The Venice Time Machine: 1,000 Years of Venice’s History Gets Digitally Preserved with Artificial Intelligence and Big Data

Along with hun­dreds of oth­er sea­side cities, island towns, and entire islands, his­toric Venice, the float­ing city, may soon sink beneath the waves if sea lev­els con­tin­ue their rapid rise. The city is slow­ly tilt­ing to the East and has seen his­toric floods inun­date over 70 per­cent of its palaz­zo- and basil­i­ca-lined streets. But should such trag­ic loss­es come to pass, we’ll still have Venice, or a dig­i­tal ver­sion of it, at least—one that aggre­gates 1,000 years of art, archi­tec­ture, and “mun­dane paper­work about shops and busi­ness­es” to cre­ate a vir­tu­al time machine. An “ambi­tious project to dig­i­tize 10 cen­turies of the Venet­ian state’s archives,” the Venice Time Machine uses the lat­est in “deep learn­ing” tech­nol­o­gy for his­tor­i­cal recon­struc­tions that won’t get washed away.

The Venice Time Machine doesn’t only proof against future calami­ty. It also sets machines to a task no liv­ing human has yet to under­take. Most of the huge col­lec­tion at the State Archives “has nev­er been read by mod­ern his­to­ri­ans,” points out the nar­ra­tor of the Nature video at the top.

This endeav­or stands apart from oth­er dig­i­tal human­i­ties projects, Ali­son Abbott writes at Nature, “because of its ambi­tious scale and the new tech­nolo­gies it hopes to use: from state-of-the-art scan­ners that could even read unopened books, to adapt­able algo­rithms that will turn hand­writ­ten doc­u­ments into dig­i­tal, search­able text.”

In addi­tion to pos­ter­i­ty, the ben­e­fi­cia­ries of this effort include his­to­ri­ans, econ­o­mists, and epi­demi­ol­o­gists, “eager to access the writ­ten records left by tens of thou­sands of ordi­nary cit­i­zens.” Lor­raine Das­ton, direc­tor of the Max Planck Insti­tute for the His­to­ry of Sci­ence in Berlin describes the antic­i­pa­tion schol­ars feel in par­tic­u­lar­ly vivid terms: “We are in a state of elec­tri­fied excite­ment about the pos­si­bil­i­ties,” she says, “I am prac­ti­cal­ly sali­vat­ing.” Project head Frédéric Kaplan, a Pro­fes­sor of Dig­i­tal Human­i­ties at the École poly­tech­nique fédérale de Lau­sanne (EPFL), com­pares the archival col­lec­tion to “’dark mat­ter’—doc­u­ments that hard­ly any­one has stud­ied before.”

Using big data and AI to recon­struct the his­to­ry of Venice in vir­tu­al form will not only make the study of that his­to­ry a far less her­met­ic affair; it might also “reshape schol­ars’ under­stand­ing of the past,” Abbott points out, by democ­ra­tiz­ing nar­ra­tives and enabling “his­to­ri­ans to recon­struct the lives of hun­dreds of thou­sands of ordi­nary people—artisans and shop­keep­ers, envoys and traders.” The Time Machine’s site touts this devel­op­ment as a “social net­work of the mid­dle ages,” able to “bring back the past as a com­mon resource for the future.” The com­par­i­son might be unfor­tu­nate in some respects. Social net­works, like cable net­works, and like most his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tives, have become dom­i­nat­ed by famous names.

By con­trast, the Time Machine model—which could soon lead to AI-cre­at­ed vir­tu­al Ams­ter­dam and Paris time machines—promises a more street-lev­el view, and one, more­over, that can engage the pub­lic in ways sealed and clois­tered arti­facts can­not. “We his­to­ri­ans were bap­tized with the dust of archives,” says Das­ton. “The future may be dif­fer­ent.” The future of Venice, in real life, might be uncer­tain. But thanks to the Venice Time Machine, its past is poised take on thriv­ing new life. See pre­views of the Time Machine in the videos fur­ther up, learn more about the project here, and see Kaplan explain the “infor­ma­tion time machine” in his TED talk above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

Venice in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images 125 Years Ago: The Rial­to Bridge, St. Mark’s Basil­i­ca, Doge’s Palace & More

New Dig­i­tal Archive Puts Online 4,000 His­toric Images of Rome: The Eter­nal City from the 16th to 20th Cen­turies

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

New Archive Digitizes 80,000 Historic Watercolor Paintings, the Medium Through Which We Documented the World Before Photography

The water­col­or paint­ing has a rep­u­ta­tion for light­ness. It’s a casu­al endeav­or, done in scenic out­door sur­round­ings on sun­lit days. Water­col­ors are the choice of week­end hob­by­ists or chil­dren unready for messier mate­ri­als. Water­col­ors, in oth­er words, are often treat­ed as unse­ri­ous. But for a cou­ple hun­dred years, they served a very seri­ous pur­pose. In addi­tion to being a portable medi­um with an expan­sive range, water­col­ors’ ease made them the pri­ma­ry means of mak­ing doc­u­men­tary images before pho­tog­ra­phy com­plete­ly took over this func­tion by the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry when portable con­sumer cam­eras became a real­i­ty.

“Before the inven­tion of the cam­era,” explains the Water­colour World, “peo­ple used water­col­ors to doc­u­ment the world. Over the cen­turies, painters—both pro­fes­sion­al and amateur—created hun­dreds of thou­sands of images record­ing life as they wit­nessed it. Every one of these paint­ings has a sto­ry to tell.”

The Water­colour World is a large-scale dig­i­ti­za­tion of thou­sands of water­col­ors found hid­den away in draw­ers all over the UK by for­mer diplo­mat Fred Hohler, who came up with the idea for the project while on a tour of Britain’s pub­lic col­lec­tions.

“The value—and excitement—of the Water­colour World project,” writes Dale Bern­ing Sawa at The Guardian, “is that it views these his­toric paint­ings as doc­u­ments, not aes­thet­ic objects.” That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly how their cre­ators’ saw them. “A lot of the val­ue in these images is… acci­den­tal. Often it’s the context—replete with tree­lines, snow­lines or waterlines—the artist paint­ed around, for exam­ple, the flower they’d set out to record.” Such acci­den­tal doc­u­men­ta­tion cap­tured one of the first known images of Mount Ever­est, sit­u­at­ed in the back­ground, in a paint­ing from the 1840s. Of course much of the doc­u­men­tary pur­pose was intentional—in land sur­veys and sci­en­tif­ic illus­tra­tions, and in the many paint­ings, like that above from 1833, of Mount Vesu­vius erupt­ing.

These images are becom­ing increas­ing­ly impor­tant to sci­en­tists and his­to­ri­ans as ice-caps melt, his­tor­i­cal sites are bombed or van­dal­ized, and flo­ra and fau­na dis­ap­pear. With a focus on pre-1900 images, the site launched with around 80,000 dig­i­tized water­col­ors, a num­ber that could expand into over a mil­lion, Hohler esti­mates, at which point, it will become an “absolute­ly indis­pens­able tool to help us under­stand today.” As for under­stand­ing the con­text in which these works were created—it’s com­pli­cat­ed. Many of the paint­ings come with a wealth of iden­ti­fy­ing infor­ma­tion. Some of the artists were pro­fes­sion­als, some mil­i­tary drafts­men, botanists, expe­di­tion water­col­orists, and sur­vey­ors.

Some had long, dis­tin­guished careers tak­ing over oth­er coun­tries, like colo­nial British Gen­er­al James Mau­rice Prim­rose, who paint­ed sev­er­al very impres­sive land­scapes in India like 1860’s “In the Neil­gher­ries,” above. And there are also “untold num­bers of ama­teurs,” Sawa writes, “which Hohler sus­pects will turn out to have been most­ly women, unpaid for their time and skill—who picked up a paint­brush to record the world around them.” Who­ev­er these painters were, and what­ev­er moti­vat­ed them to make these works of art, we can be grate­ful that they did, and that these thou­sands of paint­ings, many of which are quite frag­ile, sur­vived long enough for dig­i­ti­za­tion in this impres­sive pub­lic project.

“By mak­ing his­to­ry more vis­i­ble to more peo­ple,” the Water­colour World puts it, “we can deep­en our under­stand­ing of the world.” The UK-based orga­ni­za­tion seeks paint­ings from around the globe; “there are thou­sands of water­colours still to add.” If you have some pre-1900 works to con­tribute, you are encour­aged to get in touch and find out if they’re suit­able for inclu­sion. Enter the Water­colour World here.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it a New Dig­i­tal Archive of 2.2 Mil­lion Images from the First Hun­dred Years of Pho­tog­ra­phy

The Get­ty Dig­i­tal Archive Expands to 135,000 Free Images: Down­load High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of Paint­ings, Sculp­tures, Pho­tographs & Much Much More

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

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

Beautiful Hand-Colored Japanese Flowers Created by the Pioneering Photographer Ogawa Kazumasa (1896)

Ogawa Kazu­masa lived from the 1860s to almost the 1930s, sure­ly one of the most fas­ci­nat­ing 70-year stretch­es in Japan­ese his­to­ry. Ogawa’s home­land “opened” to the world when he was a boy, and for the rest of his life he bore wit­ness to the some­times beau­ti­ful, some­times strange, some­times exhil­a­rat­ing results of a once-iso­lat­ed cul­ture assim­i­lat­ing seem­ing­ly every­thing for­eign — art, tech­nol­o­gy, cus­toms — all at once. Nat­u­ral­ly he picked up a cam­era to doc­u­ment it all, and his­to­ry now remem­bers him as a pio­neer of his art.

At the Get­ty’s web site you can see a few exam­ples of the sort of pic­tures Ogawa took of Japan­ese life in the mid-1890s. Dur­ing that same peri­od he pub­lished Some Japan­ese Flow­ers, a book con­tain­ing his pic­tures of just that.

The fol­low­ing year, Ogawa’s hand-col­ored pho­tographs of Japan­ese flow­ers also appeared in the Amer­i­can books Japan, Described and Illus­trat­ed by the Japan­ese, edit­ed by the renowned Anglo-Irish expa­tri­ate Japan­ese cul­ture schol­ar Fran­cis Brink­ley and pub­lished in Boston, the city where Ogawa had spent a cou­ple of years study­ing por­trait pho­tog­ra­phy and pro­cess­ing.

Ogawa’s var­ied life in Japan includ­ed work­ing as an edi­tor at Shashin Shin­pō (写真新報), the only pho­tog­ra­phy jour­nal in the coun­try at the time, as well as at the flower mag­a­zine Kok­ka (国華), which would cer­tain­ly have giv­en him the expe­ri­ence he need­ed to pro­duce pho­to­graph­ic spec­i­mens such as these. Though Ogawa invest­ed a great deal in learn­ing and employ­ing the high­est pho­to­graph­ic tech­nolo­gies, they were the high­est pho­to­graph­ic tech­nolo­gies of the 1890s, when col­or pho­tog­ra­phy neces­si­tat­ed adding col­ors — of par­tic­u­lar impor­tance in the case of flow­ers — after the fact.

Some Japan­ese Flow­ers was re-issued a few years ago, but you can still see 20 strik­ing exam­ples of Ogawa’s flower pho­tog­ra­phy at the Pub­lic Domain Review. They’ve also made sev­er­al of his works avail­able as prints of sev­er­al dif­fer­ent sizes in their online shop, a selec­tion that includes not just his flow­ers but the Bronze Bud­dha at Kamaku­ra and a man locked in bat­tle with an octo­pus as well. Even as every­thing changed so rapid­ly all around him, as he mas­tered the just-as-rapid­ly devel­op­ing tools of his craft, Ogawa nev­er­the­less kept his eye for the nat­ur­al and cul­tur­al aspects of his home­land that seemed nev­er to have changed at all.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs from 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan: 110 Images Cap­ture the Wan­ing Days of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Soci­ety

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Col­or Pho­tos: See the Stereo­scop­ic Pho­tog­ra­phy of T. Ena­mi

Hun­dreds of Won­der­ful Japan­ese Fire­work Designs from the Ear­ly-1900s: Dig­i­tized and Free to Down­load

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

How Obses­sive Artists Col­orize Old Pho­tographs & Restore the True Col­ors of the Past

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

Behold the Anciente Mappe of Fairyland, a Fantastical 1917 Mashup of Tales from Homer’s Odyssey, King Arthur, the Brothers Grimm & More

For most of pub­lish­ing his­to­ry, books for chil­dren meant primers and preachy reli­gious texts, not myth­i­cal worlds invent­ed just for kids. It’s true that fairy tales may have been specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ed to the young, but they were nev­er child­ish. (See the orig­i­nal Grimms’ tales.) By the 19th cen­tu­ry, how­ev­er, the sit­u­a­tion had dra­mat­i­cal­ly changed. And by the turn of the cen­tu­ry, child­like fairy sto­ries and fan­tasies enjoyed wide pop­u­lar­i­ty among grown-ups and chil­dren alike, just as they do today. Wit­ness the tremen­dous suc­cess of Peter Pan.

The char­ac­ter first appeared as a sev­en-day-old baby in a satir­i­cal 1902 fan­ta­sy nov­el by Scot­tish writer J.M. Bar­rie. The nov­el became a play. Pan was so beloved that Barrie’s pub­lish­er excerpt­ed his chap­ters and pub­lished them as Peter Pan in Kens­ing­ton Gar­dens.

Then fol­lowed Barrie’s 1904 play, Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, in which baby Pan had grown up at least just a lit­tle. Only after this his­to­ry of Pan enter­tain­ments did Bar­rie write Peter and Wendy, the sto­ry we learned as chil­dren through Dis­ney adap­ta­tions or the 1911 orig­i­nal.

Pan’s influ­ence is wide and deep, and over a cen­tu­ry long. In 1917, one of the ear­ly adopters of Barrie’s Nev­er­land fan­ta­sy con­cept expand­ed on its world with a ver­sion called “Fairy­land,” described in an illus­trat­ed map of such a place. The artist, Bernard Sleigh, “begins with a stormy sea,” writes Jes­si­ca Leigh Hes­ter at Atlas Obscu­ra. (That is, if we read the map from left to right.) “There, waves lash the shore and tri­tons ride piscine steeds, while a wood­en ship and an unfor­tu­nate soul are half-sunk near­by, in a white whirlpool.” The influ­ence of J.M. Barrie’s descrip­tions is read­i­ly appar­ent.

The Anciente Mappe of Fairy­land (see the map in full here) “mash­es up dozens of sto­ries to make a com­pre­hen­sive geog­ra­phy of make-believe,” writes Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion: “Rapunzel’s tow­er, cheek by jowl with Belle’s palace from ‘Beau­ty and the Beast’; Hump­ty Dump­ty on a roof, over­look­ing Red Rid­ing Hood’s house; Ulysses’ ship, sail­ing past Gob­lin Land.” It’s a “Where’s Wal­do of Fan­ta­sy East­er Eggs,” by an Eng­lish land­scape painter “who wrote exten­sive­ly about fairies in Eng­land.” Sleigh was not only a fan­ta­sist, he was also a true believ­er.

Like Arthur Conan Doyle, Sleigh pro­mot­ed the exis­tence of fairies, and wrote an earnest work of fic­tion called The Gates of Horn: Being Sundry Records from the Pro­ceed­ings of the Soci­ety for the Inves­ti­ga­tion of Fairy Fact and Fal­la­cy in 1926. Like Doyle, he was a tal­ent­ed and pop­u­lar artist look­ing for mag­ic in a world of machin­ery. “The ancient map of Fairy­land,” with its visu­al anthol­o­gy of lit­er­a­ture, folk tale, and mythol­o­gy, “is said to have been his most famous work,” writes the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion. It was designed “dur­ing the ‘Arts & Crafts’ move­ment, which was in reac­tion to the Indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion.”

Like J.R.R. Tolkien, anoth­er artist who found inspi­ra­tion in Barrie’s fan­ta­sy world, Sleigh worked against a back­drop of world war. Onion quotes his­to­ri­ans Tim Bryars and Tom Harper’s com­ment that “com­pared with the dev­as­tat­ed, bomb-blast­ed land­scape of north­ern France, this vision of a make-believe land may have seemed a seduc­tive escape for a Euro­pean soci­ety bear­ing the psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal scars of mass con­flict.”

Unlike Tolkien, how­ev­er, or con­tem­po­rary inher­i­tors of the Peter Pan tra­di­tion like J.K. Rowl­ing a cen­tu­ry lat­er, or the ear­li­er Roman­tic lovers of mythol­o­gy and folk tale, Sleigh’s map invites a light reprieve from the hor­rors of war. “Any small amount of vio­lence or trau­ma you might find in ‘Fairy­land’ could eas­i­ly be evad­ed,” writes Onion, “by mov­ing on to the next area of the map, where a new set of sto­ries unfolds.”

Down­load high res­o­lu­tion scans of An Anciente Mappe of Fairy­land: new­ly dis­cov­ered and set forth from the Library of Con­gress and the David Rum­sey Map Col­lec­tion, where you can also pur­chase a print. (The map phys­i­cal­ly resides at the British Library.) Zoom into Fairy­land’s intri­cate fan­ta­sy land­scape and maybe take a break from the dark real­i­ties of yet anoth­er indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion and a world at war.

via Atlas Obscu­ra/The Vault

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Atlas of Lit­er­ary Maps Cre­at­ed by Great Authors: J.R.R Tolkien’s Mid­dle Earth, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Trea­sure Island & More

Map of Mid­dle-Earth Anno­tat­ed by Tolkien Found in a Copy of Lord of the Rings

A Dig­i­tal Archive of 1,800+ Children’s Books from UCLA

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

Take a Journey Inside Vincent Van Gogh’s Paintings with a New Digital Exhibition

Vin­cent van Gogh died in 1890, long before the emer­gence of any of the visu­al tech­nolo­gies that impress us here in the 21st cen­tu­ry. But the dis­tinc­tive vision of real­i­ty expressed through paint­ings still cap­ti­vates us, and per­haps cap­ti­vates us more than ever: the lat­est of the many trib­utes we con­tin­ue to pay to van Gogh’s art takes the form Van Gogh, Star­ry Night, a “dig­i­tal exhi­bi­tion” at the Ate­lier des Lumières, a dis­used foundry turned pro­jec­tor- and sound sys­tem-laden mul­ti­me­dia space in Paris. “Pro­ject­ed on all the sur­faces of the Ate­lier,” its site says of the exhi­bi­tion, “this new visu­al and musi­cal pro­duc­tion retraces the intense life of the artist.”

Van Gogh’s inten­si­ty man­i­fest­ed in var­i­ous ways, includ­ing more than 2,000 paint­ings paint­ed in the last decade of his life alone. Van Gogh, Star­ry Night sur­rounds its vis­i­tors with the painter’s work, “which rad­i­cal­ly evolved over the years, from The Pota­to Eaters (1885), Sun­flow­ers (1888) and Star­ry Night (1889) to Bed­room at Arles (1889), from his sun­ny land­scapes and nightscapes to his por­traits and still lives.”

It also takes them through the jour­ney of his life itself, includ­ing his “sojourns in Neunen, Arles, Paris, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, and Auvers-sur-Oise.” It will also take them to Japan, a land van Gogh dreamed of and that inspired him to cre­ate “the art of the future,” with a sup­ple­men­tal show titled Dreamed Japan: Images of the Float­ing World.

Both Van Gogh, Star­ry Night and Dreamed Japan run until the end of this year. If you hap­pen to have a chance to make it out to the Ate­lier des Lumières, first con­sid­er down­load­ing the exhi­bi­tion’s smart­phone and tablet appli­ca­tion that pro­vides record­ed com­men­tary on van Gogh’s mas­ter­pieces. That counts as one more lay­er of this elab­o­rate audio­vi­su­al expe­ri­ence that, despite employ­ing the height of mod­ern muse­um tech­nol­o­gy, nev­er­the­less draws all its aes­thet­ic inspi­ra­tion from 19th-cen­tu­ry paint­ings — and will send those who expe­ri­ence it back to those 19th-cen­tu­ry paint­ings with a height­ened appre­ci­a­tion. Near­ly 130 years after Van Gogh’s death, we’re still using all the inge­nu­ity we can muster to see the world as he did.

via MyMod­ern­met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

13 Van Gogh’s Paint­ings Painstak­ing­ly Brought to Life with 3D Ani­ma­tion & Visu­al Map­ping

Van Gogh’s 1888 Paint­ing, “The Night Cafe,” Ani­mat­ed with Ocu­lus Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Soft­ware

Near­ly 1,000 Paint­ings & Draw­ings by Vin­cent van Gogh Now Dig­i­tized and Put Online: View/Download the Col­lec­tion

Down­load Hun­dreds of Van Gogh Paint­ings, Sketch­es & Let­ters in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Watch the Trail­er for a “Ful­ly Paint­ed” Van Gogh Film: Fea­tures 12 Oil Paint­ings Per Sec­ond by 100+ Painters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

Jack Kerouac’s “Beat Paintings:” Now Gathered in One Book and Exhibition for the First Time

Most of us enter Jack Ker­ouac’s world through his 1959 nov­el On the Road. Those of us who explore it more deeply there­after may find much more than we expect­ed to: Ker­ouac’s inner life came out not just in his for­mi­da­ble body of writ­ten work, but in spo­ken-word jazz albums, fan­ta­sy base­ball mate­ri­als, and even paint­ings. Though Ker­ouac has now been gone for near­ly half a cen­tu­ry, it was­n’t until just last year that his works of visu­al art were brought togeth­er: Ker­ouac: Beat Paint­ing did it in book form, and the Museo Maga near Milan put on an exhi­bi­tion of the more than 80 pieces it could find, begin­ning with his first self-por­trait, drawn at the age of nine.

Ker­ouac had an inter­est in por­trai­ture in gen­er­al: the book, the Inde­pen­dent’s David Bar­nett writes, “begins with a series of por­traits of peo­ple Ker­ouac knew or admired. They also high­light Ker­ouac’s com­pli­cat­ed spir­i­tu­al­i­ty: brought up a Catholic, he lat­er embraced Bud­dhism and devel­oped an almost ‘holy fool’ per­sona.” Car­di­nal Gio­van­ni Mon­ti­ni, lat­er to become Pope Paul VI, counts as one par­tic­u­lar­ly notable sub­ject of a Ker­ouac por­trait; anoth­er is Ker­ouac’s fel­low cul­ture-defin­ing writer Tru­man Capote (above), who at the time Ker­ouac paint­ed him had already crit­i­cized On the Road pub­licly, and harsh­ly. San­d­ri­na Ban­dera, a cura­tor of the exhi­bi­tion and edi­tor of Ker­ouac: Beat Paint­ing, ascribes to the Capote por­trait “a dynam­ic, almost vio­lent qual­i­ty.”

The same could per­haps be said of all of Ker­ouac’s cre­ative out­put, and cer­tain­ly of much of his best-known writ­ing. And like many a cre­ator known for his vis­cer­al nature, Ker­ouac made strict rules and built sys­tems to work with­in: his 1959 man­i­festo for paint­ing includes the com­mand­ments “use only one brush” and “stop when you want to ‘improve’… it’s done.” Detrac­tors of Ker­ouac’s work will cer­tain­ly see a con­nec­tion between his visu­al art and his ver­bal art in his self-direct­ed com­mand­ment to “pile it on,” but who could call the “beat paint­ing” of this Beat Gen­er­a­tion fig­ure­head not of an aes­thet­ic and intel­lec­tu­al piece with every­thing else that Ban­dera describes, unim­prov­ably, as “that potent enti­ty known as Jack Ker­ouac.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jack Kerouac’s Hand-Drawn Map of the Hitch­hik­ing Trip Nar­rat­ed in On the Road

Hear All Three of Jack Kerouac’s Spo­ken-World Albums: A Sub­lime Union of Beat Lit­er­a­ture and 1950s Jazz

Jack Ker­ouac Lists 9 Essen­tials for Writ­ing Spon­ta­neous Prose

Jack Ker­ouac Reads from On the Road (1959)

Jack Ker­ouac Was a Secret, Obses­sive Fan of Fan­ta­sy Base­ball

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include 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.

Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives

We are a haunt­ed species: haunt­ed by the specter of cli­mate change, of eco­nom­ic col­lapse, and of automa­tion mak­ing our lives redun­dant. When Marx used the specter metaphor in his man­i­festo, he was iron­i­cal­ly invok­ing Goth­ic tropes. But Com­mu­nism was not a boogey­man. It was a com­ing real­i­ty, for a time at least. Like­wise, we face very real and sub­stan­tial com­ing real­i­ties. But in far too many instances, they are also man­u­fac­tured, under ide­olo­gies that insist there is no alter­na­tive.

But let’s assume there are oth­er ways to order our pri­or­i­ties, such as valu­ing human life as an end in itself. Per­haps then we could treat the threat of automa­tion as a ghost: insub­stan­tial, imma­te­r­i­al, maybe scary but harm­less. Or treat it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to order our lives the way we want. We could stop invent­ing bull­shit, low-pay­ing, waste­ful jobs that con­tribute to cycles of pover­ty and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. We could slash the num­ber of hours we work and spend time with peo­ple and pur­suits we love.

We have been taught to think of this sce­nario as a fan­ta­sy. Or, as Buck­min­ster Fuller declared in 1970—on the thresh­old of the “Malthu­sian-Dar­win­ian” wave of neolib­er­al thought to come—“We keep invent­ing jobs because of this false idea that every­body has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must jus­ti­fy his right to exist.” In cur­rent par­lance, every per­son must some­how “add val­ue” to share­hold­ers’ port­fo­lios. The share­hold­ers them­selves are under no oblig­a­tion to return the favor.

What about adding val­ue to our own lives? “The true busi­ness of peo­ple,” says Fuller, “should be to go back to school and think about what­ev­er it was they were think­ing about before some­body came along and told them they had to earn a liv­ing.” Against the “spe­cious notion” that every­one should have to make a wage to live–this “non­sense of earn­ing a living”–he takes a more mag­nan­i­mous view: “It is a fact today that one in ten thou­sand of us can make a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of sup­port­ing all the rest,” who then may go on to make mil­lions of small break­throughs of their own.

He may have sound­ed over­con­fi­dent at the time. But fifty years lat­er, we see engi­neers, devel­op­ers, and ana­lysts of all kinds pro­claim­ing the com­ing age of automa­tion in our life­times, with a major­i­ty of jobs to be ful­ly or par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed in 10–15 years. It is a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of dis­pens­ing with huge num­bers of peo­ple, unless its ben­e­fits are wide­ly shared. The cor­po­rate world sticks its head in the sand and issues guide­lines for retrain­ing, a solu­tion that will still leave mass­es unem­ployed. No mat­ter the state of the most recent jobs report, seri­ous loss­es in near­ly every sec­tor, espe­cial­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice work, are unavoid­able.

The jobs we invent have changed since Fuller’s time, become more con­tin­gent and less secure. But the obses­sion with cre­at­ing them, no mat­ter their impact or intent, has only grown, a run­away delu­sion no one can seem to stop. Should we fear automa­tion? Only if we col­lec­tive­ly decide the cur­rent course of action is all there is, that “every­body has to earn a living”—meaning turn a profit—or drop dead. As Con­gress­woman Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez—echoing Fuller—put it recent­ly at SXSW, “we live in a soci­ety where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our prob­lem…. We should not be haunt­ed by the specter of being auto­mat­ed out of work.”

“We should be excit­ed about automa­tion,” she went on, “because what it could poten­tial­ly mean is more time to edu­cate our­selves, more time cre­at­ing art, more time invest­ing in and inves­ti­gat­ing the sci­ences.” How­ev­er that might be achieved, through sub­si­dized health, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices, new New Deal and Civ­il Rights poli­cies, a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income, or some cre­ative syn­the­sis of all of the above, it will not pro­duce a utopia—no polit­i­cal solu­tion is up that task. But con­sid­er­ing the ben­e­fits of sub­si­diz­ing our human­i­ty, and the alter­na­tive of let­ting its val­ue decline, it seems worth a shot to try what econ­o­mist Bill Black calls the “pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy core,” which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, hap­pens to be “cen­trist in terms of the elec­torate’s pref­er­ences.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live & Learn More

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

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

Take a Free Online Course on the Great Medieval Manuscript, the Book of Kells

Last week, we called your atten­tion to the dig­i­ti­za­tion of the Book of Kells, one of the great man­u­scripts from the medieval peri­od. The dig­i­tized man­u­script, we should note, comes accom­pa­nied by anoth­er great resource–a free online course on the Book of Kells. Both dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives are made pos­si­ble by Trin­i­ty Col­lege Dublin.

The six-week course cov­ers the fol­low­ing top­ics:

  • Where and how the man­u­script was made
  • The social con­text from which the man­u­script emerged, includ­ing ear­ly medieval faith and pol­i­tics
  • The artis­tic con­text of the man­u­script, reflect­ing local and inter­na­tion­al styles
  • The the­ol­o­gy and inter­pre­ta­tions of the text
  • How and why the man­u­script sur­vived
  • The Book of Kells and con­tem­po­rary cul­ture

The course “is for any­one with an inter­est in Ire­land, medieval stud­ies, his­to­ry, art, reli­gion and/or pop­u­lar cul­ture.” Sign up for the free course today.

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

80 Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties, a sub­set of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

The Medieval Mas­ter­piece, the Book of Kells, Is Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Pages from a Medieval Monk’s Sketch­book: A Win­dow Into How Illu­mi­nat­ed Man­u­scripts Were Made (1494)

800 Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Are Now Online: Browse & Down­load Them Cour­tesy of the British Library and Bib­lio­thèque Nationale de France

How Illu­mi­nat­ed Medieval Man­u­scripts Were Made: A Step-by-Step Look at this Beau­ti­ful, Cen­turies-Old Craft

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