An Interactive Social Network of Abstract Artists: Kandinsky, Picasso, Brancusi & Many More

in Art, History | March 3rd, 2020

Who’s your favorite abstract artist? Some of us, if we like ear­ly abstrac­tion, might name a painter like Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, some a com­pos­er like Arnold Schoen­berg, some a poet like Guil­laume Apol­li­naire, and some, even, a pho­tog­ra­ph­er like Alfred Stieglitz. When we answer a ques­tion like this, we tend to con­sid­er each artist, and each artist’s body of work, in iso­la­tion. But when we talk about artis­tic move­ments, espe­cial­ly one over­ar­ch­ing and influ­en­tial as abstrac­tion, all names, all paint­ings, all com­po­si­tions, all poems, all pho­tographs — all works of any kind — are inter­con­nect­ed. Just as abstract artists man­aged to make vis­i­ble, audi­ble, and leg­i­ble con­cepts and feel­ings nev­er before real­ized in art, the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art’s inter­ac­tive social-net­work map of abstract art puts all those con­nec­tions on dis­play for us to see.

“Abstrac­tion may be mod­ernism’s great­est inno­va­tion,” says the web site of Invent­ing Abstrac­tion 1910–1925, the MoMA exhib­it for which the map (down­load­able as a PDF poster here) was orig­i­nal­ly designed. “Today it is so cen­tral to our con­cep­tion of art­mak­ing that the time when an abstract art­work was unimag­in­able has become hard to imag­ine.”

But when abstract art emerged, it seemed to do so quite sud­den­ly: begin­ning in 1911, Kandin­sky and oth­er artists, includ­ing Fer­nand Léger, Robert Delau­nay, Fran­tišek Kup­ka, and Fran­cis Picabia, “exhib­it­ed works that marked the begin­ning of some­thing rad­i­cal­ly new: they dis­pensed with rec­og­niz­able sub­ject mat­ter.” You can view the Invent­ing Abstrac­tion dia­gram with Léger at the cen­ter, which reveals his con­nec­tions to such fig­ures as Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, and Pablo Picas­so. Recon­fig­ured with Delau­nay at the cen­ter, links emerge to the likes of Blaise Cen­drars, Edgard Varèse, and Paul Klee.

But no abstract artist seems to have been as well-con­nect­ed as Kandin­sky, who “became a cen­tral force in the devel­op­ment and pro­mo­tion of abstrac­tion through his intre­pid efforts as a painter, the­o­rist, pub­lish­er, exhi­bi­tion orga­niz­er, teacher, and as a gen­er­ous host to the dozens of artists and writ­ers who trekked, often from great dis­tances, to meet him.” So says the bio along­side Kandin­sky’s page on the dia­gram, which depicts him as the node con­nect­ing fig­ures, influ­en­tial in their own right, like Josef Albers, Lás­zló Moholy-Nagy, and Hans Richter. Kandin­sky’s “mes­sage about abstrac­tion’s poten­tial tran­scend­ed dis­tinc­tions between medi­ums, and his impact was felt from New York to Moscow.” But only a com­mu­ni­ty of artists span­ning at least that range of the globe, each in his or her own way look­ing to cre­ate a new world, could bring abstract art into being. More than a cen­tu­ry lat­er, we can safe­ly call it here to stay.

Enter the social net­work of abstract artists here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Mar­tin on How to Look at Abstract Art

How to Paint Like Kandin­sky, Picas­so, Warhol & More: A Video Series from the Tate

Who Paint­ed the First Abstract Paint­ing?: Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky? Hilma af Klint? Or Anoth­er Con­tender?

The First Mas­ter­pieces of Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s Rhyth­mus 21 (1921) & Viking Eggeling’s Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale (1924)

A Quick Six Minute Jour­ney Through Mod­ern Art: How You Get from Manet’s 1862 Paint­ing, “The Lun­cheon on the Grass,” to Jack­son Pol­lock 1950s Drip Paint­ings

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

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.

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The Story of Physics Animated in 4 Minutes: From Galileo and Newton, to Einstein

in History, Physics | February 28th, 2020

No mat­ter how well you remem­ber your physics class­es, you most like­ly don’t remem­ber learn­ing any sto­ries in them. The­o­ries and equa­tions, yes, but not sto­ries — yet each of those the­o­ries and equa­tions has a sto­ry behind it, as does the entire sci­en­tif­ic enter­prise of physics they con­sti­tute. The video above from the BBC’s Dara Ó Bri­ain’s Sci­ence Club pro­vides an overview of the lat­ter sto­ry in an ani­mat­ed four min­utes, mak­ing it ide­al for young­sters just start­ing to learn about physics. It will also do the job for those of us not-so-young­sters cir­cling back to get a bet­ter grasp of physics, its dis­cov­er­ies and dri­ving ques­tions.

“The sto­ry of physics is, for the most part, a tale of ever-increas­ing con­fi­dence,” says Ó Bri­ain, a come­di­an as well as a tele­vi­sion host and writer on var­i­ous sub­jects. This ver­sion of the sto­ry begins with rolling balls and falling objects, observed with a new rig­or by such 17th-cen­tu­ry Ital­ians as Galileo Galilei. Galileo’s work became “the rock on which mod­ern physics is found­ed,” and those who first built upon that rock includ­ed Isaac New­ton, who start­ed by notic­ing how apples fall and end­ed up with a the­o­ry of grav­i­ty. New­ton’s work would lat­er pre­dict the exis­tence of Nep­tune; James Clerk Maxwell, work­ing in the 19th cen­tu­ry, made dis­cov­er­ies about elec­tro­mag­net­ism that would lat­er give us radio and tele­vi­sion.

For quite a while, physics seemed to go from strength to strength. But as the 20th cen­tu­ry began, “the lat­est dis­cov­er­ies did­n’t build on the old ones. Things like x‑rays and radioac­tiv­i­ty were just plain weird, and in a bad way.” But in 1905, onto the scene came a 26-year-old Albert Ein­stein, who “tore up the script by” claim­ing that “light is a kind of wave but also comes in pack­ets, or par­ti­cles.” That same year he pub­lished an equa­tion you’ll cer­tain­ly remem­ber from your school days: E = mc2, which holds “that mass and ener­gy are equiv­a­lent.” Ein­stein pro­posed that, if “some­one watch­es a space­ship fly­ing very fast, what they would see is the ship’s clocks run­ning slow­er than their own watch — and the ship will actu­al­ly shrink in size. But for the astro­nauts inside, all would be nor­mal.”

In oth­er words, “time and space can change: they are rel­a­tive depend­ing on who’s observ­ing.” Ein­stein called this “spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty,” and he also had a the­o­ry of “gen­er­al rel­a­tiv­i­ty.” That showed “how balls and apples weren’t the only thing sub­ject to grav­i­ty: light, time, and space were also affect­ed. Grav­i­ty slows down time and it warps space.” No mat­ter how dim­ly we under­stand physics itself, we all know the major play­ers in its sto­ry: Galileo and New­ton made impor­tant ear­ly dis­cov­er­ies, but it was Ein­stein who “shat­tered tra­di­tion­al physics” and revealed just how much we still have to learn about phys­i­cal real­i­ty. Still today, physi­cists labor to rec­on­cile Ein­stein’s dis­cov­er­ies with all oth­er known facts of that real­i­ty. As frus­trat­ing as that task often proves, the kids who take an inter­est of their own in physics after watch­ing the video will sure­ly be heart­ened to know that the sto­ry of physics goes on.

via The Kids Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Physics Cours­es (part of our larg­er col­lec­tion, 1,500 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties)

The Map of Physics: Ani­ma­tion Shows How All the Dif­fer­ent Fields in Physics Fit Togeth­er

The Case for Study­ing Physics in a Charm­ing Ani­mat­ed Video

Physics & Caf­feine: Stop Motion Film Uses a Cup of Cof­fee to Explain Key Con­cepts in Physics

The Feyn­man Lec­tures on Physics, The Most Pop­u­lar Physics Book Ever Writ­ten, Is Now Com­plete­ly Online

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.

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The Photos That Ended Child Labor in the US: See the “Social Photography” of Lewis Hine (1911)

in History, Life, Photography | February 28th, 2020

The aver­age per­son believes implic­it­ly that the pho­to­graph can­not fal­si­fy. Of course, you and I know that this unbound­ed faith in the integri­ty of the pho­to­graph is often rude­ly shak­en, for, while pho­tographs may not lie, liars may pho­to­graph.  —Lewis Wick­es Hine, “Social Pho­tog­ra­phy: How the Cam­era May Help in the Social Uplift” (1909)

Long before Bran­don Stanton’s wild­ly pop­u­lar Humans of New York project tapped into the public’s capac­i­ty for com­pas­sion by com­bin­ing pho­tos of his sub­jects with some telling nar­ra­tive about their lives, edu­ca­tor and soci­ol­o­gist Lewis Wick­es Hine was using his cam­era as a tool to pres­sure the pub­lic into demand­ing an end to child labor in the Unit­ed States.

In a time when the US Fed­er­al Cen­sus report­ed that one in five chil­dren under the age of 16—over 1.75 mil­lion—was gain­ful­ly employed, Hines tra­versed the coun­try under the aus­pices of the Nation­al Child Labor Com­mit­tee, gath­er­ing infor­ma­tion and mak­ing por­traits of the under­age work­ers.

His images, made between 1911 and 1916, intro­duced view­ers to young boys break­ing up coal in Penn­syl­va­nia mines, tiny Louisiana oys­ter shuck­ers and Maine sar­dine cut­ters, child pick­ers in Ken­tucky tobac­co fields and Mass­a­chu­setts cran­ber­ry bogs, and news­boys in a num­ber of cities.

Their employ­ers active­ly recruit­ed kids from poor fam­i­lies, wager­ing that they would per­form repet­i­tive, often dan­ger­ous tasks for a pit­tance, with lit­tle chance of union­iz­ing.

Hine was a scrupu­lous doc­u­men­tar­i­an, label­ing each pho­to with cru­cial infor­ma­tion gleaned from con­ver­sa­tions with the child pic­tured there­in: name, age, loca­tion, occu­pa­tion, wages, and—hor­rif­i­cal­ly—any work­place injuries.

In an essay in the anthol­o­gy Major Prob­lems in the Gild­ed Age and the Pro­gres­sive Era, his­to­ri­an Robert West­brook lauds Hines’ way of inter­act­ing with his sub­jects with “deco­rum and tact,” accord­ing them a dig­ni­ty that few of the period’s “con­de­scend­ing” mid­dle-class reform­ers did.

As the Vox Dark­room seg­ment, above, explains, Hine’s for­mal com­po­si­tions lent addi­tion­al pow­er to his images of smudged child work­ers pos­ing in their places of employ­ment. Shal­low depth of field to ensure that the viewer’s eyes would not become absorbed in the back­ground, but rather engage with those of his sub­ject.

But it was the accom­pa­ny­ing nar­ra­tives, which he referred to var­i­ous­ly as “pic­ture sto­ries” or “pho­to-inter­pre­ta­tions,” that he cred­it­ed with real­ly get­ting through to the hearts and minds of an indif­fer­ent pub­lic.

The text pre­vent­ed view­ers from eas­i­ly brush­ing the chil­dren off as anony­mous, scruffy urchins.

Here for instance is “Manuel, the young shrimp-pick­er, five years old, and a moun­tain of child-labor oys­ter shells behind him. He worked last year. Under­stands not a word of Eng­lish. Dun­bar, Lopez, Dukate Com­pa­ny. Loca­tion: Biloxi, Mis­sis­sip­pi.”

“Lau­ra Pet­ty, a 6 year old berry pick­er on Jenk­ins farm, Rock Creek near Bal­ti­more, Md. ‘I’m just begin­nin.’ Picked two box­es yes­ter­day. (2 cents a box).”

“Ange­lo Ross, 142 Pana­ma Street, Hughestown Bor­ough, a young­ster who has been work­ing in Break­er #9 Penn­syl­va­nia Co. for four months, said he was 13 years old, but very doubt­ful. He has a broth­er, Tony, prob­a­bly under 14 work­ing. Loca­tion: Pittston, Penn­syl­va­nia.”

Hine cor­rect­ly fig­ured that the com­bi­na­tion of pho­to and bio­graph­i­cal infor­ma­tion was a “lever for the social uplift.”

Once the pic­tures were pub­lished in Pro­gres­sive mag­a­zines, state leg­is­la­tures came under immense pres­sure to impose min­i­mum age require­ments in the work­place, effec­tive­ly end­ing child labor, and return­ing many for­mer work­ers to school.

View the entire col­lec­tion of Lewis Hine’s Nation­al Child Labor Com­mit­tee pho­tos here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How Dorothea Lange Shot, Migrant Moth­er, Per­haps the Most Icon­ic Pho­to in Amer­i­can His­to­ry

Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Clem Albers & Fran­cis Stewart’s Cen­sored Pho­tographs of a WWII Japan­ese Intern­ment Camp

Meet Ger­da Taro, the First Female Pho­to­jour­nal­ist to Die on the Front Lines

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC this March, when her com­pa­ny, The­ater of the Apes, presents the world pre­miere of Tony Award win­ner Greg Kotis’ new low-bud­get, gui­tar-dri­ven musi­cal, I AM NOBODY.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Smithsonian Puts 2.8 Million High-Res Images Online and Into the Public Domain

in Art, Education, History, How to Learn for Free, Libraries, Museums, Photography | February 27th, 2020

No mat­ter how many pub­lic insti­tu­tions you vis­it in a day—schools, libraries, muse­ums, or the dread­ed DMV—you may still feel like pri­va­tized ser­vices are clos­ing in. And if you’re a fan of nation­al parks and pub­lic lands, you’re keen­ly aware they’re at risk of being eat­en up by devel­op­ers and ener­gy com­pa­nies. The com­mons are shrink­ing, a trag­ic fact that is hard­ly inevitable but, as Mat­to Milden­berg­er argues at Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, the result of some very nar­row ideas.

But we can take heart that one store of com­mon wealth has major­ly expand­ed recent­ly, and will con­tin­ue to grow each year since Jan­u­ary 1, 2019—Pub­lic Domain Day—when hun­dreds of thou­sands of works from 1923 became freely avail­able, the first time that hap­pened in 21 years. This year saw the release of thou­sands more works into the pub­lic domain from 1924, and so it will con­tin­ue ad infini­tum.

And now—as if that weren’t enough to keep us busy learn­ing about, shar­ing, adapt­ing, and repur­pos­ing the past into the future—the Smith­son­ian has released 2.8 mil­lion images into the pub­lic domain, mak­ing them search­able, share­able, and down­load­able through the museum’s Open Access plat­form.

This huge release of “high res­o­lu­tion two- and three-dimen­sion­al images from across its col­lec­tions,” notes Smith­son­ian Mag­a­zine, “is just the begin­ning. Through­out the rest of 2020, the Smith­son­ian will be rolling out anoth­er 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Insti­tu­tion con­tin­ues to dig­i­tize its col­lec­tion of 155 mil­lion items and count­ing.”

There are those who would say that these images always belonged to the pub­lic as the hold­ings of a pub­licly-fund­ed insti­tu­tion some­times called “the nation’s attic.” It’s a fair point, but shouldn’t take away from the excite­ment of the news. “Smith­son­ian” as a con­ve­nient­ly sin­gu­lar moniker actu­al­ly names “19 muse­ums, nine research cen­ters, libraries, archives, and the Nation­al Zoo,” an enor­mous col­lec­tion of art and his­toric arti­facts.

That’s quite a lot to sift through, but if you don’t know what you’re look­ing for, the site’s high­lights will direct you to one fas­ci­nat­ing image after anoth­er, from Moham­mad Ali’s 1973 head­gear to the his­toric Eliz­a­bethan por­trait of Poc­a­hon­tas, to the col­lec­tion box of the Rhode Island Anti-Slav­ery Soci­ety owned by William Lloyd Garrison’s fam­i­ly, to Walt Whit­man in 1891, as pho­tographed by the painter Thomas Eakins, to just about any­thing else you might imag­ine.

Enter the Smithsonian’s Open Access archive here and browse and search its mil­lions of new­ly-pub­lic domain images, a mas­sive col­lec­tion that may help expand the def­i­n­i­tion of com­mon knowl­edge.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pub­lic Domain Day Is Final­ly Here!: Copy­right­ed Works Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years

The Library of Con­gress Launch­es the Nation­al Screen­ing Room, Putting Online Hun­dreds of His­toric Films

The Smith­son­ian Design Muse­um Dig­i­tizes 200,000 Objects, Giv­ing You Access to 3,000 Years of Design Inno­va­tion & His­to­ry

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

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A Trip Through New York City in 1911: Vintage Video of NYC Gets Colorized & Revived with Artificial Intelligence

in Film, History | February 27th, 2020

Denis Shi­rayev is at it again! The man who only a few weeks ago put one of the most famous pieces of film his­to­ry–the Lumiere Bros. footage of a train arriv­ing at La Cio­tat sta­tion–through a neur­al net­work to bring it “to life,” so to speak, has turned to anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing slice of his­to­ry.

For his next install­ment, he has tak­en footage of New York City dai­ly life in 1911, eight min­utes of tram rides, horse-drawn wag­ons, the ele­vat­ed train, and the rush of crowd­ed streets, and applied the same deep learn­ing algo­rithms to make it all look like it was shot yes­ter­day. This time he had a bit of help from anoth­er YouTube historian/technician Guy Jones, who had already speed cor­rect­ed and tweaked the footage, as well as adding envi­ron­men­tal sounds. Shi­rayev has used AI to upscale the footage to 4K and to 60p.

The orig­i­nal footage was shot by Sven­s­ka Biografteatern, a Swedish news­reel com­pa­ny, and begins with a shot of the Stat­ue of Lib­er­ty as if seen through a spy­glass. The film con­tin­ues as trav­el­ogue and as an intro­duc­tion to the immi­grant expe­ri­ence, as the cam­era shows boats dock­ing, pas­sen­gers dis­em­bark­ing, and then the over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence of New York City.

The footage is clear enough to take in store­fronts and adver­tis­ing on trams and the sides of build­ings. But the atmos­phere is too clogged with dai­ly smoke to get a real clear vista of the sky­line from the Brook­lyn Bridge.

At the time, Man­hat­tan had a pop­u­la­tion about 2 mil­lion. Inter­est­ing­ly, that was its height. Over a hun­dred years lat­er, that has declined to 1.6 mil­lion, with a sig­nif­i­cant decrease in pop­u­la­tion den­si­ty. This Observ­er arti­cle ascribes that to gen­tri­fi­ca­tion, and a change of res­i­den­tial areas to com­mer­cial ones.

And let’s repeat what we said about Shirayev’s pre­vi­ous 4K footage: this is not a “remas­ter”. This is not a “restora­tion.” This is using the pow­er of com­put­ing to inter­pret frames of film and cre­ate in between frames, as well as cre­ate detail from blur­ry footage. (I’m not too sure about the colorization–it doesn’t real­ly work as well as all the oth­er software…yet).

Now we know that Shi­rayev is mak­ing this a thing, please note his pinned mes­sage in the YouTube com­ments: he’s tak­ing requests.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Icon­ic Film from 1896 Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Watch an AI-Upscaled Ver­sion of the Lumière Broth­ers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Cio­tat Sta­tion

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Immac­u­late­ly Restored Film Lets You Revis­it Life in New York City in 1911

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Bernie Sanders Time as an Educational Filmmaker: Watch His Documentary on Socialist Activist Eugene V. Debs (1979)

in Film, History, Politics | February 27th, 2020

If you grew up in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, you’ll remem­ber the name Eugene V. Debs from his­to­ry class. And if you grew up dur­ing a cer­tain era in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, you might have learned about Debs from Bernie Sanders. Try to recall one of Debs’ speech­es; if you hear it in Sanders’ dis­tinc­tive Brook­lyn accent, you have at some point or anoth­er seen Eugene V. Debs: Trade Union­ist, Social­ist, Rev­o­lu­tion­ary. A film-strip slideshow with an accom­pa­ny­ing audio track, it came out in 1979 as a prod­uct of the Amer­i­can People’s His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety, Sanders’ own pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny.

That ven­ture con­sti­tutes just one chap­ter of a sto­ried life and career, which includes peri­ods as a high-school track star, a folk singer, and the may­or of Burling­ton, Ver­mont. Now that Sanders, junior Unit­ed States Sen­a­tor from Ver­mont since 2007, has pulled ahead in the race for the Demo­c­ra­t­ic nom­i­na­tion in the 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, peo­ple want to know what he’s all about — and he has long been giv­en, cer­tain­ly by the stan­dards of U.S. politi­cians, to clear and fre­quent expres­sion of what he’s all about. He has made no secret, for exam­ple, of his admi­ra­tion for Debs, a social­ist polit­i­cal activist who five times ran for Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States. You can see it come through in Eugene V. Debs: Trade Union­ist, Social­ist, Rev­o­lu­tion­ary, which Jacobin mag­a­zine has recon­struct­ed and made avail­able on Youtube.

Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Nathan Smith writes that the doc­u­men­tary frames Debs “as a lost prophet before explain­ing how he end­ed up where he did ide­o­log­i­cal­ly. It opens with Debs’s final pres­i­den­tial cam­paign, con­duct­ed in 1920 from prison. If a mil­lion peo­ple vot­ed for this man while he was behind bars, if more peo­ple went to hear him speak than Pres­i­dent Taft, then how could his­to­ry have for­got­ten him?” Sanders explains Debs’ social­ism “as a response to issues which still res­onate today: the exploita­tion of work­ing peo­ple, seg­re­ga­tion and vio­lent racism, vot­ing rights, and the sup­pres­sion of free speech and dis­sent dur­ing World War I.” More so than see Sanders’ admi­ra­tion for Debs — Jacobin hav­ing had to use visu­als oth­er than the ones on the film strip at the time — you can hear it: as in all the shoe­string pro­duc­tions of the Amer­i­can People’s His­tor­i­cal Soci­ety’s shoe­string pro­duc­tions, Sanders him­self plays the roles of the his­tor­i­cal char­ac­ters involved.

In this case, that means we hear Sanders give Debs’ speech­es, and in cer­tain moments we view­ers of 2020 could eas­i­ly mis­take Debs’ indict­ments of the dis­tri­b­u­tion of wealth, goods, and the means of pro­duc­tion in Amer­i­ca as Sanders’ own. A self-described social­ist, Sanders has in his polit­i­cal career placed him­self in Debs’ tra­di­tion, and hav­ing made a doc­u­men­tary like this more than 40 years ago shores up that image. The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Philip Bump points out that, before becom­ing a U.S. sen­a­tor, Sanders did a cou­ple more act­ing jobs in fea­ture films, once as a man stingy with Hal­loween can­dy and once as a Dodgers-obsessed rab­bi. As much as those roles might have suit­ed his demeanor, it’s safe to say he played Eugene V. Debs with more con­vic­tion.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bernie Sanders: I Will Be an Arts Pres­i­dent

Spike Lee Inter­views Bernie Sanders: Two Guys from Brook­lyn Talk About Edu­ca­tion, Inequal­i­ty & More

Bernie Sanders Sings “This Land is Your Land” on the Endear­ing­ly Bad Spo­ken Word Album, We Shall Over­come

Allen Ginsberg’s Hand­writ­ten Poem For Bernie Sanders, “Burling­ton Snow” (1986)

Albert Ein­stein Writes the 1949 Essay “Why Social­ism?” and Attempts to Find a Solu­tion to the “Grave Evils of Cap­i­tal­ism”

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.

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

in History, Technology | February 26th, 2020

“When I get back from school I basi­cal­ly bar­ri­cade myself in the apart­ment and nev­er go out at night,” says the nar­ra­tor of Michel Houelle­bec­q’s Les Par­tic­ules élé­men­taires. “Some­times I go on the Mini­tel and check out the sex sites, that’s about it.” Here those read­ing the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the nov­el (in this case Frank Wyn­ne’s, called Atom­ised) will tilt their heads: the “Mini­tel”? Though he writes more or less real­is­tic nov­els, Houelle­becq does come out with the occa­sion­al sci­ence-fic­tion­al flour­ish. But in France, the Mini­tel was a very real tech­no­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. “What the TGV was to train trav­el, the Pom­pi­dou Cen­tre to art, and the Ari­ane project to rock­etry,” writes BBC News’ Hugh Schofield, “in the ear­ly 1980s the Mini­tel was to the world of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

Com­bin­ing a mon­i­tor, key­board, and modem all in one beige plas­tic pack­age, the Mini­tel ter­mi­nal — known as the “Lit­tle French Box” — was once a com­mon sight in French house­holds. With it, writes Julien Mail­land in the Atlantic, “one could read the news, engage in mul­ti-play­er inter­ac­tive gam­ing, gro­cery shop for same-day deliv­ery, sub­mit nat­ur­al lan­guage requests like ‘reserve the­ater tick­ets in Paris,’ pur­chase said tick­ets using a cred­it card, remote­ly con­trol ther­mostats and oth­er home appli­ances, man­age a bank account, chat, and date.” All this at a time when, as Schofield puts it, “the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank man­ag­er or queue­ing for tick­ets at the sta­tion.” And what’s more, the French got their Mini­tel ter­mi­nals for free.

Con­ceived in the “white heat of Pres­i­dent Valery Gis­card d’Es­taing’s tech­no­log­i­cal great leap for­ward of the late 1970s,” Mini­tel appeared as one of the sig­nal efforts of a nation­wide devel­op­men­tal project. “France was lag­ging behind on telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions,” writes the Guardian’s Angelique Chrisafis, “with the nation’s homes under­served by tele­phones – par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al areas.” But soon after the roll­out of the Mini­tel, usage explod­ed such that, “at the height of its glo­ry in the mid-1990s, the French owned about 9m Mini­tel devices, with 25m users con­nect­ing to more than 23,000 ser­vices.” Ini­tial­ly pitched to the pub­lic as a replace­ment for the paper tele­phone direc­to­ry, the Mini­tel evolved to pro­vide many of the ser­vices for which most of the world now relies on the mod­ern inter­net.

Though devel­oped and imple­ment­ed by the French gov­ern­ment, Mini­tel incor­po­rat­ed ser­vices by inde­pen­dent providers. “The most lucra­tive ser­vice turned out to be some­thing no-one had envis­aged — the so-called Mini­tel Rose,” writes Schofield. “With names like 3615-Cum (actu­al­ly it’s from the Latin for ‘with’), these were sexy chat-lines in which men” — Houelle­becq-pro­tag­o­nist types and oth­er — “paid to type out their fan­tasies to anony­mous ‘dates.’ ” Not long before Minitel’s dis­con­tin­u­a­tion in 2012, when more than 800,000 ter­mi­nals were still active, “bill­boards fea­tur­ing lip-pout­ing lovelies adver­tis­ing the delights of 3615-some­thing were ubiq­ui­tous across the coun­try.” 3615, as every one­time Mini­tel user knows, were the most com­mon ini­tial dig­its for Mini­tel ser­vices, each of which had to be hand-dialed on a tele­phone before the ter­mi­nal could con­nect to it.

You can see this process in the Retro Man Cave video at the top of the post, which tells the sto­ry of the Mini­tel and shows how its ter­mi­nals actu­al­ly worked. (Retro-mind­ed Fran­coph­o­nes may also enjoy the 1985 TV doc­u­men­tary just above.) The host draws a com­par­i­son between Mini­tel and the much less suc­cess­ful Pres­tel, a sim­i­lar ser­vice launched in the Unit­ed King­dom in 1979. It might also remind Cana­di­ans of a cer­tain age of Telidon, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But no oth­er oth­er pre-inter­net video­tex sys­tem made any­where the impact of Mini­tel, which lives on in France as a cul­tur­al touch­stone, if no longer as a fix­ture of every­day life. As Valérie Schafer, co-author of the book Mini­tel: France’s Dig­i­tal Child­hood puts it to Chri­asafis, “There’s a nos­tal­gia for an era when the French devel­oped new ideas, took risks on ideas that did­n’t just look to the US or out­side mod­els; a time when we want­ed to invent our own voice.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

John Tur­tur­ro Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Inter­net

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.

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A Tribute to NASA’s Katherine Johnson (RIP): Learn About the Extraordinary Mathematician Who Broke Through America’s Race & Gender Barriers

in Film, History, Science | February 25th, 2020

We don’t call it a tragedy when a renowned per­son dies after the cen­tu­ry mark, espe­cial­ly if that per­son is bril­liant NASA math­e­mati­cian Kather­ine John­son, who passed away yes­ter­day at the ven­er­a­ble age of 101. Her death is a great his­tor­i­cal loss, but by almost any mea­sure we would con­sid­er reach­ing such a fin­ish line a tri­umphant end to an already hero­ic life.

A prodi­gy and pio­neer, John­son joined the all-black “human com­put­ing” sec­tion at NASA’s pre­de­ces­sor, the Nation­al Advi­so­ry Com­mit­tee for Aero­nau­tics, in 1953. She would go on to cal­cu­late the launch win­dows and return tra­jec­to­ries for Alan Shepard’s first space­flight, John Glenn’s first trip into orbit, and the Apol­lo Lunar Module’s first return from the Moon.

All this with­out the ben­e­fit of any machine com­put­ing pow­er to speak of and—as Hid­den Fig­ures dra­ma­tizes through the pow­er­ful per­for­mance of Tara­ji P. Hen­son as Johnson—while fac­ing the dual bar­ri­ers of racism and sex­ism her white male boss­es and co-work­ers blithe­ly ignored or delib­er­ate­ly upheld.

John­son and her fel­low “com­put­ers,” with­out whom none of these major mile­stones would have been pos­si­ble, had to fight not only for recog­ni­tion and a seat at the table, but for the basic accom­mo­da­tions we take for grant­ed in every work­place.

Her con­tri­bu­tions didn’t end when the space race was over—her work was crit­i­cal to the Space Shut­tle pro­gram and she even worked on a mis­sion to Mars. But John­son her­self kept things in per­spec­tive, telling Peo­ple mag­a­zine in the inter­view above from 2016, “I’m 98. My great­est accom­plish­ment is stay­ing alive.” Still, she lived to see her­self turned into the hero of that year’s crit­i­cal­ly laud­ed film based on the best­selling book of the same name by Mar­got Lee Shetterly—decades after she com­plet­ed her most ground­break­ing work.

Shetterly’s book, writes his­to­ri­an of tech­nol­o­gy Marie Hicks, casts John­son and her fel­low black women math­e­mati­cians “as pro­tag­o­nists in the grand dra­ma of Amer­i­can tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry rather than mere details.” By its very nature, a Hol­ly­wood film adap­ta­tion will leave out impor­tant details and take lib­er­ties with the facts for dra­mat­ic effect and mass appeal. The fea­ture treat­ment moves audi­ences, but it also soothes them with feel-good moments that “keep racism at arm’s length from a nar­ra­tive that, with­out it, would nev­er have exist­ed.”

The point is not that John­son and her col­leagues decid­ed to make racism and sex­ism cen­tral to their sto­ries; they sim­ply want­ed to be rec­og­nized for their con­tri­bu­tions and be giv­en the same access and oppor­tu­ni­ties as their white male col­leagues. But to suc­ceed, they had to work togeth­er instead of com­pet­ing with each oth­er. Despite its sim­pli­fi­ca­tions and gloss­es over Cold War his­to­ry and the depth of prej­u­dice in Amer­i­can soci­ety, Hid­den Fig­ures does some­thing very dif­fer­ent from most biopics, as Atlantic edi­tor Leni­ka Cruz writes, telling “a sto­ry of bril­liance, but not of ego. It’s a sto­ry of strug­gle and willpow­er, but not of indi­vid­ual glo­ry… it looks close­ly at the remark­able per­son in the con­text of a com­mu­ni­ty.”

Kather­ine John­son lived her life as a tremen­dous exam­ple for young women of col­or who excel at math and sci­ence but feel exclud­ed from the estab­lish­ment. On her 98th birth­day, she “want­ed to share a mes­sage to the young women of the world,” says the nar­ra­tor of the 20th Cen­tu­ry Stu­dios video above: “Now it’s your turn.” And, she might have added, “you don’t have to do it alone.” Hear Hid­den Fig­ures author Shet­ter­ly dis­cuss the crit­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions of Kather­ine and her extra­or­di­nary “human com­put­er” col­leagues in the inter­view below, and learn more about John­son’s life and lega­cy in the fea­turette at the top and at her NASA biog­ra­phy here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Women Sci­en­tists Launch a Data­base Fea­tur­ing the Work of 9,000 Women Work­ing in the Sci­ences

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Women’s Hid­den Con­tri­bu­tions to Mod­ern Genet­ics Get Revealed by New Study: No Longer Will They Be Buried in the Foot­notes

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

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