Japanese Art Installation Lets People Play Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” As They Walk on Socially-Distanced Notes on the Floor

in Art, Life, Music | December 2nd, 2020

The glob­al pan­dem­ic has revealed the depths of sys­tem­at­ic cru­el­ty in cer­tain places in the world that have refused to com­mit resources to pro­tect­ing peo­ple from the virus or refused to even acknowl­edge its exis­tence. Oth­er respons­es show a dif­fer­ent way for­ward, one in which every­one con­tributes mean­ing­ful­ly through the prin­ci­pled actions of wear­ing masks and social dis­tanc­ing or the prin­ci­pled non-action of stay­ing home to slow the spread.

Then there’s the crit­i­cal role of art, design, and music in our sur­vival. As we have seen—from spon­ta­neous bal­cony ser­e­nades in Italy to poignant ani­mat­ed video poet­ry—the arts are no less cru­cial to our sur­vival than pub­lic health. Human beings need delight, won­der, humor, mourn­ing, and cel­e­bra­tion, and we need to come togeth­er to expe­ri­ence these things, whether online or in real, if dis­tant, life. Ide­al­ly, pub­lic health and art can work togeth­er.

Japan­ese design­er Eisuke Tachikawa has put his skills to work doing exact­ly that. When cas­es began spik­ing in his coun­try in April, Tachikawa and his design firm Nosign­er made some beau­ti­ful­ly designed, and very fun­ny, posters to encour­age social dis­tanc­ing as part of an ini­tia­tive called Pandaid. Then they cre­at­ed Super Mario Broth­ers coin stick­ers to place six feet (or two meters, or one tuna) apart. In its Eng­lish trans­la­tion, at least, the text on Nosigner’s site is direct about their inten­tions: “As this con­tin­ues we want­ed to val­ue-trans­late the social con­straints of social dis­tanc­ing into some­thing pos­i­tive and enjoy­able.”

Tachikawa and Nosign­er have “devel­oped a brand,” they announced recent­ly, called SOCIAL HARMONY “in order to spread the cul­ture of social dis­tanc­ing in a humor­ous way.” Their lat­est instal­la­tion, how­ev­er, does not incor­po­rate jokes or Nin­ten­do ref­er­ences. Rather it draws on one of the most pop­u­lar and beloved pieces of min­i­mal­ist clas­si­cal music, Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédie No. 1” (pro­claimed by Clas­sic FM as “the most flat-out relax­ing piece of piano music ever writ­ten”). “Peo­ple stand on a large music sheet on the floor and notes are played the moment you step on them. By respect­ing social dis­tances and going one note at a time, the pub­lic is able to play” Satie’s piece.

Even for such a suc­cinct com­po­si­tion, this must require a rig­or­ous amount of coor­di­na­tion. But it is nec­es­sary to play the notes in order: “Since the melody changes with every stop, one can cre­ate one’s own Gymnopédie No. 1, since the played melody changes with every step.” The piece was installed at the entrance hall to the Yoko­hama Minatomi­rai Hall for DESIGNART TOKYO 2020, where it will remain until the end of the year. Sure­ly there will be oth­er forms of “social har­mo­ny” to come from the Japan­ese design­ers. Like the prac­tice of social dis­tanc­ing itself, we can only hope such projects catch on and go glob­al, until the wide­spread vac­ci­na­tion and an end to the pan­dem­ic can bring us clos­er again.

via Spoon & Tam­a­go 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A New Dig­i­tal Archive Pre­serves Black Lives Mat­ter & COVID-19 Street Art

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beau­ti­ful Short Ani­ma­tion on the Real­i­ties of Social Iso­la­tion in 2020

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

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

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Salvador Dalí Gets Surreal with 1950s America: Watch His Appearances on What’s My Line? (1952) and The Mike Wallace Interview (1958)

in Art, Television | December 1st, 2020

When was the last time you saw a Sur­re­al­ist (or even just a sur­re­al­ist) painter appear on nation­al tele­vi­sion? If such a fig­ure did appear on nation­al tele­vi­sion today, for that mat­ter, who would know? Per­haps sur­re­al­ist paint­ing does not, in our time, make the impact it once did, but nor does nation­al tele­vi­sion. So imag­ine what a spec­ta­cle it must have been in 1950s Amer­i­ca, cra­dle of the “mass media” as we once knew them, when Sal­vador Dalí turned up on a major U.S. tele­vi­sion net­work. Such a fab­u­lous­ly incon­gru­ous broad­cast­ing event hap­pened more than once, and in these clips we see that, among the “big three,” CBS was espe­cial­ly recep­tive to his impul­sive, oth­er­world­ly artis­tic pres­ence.

On the quiz show What’s My Line?, one of CBS’ most pop­u­lar offer­ings through­out the 50s, con­tes­tants aimed to guess the occu­pa­tion of a guest. They did so wear­ing blind­folds, with­out which they’d have no trou­ble pin­ning down the job of an instan­ta­neous­ly rec­og­niz­able celebri­ty like Dalí — or would they? To the pan­el’s yes-or-no ques­tions, the only kind per­mit­ted by the rules, Dalí near­ly always responds flat­ly in the affir­ma­tive.

Is he asso­ci­at­ed with the arts? “Yes.” Would he ever have been seen on tele­vi­sion? “Yes.” Would he be con­sid­ered a lead­ing man? “Yes.” At this host John Charles Daly steps in to clar­i­fy that, in the con­text of the ques­tion, Dalí would not, in fact, be con­sid­ered a lead­ing man. One con­tes­tant offers an alter­na­tive: “He’s a mis­lead­ing man!” Few titles have cap­tured the essence of Dalí so neat­ly.

The artist, show­man, and human con­scious-alter­ing sub­stance lat­er appeared on The Mike Wal­lace Inter­view. Host­ed by the for­mi­da­ble CBS news­man well before he became one of the faces of 60 Min­utes, the show fea­tured a range of guests from Aldous Hux­ley and Frank Lloyd Wright to Eleanor Roo­sevelt and Ayn Rand. In this broad­cast, Wal­lace and Dalí dis­cuss “every­thing from sur­re­al­ism to nuclear physics to chasti­ty to what artists in gen­er­al con­tribute to the world,” as Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va describes it. A curi­ous if occa­sion­al­ly bemused Wal­lace, writes The Wall­break­ers’ Matt Weck­el, “asks Dalí such gems as ‘What is philo­soph­i­cal about dri­ving a car full of cau­li­flow­ers?’ and ‘Why did you lec­ture with your head enclosed in a div­ing hel­met?’ ” But they also seri­ous­ly dis­cuss “the fear of death, and their own mor­tal­i­ty,” top­ics to which Amer­i­can air­waves have hard­ly grown more accom­mo­dat­ing over the past six­ty years.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí Gets Sur­re­al with Mike Wal­lace (1958)

Sal­vador Dalí Strolls onto The Dick Cavett Show with an Anteater, Then Talks About Dreams & Sur­re­al­ism, the Gold­en Ratio & More (1970)

A Soft Self-Por­trait of Sal­vador Dali, Nar­rat­ed by the Great Orson Welles

Q: Sal­vador Dalí, Are You a Crack­pot? A: No, I’m Just Almost Crazy (1969)

Sal­vador Dalí Explains Why He Was a “Bad Painter” and Con­tributed “Noth­ing” to Art (1986)

Sal­vador Dalí Goes Com­mer­cial: Three Strange Tele­vi­sion Ads

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Beatles Create an Abstract Collaborative Painting, Images of a Woman, During Three Days of Lockdown in Japan (1966)

in Art, Music | November 26th, 2020

One of the ear­li­est known non-human visu­al artists, Con­go the chim­panzee, learned to draw in 1956 at the age of two. Moody, fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of his work, and par­tic­u­lar about his process, he made around 400 draw­ings and paint­ings in a style described as “lyri­cal abstract impres­sion­ism.” He appeared sev­er­al times on British tele­vi­sion before his death in 1964. He count­ed Picas­so among his fans and, in a 2005 auc­tion, out­sold Warhol and Renoir.

One won­ders if who­ev­er gave the four-head­ed beast known as the Bea­t­les can­vas and paint (“pos­si­bly Bri­an Epstein or their Japan­ese pro­mot­er, Tats Nagashima”) remem­bered Con­go as the fab four bounced off the walls in their hotel rooms in Tokyo dur­ing their last, 1966 tour, when extra secu­ri­ty forced them to stay inside for three full days. Or per­haps their keep­ers were inspired by the humane prac­tice of art ther­a­py, com­ing into its own at the same time in men­tal health cir­cles with the found­ing of the British Asso­ci­a­tion of Art Ther­a­pists in 1964.

“Accord­ing to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Whitak­er,” David Wol­man writes at The Atlantic, the Bea­t­les’ man­ag­er “brought the guys a bunch of art sup­plies to help pass the time. Then Epstein set a large can­vas on a table and placed a lamp in the mid­dle. Each mem­ber of the group set to work paint­ing a corner—comic strip­py for Ringo, psy­che­del­ic for John.” Paul’s cor­ner resem­bles an odd­ly erot­ic sea crea­ture, George’s the spir­i­tu­al abstrac­tions of Kandin­sky. Accord­ing to the Bea­t­les Bible, it was Nagashima “who sug­gest­ed that the com­plet­ed paint­ing be auc­tioned for char­i­ty.”

Whitak­er doc­u­ment­ed the exper­i­ment and lat­er pro­nounced it an imme­di­ate suc­cess: “I nev­er saw them calmer, more con­tent­ed than at this time… They’d stop, go and do a con­cert, and then it was ‘Let’s go back to the pic­ture!’” Once fin­ished, the lamp was lift­ed, all four signed their names in the cen­ter, and the paint­ing was titled Images of A Woman, which may be no indi­ca­tion of the artists’ inten­tions. Who knows what kind of scouser humor passed between them as they worked.

The paint­ing then passed to cin­e­ma exec­u­tive Tet­sus­aburo Shi­moya­ma, whose wid­ow auc­tioned it in 1989 to wealthy record store own­er Takao Nishi­no, who had seen them at Budokan in 1966 dur­ing the same his­toric tour that pro­duced the paint­ing. Then it end­ed up under a bed for twen­ty years before being auc­tioned again in 2012. It’s cer­tain­ly true the band, most espe­cial­ly Paul and John, had always tak­en to visu­al art, as artists them­selves or as col­lec­tors and appre­ci­a­tors. But this is some­thing spe­cial. It rep­re­sents their only col­lab­o­ra­tive art­work, aside from some doo­dles on a card sent to the Mon­ter­rey orga­niz­ers.

When look­ing at Whitaker’s pho­tographs of the band at work (see video mon­tage above), one doesn’t, of course, think of Con­go the chimp or the patients of a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. Instead, they look like stu­dents in a ‘60s alter­na­tive school, set loose to cre­ate with­out inter­rup­tion (but for the occa­sion­al mega-con­cert) to their hearts’ con­tent. Maybe Epstein or Nagashima had just seen the 1966 Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da doc­u­men­tary Sum­mer­hill, about just such a school in Eng­land? What­ev­er inspired the zeitgeist‑y moment, we can see why it nev­er came again. That year, they played their final con­cert and retired to the stu­dio, where they could lock them­selves away with their pre­ferred means of cre­ative dis­trac­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

Meet Con­go the Chimp, London’s Sen­sa­tion­al 1950s Abstract Painter

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Audio: The Bea­t­les Play Their Final Con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park, 1966

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

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A Mysterious Monolith Appears in the Utah Desert, Channeling Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Art | November 25th, 2020

Peo­ple do weird things in the desert. A spokesman for the Utah Divi­sion of Wildlife Resources acknowl­edges that wide­ly under­stood truth in a recent New York Times arti­cle about a mys­te­ri­ous mono­lith dis­cov­ered in Red Rock Coun­try. “A team that was count­ing bighorn sheep by heli­copter spot­ted some­thing odd and land­ed to take a clos­er look,” writes Alan Yuhas. “It was a three-sided met­al mono­lith, about 10 to 12 feet tall, plant­ed firm­ly in the ground with no clear sign of where it came from or why it was there.” What­ev­er the dif­fer­ences in size, shape, and col­or, this still-unex­plained object brings to mind noth­ing so much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its most famous mono­lith of all.

Though Stan­ley Kubrick shot that par­tic­u­lar scene in Lon­don’s Shep­per­ton Stu­dios, plen­ty of oth­er pro­duc­tions have made use of the Utah Desert, includ­ing install­ments of the spec­ta­cle-dri­ven Indi­ana Jones and Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble series. But as far as any­one knows, the mono­lith isn’t a piece of set dress­ing.

Crowd­sourc­ing guess­es on social media, the Utah High­way Patrol received such respons­es as “a ‘res­o­nance deflec­tor,’ ‘an eye­sore,’ ‘some good met­al.’ Some the­o­rized, vague­ly, that it was a satel­lite bea­con. Oth­ers joked that it was a Wi-Fi router.” Who­ev­er assem­bled and installed it, they did so with “human-made riv­ets” and a skilled enough hand to cut a per­fect­ly shaped hole into the rock — the kind of com­bi­na­tion of appar­ent skill and inex­plic­a­bil­i­ty that once stirred up so much fas­ci­na­tion over crop cir­cles.

Image by Utah Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safe­ty

The Art News­pa­per’s Gabriel­la Angeleti describes the mono­lith as “resem­bling the free­stand­ing plank sculp­tures of the late Min­i­mal­ist artist John McCrack­en.” Though McCrack­en nev­er offi­cial­ly made an instal­la­tion in the Utah desert, he did spend the last years of his life not far away (at least by the stan­dards of the south­west­ern Unit­ed States) in north­ern New Mex­i­co, and any­one famil­iar with his work will sense a cer­tain affin­i­ty with it in this new­ly dis­cov­ered object. “While this is not a work by the late Amer­i­can artist John McCrack­en,” says a spokesman for the gallery that rep­re­sents him, “we sus­pect it is a work by a fel­low artist pay­ing homage.” Whether or not the mono­lith has an intend­ed mes­sage, the reac­tions now going viral around the world already have many of us won­der­ing how far we’ve real­ly evolved past the apes.

The mono­lith is appar­ent­ly view­able on Google Earth here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

The CIA Puts Hun­dreds of Declas­si­fied Doc­u­ments About UFO Sight­ings Online, Plus 10 Tips for Inves­ti­gat­ing Fly­ing Saucers

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Uncanny Children’s Book Illustrations of Sigmund’s Freud’s Niece, Tom Seidmann-Freud

in Art, Education, K-12 | November 25th, 2020

In 1919, Sig­mund Freud pub­lished “The ‘Uncan­ny,’” his rare attempt as a psy­cho­an­a­lyst “to inves­ti­gate the sub­ject of aes­thet­ics.” The essay arrived in the midst of a mod­ernist rev­o­lu­tion Freud him­self unwit­ting­ly inspired in the work of Sur­re­al­ists like Sal­vador Dali, Andre Bre­ton, and many oth­ers. He also had an influ­ence on anoth­er artist of the peri­od: his niece Martha-Gertrud Freud, who start­ed going by the name “Tom” after the age of 15, and who became known as children’s book author and illus­tra­tor Tom Sei­d­mann-Freud after she mar­ried Jakob Sei­d­mann and the two estab­lished their own pub­lish­ing house in 1921.

Seidmann-Freud’s work can­not help but remind stu­dents of her uncle’s work of the unheim­lich—that which is both fright­en­ing and famil­iar at once. Uncan­ni­ness is a feel­ing of trau­mat­ic dis­lo­ca­tion: some­thing is where it does not belong and yet it seems to have always been there. Per­haps it’s no coin­ci­dence that the Seidmann-Freud’s named their pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny Pere­grin, which comes from “the Latin, Pere­gri­nos,” notes an exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue, “mean­ing ‘for­eign­er,’ or ‘from abroad’—a title used dur­ing the Roman Empire to iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als who were not Roman cit­i­zens.”

Uncan­ny dis­lo­ca­tion was a theme explored by many an artist—many of them Jewish—who would lat­er be labeled “deca­dent” by the Nazis and killed or forced into exile. Sei­d­mann-Freud her­self had migrat­ed often in her young life, from Vien­na to Lon­don, where she stud­ied art, then to Munich to fin­ish her stud­ies, and final­ly to Berlin with her hus­band. She became famil­iar with the Jew­ish philoso­pher and mys­tic Ger­shom Scholem, who inter­est­ed her in illus­trat­ing a Hebrew alpha­bet book. The project fell through, but she con­tin­ued to write and pub­lish her own children’s books in Hebrew.

In Berlin, the cou­ple estab­lished them­selves in the Char­lot­ten­burg neigh­bor­hood, the cen­ter of the Hebrew pub­lish­ing indus­try. Seidmann-Freud’s books were part of a larg­er effort to estab­lish a specif­i­cal­ly Jew­ish mod­ernism. Tom “was a typ­i­cal exam­ple of the busy dawn of the 1920s,” Chris­tine Brinck writes at Der Tagesspiegel. Scholem called the chain-smok­ing artist an “authen­tic Bohèmi­enne” and an “illus­tra­tor… bor­der­ing on genius.” Her work shows evi­dence of a “close famil­iar­i­ty with the world of dreams and the sub­con­scious,” writes Hadar Ben-Yehu­da, and a fas­ci­na­tion with the fear and won­der of child­hood.

In her 1923 The Fish’s Jour­ney, Sei­d­mann-Freud draws on a per­son­al trau­ma, “the first real tragedy to have struck her young life when her beloved broth­er Theodor died by drown­ing.” Oth­er works illus­trate texts—chosen by Jakob and the couple’s busi­ness part­ner, poet Hay­im Nah­man Bialik—by Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen and the Broth­ers Grimm, “with draw­ings adapt­ed to the land­scapes of a Mediter­ranean com­mu­ni­ty,” “a Jew­ish, social­ist notion… added to the texts,” “and the dif­fer­ence between boys and girls made inde­ci­pher­able,” the Sei­d­mann-Freud exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue points out.

These books were part of a larg­er mis­sion to “intro­duce Hebrew-speak­ing chil­dren to world lit­er­a­ture, as part of estab­lish­ing a mod­ern Hebrew soci­ety in Pales­tine.” Trag­i­cal­ly, the pub­lish­ing ven­ture failed, and Jakob hung him­self, the event that pre­cip­i­tat­ed Tom’s own trag­ic end, as Ben-Yehu­da tells it:

The del­i­cate, sen­si­tive illus­tra­tor nev­er recov­ered from her husband’s death. She fell into depres­sion and stopped eat­ing. She was hos­pi­tal­ized, but no one from her fam­i­ly and friends, not even her uncle Sig­mund Freud who came to vis­it and to care for her was able to lift her spir­its. After a few months, she died of anorex­ia at the age of thir­ty-eight.

Sei­d­mann-Freud passed away in 1930, “the same year that the lib­er­al democ­ra­cy in Ger­many, the Weimar Repub­lic, start­ed it fren­zied down­ward descent,” a biog­ra­phy writ­ten by her fam­i­ly points out. Her work was burned by the Nazis, but copies of her books sur­vived in the hands of the couple’s only daugh­ter, Angela, who changed her name to Avi­va and “emi­grat­ed to Israel just before the out­break of World War II.”

The “whim­si­cal­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic” illus­tra­tions in books like Buch Der Hasen­geschicht­en, or The Book of Rab­bit Sto­ries from 1924, may seem more omi­nous in hind­sight. But we can also say that Tom, like her uncle and like so many con­tem­po­rary avant-garde artists, drew from a gen­er­al sense of uncan­ni­ness that per­me­at­ed the 1920s and often seemed to antic­i­pate more full-blown hor­ror. See more Sei­d­mann-Freud illus­tra­tions at 50 Watts, the Freud Muse­um Lon­don, Kul­tur­Port, and at her fam­i­ly-main­tained site, where you can also pur­chase prints of her many weird and won­der­ful scenes.

via 50 Watts

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: Hear the Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Ralph Stead­man Cre­ates an Unortho­dox Illus­trat­ed Biog­ra­phy of Sig­mund Freud, the Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis (1979)

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

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

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The Geometry of Sound: Watch Artist Kenichi Kanazawa Make Amazing Geometric Designs Out of Sand, Using Sound Waves Alone

in Art, Physics | November 23rd, 2020

Before our eyes, Japan­ese artist Kenichi Kanaza­wa cre­ates crisp shapes and geo­met­ric pat­terns with no spe­cial tools but sand and sound, the kind of work that at first looks express­ly designed to go viral on social media. But he’s been at it much longer than that: “Orig­i­nal­ly a sculp­tor by trade,” accord­ing to Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Wald­man, “Kanaza­wa began work­ing with steel and sound in 1987 after col­lab­o­rat­ing with the late sound artist Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra. Today, his work pri­mar­i­ly involves ele­ments like sound, vibra­tion and heat: mak­ing the invis­i­ble, vis­i­ble.” Or in oth­er words, using what crit­ic and music Ted Gioia calls, in a tweet of one of Kanaza­wa’s short table­top per­for­mances, “the pow­er of sound to cre­ate order out of chaos.”

Kanaza­wa does­n’t use just any old tables, but spe­cial ones made of steel, the bet­ter to res­onate when he taps and strokes them with his vari­ety of mal­lets. Nor does he use just any old sand, opt­ing instead for either a pure white — for max­i­mum visu­al stark­ness against the black steel — or a set of bright col­ors, as in the video at the top of the post.

What­ev­er its place on the spec­trum, the stuff seems to rearrange itself across the sur­face in response to the tones cre­at­ed by the artist. The strik­ing pre­ci­sion of the effects pro­duced by this inter­ac­tion of sand, steel, and sound gets view­ers won­der­ing what, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, is going on here. The under­ly­ing set of phe­nom­e­na has a name: cymat­ics, coined in the 1960s by a Swiss doc­tor named Hans Jen­ny.

In his book Heal­ing Songs, Gioia calls Jen­ny’s study of cymat­ics “the most impres­sive and rig­or­ous inquiry yet made into the nature of vibra­tions and their impact on phys­i­cal objects of var­i­ous sorts.” In such a medi­um sen­si­tive to son­ic vibra­tions, Jen­ny him­self writes, “a pat­tern appears to take shape before the eye and, as long as the sound is spo­ken, to behave like some­thing alive.” This also fair­ly describes Kanaza­wa’s danc­ing sand, whether seen from up close or at a dis­tance. Phys­i­cal­ly speak­ing, sound is, of course, a form of vibra­tion, which is itself a form of motion. But for an observ­er like Jen­ny — an adher­ent of eso­teric philoso­pher Rudolf Stein­er’s anthro­pos­o­phy, a school of thought ori­ent­ed toward the obser­va­tion of the spir­i­tu­al world through sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence — Kanaza­wa’s work would sure­ly have, as it were, much deep­er res­o­nances.

via @Ted­Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Geom­e­try of Sound Waves Visu­al­ized

What Does Sound Look Like?: The Audi­ble Ren­dered Vis­i­ble Through Clever Tech­nol­o­gy

The Physics of Play­ing a Gui­tar Visu­al­ized: Metallica’s “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters” Viewed from Inside the Gui­tar

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Some­times beau­ti­ful things come out of ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. This does not jus­ti­fy more ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. But as evi­dence of the resilience, resource­ful­ness, and cre­ativ­i­ty of human beings—and more specif­i­cal­ly of moth­ers in dire straits—we offer the fol­low­ing: A Curi­ous Herbal, Eliz­a­beth Blackwell’s fine­ly illus­trat­ed, engraved, and col­ored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describ­ing their appear­ance, their prop­er­ties and how they may be used for prepar­ing oint­ments,” the British Library writes.

Born some­time around 1700 to a suc­cess­ful mer­chant fam­i­ly in Scot­land, Eliz­a­beth mar­ried Alexan­der Black­well, a “shady char­ac­ter” who pro­ceed­ed to drag her through a series of mis­ad­ven­tures involv­ing him pos­ing as a doc­tor and a print­er, despite the fact that he’d had no train­ing in either pro­fes­sion.

Black­well incurred sev­er­al hefty fines from the author­i­ties, which he could not pay, and he was final­ly remand­ed to debtor’s prison, an insti­tu­tion that often left women with young chil­dren to fend for them­selves.

“With Alexan­der in prison, Eliz­a­beth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep her­self and her child.” For­tu­nate­ly, she had been pre­pared with life skills dur­ing her pros­per­ous upbring­ing, hav­ing learned a thing or two about busi­ness and “received tuition in draw­ing and paint­ing, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Black­well real­ized a pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty: find­ing no high-qual­i­ty herbals avail­able, she decid­ed to make her own in “a rare tri­umph of turn­ing des­per­a­tion into inspi­ra­tion,” Maria Popo­va writes.

After befriend­ing the head cura­tor Chelsea Physic Gar­den — a teach­ing facil­i­ty for appren­tice apothe­caries estab­lished sev­er­al decades ear­li­er — she real­ized that there was a need for a hand­book depict­ing and describ­ing the garden’s new col­lec­tion of mys­te­ri­ous plants from the New World. A keen observ­er, a gift­ed artist, and an entre­pre­neur by nature, she set about bridg­ing the world’s need and her own.

The gor­geous book, A Curi­ous Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she com­plet­ed all of the illus­tra­tions from start to fin­ish. She also enlist­ed her husband’s help, vis­it­ing his cell to have him “sup­ply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Dutch, and Ger­man.” Black­well pro­duced 500 illus­tra­tions in total. She adver­tised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in sev­er­al jour­nals” and “showed her­self an adept busi­ness­woman, strik­ing mutu­al­ly advan­ta­geous deals with book­sellers that ensured the finan­cial suc­cess of the herbal.”

Black­well not only ben­e­fit­ed her fam­i­ly and her read­ers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been dig­i­tized in full by the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library. The herbal will also give back to the nat­ur­al world she lov­ing­ly ren­dered (includ­ing plants that have since gone extinct). Popo­va has made a selec­tion of the illus­tra­tions avail­able as prints to ben­e­fit The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. See Blackwell’s dig­i­tized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pick­ings.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

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

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Behold One of the Earliest Known Color Charts: The Table of Physiological Colors (1686)

in Art, Science | November 20th, 2020

The peri­od called the Enlight­en­ment pro­duced a rev­o­lu­tion in which one sense, vision, became priv­i­leged above all oth­ers. As a result, Sachiko Kusukawa writes at The Roy­al Soci­ety Jour­nal of the His­to­ry of Sci­ence, “sci­ence is supreme­ly visu­al. Indeed, one might say, exces­sive­ly so.” Kusukawa sit­u­ates Eng­lish nat­u­ral­ist and illus­tra­tor Richard Waller at the begin­ning of her his­to­ry about how sight came to dom­i­nate, and Sarah Lowen­gard places Waller’s col­or chart, pre­sent­ed at the Roy­al Soci­ety in 1686, at a for­ma­tive moment in “the cre­ation of col­or in Eigh­teenth-Cen­tu­ry Europe.”

That’s not to say, of course, that col­or didn’t exist before charts like Waller’s, but it did­n’t exist in neat tax­onomies that divid­ed col­or dis­crete­ly, named and cat­e­go­rized it, and mapped the nat­ur­al world by means of col­or the­o­ry. Waller’s “‘Table of Phys­i­o­log­i­cal Col­ors Both Mixt and Sim­ple’ would per­mit unam­bigu­ous descrip­tions of the col­ors of nat­ur­al bod­ies. To describe a plant, for exam­ple, one could com­pare it to the chart and use the names found there to iden­ti­fy the col­ors of the bark, wood, leaves, etc. Sim­i­lar appli­ca­tions of the infor­ma­tion col­lect­ed in the chart might also extend to the arts and trades, he sug­gest­ed.”

The nat­u­ral­ist approach to col­or would inform the arti­fi­cial cre­ation of col­or, help­ing “man­u­fac­tur­ers to pro­duce con­sis­tent dyes and paints,” notes the Smith­son­ian Libraries. Waller’s sys­tem was not pre­cise enough for the task, but many oth­ers, includ­ing board game pio­neer Mil­ton Bradley, picked up his work and refined it, pro­duc­ing not only sci­en­tif­ic and indus­tri­al col­or guides, but also ped­a­go­gies like Bradley’s Ele­men­tary Col­or text­book for chil­dren. Kei­th Moore, Head of Library & Infor­ma­tion Ser­vices at the Roy­al Soci­ety, traces Waller’s col­or dots through the arts, “from the low art Ben-Day dots in the vin­tage com­ic books I used to read as a child to the high art pointil­lism and divi­sion­ism pio­neered by Georges Seu­rat.”

Dozens of col­or sys­tems, wheels, charts, and tables appeared over the next few hun­dred years, from the elab­o­rate to the very sim­ple. All of them have encoun­tered the same basic issue, name­ly the sub­jec­tiv­i­ty of visu­al per­cep­tion. “Waller’s visu­al sys­tem exhibits the same con­cep­tu­al prob­lem… that plagued near­ly all eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems. Which col­ors can be includ­ed and what is their ‘cor­rect’ order? The answer was always tem­pered by avail­able col­or­ing mate­ri­als and choice of media.” As more pig­ments became avail­able, so too did more col­ors in the col­or charts.

Is the mak­ing of col­or clas­si­fi­ca­tion sys­tems more of a sci­ence or an art? It depends, per­haps, on what they’re used for, but “col­or remains elu­sive to sci­en­tists and col­or experts,” the Smith­son­ian points out, over 400 years after Waller’s chart. Since then, how­ev­er, the lan­guage of col­or has evolved, as he envi­sioned, into a prac­ti­cal and poet­ic syn­tax and vocab­u­lary.

See a larg­er ver­sion of the chart here and read about it in detail in Lowen­gard’s excel­lent arti­cle.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Werner’s Nomen­cla­ture of Colour, the 19th-Cen­tu­ry “Col­or Dic­tio­nary” Used by Charles Dar­win (1814)

A Pre-Pan­tone Guide to Col­ors: Dutch Book From 1692 Doc­u­ments Every Col­or Under the Sun

The Vibrant Col­or Wheels Designed by Goethe, New­ton & Oth­er The­o­rists of Col­or (1665–1810)

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

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