Europe’s Oldest Intact Book Was Preserved and Found in the Coffin of a Saint

in Books, History | September 28th, 2018

Photo via the British Library

If you’re a British history buff, next month is an ideal time to be in London for the British Library’s “once-in-a-generation exhibition” Anglo-Saxon Kingdoms: Art, Word, War, opening October 19th and featuring the illuminated Lindisfarne Gospels, Beowulf, Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, the “world-famous” Domesday Book, and Codex Amiatinus, a “giant Northumbrian Bible taken to Italy in 716” and returning to England for the first time in 1300 years. But with all of these manuscript stars stealing the show, one special exhibit might go overlooked, the St. Cuthbert Gospel, the oldest surviving intact European book.

A Latin copy of the Gospel of John, the book was originally called the Stonyhurst Gospel, after its first owner, Stonyhurst College. It acquired its current name because it was found inside the coffin of St. Cuthbert, a hermit monk who died in 687 and whose remains, legend has it, were incorruptible. This supposed miracle inspired a cult that placed offerings around Cuthbert’s tomb. Just when and how the small book made its way into his coffin remains a mystery. It was likely sometime between the 700s and 800s CE, when his body was moved to Durham due to Viking raids.

When Cuthbert’s casket was opened in 1104, the book was found “in miraculously perfect condition,” writes the British Library, inside “a satchel-like container of red leather with a badly-frayed sling made of silken threads.” Scholars have dated the book’s creation to between 700 and 730, and its interest for academics and lay people alike lies not only in the legend of St. Cuthbert but in the book’s physical qualities and its own uncorrupted nature. As Allison Meier writes at JSTOR Daily, “the 1,300-year-old manuscript retains its original pages and binding,” a remarkable fact for a book of its age.

Its condition makes it an “important example of Insular art, which was created on the British Isles and Ireland between 600 and 900 CE.” The general features of this style involve “the layering of pattern, line, and color on seemingly flat surfaces,” notes Oxford Bibliographies, in order to create “complex spatial patterns.” Scholar Robert D. Stevick describes these properties on the ornate dyed leather covers of the St. Cuthbert Gospel:

There is interlace pattern in two panels on the front cover, step-pattern implying two crosses on the lower cover, a prominent double vine scroll at the center of the front cover—elements of this early art that have been well catalogued for their individual features as well as for their affinities to similar decorative elements in other artifacts.

Bound with a sewing technique that originated in North Africa (and therefore often called “Coptic sewing”), the “simple but elegant” book, Meier explains, “reflects the transmission of publishing knowledge across Europe” from the Mediterranean. Its small size and placement in a leather pouch is also significant. St. John’s Gospel “was sometimes employed as a protective talisman,” worn in a pouch on the body to ward off evil. Why one of Cuthbert’s admirers would have given such a talisman to his corpse remains unclear.

If you can’t make it to the British Library to see this fascinating artifact in person, you can see its miraculously well-preserved binding and pages in scans at the British Library site here.

via JSTOR Daily

1,000-Year-Old Manuscript of Beowulf Digitized and Now Online

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

Wearable Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Manuscripts & Turned Them into Clothes

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 8 ) |

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial Intelligence

in History, Physics, Science | September 25th, 2018

Everyone knows that Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, entombing the Roman town of Pompeii in ash. Almost everyone knows that it also did the same to several other towns, including wealthy Herculaneum on the Bay of Naples. Countless scholars have dedicated their lives to studying these unusually well-preserved first-century ruins and the historical treasures found within. We now understand a great deal about the layout, the structures, the social life of Herculaneum, but some aspects remain unknowable, such as the contents of the scrolls, charred beyond recognition, that fill its libraries — or at least that remained unknowable until now.

“In the 18th century, workmen employed by King Charles III of Spain, then in charge of much of southern Italy, discovered the remains of a magnificent villa, thought to have belonged to Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus (known as Piso), a wealthy statesman and the father-in-law of Julius Caesar,” writes Smithsonian’s Jo Marchant. There, “in what was to become one of the most frustrating archaeological discoveries ever, the workmen also found approximately 2,000 papyrus scrolls.” But since the heat and gases of Vesuvius had turned them “black and hard like lumps of coal” — and indeed, some of Charles III’s workmen mistook them for coal and threw them away — attempts to open them “created a mess of fragile flakes that yielded only brief snippets of text.”

The time of Charles III barely had sufficient know-how to avoid destroying the scrolls of Herculaneum, let alone to read them. That task turns out to demand even the most cutting-edge technology we have today, including custom-made 3D modeling software, artificial intelligence, and the most advanced x‑ray facilities in existence. Marchant’s article focuses on an American computer scientist named Brent Seales (Professor and Chair of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky), whose quest to read the Herculaneum scrolls has become a quest to develop a method to virtually “unroll” them. This requires not just the computing power and logic to determine how these blackened lumps (Seales calls two of them “Fat Bastard” and “Banana Boy”) might originally have opened up, but the most advanced particle accelerators in the world to scan them in the first place.

You can read more about Seales’ work with the Herculaneum scrolls, which after twenty years has shown real promise, at Mental Floss and Newsweek. Though quite expensive (demand for “beam time” on a particle accelerator being what it is), hugely time-consuming, and occasionally, in Seales’ words, “excruciatingly frustrating,” the invention of a reliable method for reading these and other seemingly lost texts from antiquity could make substantial additions to what we think of as the canon. (The texts revealed so far have had to do with the ideas of Epicurus, a primer on whose philosophy we’ve previously featured on Open Culture.) But gaining the fullest possible understanding of what our ancestors knew in the first century may first require a few more 21st-century developments in physics and computer science yet.

via Mental Floss

Watch the Destruction of Pompeii by Mount Vesuvius, Re-Created with Computer Animation (79 AD)

See the Expansive Ruins of Pompeii Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before: Through the Eyes of a Drone

2,000-Year-Old Manuscript of the Ten Commandments Gets Digitized: See/Download “Nash Papyrus” in High Resolution

Google Puts The Dead Sea Scrolls Online (in Super High Resolution)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Long-Lost Letter Shows How Galileo Tried to Fool the Inquisition & Escape Censure for Putting Scientific Truth Ahead of Church Dogma (1613)

in History, Science | September 24th, 2018

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant,” wrote Emily Dickinson, “Success in Circuit lies.” No doubt she had more literary, or metaphysical, matters in mind than scientific. But for scientists working in times hostile to change, telling the truth, as they know it, can be dangerous. This applies to EPA scientists working today as it did 400 years ago to European astronomers, who faced censure—with possibly fatal consequences—for contradicting the official version of reality dictated by the Catholic Church and enforced by the Inquisition.

The story of Galileo Galilei’s infamous confrontation with what the Rice University Galileo Project calls that “permanent institution” of the Church, “charged with the eradication of heresies,” has swelled into legend, with the astronomer playing the part of a martyr for reason and evidence. Other versions, like Bertolt Brecht’s play Galileo, portray him, writes The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik, not as “a martyr-hero but a turncoat, albeit one of genius.” Rather than standing on principle, he hedged and compromised.

A “newer (and, unsurprisingly, Church-endorsed) view,” writes Gopnik, “is that Galileo made needless trouble for himself by being impolitic,” and that all the poor Church wanted, “as today’s intelligent designers now say,” was to “’teach the controversy’” between Copernican and Aristotelian theories. Whatever their interpretation, historians of the events leading up to Galileo’s conviction for heresy after the publication of his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems now have a new piece of evidence to add to their assessment.

A letter, “long thought lost,” Nature reports, has reappeared, providing “the strongest evidence yet that, at the start of his battle with the religious authorities, Galileo actively engaged in damage control and tried to spread a toned-down version of his claims.” In the seven-page document, written to his friend Benedetto Castelli in 1613, Galileo “set out for the first time his arguments that scientific research should be free from theological doctrine.” Furthermore, and most damningly for him:

He argued that the scant references in the Bible to astronomical events should not be taken literally, because scribes had simplified these descriptions so that they could be understood by common people. Religious authorities who argued otherwise, he wrote, didn’t have the competence to judge. Most crucially, he reasoned that the heliocentric model of Earth orbiting the Sun, proposed by Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus 70 years earlier, is not actually incompatible with the Bible.

Copies of the controversial letter circulated, and inevitably made their way into the hands of Inquisition authorities in 1615, forwarded by a Dominican friar named Niccolò Lorini. Alarmed, Galileo “wrote to his friend Piero Dini, a cleric in Rome, suggesting that the letter Lorini had sent to the Inquisition might have been doctored.” He enclosed another, less inflammatory, version, which he claimed was the original. He wrote of the “wickedness and ignorance” of those he claimed had tried to frame him. The Inquisitors, he wrote “may be in part deceived by this fraud which is going around under the cloak of zeal and charity.”

Historians have long known of the two letters, but were uncertain as to whose version of events to believe. The original of the Lorini copy was thought to have been lost, until its recent discovery by postdoctoral science historian Salvatore Ricciardo, who found it, of all places, in the Royal Society library, where it had sat unnoticed for 250 years. The original letter, which Castelli had returned to Galileo, shows edits in his own hand. “Beneath its scratchings-out and amendments, the signed copy discovered by Ricciardo shows Galileo’s original wording—and it is the same as in the Lorini copy” that landed him in trouble.

The evidence proves that Galileo strongly advocated for the Copernican system, and against Church interference in free inquiry, in 1613. In one passage of the letter, originally describing the Bible as “false if one goes by the literal meaning of the words,” Galileo crosses out “false” and inserts “look different from the truth.” In another reference to scripture as “concealing” the truth, he opts for the more theological-sounding “veiling.” The letter shows Galileo softening his views to escape condemnation, but it does not show him recanting in any way.

In 1616, the year after the Church received a copy of the first letter from Lorini and Galileo’s doctored version, he was warned to stop arguing for the Copernican model, though he later received assurances from Pope Urban VIII that he could continue to write about heliocentrism if he presented the idea as a mathematical proposition rather than a statement of fact. Of course, as we know, his continued support for the science earned him permanent house arrest in 1633, and centuries of enduring admiration from the opponents of dogmatic suppression of scientific knowledge.

via Nature

An Animated History of Physics Introduces the Discoveries of Galileo, Newton, Maxwell & Einstein

See Galileo’s Famous Gravity Experiment Performed in the World’s Largest Vacuum Chamber, and on the Moon

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

in Art, Books, Design, History | September 18th, 2018

Traditional Japanese art may please so many of us, even those of us with little interest in Japan itself, because of the way it inhabits the realm between representation and abstraction. But then, it doesn’t just inhabit that realm: it has settled those borderlands, made them its own, for much longer than most cultures have been doing anything at all. The space between art, strictly defined, and what we now call design has also seen few achievements quite so impressive as those made in Japan, going all the way back to the rope markings on the clay vessels used by the islands’ Jōmon people in the 11th century BC.

Those ancient rope-on-clay markings can easily look like predecessors of the “wave patterns” still seen in Japanese art and design today. Since time almost immemorial they have appeared on “swords (both blades and handles) and associated paraphernalia (known as ‘sword furniture’), as well as lacquerware, Netsuke, religious objects, and a host of other items.”

So says the Public Domain Review, which has featured a series of three books full of elegant wave and ripple designs originally published in 1903 and now available to download free at the Internet Archive (volume one, volume two, volume three).

Called Hamonshū, the books were produced by the artist Mori Yuzan, “about whom not a lot is known,” adds the Public Domain review, “apart from that he hailed from Kyoto, worked in the Nihonga style” — or the “Japanese painting” style of Japanese painting, which emerged during the Meiji period, a time of rapid Westernization in Japan.

He “died in 1917. The works would have acted as a kind of go-to guide for Japanese craftsmen looking to adorn their wares with wave and ripple patterns.” Though they do contain text, they require no knowledge of the Japanese language to appreciate the many illustrations they present.

Taken together, Mori’s books offer a complete spectrum from traditional Japanese-style representation — especially of land, water, mountains, sky, and other natural elements — to a taste of the infinite variety of abstract patterns that result. Such imagery remains prevalent in Japan more than a century after the publication of Hamonshū, as any visitor to Japan today will see.

But now that the Internet Archive has made the books freely available online (volume one, volume two, volume three), they’ll surely inspire work not just between representation and abstraction as well as between art and design, but between Japanese aesthetics and those of every other culture in the world as well.

via Public Domain Review

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

Download 2,500 Beautiful Woodblock Prints and Drawings by Japanese Masters (1600–1915)

1,000+ Historic Japanese Illustrated Books Digitized & Put Online by the Smithsonian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

The Art of Collotype: See a Near Extinct Printing Technique, as Lovingly Practiced by a Japanese Master Craftsman

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

Umberto Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

in History, Literature | September 17th, 2018

Creative Commons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the National Archives in Holland

We hate lists, which have told us what to do since at least the days Leonardo da Vinci, and which now, as “listicles,” constitute one of the lowest strata of internet content. But we also love lists: a great many of us click on those listicles, after all, and one might argue that the list, as a form, represents the beginning of written texts. “The list is the origin of culture,” said Umberto Eco in a 2009 Der Spiegel interview about the exhibition on the history of the list he curated at the Louvre. “It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often.”

How, as mere human beings, do we impose order when we gaze up into infinity, down into the abyss — pick your metaphor of the sublimely, incomprehensibly vast? We do it, Eco thought, “through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.” The breadth as well as depth of the knowledge he accumulated throughout his 84 years — which itself could seem sublimely and incomprehensibly vast, as anyone who has read one of his list-filled novels knows — placed him well to explain the origins, functions, and importance of the list. In the Spiegel interview he names Don Giovanni’s 2,063 lovers, the contents of Leopold Bloom’s drawers, and the many ships and generals specified in the Iliad as just a few of the classic lists and enumerations of Western culture.

Eco’s research into and/or obsession with lists produced not just the exhibition at the Louvre but also a book, The Infinity of Lists: An Illustrated Essay. Did it also lead him to any other answers about why, whether in the Middle Ages with its “very clear image of the universe,” the Renaissance and Baroque eras with their “worldview based on astronomy,” the “postmodern age” in which we live today, or any other time, “the list has prevailed over and over again?” Ultimately, we make lists whenever we experience a “deficiency of language,” such as when lovers describe one another (“Your eyes are so beautiful, and so is your mouth, and your collarbone”) or when we remember the “very discouraging, humiliating limit” of death. Making lists of things that seem infinite is “a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.”

Having died in 2016 himself, Eco left behind an immense personal library (his walkthrough of which we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture). “It might actually be 50,000 books,” he said to the Spiegel interviewer, but he refused to put them on a list and find out for sure: “When my secretary wanted to catalogue them, I asked her not to. My interests change constantly, and so does my library.” If he were to try to list his interests, he would have had to keep scrapping the list and drawing up a new one; more than providing abundant material for his writing, this constant and lifelong circulation of fascinations (he mentioned first loving Chopin at 16, and again in his seventies) confirmed his engagement with the infinite world around him: “If you interact with things in your life, everything is constantly changing. And if nothing changes, you’re an idiot.”

Umberto Eco Makes a List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

Watch Umberto Eco Walk Through His Immense Private Library: It Goes On, and On, and On!

Umberto Eco Dies at 84; Leaves Behind Advice to Aspiring Writers

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

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ruins of Pompeii

in History | September 10th, 2018

The better part of two millennia after its entombment in ash and pumice by Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii ranks as one of Italy’s most popular tourist attractions. Ancient-history buffs who visit its well-preserved ruins today will find plenty to occupy their time and attention, but they won’t be able to see as much as they used to: less than a third of the Pompeii accessible to tourists fifty years ago remains so today. But thanks to technology, entirely new views of Pompeii have also opened up. Camera drones, which now seem to get lighter, more agile, and clearer-sighted every day, provide a perspective on Pompeii that no visitor has ever enjoyed before, regardless of their level of access.

The video at the top of the post takes a quick flight down one of Pompeii’s streets, which at first looks like nothing more than a faster, smoother version of the experience available to any visitor to the ruined Roman city. But then the perspective changes in a way it can only in a drone-shot video, revealing the sheer scale of Pompeii as does no possible vista from the ground.

The video just below, which runs nearly six and a half minutes, offers an even more unusual, dramatic, and revealing view of Pompeii, chasing a dog down its empty stone streets, gazing straight down onto the walls of its many roofless buildings, flying between its still-standing columns and pillars, and even following a drone — presumably with another drone — as it navigates the enormous archaeological site.

These drone’s-eye-views may well spark in their viewers a desire to visit Pompeii that had never existed before, or even renew a previously existing desire to do so that has gone dormant. To archaeologists, however, Pompeii has never lost its fascination: researchers continue to discover new artifacts there, and just this year found the remains of a child, a horse, and a fleeing citizen crushed under a boulder. With each new piece of Pompeii unearthed, we learn more about how our predecessors once lived. Combined with the kind of drone footage that has already given us a thrilling new understanding of living cities around the world (and even modern-day Pompeiis like Chernobyl) we come ever closer to a full picture of human history — and to the irresistible, if grim, question of what sort of unimaginable technology humans of the future will use to explore the ruins of the metropolises we live in today.

Visit Pompeii (also Stonehenge & Versailles) with Google Street View

Rome Reborn: Take a Virtual Tour Through Ancient Rome, 320 C.E.

The History of Rome in 179 Podcasts

A Haunting Drone’s‑Eye View of Chernobyl

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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

in History, Psychology | September 10th, 2018

On December 7, 1938, a BBC radio crew visited Sigmund Freud at his new home at Hampstead, North London. Freud had moved to England only a few months earlier to escape the Nazi annexation of Austria. He was 81 years old and suffering from incurable jaw cancer. Every word was an agony to speak.

Less than a year later, when the pain became unbearable, Freud asked his doctor to administer a lethal dose of morphine. The BBC recording is the only known audio recording of Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the towering intellectual figures of the 20th century. (Find works by Freud in our collection of 800 Free eBooks.) In heavily accented English, he says:

I started my professional activity as a neurologist trying to bring relief to my neurotic patients. Under the influence of an older friend and by my own efforts, I discovered some important new facts about the unconscious in psychic life, the role of instinctual urges, and so on. Out of these findings grew a new science, psychoanalysis, a part of psychology, and a new method of treatment of the neuroses. I had to pay heavily for this bit of good luck. People did not believe in my facts and thought my theories unsavory. Resistance was strong and unrelenting. In the end I succeeded in acquiring pupils and building up an International Psychoanalytic Association. But the struggle is not yet over. –Sigmund Freud.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site back in May, 2012.

via The Library of Congress

The Famous Break Up of Sigmund Freud & Carl Jung Explained in a New Animated Video

Sigmund Freud’s Psychoanalytic Drawings Show How He First Visualized the Ego, Superego, Id & More

by Mike Springer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

in Art, History, Technology | September 7th, 2018

When Andy Warhol first became famous, few knew what to make of his art. When Apple first released the Macintosh — dramatically promoted with that Ridley Scott Super Bowl commercial — few knew what to make of it either. The year was 1984, when almost nobody had seen a graphical user interface or even a mouse, let alone used them, and the Macintosh looked as strange and compelling when it entered the computing scene as Warhol did when he entered the art scene. Both seemed so casually to repudiate so many long-held assumptions, an act that tends to startle and confuse older people but makes immediate sense to younger ones. What happened, then, when Warhol and the Macintosh first crossed paths?

Journalist David Sheff, who wrote an early profile of Steve Jobs and conducted the last in-depth interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, remembers it well. In October 1984, he and Jobs attended the ninth-birthday party thrown by Ono for Sean, her son with Lennon. As a present, Jobs brought along one of his company’s new Macintoshes and set it up himself in young Sean’s bedroom. “Sean took control of the mouse, and rolled the small box along the floor,” Sheff writes. “Steve said, ‘Now hold the button down while you move it and see what happens.’ Sean did, and a thin, jagged, black line, appeared on the screen. Sean, entranced, said, ‘Cool!’ He clicked the mouse button, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased, and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a figure that he said was Boy George.”

Though Boy George may not have been in attendance, the party’s unsurprisingly fabulous guest list also included Andy Warhol (an “eccentric uncle” to Sean) and Keith Haring, both of whom Sheff remembers coming into the room as part of a crowd wanting to catch a glimpse of Sean’s new toy. It wasn’t long before Warhol, presumably compelled by the artistic impulse as well as by his fascination for all things new, asked if he could give it a try:

Andy took Sean’s spot in front of the computer and Steve showed him how to maneuver and click the mouse. Warhol didn’t get it; he lifted and waved the mouse, as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jobs gently explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a surface. Warhol kept lifting it until Steve placed his hand on Warhol’s and guided it along the floor. Finally Warhol began drawing, staring at the “pencil” as it drew on the screen.

Warhol was spellbound – people who knew him know the way he tuned out everything extraneous when he was entranced by whatever it was – gliding the mouse, eyes affixed to the monitor. Haring was bent over watching. Andy, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Haring, and said, “Look! Keith! I drew a circle!”

In his diary, Warhol writes of entering Sean’s room to find “a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ ” But Jobs, possessed of as keen a promotional instinct as Warhol’s own, assured him that the offer was still good, and that he would also give him a lesson in drawing on the Mac right then and there. “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it,” writes Warhol, noting that “it only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color.”

The Macintosh made an appearance in Warhol’s “Ads” series of paintings in 1984, the same year he also agreed, according to Artsy’s Abigail Cain, “to be a spokesperson for Apple’s rival in the personal computing sphere — Commodore. The artist was to promote the company’s new computer, the Amiga 1000, and its cutting-edge multimedia capabilities” that included a 4,096-color display. At the machine’s launch, Warhol “used ProPaint to sketch Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry in front of a crowd of eager tech enthusiasts,” which you can see in the video above. Just a few years ago, the efforts of digital artist Cory Arcangel and specialists at Carnegie Mellon University recovered 28 long-lost digital paintings Warhol made on his Amiga. Whether the artist ever made anything with or even took delivery of his promised Mac, we don’t know – or at least we don’t know yet.

Andy Warhol Digitally Paints Debbie Harry with the Amiga 1000 Computer (1985)

Apple’s Guided Tour to Using the First Macintosh (1984)

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

Japanese Computer Artist Makes “Digital Mondrians” in 1964: When Giant Mainframe Computers Were First Used to Create Art

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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 Faceboo k.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Europe’s Oldest Intact Book Was Preserved and Found in the Coffin of a Saint

How Ancient Scrolls, Charred by the Eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, Are Now Being Read by Particle Accelerators, 3D Modeling & Artificial Intelligence

Long-Lost Letter Shows How Galileo Tried to Fool the Inquisition & Escape Censure for Putting Scientific Truth Ahead of Church Dogma (1613)

Download Classic Japanese Wave and Ripple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japanese Artists from 1903

Umberto Eco Explains Why We Make Lists

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ruins of Pompeii

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

When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

Essentials

Support Us

Free Courses

Free Movies

Free Language Lessons

Free eBooks

Free Audio Books

Free Textbooks

K-12 Resources

Free Art & Images

Free Music

Writing Tips

Archive

Personal Finance

Categories

Great Lectures

About Us

Great Recordings

Book Lists By

Syllabi

Favorite Movies

Archives

Search