­ly next year. In addi­tion to the stan­dard edi­tion of the book, we’ve worked with Vol­ume to cre­ate a spe­cial Collector’s Edi­tion (in a slip­case with lim­it­ed edi­tion poster) and also a set of lim­it­ed edi­tion prints. All of the offer­ings are only avail­able dur­ing the cam­paign. 

Learn more, and order your copy, over on the crowd­fun­der page.

Adam Green is co-founder, cre­ator, and main edi­tor of The Pub­lic Domain Review and PDR Press.

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Watch 400+ Documentaries from German Broadcaster Deutsche Welle: Art Forgery, Fashion Photography, the Mona Lisa, and More

in Art, Photography, Television | April 28th, 2021

You’re cer­tain­ly famil­iar with Nou­velle Vague, the “French new wave” that shook up world cin­e­ma in the mid-2oth cen­tu­ry. You’ve prob­a­bly also heard of Hal­lyu, the “Kore­an wave” of pop music and tele­vi­sion dra­mas (and, increas­ing­ly, films) now crash­ing across not just Asia but the West. As for Deutsche Welle, lit­er­al­ly the “Ger­man wave,” you may know the term bet­ter in its abbre­vi­at­ed form: DW, the brand of Ger­many’s pub­lic inter­na­tion­al broad­cast­er. Here on Open Cul­ture we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured DW’s series Bauhaus World, a cel­e­bra­tion of that influ­en­tial Ger­man school of art, archi­tec­ture, and design, but it’s just one of 415 doc­u­men­taries free to watch on the DW Doc­u­men­tary Youtube chan­nel.

DW’s doc­u­men­tar­i­ans have a thor­ough­ly inter­na­tion­al man­date, as evi­denced by their pop­u­lar exam­i­na­tions of the dic­ta­to­r­i­al regime of North Korea, Bul­gar­i­a’s Roma mar­riage mar­ket, extrav­a­gant wealth in cen­tral Africa, and dire pover­ty in the Unit­ed States. You can also browse the archive through themed playlists rang­ing from pol­i­tics and eco­nom­ics to human nature and soci­ety to cul­ture and arts.

That last sec­tion, no doubt of par­tic­u­lar inter­est to Open Cul­ture read­ers, demon­strates DW’s advan­tage as a long-stand­ing broad­cast­er sit­u­at­ed in the heart of Europe. Where bet­ter to start learn­ing about Goth­ic and Romanesque cathe­drals, top elec­tron­ic dance music DJs, Mar­tin Luther and the Ref­or­ma­tion, or the truth behind the Last Sup­per and the Mona Lisa?

Even more inter­est lies in DW’s explo­rations of less­er-known top­ics like the trea­sures of Turk­menistan, fak­ery in the art world, and Berlin’s Lit­tle Hanoi. There are also pro­files of such Ger­man fig­ures as Peter Lind­bergh, the late fash­ion and adver­tis­ing pho­tog­ra­ph­er count­ed as an inspi­ra­tion by the likes of Wim Wen­ders, and Klaus-Dieter Lehmann, out­go­ing pres­i­dent of the Goethe-Insti­tut, a nat­ur­al sub­ject for DW to cov­er. Found­ed with­in a cou­ple of years of one anoth­er, both DW and the Goethe-Insti­tut take the pro­mo­tion of Ger­man cul­ture abroad as a large part of their mis­sion — and both do so in the knowl­edge that, to get oth­er soci­eties inter­est­ed in your cul­ture, you’ve got to show gen­uine inter­est in all of theirs as well. Explore the com­plete list of DW doc­u­men­taries here. And find more doc­u­men­taries online in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch 3,000+ Films Free Online from the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch Bauhaus World, a Free Doc­u­men­tary That Cel­e­brates the 100th Anniver­sary of Germany’s Leg­endary Art, Archi­tec­ture & Design School

Beat Club, the 1960s TV Show That Brought Rock Music to 70 Mil­lion Kids in Ger­many, Hun­gary, Thai­land, Tan­za­nia & Beyond

285 Free Doc­u­men­taries Online

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.

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The Meaning of Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights Explained

in Art, History | April 26th, 2021

Over the half-mil­len­ni­um since Hierony­mus Bosch paint­ed it, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights has pro­duced an ever-widen­ing array of inter­pre­ta­tions. Is it “a paint­ing about sex­u­al free­dom”? A “medieval acid trip”? An “erot­ic fan­ta­sy”? A “hereti­cal attack on the church”? The work of “a mem­ber of an obscure free-love cult”? James Payne, the Lon­don cura­tor behind the Youtube chan­nel Great Art Explained, rejects all these views. In the open­ing of the in-depth video analy­sis above, he describes Bosch’s well-known and much-scru­ti­nized late-15th or ear­ly-16th cen­tu­ry trip­tych as, “pure and sim­ply, hard­core Chris­tian­i­ty.”

Dat­ing from “a time when Euro­pean artists, writ­ers, and the­olo­gians were shap­ing a new, ter­ri­fy­ing vision of Hell and the pun­ish­ment await­ing sin­ners,” Payne argues, The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights is “an intense­ly moral­is­tic work that should be approached as what it is: reli­gious pro­pa­gan­da.”

Depict­ing the Bib­li­cal cre­ation of the world on its out­er pan­els, the work opens up to reveal elab­o­rate­ly detailed visions of Adam and Eve in the Gar­den of Eden, then human­i­ty indulging in all known earth­ly delights, then the con­se­quent tor­ments of Hell. It is that last pan­el, with its abun­dance of per­verse activ­i­ties and grotesque human, ani­mal, and human-ani­mal fig­ures (recent­ly made into fig­urines and even piñatas) that keeps the strongest hold on our imag­i­na­tion today.

Payne’s expla­na­tion goes into detail on all aspects of the work, high­light­ing and con­tex­tu­al­iz­ing details that even avowed appre­ci­a­tors may not have con­sid­ered before. While iden­ti­fy­ing both the pos­si­ble inspi­ra­tions and the pos­si­ble sym­bol­ic inten­tions of the fig­ures and sym­bols with which Bosch filled the trip­tych, Payne empha­sizes that, as far as the artist was con­cerned, “his images were a real­is­tic por­tray­al of sin and its con­se­quences, so in that sense, it was­n’t sur­re­al­ism, it was real­ism.” This bears repeat­ing, giv­en how dif­fi­cult we mod­erns find it “to look at this paint­ing and not see it as sur­re­al­ism or a prod­uct of the sub­con­scious, not see it as a sex­u­al utopia, a cri­tique of reli­gion, or even a psy­che­del­ic romp.” Just as The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights tells us a great deal about the world Bosch lived in, so our views of it tell us a great deal about the world we live in.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

Hierony­mus Bosch’s Medieval Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Comes to Life in a Gigan­tic, Mod­ern Ani­ma­tion

Take a Mul­ti­me­dia Tour of the But­tock Song in Hierony­mus Bosch’s Paint­ing The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

New App Lets You Explore Hierony­mus Bosch’s “The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights” in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Fig­ures from Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Come to Life as Fine Art Piñatas

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.

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3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculptures, Statues & Artworks: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

in Art, Google, History, Photography, Technology | April 23rd, 2021

To recent news sto­ries about 3D print­ed guns, pros­thet­ics, and homes, you can add Scan the World’s push to cre­ate “an ecosys­tem of 3D print­able objects of cul­tur­al sig­nif­i­cance.”

Items that took the ancients untold hours to sculpt from mar­ble and stone can be repro­duced in con­sid­er­ably less time, pro­vid­ed you’ve got the tech­nol­o­gy and the know-how to use it.

Since we last wrote about this free, open source ini­tia­tive in 2017, Scan the World has added Google Arts and Cul­ture to the many cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions with whom it part­ners, expand­ing both its audi­ence and the audi­ence of the muse­ums who allow items in their col­lec­tions to be scanned pri­or to 3D print­ing.


Com­mu­ni­ty con­trib­u­tors have uploaded scan data for over 18,000 sculp­tures and arti­facts onto the plat­form.

Chi­na and India are active­ly court­ing par­tic­i­pants to make some of their trea­sures avail­able.

Although Scan the World is search­able by col­lec­tion, artist, and loca­tion, with so many options, the com­mu­ni­ty blog is a great place to start.

Here you will find help­ful tips for begin­ners hop­ing to pro­duce real­is­tic look­ing skulls and sculp­tures — con­trol your tem­per­a­ture, shake your resin, and learn from your mis­takes.

Got an unreach­able object you’re itch­ing to print? Take a look at the drone pho­togram­me­try tuto­r­i­al to prep your­self for tak­ing a good scan — rotate slow­ly, remem­ber the impor­tance of light, and get up to speed on your drone by test-dri­ving it in an open loca­tion.

Keep an eye peeled for com­pe­ti­tions, like this one, which was won by a pho­to edi­tor and retouch­er with no for­mal 3‑D train­ing.

Art lovers with lit­tle incli­na­tion to crack out the 3D print­er will find inter­est­ing essays on such top­ics as the Gates of Hell, scan­ning in the pan­dem­ic, and the his­to­ry of hair­styles in sculp­ture

You can also embark on a vir­tu­al tour of some of the glob­al loca­tions whose splen­dors are being scanned, pro­grammed, and ren­dered in resin.

A vir­tu­al trip to Paris takes in some of the Louvre’s great­est 3‑dimensional hits: the Venus de Milo, Winged Vic­to­ry, and Psy­che Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

(Any one of those ough­ta class up the ol’ bed­sit…)

The vir­tu­al trip to Aus­tria includes Kierling’s mon­u­ment to Franz Kaf­ka, the Beethoven memo­r­i­al in Vienna’s Heili­gen­städter Park, and Klaus Weber’s trib­ute to Hugo Rheinhold’s Dar­win­ian sculp­ture, Mon­key with Skull. (1,868 down­loads and count­ing!)

A Google map awaits those who would tour the orig­i­nal fla­vor inspi­ra­tions in per­son.

Begin your explo­rations of Scan the World here, and do let us know in the com­ments if you have plans for print­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

The Earth Archive Will 3D-Scan the Entire World & Cre­ate an “Open-Source” Record of Our Plan­et

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er, Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, and some­times, a French Cana­di­an bear known as L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Free Software Lets You Create Traditional Japanese Wood Joints & Furniture: Download Tsugite

in Architecture, Art | April 14th, 2021

The Japan­ese art of tsug­ite, or wood join­ery, goes back more than a mil­len­ni­um. As still prac­ticed today, it involves no nails, screws, or adhe­sives at all, yet it can be used to put up whole build­ings — as well as to dis­as­sem­ble them with rel­a­tive ease. The key is its canon of elab­o­rate­ly carved joints engi­neered to slide togeth­er with­out acci­den­tal­ly com­ing apart, the designs of which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture in ani­mat­ed GIF form. Though it would be nat­ur­al to assume that 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy has no pur­chase on this domain of ded­i­cat­ed tra­di­tion­al crafts­men, it does great­ly assist the efforts of the rest of us to under­stand just how tsug­ite works.

Now, thanks to researchers at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo, a new piece of soft­ware makes it pos­si­ble for us to do our own Japan­ese join­ery as well. Called, sim­ply, Tsug­ite, it’s described in the video intro­duc­tion above as  “an inter­ac­tive com­pu­ta­tion­al sys­tem to design wood­en join­ery that can be fab­ri­cat­ed using a three-axis CNC milling machine.” (CNC stands for “com­put­er numer­i­cal con­trol,” the term for a stan­dard auto­mat­ed-machin­ing process.)

In real time, Tsug­ite’s inter­face gives graph­i­cal feed­back on the joint being designed, eval­u­at­ing its over­all “slid­abilty” and high­light­ing prob­lem areas, such as ele­ments “per­pen­dic­u­lar to the grain ori­en­ta­tion” and thus more like­ly to break under pres­sure.

This is the sort of thing that a Japan­ese car­pen­ter, hav­ing under­gone years if not decades of train­ing and appren­tice­ship, will know by instinct. And though the work of a three-axis CNC machine can’t yet match the aes­thet­ic ele­gance of join­ery hand-carved by a such a mas­ter, Tsug­ite could well, in the hands of users from dif­fer­ent cul­tures as well as domains of art and craft, lead to the cre­ation of new and uncon­ven­tion­al kinds of joints as yet unimag­ined. You can down­load the soft­ware on Github, and you’ll also find sup­ple­men­tary doc­u­men­ta­tion here. Even if you don’t have a milling sys­tem handy, work­ing through vir­tu­al tri­al and error con­sti­tutes an edu­ca­tion in tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese wood join­ery by itself.  The cur­rent ver­sion of Tsug­ite only accom­mo­dates sin­gle joints, but its poten­tial for future expan­sion is clear: with prac­tice, who among us would­n’t want to try our hand at, say, build­ing a shrine?

via Spoon & Tam­a­go

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery: A Kyoto Wood­work­er Shows How Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Cre­at­ed Wood Struc­tures With­out Nails or Glue

Mes­mer­iz­ing GIFs Illus­trate the Art of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Wood Join­ery — All Done With­out Screws, Nails, or Glue

See How Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Car­pen­ters Can Build a Whole Build­ing Using No Nails or Screws

Watch Japan­ese Wood­work­ing Mas­ters Cre­ate Ele­gant & Elab­o­rate Geo­met­ric Pat­terns with Wood

Nick Offer­man Explains the Psy­cho­log­i­cal Ben­e­fits of Woodworking–and How It Can Help You Achieve Zen in Oth­er Parts of Your Life

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.

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