How Olivetti Designed the First Personal Computer in History, the Programma 101 (1965)

If you were to come across an Olivet­ti Pro­gram­ma 101, you prob­a­bly would­n’t rec­og­nize it as a com­put­er. With its 36 keys and its paper-strip print­er, it might strike you as some kind of over­sized adding machine, albeit an unusu­al­ly hand­some one. But then, you’d expect that qual­i­ty from Olivet­ti, a com­pa­ny best remem­bered for its enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful type­writ­ers that now occu­py prime space in muse­ums of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry design. Among its less­er-known prod­ucts, at least out­side its native Italy, are its com­put­ers, a line that began with main­frames in the mid-nine­teen-fifties and end­ed with IBM PC clones in the nineties, reach­ing the height of its inno­va­tion with the Pro­gram­ma 101 in 1965.

The Pro­gram­ma 101 is also known as the P101 or the Per­ot­ti­na, a name derived from that of its inven­tor, engi­neer Pier Gior­gio Per­ot­to. “I dreamed of a friend­ly machine to which you could del­e­gate all those menial tasks which are prone to errors,” he lat­er said, “a machine that could qui­et­ly learn and per­form tasks, that could store sim­ple data and instruc­tions, that could be used by any­one, that would be inex­pen­sive and the size of oth­er office prod­ucts which peo­ple used.”

To real­ize that vision required not just a tech­ni­cal effort but also an aes­thet­ic one, which fell to the young archi­tect and indus­tri­al design­er Mario Belli­ni, who had fol­lowed his col­league (and lat­er Mem­phis Group founder) Ettore Sottsass into con­sult­ing work for Olivet­ti.

All this work took place at a time of cri­sis for the com­pa­ny. Fol­low­ing the death of its head Adri­ano Olivet­ti in 1960, writes Opin­ion­at­ed Design­er, it “got into severe finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties after buy­ing the giant US Under­wood com­pa­ny, and the elec­tron­ics divi­sion was sold off to Gen­er­al Elec­tric ear­ly in 1965.” Olivet­ti’s son Rober­to had already “giv­en the go-ahead in 1962 for the devel­op­ment of a small ‘desk-top’ com­put­er.” In order “to avoid their project being swal­lowed up by GE, Perotto’s team changed some of the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the 101 to make it appear to be a ‘cal­cu­la­tor’ rather than a ‘com­put­er’ which meant the project could stay with Olivet­ti.” Yet on a tech­ni­cal lev­el, the Per­ot­ti­na remained very much a com­put­er indeed.

In addi­tion to sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, and divi­sion, “it could also per­form log­i­cal oper­a­tions, con­di­tion­al and uncon­di­tion­al jumps, and print the data stored in a reg­is­ter, all through a cus­tom-made alphanu­mer­ic pro­gram­ming lan­guage,” writes Ric­car­do Bian­chi­ni at Inex­hib­it. In the video above, enthu­si­ast Wladimir Zaniews­ki demon­strates its capa­bil­i­ties with a sim­ple alphanu­mer­ic lunar-lan­der game: a his­tor­i­cal­ly apt project, since NASA bought ten of them for use in plan­ning the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. Yet even more impor­tant was the device’s com­par­a­tive­ly down-to-earth achieve­ment of being, in Bian­chini’s words, “an unin­tim­i­dat­ing object every­one could use, even at home. In that sense, there is no doubt that the Olivet­ti Pro­gram­ma 101 tru­ly is the first per­son­al com­put­er in his­to­ry.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the World’s Old­est Work­ing Dig­i­tal Com­put­er — the 1951 Har­well Deka­tron — Get Fired Up Again

Dis­cov­ered: The User Man­u­al for the Old­est Sur­viv­ing Com­put­er in the World

How British Code­break­ers Built the First Elec­tron­ic Com­put­er

When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor Syn­the­siz­er — to Play Their Song “Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor” (1981)

How France Invent­ed a Pop­u­lar, Prof­itable Inter­net of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Mini­tel

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Can You Crack the Uncrackable Code in Kryptos, the CIA’s Work of Public Art?

It can be chal­leng­ing to parse the mean­ing of many non-nar­ra­tive art­works.

Some­times the title will offer a clue, or the artist will shed some light in an inter­view.

Is it a com­ment on the cul­tur­al, socio-eco­nom­ic or polit­i­cal con­text in which it was cre­at­ed?

Or is the act of cre­at­ing it the artist’s most salient point?

Are mul­ti­ple inter­pre­ta­tions pos­si­ble?

Artist Jim San­born’s mas­sive sculp­ture Kryp­tos may inspire var­i­ous reac­tions in its view­ers, but there’s def­i­nite­ly a sin­gle cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion.

But 78-year-old San­born isn’t say­ing what…

He wants some­one else to iden­ti­fy it.

Kryp­tos’ main mys­tery — more like “a rid­dle wrapped in a mys­tery inside an enig­ma” to quote Win­ston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped cop­per screen using jig­saws.

Image cour­tesy of the CIA

Pro­fes­sion­al crypt­an­a­lysts, hob­by­ists, and stu­dents have been attempt­ing to crack the code of its 865 let­ters and 4 ques­tion marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA head­quar­ters in Lan­g­ley, Vir­ginia.

The hands-on part fell well with­in Sanborn’s purview. But a Mas­ters in sculp­ture from Pratt Insti­tute does not auto­mat­i­cal­ly con­fer cryp­tog­ra­phy bonafides, so San­born enlist­ed Edward Schei­dt, the retired chair­man of the CIA’s Cryp­to­graph­ic Cen­ter, for a crash course in late 20th-cen­tu­ry cod­ing sys­tems.

San­born sam­pled var­i­ous cod­ing meth­ods for the fin­ished piece, want­i­ng the act of deci­pher­ing to feel like “peel­ing lay­ers off an onion.”

That onion has been par­tial­ly peeled for years.

Deci­pher­ing three of its four pan­els is a pelt shared by com­put­er sci­en­tist and for­mer pres­i­dent of the Amer­i­can Cryp­togram Asso­ci­a­tion, James Gillo­gly, and CIA ana­lyst David Stein.

Gillo­gly arrived at his solu­tion in 1999, using a Pen­tium II.

Stein reached the same con­clu­sion a year ear­li­er, after chip­ping away at it for some 400 hours with pen­cil and paper, though the CIA kept his achieve­ment on the down low until Gillo­gly went pub­lic with his.

The fol­low­ing year the Nation­al Secu­ri­ty Agency claimed that four of their employ­ees, work­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive­ly, had reached an iden­ti­cal solu­tion in 1992, a fact cor­rob­o­rat­ed by doc­u­ments obtained through the Free­dom of Infor­ma­tion Act.

(On a relat­ed note, I got Wor­dle in three this morn­ing…)

This still leaves the 97-char­ac­ter phrase from the final pan­el up for grabs. Crack­ing it will be the penul­ti­mate step in solv­ing Kryp­tos’ puz­zle. As San­born told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a rid­dle:”

It’s mys­te­ri­ous. It’s going to lead to some­thing else. It’s not going to be fin­ished when it’s decod­ed.

The pub­lic is wel­come to con­tin­ue mak­ing edu­cat­ed guess­es.

San­born has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final pas­sage of decrypt­ed text.

BERLIN, at posi­tions 64 — 69 (2010)

CLOCK, at posi­tions 70 — 74 (2014)

NORTHEAST, at posi­tion 26 — 34

Have you solved it, yet?

No?

Don’t feel bad…

San­born has been field­ing incor­rect answers dai­ly for decades, though a ris­ing tide of aggres­sive and racist mes­sages led him to charge 50 bucks per sub­mis­sion, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolute­ly no hope of hints.

Kryp­tos’ most ded­i­cat­ed fans, like game devel­op­er /cryptologist Elon­ka Dunin, seen ply­ing San­born with copi­ous quan­ti­ties of sushi above in Great Big Sto­ry’s video, find val­ue in work­ing togeth­er and, some­times, in per­son.

Their dream is that San­born might inad­ver­tent­ly let slip a valu­able tid­bit in their pres­ence, though that seems like a long shot.

The artist claims to have got­ten very skilled at main­tain­ing a pok­er face.

(Wait, does that sug­gest his inter­locu­tors have been get­ting warmer?)

Dunin has relin­quished all fan­tasies of solv­ing Kryp­tos solo, and now works to help some­one — any­one — solve it.

(Please, Lord, don’t let it be chat­G­PT…)

San­ford has put a con­tin­gency plan in place in case no one ever man­ages to get to the bot­tom of the Kryp­tos (ancient Greek for “hid­den”) conun­drum.

He, or rep­re­sen­ta­tives of his estate, will auc­tion off the solu­tion. He is con­tent with let­ting the win­ning bid­der decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.

“I do real­ize that the val­ue of Kryp­tos is unknown and that per­haps this con­cept will bear lit­tle fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the mass­es of peo­ple des­per­ate to learn the solu­tion and fac­tors in Sanford’s inten­tion to donate all pro­ceeds to cli­mate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.

Join Elon­ka Dunin’s online com­mu­ni­ty of Kryp­tos enthu­si­asts here.

To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two pan­els, fol­lowed by their solu­tions, with the artist’s inten­tion­al mis­spellings intact.


1.
Encrypt­ed Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD

Decrypt­ed Text
Between sub­tle shad­ing and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlu­sion.

2.

Encrypt­ed Text
VFPJUDEEHZWETZYVGWHKKQETGFQJNCE
GGWHKK?DQMCPFQZDQMMIAGPFXHQRLG
TIMVMZJANQLVKQEDAGDVFRPJUNGEUNA
QZGZLECGYUXUEENJTBJLBQCRTBJDFHRR
YIZETKZEMVDUFKSJHKFWHKUWQLSZFTI
HHDDDUVH?DWKBFUFPWNTDFIYCUQZERE
EVLDKFEZMOQQJLTTUGSYQPFEUNLAVIDX
FLGGTEZ?FKZBSFDQVGOGIPUFXHHDRKF
FHQNTGPUAECNUVPDJMQCLQUMUNEDFQ
ELZZVRRGKFFVOEEXBDMVPNFQXEZLGRE
DNQFMPNZGLFLPMRJQYALMGNUVPDXVKP
DQUMEBEDMHDAFMJGZNUPLGEWJLLAETG

Decrypt­ed Text
It was total­ly invis­i­ble Hows that pos­si­ble? They used the Earths mag­net­ic field X
The infor­ma­tion was gath­ered and trans­mit­ted under­gru­und to an unknown loca­tion X
Does Lan­g­ley know about this? They should Its buried out there some­where X
Who knows the exact loca­tion? Only WW This was his last mes­sage X
Thir­ty eight degrees fifty sev­en min­utes six point five sec­onds north
Sev­en­ty sev­en degrees eight min­utes forty four sec­onds west ID by rows

View step by step solu­tions for the first three of Kryp­tos’ encrypt­ed pan­els here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence May Have Cracked the Code of the Voyn­ich Man­u­script: Has Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy Final­ly Solved a Medieval Mys­tery?

The Code of Charles Dick­ens’ Short­hand Has Been Cracked by Com­put­er Pro­gram­mers, Solv­ing a 160-Year-Old Mys­tery

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

The Oldest Voices That We Can Still Hear: Hear Audio Recordings of Ghostly Voices from the 1800s

What his­to­ry nerd doesn’t thrill to Thomas Edi­son speak­ing to us from beyond the grave in a 50th anniver­sary repeat of his ground­break­ing 1877 spo­ken word record­ing of (those hop­ing for lofti­er stuff should dial it down now) Mary Had a Lit­tle Lamb?

The orig­i­nal rep­re­sents the first time a record­ed human voice was suc­cess­ful­ly cap­tured and played back. We live in hope that the frag­ile tin­foil sheet on which it was record­ed will turn up in someone’s attic some­day.

Appar­ent­ly Edi­son got it in the can on the first take. The great inven­tor lat­er rem­i­nisced that he “was nev­er so tak­en aback” in his life as when he first heard his own voice, issu­ing forth from the phono­graph into which he’d so recent­ly shout­ed the famous nurs­ery rhyme:

Every­body was aston­ished. I was always afraid of things that worked the first time.

His achieve­ment was a game chang­er, obvi­ous­ly, but it was­n’t the first time human speech was suc­cess­ful­ly record­ed, as Kings and Things clar­i­fies in the above video.

That hon­or goes to Édouard-Léon Scott de Mar­t­inville, whose pho­nau­to­graph, patent­ed in 1857, tran­scribed vocal sounds as wave forms etched onto lamp­black-coat­ed paper, wood, or glass.

Edison’s plans for his inven­tion hinged on its abil­i­ty to repro­duce sound in ways that would be famil­iar and of ser­vice to the lis­ten­ing pub­lic. A sam­pling:

  • A music play­er 
  • A device for cre­at­ing audio­books for blind peo­ple
  • A lin­guis­tic tool
  • An aca­d­e­m­ic resource of archived lec­tures
  • A record of tele­phone con­ver­sa­tions
  • A means of cap­tur­ing pre­cious fam­i­ly mem­o­ries. 

Léon Scot­t’s vision for his pho­nau­to­graph reflects his pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the sci­ence of sound.

A pro­fes­sion­al type­set­ter, with an inter­est in short­hand, he con­ceived of the pho­nau­to­graph as an arti­fi­cial ear capa­ble of repro­duc­ing every hic­cup and quirk of pro­nun­ci­a­tion far more faith­ful­ly than a stenog­ra­ph­er ever could. It was, in the words of audio his­to­ri­an Patrick Feast­er,  the “ulti­mate speech-to-text machine.”

As he told NPR’s Talk of the Nation, Léon Scott was dri­ven to “get sounds down on paper where he could look at them and study them:”

…in terms of what we’re talk­ing about here visu­al­ly, any­body who’s ever used audio edit­ing soft­ware should have a pret­ty good idea of what we’re talk­ing about here, that kind of wavy line that you see on your screen that some­how cor­re­sponds to a sound file that you’re work­ing with…He was hop­ing peo­ple would learn to read those squig­gles and not just get the words out of them.

Although Léon Scott man­aged to sell a few pho­nau­to­graphs to sci­en­tif­ic lab­o­ra­to­ries, the gen­er­al pub­lic took lit­tle note of his inven­tion. He was pained by the glob­al acclaim that greet­ed Edison’s phono­graph 21 years lat­er, fear­ing that his own name would be lost to his­to­ry.

His fear was not unfound­ed, though as Conan O’Brien, of all peo­ple, mused, “even­tu­al­ly, all our graves go unat­tend­ed.”

But Léon Scott got a sec­ond act, as did sev­er­al uniden­ti­fied long-dead humans whose voic­es he had record­ed, when Dr. Feast­er and his First Sounds col­league David Gio­van­noni con­vert­ed some pho­nau­to­grams to playable dig­i­tal audio files using non-con­tact opti­cal-scan­ning tech­nol­o­gy from the Lawrence Berke­ley Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry.

Dr. Feast­er describes the eerie expe­ri­ence of lis­ten­ing to the cleaned-up spo­ken word tracks after a long night of tweak­ing file speeds, using Léon Scot­t’s pho­nau­to­grams of tun­ing forks as his guide:

I’m a sound record­ing his­to­ri­an, so hear­ing a voice from 100 years ago is no real sur­prise for me. But sit­ting there, I was just kind of stunned to be think­ing, now I’m sud­den­ly at last lis­ten­ing to a per­for­mance of vocal music made in France before the Amer­i­can Civ­il War. That was just a stun­ning thing, feel­ing like a ghost is try­ing to sing to me through that sta­t­ic.

Scan­ning tech­nol­o­gy also allowed his­to­ri­ans to cre­ate playable dig­i­tal files of frag­ile foil record­ings made on Edi­son devices, like the St. Louis Tin­foil , made by writer and ear­ly adopter Thomas Mason in the sum­mer of 1878, as a way of show­ing off his new-fan­gled phono­graph, pur­chased for the whop­ping sum of $95.

The British Library’s Tin­foil Record­ing is thought to be the ear­li­est in exis­tence. It fea­tures an as-yet uniden­ti­fied woman, who may or may not be quot­ing from social the­o­rist Har­ri­et Mar­tineau… this gar­bled ghost is excep­tion­al­ly dif­fi­cult to pin down.

Far eas­i­er to deci­pher are the 1889 record­ings of Pruss­ian Field Mar­shall Hel­muth Von Multke, who was born in 1800, the last year of the 18th cen­tu­ry, mak­ing his the ear­li­est-born record­ed voice in audio his­to­ry.

The nona­ge­nar­i­an recites from Ham­let and Faust, and con­grat­u­lates Edi­son on his aston­ish­ing inven­tion:

This phono­graph makes it pos­si­ble for a man who has already long rest­ed in the grave once again to raise his voice and greet the present.

Relat­ed Con­tent

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Suzanne Vega, “The Moth­er of the MP3,” Records “Tom’s Din­er” with the Edi­son Cylin­der

A Beer Bot­tle Gets Turned Into a 19th Cen­tu­ry Edi­son Cylin­der and Plays Fine Music

400,000+ Sound Record­ings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain

The Web Site “Cen­turies of Sound” is Mak­ing a Mix­tape for Every Year of Record­ed Sound from 1860 to Present

Stream 385,000 Vin­tage 78 RPM Records at the Inter­net Archive: Louis Arm­strong, Glenn Miller, Bil­lie Hol­i­day & More

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

What Happens When Someone Crochets Stuffed Animals Using Instructions from ChatGPT

Alex Wool­ner knows how to put a degree in Eng­lish to good use.

Past projects include a fem­i­nist type­writer blog, retro­fitting stick­er vend­ing machines to dis­pense poet­ry, and a free res­i­den­cy pro­gram for emerg­ing artists at a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary stu­dio she co-found­ed with play­wright and painter Jason Mont­gomery in East­hamp­ton, Mass­a­chu­setts.

More recent­ly, the poet and inter­na­tion­al edu­ca­tor has com­bined her inter­est in amigu­ru­mi cro­cheted ani­mals and Chat­G­PT, the open source AI chat­bot.

Hav­ing cro­cheted an amigu­ru­mi nar­whal for a nephew ear­li­er this year, she hopped on Chat­G­PT and asked it to cre­ate “a cro­chet pat­tern for a nar­whal stuffed ani­mal using worsted weight yarn.”

The result might have dis­cour­aged anoth­er quer­ent, but Wool­ner got out her cro­chet hook and sal­lied forth, fol­low­ing Chat­G­PTs instruc­tions to the let­ter, despite a num­ber of red flags indi­cat­ing that the chatbot’s grasp of nar­whal anato­my was high­ly unre­li­able.

Its igno­rance is part of its DNA. As a large lan­guage mod­el, Chat­G­PT is capa­ble of pro­duc­ing pre­dic­tive text based on vast amounts of data in its mem­o­ry bank. But it can’t see images.

As Amit Kat­wala writes in Wired:

It has no idea what a cat looks like or even what cro­chet is. It sim­ply con­nects words that fre­quent­ly appear togeth­er in its train­ing data. The result is super­fi­cial­ly plau­si­ble pas­sages of text that often fall apart when exposed to the scruti­ny of an expert—what’s been called “flu­ent bull­shit.”

It’s also not too hot at math, a skill set knit­ters and cro­cheters bring to bear read­ing pat­terns, which traf­fic in num­bers of rows and stitch­es, indi­cat­ed by abbre­vi­a­tions that real­ly flum­mox a chat­bot.

An exam­ple of begin­ner-lev­el instruc­tions from a free down­load­able pat­tern for a cute amigu­ru­mi shark:

DORSAL FIN (gray yarn)

Rnd 1: in a mr work 3 sc, 2 hdc, 1 sc (6)

Rnd 2: 3 sc, 1 hdc inc, 1 hdc, 1 sc (7)

Rnd 3: 3 sc, 2 hdc, 1 hdc inc, 1 sc (8)

Rnd 4: 3 sc, 1 hdc inc, 3 hdc, 1 sc inc (10)

Rnd 5: 3 sc, 1 hdc, 1 hdc inc, 3 hdc, 1 sc, 1 sc inc (12)

Rnd 6: 3 sc, 6 hdc, 3 sc (12)

Rnd 7: sc even (12); F/O and leave a long strand of yarn to sew the dor­sal fin between rnds # 18–23. Do not stuff the fin.

Pity poor Chat­G­PT, though, like Wool­ner, it tried.

Their col­lab­o­ra­tion became a cause célèbre when Wool­ner debuted the “AI gen­er­at­ed nar­whal cro­chet mon­stros­i­ty” on Tik­Tok, apt­ly com­par­ing the large tusk Chat­G­PT had her posi­tion atop its head to a chef’s toque.

Is that the best AI can do?

A recent This Amer­i­can Life episode details how Sebastien Bubeck, a machine learn­ing researcher at Microsoft, com­mand­ed anoth­er large lan­guage mod­el, GPT‑4, to cre­ate code that TikZ, a vec­tor graph­ics pro­duc­er, could use to “draw” a uni­corn.

This col­lab­o­ra­tive exper­i­ment was per­haps more empir­i­cal­ly suc­cess­ful than the Chat­G­PT amigu­ru­mi pat­terns Wool­ner duti­ful­ly ren­dered in yarn and fiber­fill. This Amer­i­can Life’s David Kesten­baum was suf­fi­cient­ly awed by the result­ing image to haz­ard a guess that “when peo­ple even­tu­al­ly write the his­to­ry of this crazy moment we are in, they may include this uni­corn.”

It’s not good, but it’s a fuck­ing uni­corn. The body is just an oval. It’s got four stu­pid rec­tan­gles for legs. But there are lit­tle squares for hooves. There’s a mane, an oval for the head. And on top of the head, a tiny yel­low tri­an­gle, the horn. This is insane to say, but I felt like I was see­ing inside its head. Like it had pieced togeth­er some idea of what a uni­corn looked like and this was it.

Let’s not poo poo the mer­its of Woolner’s ongo­ing explo­rations though. As one com­menter observed, it seems she’s “found a way to instan­ti­ate the weird messed up arti­facts of AI gen­er­at­ed images in the phys­i­cal uni­verse.”

To which Wool­ner respond­ed that she “will either be spared or be one of the first to per­ish when AI takes over gov­er­nance of us meat sacks.”

 

In the mean­time, she’s con­tin­u­ing to har­ness Chat­G­PT to birth more mon­strous amigu­ru­mi. Ger­ald the Narwhal’s has been joined by a cat, an otter, Nor­ma the Nor­mal Fish, XL the Newt, and Skein Green, a pel­i­can bear­ing get well wish­es for author and sci­ence vlog­ger Hank Green.

When retired math­e­mati­cian Daina Taim­i­na, author of Cro­chet­ing Adven­tures with Hyper­bol­ic Planes, told the Dai­ly Beast that Ger­ald would have resem­bled a nar­whal more close­ly had Wool­ner sup­plied Chat­G­PT with more specifics, Wool­ner agreed to give it anoth­er go.

Two weeks lat­er, the Dai­ly Beast pro­nounced this attempt, nick­named Ger­ard, “even less nar­whal-look­ing than the first. Its body was a mas­sive stuffed tri­an­gle, and its tusk looked like a gum­drop at one end.”

Wool­ner dubbed Ger­ard pos­si­bly the most frus­trat­ing AI-gen­er­at­ed amigu­ru­mi of her acquain­tance, owing to an onslaught of speci­fici­ty on ChatCPT’s part. It over­loaded her with instruc­tions for every indi­vid­ual stitch, some­times call­ing for more stitch­es in a row than exist­ed in the entire pat­tern, then dipped out with­out telling her how to com­plete the body and tail.

As sil­ly as it all may seem, Wool­ner believes her Chat­G­PT amigu­ru­mi col­labs are a healthy mod­el for artists using AI tech­nol­o­gy:

I think if there are ways for peo­ple in the arts to con­tin­ue to cre­ate, but also approach AI as a tool and as a poten­tial col­lab­o­ra­tor, that is real­ly inter­est­ing. Because then we can start to branch out into com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent, new art forms and cre­ative expressions—things that we couldn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do before or didn’t have the spark or the idea to do can be explored. 

If you, like Hank Green, have fall­en for one of Woolner’s unholy cre­ations, down­load­able pat­terns are avail­able here for $2 a pop.

Those seek­ing alter­na­tives to fiber­fill are advised to stuff their amigu­ru­mi with “aban­doned hopes and dreams” or “all those free tee shirts you get from giv­ing blood and run­ning road races or what­ev­er you do for fun”.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

An Artist Cro­chets a Life-Size, Anatom­i­cal­ly-Cor­rect Skele­ton, Com­plete with Organs

A Bio­sta­tis­ti­cian Uses Cro­chet to Visu­al­ize the Fright­en­ing Infec­tion Rates of the Coro­n­avirus

Make an Adorable Cro­cheted Fred­die Mer­cury; Down­load a Free Cro­chet Pat­tern Online

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Explore the Largest Online Archive Exploring the Genius of Leonard da Vinci

We dare not spec­u­late as to what Leonar­do DaVin­ci would make of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

We are, how­ev­er, fair­ly con­fi­dent that he would love the Inter­net.

The Renais­sance-era genius applied his sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of the human body and the nat­ur­al world to oth­er types of sys­tems, includ­ing plans for civ­il engi­neer­ing projects, mil­i­tary pro­jec­tiles, and fly­ing machines.

Google Arts & Culture’s new ini­tia­tive Inside a Genius Mind offers an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence of the codices in which Da Vin­ci made his sketch­es, dia­grams, and notes.

It’s also a cura­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tion between a human — Oxford art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Kemp  — and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Pro­fes­sor Kemp, author of Liv­ing with Leonar­do: Fifty Years of San­i­ty and Insan­i­ty in the Art World and Beyond, brings a life­time of rig­or­ous study and pas­sion for the sub­ject.

His non-human coun­ter­part used machine learn­ing to delve into the note­books’ con­tents, inves­ti­gat­ing some 1040 pages from 6 vol­umes and “draw­ing the­mat­ic con­nec­tions across time and sub­ject mat­ter to reflect Leonardo’s spir­it of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary imag­i­na­tion, inno­va­tion and the pro­found uni­ty at the heart of his appar­ent­ly diverse pur­suits.”

Upon launch­ing the exper­i­ment, you bush­whack your way through the indi­vid­ual codices by click­ing on the sketch­es float­ing toward you like ele­ments in a clas­sic space-themed video game, or choose to enjoy one of five curat­ed sto­ries.


We went with Earth as Body, which gath­ers sev­en pages from the UK’s Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust’s Codex Wind­sor, and one from the Codex Leices­ter, which inspired an ani­mat­ed mod­el that should sure­ly please its cur­rent own­er, Bill Gates.

 

Using a dis­creet and some­what fid­dly nav­i­ga­tion bar on the left side of the screen, we toured Leonardo’s ren­der­ings of the flayed mus­cles of the upper spine, the ves­sels and nerves of the neck and liv­er, the Arno val­ley with the route of a pro­posed canal that would run from Flo­rence to Pisa, a view of the Alps from Milan, the fall of light on a face, stud­ies of optics and men in action, and obser­va­tions of the moon and earth­shine.

How are these things relat­ed?

“Leonar­do believed that the human body rep­re­sent­ed the whole nat­ur­al world in minia­ture” and the selec­tions do offer food for thought that Leonardo’s pas­sion for the under­ly­ing laws of nature is the com­mon thread run­ning through his research and art.

Each image is accom­pa­nied a but­ton invit­ing you to “explore” the work fur­ther. Click it for infor­ma­tion about dimen­sions, prove­nance, and media, as well as some tan­ta­liz­ing bio­graph­i­cal tid­bits, such as this, adapt­ed from the cat­a­logue for the 2019 exhib­it Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Life in Draw­ing:

Leonar­do had first stud­ied anato­my in the late 1480s. By the end of his life he claimed to have per­formed 30 human dis­sec­tions, intend­ing to pub­lish an illus­trat­ed trea­tise on the sub­ject, but this was nev­er com­plet­ed, and Leonardo’s work thus had no dis­cernible impact on the dis­ci­pline. His only doc­u­ment­ed dis­sec­tion was car­ried out in the win­ter of 1507–8, when he per­formed an autop­sy on an old man whose death he had wit­nessed in a hos­pi­tal in Flo­rence. The stud­ies on this page from Leonardo’s note­book are based on that dis­sec­tion: on the ver­so Leonar­do depicts the ves­sels of the liv­er; and in notes else­where in the note­book he gives the first known clin­i­cal descrip­tion of cir­rho­sis of the liv­er.

Per­haps you’d like to cir­cum­vent the machine learn­ing and use your own genius mind to make  con­nec­tions a la Da Vin­ci?

Try mess­ing around with the AI tags. See what you can cob­ble togeth­er to forge a cohe­sive alliance between such ele­ments as wing, horse, map, musi­cal instru­ments, and spi­ral.

Or cleanse your palate by putting a mash-up of two codex sketch­es on a dig­i­tal sticky with the help of Google AI, mind­ful that the mas­ter, who lived to the ripe old age of 67, was prob­a­bly a bit more inten­tion­al with his time…

Begin your explo­rations of Google Arts & Culture’s Inside a Genius Mind here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490)

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Robots Are Carving Replicas of the Parthenon Marbles: Could They Help the Real Ancient Sculptures Return to Greece?

Art forgery is a stur­dy trope of film and fic­tion. We’re all famil­iar with the spec­ta­cle of a rar­i­fied expert exam­in­ing a work, while a wealthy col­lec­tor anx­ious­ly wrings their hands near­by.

As Mag­gie Cao observes in the Guardian:

Forg­eries expose some of the art world’s most psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex fig­ures: the col­lec­tor and the coun­ter­feit­er. What com­pels the pro­to­typ­i­cal col­lec­tor to accu­mu­late objects of beau­ty is usu­al­ly a pecu­liar devo­tion to the pow­er of sin­gu­lar­i­ty. The col­lec­tor wor­ships art’s pow­er to move us, a pow­er we imag­ine emanates from unique objects. Mean­while, what moti­vates the coun­ter­feit­er is an undue con­fi­dence in the pos­si­bil­i­ties of repli­ca­tion. To deceive a view­er with a copy is to affirm that copy’s inter­change­abil­i­ty with the orig­i­nal.

But what if art forgery can be used for good?

That’s the hope of Roger Michel, founder of the Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Archae­ol­o­gy, who employs tech­no­log­i­cal advances to pre­serve cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant objects and offer acces­si­ble tac­tile expe­ri­ences to those with vision impair­ment.

Short­ly after ISIS destroyed the Mon­u­men­tal Arch of Palymyra, he har­nessed 3D tech­nol­o­gy to recre­ate the 1800-year old land­mark in two-thirds scale Egypt­ian mar­ble.

The pub­lic was able to get up close and per­son­al with the mod­el in var­i­ous loca­tions around the world, includ­ing New York’s City Hall Park, Florence’s Piaz­za del­la Sig­no­ria, and London’s Trafal­gar Square, where Michel enjoyed watch­ing passers­by touch­ing and pho­tograph­ing the repli­ca Arch:

There are guys in Carn­a­by Street suits mixed with young peo­ple in hip-hop clothes and Syr­i­ans in tra­di­tion­al dress. It’s the cross­roads of human­i­ty, and that was what Palym­ra was.

Michel is also striv­ing to con­vince the British Muse­um that all will not be lost, should it choose to repa­tri­ate the 2,500-year-old Parthenon Mar­bles to Greece, much as the Smith­son­ian returned 29 Benin bronzes tak­en dur­ing an 1897 British raid to the Nation­al Com­mis­sion for Muse­ums and Mon­u­ments in Nige­ria.

Michel made his case with a robot­i­cal­ly carved fac­sim­i­le of the head of the Horse of Selene, above, which is all the more remark­able when one learns that he was work­ing from pho­tos tak­en on an iPhone and iPad while vis­it­ing the gallery in which it is dis­played, after the muse­um refused his request for an offi­cial scan.

The item descrip­tion on the museum’s collection’s por­tal notes that the Horse of Selene was pur­chased from Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin, who took pos­ses­sion of it while serv­ing as Britain’s ambas­sador to Ottoman Turkey from 1799–1803.

(The descrip­tion neglects to men­tion that rather than allow him to adorn his home with this and oth­er ill-got­ten antiq­ui­ties, a par­lia­men­tary com­mit­tee ordered Lord Elgin to sell his vast col­lec­tion to the British gov­ern­ment for £35,000, which is how they wound up in the muse­um.)

Orig­i­nal­ly a part of the Parthenon’s east ped­i­ment, the Horse of Selene is such a fan favorite that the muse­um shop sells an “exquis­ite” hand-cast resin repli­ca for £1,650, promis­ing that it will make “a show-stop­ping point of focus in any home.”

Perhaps…though we’re will­ing to bet it can’t match the verisimil­i­tude of the tiny chips and chis­el marks painstak­ing­ly cap­tured by the robot carv­er, which took about about 8 days to cre­ate a rough mod­el once it received the scans, fol­lowed by some 3 weeks of refin­ing. The robot got an assist at the very end from human arti­sans, whose hand­i­work Michel calls “the cru­cial 3 to 5 per­cent.”

Gia­co­mo Mas­sari, founder of Robot­or, who part­nered with Michel on this recre­ation, vaunts the pre­ci­sion tech­nol­o­gy makes pos­si­ble:

You can rec­og­nize every scratch. You can see the flaws of the stone and you can see the chal­lenges our col­leagues from 2,000 years ago were fac­ing. It’s like going back in time — you can feel the strug­gles of the artist.

The muse­um brass appears unmoved by the prospect of swap­ping repli­cas, no mat­ter how excel­lent, for the frieze pan­els, sculp­tures, archi­tec­tur­al frag­ments and oth­er trea­sures of antiq­ui­ty Elgin shipped home from the Acrop­o­lis in the ear­ly 1800s, though the New York Times report­ed last week that secret talks with Greece’s prime min­is­ter may indi­cate the two par­ties are edg­ing clos­er to res­o­lu­tion.

This col­lec­tion has been a cul­tur­al hot pota­to since Lord Byron, tour­ing the Parthenon short­ly after Elgin made off with so many its trea­sures, denounced his avarice in a poem titled The Curse of Min­er­va:

Lo! here, despite of war and wast­ing fire,

I saw suc­ces­sive Tyran­nies expire;

‘Scaped from the rav­age of the Turk and Goth,

Thy coun­try sends a spoil­er worse than both.

Sur­vey this vacant, vio­lat­ed fane;

Recount the relics torn that yet remain:

‘These’ Cecrops placed, ‘this’ Per­i­cles adorned,

‘That’ Adri­an reared when droop­ing Sci­ence mourned.

What more I owe let Grat­i­tude attest—

Know, Alar­ic and Elgin did the rest.

That all may learn from whence the plun­der­er came,

The insult­ed wall sus­tains his hat­ed name:

For Elgin’s fame thus grate­ful Pal­las pleads,

Below, his name—above, behold his deeds!

The New York Times quot­ed a mid­dle-aged Lon­don bus dri­ver who voiced the opin­ion, as did the vast major­i­ty of respon­dents to a British sur­vey, that the Parthenon sculp­tures should be returned to their land of ori­gin, remark­ing, “It’s like the Crown Jew­els. If some­one took those, you’d want them back, wouldn’t you?”

His argu­ment is a hard one to refute in an age when the inno­v­a­tive tech­ni­cal solu­tions pro­mot­ed by Michel and the Insti­tute for Dig­i­tal Archae­ol­o­gy cre­ate oppor­tu­ni­ties that Lord Elgin and muse­um vis­i­tors of yore could nev­er have envi­sioned.

The pub­lic invi­ta­tion to the Novem­ber 2022 unveil­ing of the Selene Horse repli­ca stat­ed that “Britain’s stew­ard­ship of the Elgin mar­bles embod­ies a psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly com­plex sto­ry of obses­sion, pos­ses­sion, and assim­i­la­tion — so far with­out res­o­lu­tion”, ask­ing:

Might per­fect copies, ren­dered in sacred Pen­tel­ic mar­ble, sug­gest a pos­si­ble path for­ward?

Read­ers, what say you?

Relat­ed Con­tent

John Oliver’s Show on World-Class Art Muse­ums & Their Loot­ed Art: Watch It Free Online

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Discover DALL‑E, the Artificial Intelligence Artist That Lets You Create Surreal Artwork

DALL‑E, an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence sys­tem that gen­er­ates viable-look­ing art in a vari­ety of styles in response to user sup­plied text prompts, has been gar­ner­ing a lot of inter­est since it debuted this spring.

It has yet to be released to the gen­er­al pub­lic, but while we’re wait­ing, you could have a go at DALL‑E Mini, an open source AI mod­el that gen­er­ates a grid of images inspired by any phrase you care to type into its search box.

Co-cre­ator Boris Day­ma explains how DALL‑E Mini learns by view­ing mil­lions of cap­tioned online images:

Some of the con­cepts are learnt (sic) from mem­o­ry as it may have seen sim­i­lar images. How­ev­er, it can also learn how to cre­ate unique images that don’t exist such as “the Eif­fel tow­er is land­ing on the moon” by com­bin­ing mul­ti­ple con­cepts togeth­er.

Sev­er­al mod­els are com­bined togeth­er to achieve these results:

• an image encoder that turns raw images into a sequence of num­bers with its asso­ci­at­ed decoder

• a mod­el that turns a text prompt into an encod­ed image

• a mod­el that judges the qual­i­ty of the images gen­er­at­ed for bet­ter fil­ter­ing 

My first attempt to gen­er­ate some art using DALL‑E mini failed to yield the hoped for weird­ness.  I blame the bland­ness of my search term — “toma­to soup.”

Per­haps I’d have bet­ter luck “Andy Warhol eat­ing a bowl of toma­to soup as a child in Pitts­burgh.”

Ah, there we go!

I was curi­ous to know how DALL‑E Mini would riff on its name­sake artist’s han­dle (an hon­or Dali shares with the tit­u­lar AI hero of Pixar’s 2018 ani­mat­ed fea­ture, WALL‑E.)

Hmm… seems like we’re back­slid­ing a bit.

Let me try “Andy Warhol eat­ing a bowl of toma­to soup as a child in Pitts­burgh with Sal­vador Dali.”

Ye gods! That’s the stuff of night­mares, but it also strikes me as pret­ty legit mod­ern art. Love the spar­ing use of red. Well done, DALL‑E mini.

At this point, van­i­ty got the bet­ter of me and I did the AI art-gen­er­at­ing equiv­a­lent of googling my own name, adding “in a tutu” because who among us hasn’t dreamed of being a bal­le­ri­na at some point?

Let that be a les­son to you, Pan­do­ra…

Hope­ful­ly we’re all plan­ning to use this play­ful open AI tool for good, not evil.

Hyperallergic’s Sarah Rose Sharp raised some valid con­cerns in rela­tion to the orig­i­nal, more sophis­ti­cat­ed DALL‑E:

It’s all fun and games when you’re gen­er­at­ing “robot play­ing chess” in the style of Matisse, but drop­ping machine-gen­er­at­ed imagery on a pub­lic that seems less capa­ble than ever of dis­tin­guish­ing fact from fic­tion feels like a dan­ger­ous trend.

Addi­tion­al­ly, DALL‑E’s neur­al net­work can yield sex­ist and racist images, a recur­ring issue with AI tech­nol­o­gy. For instance, a reporter at Vice found that prompts includ­ing search terms like “CEO” exclu­sive­ly gen­er­at­ed images of White men in busi­ness attire. The com­pa­ny acknowl­edges that DALL‑E “inher­its var­i­ous bias­es from its train­ing data, and its out­puts some­times rein­force soci­etal stereo­types.”

Co-cre­ator Day­ma does not duck the trou­bling impli­ca­tions and bias­es his baby could unleash:

While the capa­bil­i­ties of image gen­er­a­tion mod­els are impres­sive, they may also rein­force or exac­er­bate soci­etal bias­es. While the extent and nature of the bias­es of the DALL·E mini mod­el have yet to be ful­ly doc­u­ment­ed, giv­en the fact that the mod­el was trained on unfil­tered data from the Inter­net, it may gen­er­ate images that con­tain stereo­types against minor­i­ty groups. Work to ana­lyze the nature and extent of these lim­i­ta­tions is ongo­ing, and will be doc­u­ment­ed in more detail in the DALL·E mini mod­el card.

The New York­er car­toon­ists Ellis Rosen and Jason Adam Katzen­stein con­jure anoth­er way in which DALL‑E mini could break with the social con­tract:

And a Twit­ter user who goes by St. Rev. Dr. Rev blows minds and opens mul­ti­ple cans of worms, using pan­els from car­toon­ist Joshua Bark­man’s beloved web­com­ic, False Knees:

Pro­ceed with cau­tion, and play around with DALL‑E mini here.

Get on the wait­list for orig­i­nal fla­vor DALL‑E access here.

 

Relat­ed Con­tent

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Google App Uses Machine Learn­ing to Dis­cov­er Your Pet’s Look Alike in 10,000 Clas­sic Works of Art

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence for Every­one: An Intro­duc­to­ry Course from Andrew Ng, the Co-Founder of Cours­era

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Remembering Dave Smith (RIP), the Father of MIDI & the Creator of the 80s’ Most Beloved Synthesizer, the Prophet‑5

Some founders rest on their lau­rels, build indus­tries around them­selves like a cocoon, and nev­er escape or out­grow the big achieve­ment that made their name. Some, like Dave Smith — the so-called “father of MIDI,” and one of the most inno­v­a­tive syn­the­siz­er pio­neers of the last sev­er­al decades – don’t stop cre­at­ing for long enough to col­lect dust. You may nev­er have heard of Smith, but you’ve heard his tech­nol­o­gy. Before pio­neer­ing MIDI (Musi­cal Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face), the dig­i­tal stan­dard that allows hun­dreds of elec­tron­ic instru­ments to play nice­ly with each oth­er across com­put­er and soft­ware mak­ers, Smith found­ed Sequen­tial Cir­cuits and built one of the most revered syn­the­siz­ers ever made, the Prophet‑5, invent­ed in 1977 and essen­tial to the sound of the 1980s and beyond.

Smith’s key­boards made appear­ances on stage, video, and albums through­out the decade. Duran Duran’s Nick Rhodes used the Prophet‑5 on the band’s first album and “vir­tu­al­ly every record I have made since then,” he said in a state­ment. “With­out Dav­e’s vision and inge­nu­ity,” Rhodes went on, “the sound of the 1980s would have been very dif­fer­ent, he tru­ly changed the son­ic sound­scape of a gen­er­a­tion.”

Sequen­tial synths appeared on albums by bands as dis­parate as The Cure and Daryl Hall & John Oates, who demon­strate the dream-like, ethe­re­al capa­bil­i­ties of the Prophet‑5 — the first ful­ly pro­gram­ma­ble poly­phon­ic ana­log synth — in “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do).” The Prophet‑5 also drove the sound of Radio­head­’s Kid A, and indie dance dar­lings Hot Chip wrote they would be “noth­ing with­out what [Smith] cre­at­ed.” Few vin­tage synths are as desir­able as the Prophet‑5.

The orig­i­nal Prophet is “not immune to the dark side of vin­tage synths,” writes Vin­tage Synth Explor­er, includ­ing prob­lems such as unsta­ble tun­ing and a lack of MIDI. Smith fixed that issue him­self with new iter­a­tions of the Prophet and oth­er synths fea­tur­ing his most famous post-Prophet‑5 tech­nol­o­gy. “Like so many bril­liant and cre­ative peo­ple,” the MIDI Asso­ci­a­tion writes, Smith “always focused on the future.” He was “not actu­al­ly a big fan of being called the ‘Father of MIDI.’ ” Many peo­ple con­tributed to the devel­op­ment of the tech­nol­o­gy, espe­cial­ly Roland founder Iku­taro Kake­hashi, who won a tech­ni­cal Gram­my with Smith in 2013 for the pro­to­col that made its debut as a new stan­dard in 1983.

Smith pre­ferred mak­ing hard­ware instru­ments and “almost begrudg­ing­ly accept­ed inter­views about his con­tri­bu­tions to MIDI.…. He was also not a big fan of orga­ni­za­tions, com­mit­tees and meet­ings.” He was a synth lover’s synth mak­er, a design­er and engi­neer with a “deep under­stand­ing of what musi­cians want­ed,” says Rhodes. Col­lab­o­ra­tions with Yama­ha and Korg pro­duced more soft­ware inno­va­tions in the 90s, but in the 2000s, Smith returned to Sequen­tial Cir­cuits and debuted the Prophet X, Prophet‑6, and OB‑6 with Tom Ober­heim. The two design­ers col­lab­o­rat­ed in 2021 on the Ober­heim OB-X8 and Smith intro­duced it just weeks before his death.

He had trav­eled a long way from invent­ing the Prophet‑5 in 1977 and pre­sent­ing a paper in 1981 to the Audio Engi­neer­ing Soci­ety on what he then called a Uni­ver­sal Syn­the­siz­er Inter­face. Smith him­self nev­er seemed to stop and look back, but lovers of his famous instru­ments are hap­py we still can, and that elec­tron­ic instru­ments and com­put­ers can talk to each oth­er eas­i­ly thanks to MIDI. Few of those instru­ments sound as good as the orig­i­nal, how­ev­er. See a demon­stra­tion of the Prophet-5’s range of sounds in the video just above and hear more tracks that show off the synth in the list here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of the Syn­thAxe, the Aston­ish­ing 1980s Gui­tar Syn­the­siz­er: Only 100 Were Ever Made

Wendy Car­los Demon­strates the Moog Syn­the­siz­er on the BBC (1970)

Thomas Dol­by Explains How a Syn­the­siz­er Works on a Jim Hen­son Kids Show (1989)

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

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