Watch Björk’s 6 Favorite TED Talks, From the Mushroom Death Suit to the Virtual Choir

in Architecture, Art, Biology, Design, Food & Drink, Music, Photography, TED Talks | April 17th, 2015

Björk_-_Hurricane_Festival

Image by Zach Klein

Singer-song­writer Björk, cur­rent­ly enjoy­ing a career ret­ro­spec­tive at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art, cel­e­brat­ed TED’s bil­lionth video view with a playlist of six trea­sured TED Talks. What do her choic­es say about her?

In this talk, artist Jae Rhim Lee mod­els her Mush­room Death Suit, a kicky lit­tle snug­gy designed to decom­pose and reme­di­ate tox­ins from corpses before they leech back into the soil or sky. Despite Björk’s fond­ness for out­ré fash­ion, I’m pret­ty sure this choice goes beyond the mere­ly sar­to­r­i­al.

For more infor­ma­tion, or to get in line for a mush­room suit of your own, see the Infin­i­ty Bur­ial Project.

Con­tin­u­ing with the mush­room / fash­ion theme, Björk next turns to design­er Suzanne Lee, who demon­strates how she grows sus­tain­able tex­tiles from kom­bucha mush­rooms. The result­ing mate­r­i­al may var­i­ous­ly resem­ble paper or flex­i­ble veg­etable leather. It is extreme­ly recep­tive to nat­ur­al dyes, but not water repel­lent, so bring a non-kom­bucha-based change of clothes in case you get caught in the rain.

For more infor­ma­tion on Lee’s home­grown, super green fab­ric, vis­it Bio­Cou­ture.

Björk’s clear­ly got a soft spot for things that grow: mush­rooms, mush­room-based fab­ric, and now…building mate­ri­als? Pro­fes­sor of Exper­i­men­tal Archi­tec­ture Rachel Arm­strong’s plan for self-regen­er­at­ing build­ings involves pro­to­cols, or “lit­tle fat­ty bags” that behave like liv­ing things despite an absence of DNA. I’m still not sure how it works, but as long as the lit­tle fat­ty bags are not added to my own ever-grow­ing edi­fice, I’m down.

For more infor­ma­tion on what Dr. Arm­strong refers to as bot­tom up con­struc­tion (includ­ing a scheme to keep Venice from sink­ing) see Black Sky Think­ing.

Björk’s next choice takes a turn for the seri­ous… with games. Game Design­er Bren­da Romero began explor­ing the heavy duty emo­tion­al pos­si­bil­i­ties of the medi­um when her 9‑year-old daugh­ter returned from school with a less than nuanced under­stand­ing of the Mid­dle Pas­sage. The suc­cess of that exper­i­ment inspired her to cre­ate games that spur play­ers to engage on a deep­er lev­el with thorny his­tor­i­cal sub­jects. (The Trail of Tears required 50,000 indi­vid­ual red­dish-brown pieces).

Learn more about Romero’s ana­log games at The Mechan­ic is the Mes­sage.

Remem­ber those 50,000 indi­vid­ual pieces? As pho­tog­ra­ph­er Aaron Huey doc­u­ment­ed life on Pine Ridge Reser­va­tion, he was hum­bled by hear­ing him­self referred to as “wasichu,” a Lako­ta word that can be trans­lat­ed as “non-Indi­an.” Huey decid­ed not to shy away from its more point­ed trans­la­tion: “the one who takes the best meat for him­self.” His TED Talk is an impas­sioned his­to­ry les­son that begins in 1824 with the cre­ation of the Bureau of Indi­an Affairs and ends in an activist chal­lenge.

Proof that Björk is not entire­ly about the quirk.

See Huey’s pho­tos from the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic cov­er sto­ry, “In the Spir­it of Crazy Horse.”

Björk opts to close things on a musi­cal note with excerpts from com­pos­er Eric Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque” and “Sleep” per­formed by a crowd­sourced vir­tu­al choir. Its members—they swell to 1999 for “Sleep”—record their parts alone at home, then upload them to be mixed into some­thing son­i­cal­ly and spir­i­tu­al­ly greater than the sum of its parts.

Lis­ten to “Sleep” in its entire­ty here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the Album Björk Record­ed as an 11-Year-Old: Fea­tures Cov­er Art Pro­vid­ed By Her Mom (1977)

A Young Björk Decon­structs (Phys­i­cal­ly & The­o­ret­i­cal­ly) a Tele­vi­sion in a Delight­ful Retro Video

Björk and Sir David Atten­bor­ough Team Up in a New Doc­u­men­tary About Music and Tech­nol­o­gy

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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An Online Gallery of Over 900,000 Wonderful Photos of Historic New York City

in History, Photography | March 27th, 2015

Grand Central

What is any major Amer­i­can city if not an indus­tri­al gallery bustling with peo­ple and machines? Some­times the images are bleak, as with the pho­to essays that often cir­cu­late of Detroit’s beau­ti­ful ruin; some­times they are defi­ant­ly hope­ful, as with those of the ris­ing of New Orleans; and some­times they are almost unfath­omably mon­u­men­tal, as with the images here of New York City, cir­ca the 20th century—or a great good bit of it, any­way.

Queensboro Bridge

You can sur­vey almost a hun­dred years of New York’s indomitable grandeur by perus­ing over 900,000 images from the New York City Munic­i­pal Archives Online Gallery.

Pho­tos like the aston­ish­ing tableaux in a sun­light-flood­ed Grand Cen­tral Ter­mi­nal at the top (tak­en some­time between 1935 and 41) and like the breath­tak­ing scale on dis­play in the 1910 expo­sure of the Queens­boro Bridge, above.

Bathers

The online gallery fea­tures large-for­mat pho­tos of the human, like the sea of bathers above; of the human-made, like the vault­ed, cav­ernous City Hall sub­way sta­tion below; and of the meld­ing of the two, like the painters pos­ing on the cables of the Brook­lyn Bridge, fur­ther down.

City Hall Station

These images come from a selec­tion of pho­tos culled from the var­i­ous gal­leries by The Atlantic. For more, see the NYC Munic­i­pal Archives site, which you can search by key­word or oth­er cri­te­ria. “Vis­i­tors,” writes the site, “are encour­aged to return fre­quent­ly as new con­tent will be added on a reg­u­lar basis. Patrons may order repro­duc­tions in the form of prints or dig­i­tal files.”

Brooklyn Bridge

Many of the images have water­marks on them to pre­vent ille­gal use. Nonethe­less the gallery is a jaw-drop­ping col­lec­tion of pho­tos you can eas­i­ly get lost in for hours, as well as an impor­tant resource for his­to­ri­ans and schol­ars of 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can urban­ism. See The Atlantic’s selec­tion of images for even more daz­zling pho­tos. Or bet­ter yet, start rum­mag­ing through the New York City Munic­i­pal Archives Online Gallery right here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New York Pub­lic Library Puts 20,000 Hi-Res Maps Online & Makes Them Free to Down­load and Use

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

Vin­tage Video: A New York City Sub­way Train Trav­els From 14th St. to 42nd Street (1905)

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

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

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Has Technology Changed Us?: BBC Animations Answer the Question with the Help of Marshall McLuhan

in Animation, Photography, Technology | March 4th, 2015

In Jan­u­ary, we fea­tured series of short ani­ma­tions from BBC Radio 4 address­ing the ques­tion “How Did Every­thing Begin?” In Feb­ru­ary, we fea­tured its fol­low-up on an equal­ly eter­nal ques­tion, “What Makes Us Human?” Both came script­ed by Phi­los­o­phy Bites co-cre­ator Nigel War­bur­ton and nar­rat­ed by X‑Files co-star Gillian Ander­son (in full British mode). Now that March has come, so has the next install­ment of these brief, crisp, curios­i­ty-fueled pro­duc­tions: “Has Tech­nol­o­gy Changed Us?”

In a word: yes. But then, every­thing we do has always changed us, thanks to the prop­er­ty of the brain we now call “plas­tic­i­ty.” This we learn from the video, “Rewiring the Brain” (right below), which, bal­anc­ing its heart­en­ing neu­ro­sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence with the prover­bial old dog’s abil­i­ty to learn new tricks, also tells of the “atten­tion dis­or­ders, screen addic­tions, and poor social skills” that may have already begun plagu­ing the younger gen­er­a­tion.

Mar­shall McLuhan, of course, could have fore­seen all this. Hence his appear­ance in “The Medi­um is the Mes­sage” (top), a title tak­en from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to Eng­lish pro­fes­sor turned com­mu­ni­ca­tion-the­o­ry guru’s famous dic­tum.

The video actu­al­ly spells out McLuhan’s own expla­na­tion of that much-quot­ed line: “What has been com­mu­ni­cat­ed has been less impor­tant than the par­tic­u­lar medi­um through which peo­ple com­mu­ni­cate.” Whether you buy that notion or not, the whole range of procla­ma­tions McLuhan had on the sub­ject will cer­tain­ly get you think­ing — in his own words, “You don’t like these ideas? I got oth­ers.”

The oth­er two videos in this series, despite their short length, get into oth­er intrigu­ing relat­ed con­cepts: “The Fourth Rev­o­lu­tion” that comes as a result of life in a “mass age of infor­ma­tion and data,” and the work­ings of “The Antikythera Mech­a­nism,” the first com­put­er ever built. Our per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy has cer­tain­ly come a long way, but we should­n’t fall into com­pla­cen­cy about it, lest, as Ander­son says in this series, it all wrecks our atten­tion spans and “edu­ca­tion will all have to be deliv­ered in two-minute ani­ma­tions.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Did Every­thing Begin?: Ani­ma­tions on the Ori­gins of the Uni­verse Nar­rat­ed by X‑Files Star Gillian Ander­son

What Makes Us Human?: Chom­sky, Locke & Marx Intro­duced by New Ani­mat­ed Videos from the BBC

McLuhan Said “The Medi­um Is The Mes­sage”; Two Pieces Of Media Decode the Famous Phrase

Mar­shall McLuhan: The World is a Glob­al Vil­lage

A His­to­ry of Ideas: Ani­mat­ed Videos Explain The­o­ries of Simone de Beau­voir, Edmund Burke & Oth­er Philoso­phers

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es (130 in Total)

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Take a Super Slow Motion Look at What Happens Inside a DSLR Camera

in Photography | February 2nd, 2015

With the naked eye, it’s near­ly impos­si­ble to see what hap­pens inside a DSLR cam­era when the shut­ter acti­vates. But all of that changes when you use a high speed cam­era — the Phan­tom Flex — to slow things down to 10,000fps. Above, you can see The Slow Mo Guys do their thing. It’s fun to watch, and you’ll prob­a­bly learn a few things about how a cam­era works.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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The Public Domain Project Makes 10,000 Film Clips, 64,000 Images & 100s of Audio Files Free to Use

in Art, Creativity, Film, History, Photography | January 21st, 2015

Sure, we love the inter­net for how it makes freely avail­able so many cul­tur­al arti­facts. And sure, we also love the inter­net for how it allows us to dis­sem­i­nate our own work. But the inter­net gets the most inter­est­ing, I would sub­mit, when it makes freely avail­able cul­tur­al arti­facts with the express pur­pose of let­ting cre­ators use them in their own work — which we then all get to expe­ri­ence through the inter­net. The new Pub­lic Domain Project will soon become an impor­tant resource for many such cre­ators, offer­ing as it does “thou­sands of his­toric media files for your cre­ative projects, com­plete­ly free and made avail­able by Pond5,” an enti­ty that brands itself as “the world’s most vibrant mar­ket­place for cre­ativ­i­ty.”

trip to the moon public domain

So what can you find to use in the Pub­lic Domain Project? As of this writ­ing, it offers 9715 pieces of footage, 473 audio files, 64,535 images, and 121 3D mod­els. “The project includes dig­i­tal mod­els of NASA tools and satel­lites, Georges Méliès’ 1902 film, A Trip To The Moon, speech­es by polit­i­cal fig­ures like Win­ston Churchill and Mar­tin Luther King, Jr., record­ings of per­for­mances from com­posers like Beethoven, and a laid-back pic­ture of Pres­i­dent Oba­ma play­ing pool,” says a post at The Cre­ators Project explain­ing the site’s back­ground.

In the Pub­lic Domain Pro­jec­t’s expand­ing archives you will also find clips of every­thing, from rock­et launch­es to film of old New York to very, very ear­ly cat videos, to, of course, mush­room clouds. I imag­ine that some future Chris Mark­er could make cre­ative use of this stuff indeed, and if they need a score, they could use a con­cer­to for pizzi­ca­to and ten instru­ments, Chopin’s “Noc­turne in E Flat Major,” or maybe “John­ny Get Your Gun.” Alter­na­tive­ly, they could part out the very first doc­u­men­tary and use the Pub­lic Domain Pro­jec­t’s bits and pieces of Dzi­ga Ver­tov’s Man With a Movie Cam­era. What­ev­er you want to cre­ate, the usable pub­lic domain can only grow more fruit­ful, so you might as well get mix­ing, remix­ing, and shar­ing, as Pond5 puts it, right away. Vis­it The Pub­lic Domain Project here.

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kandin­sky, Mon­dri­an, Munch & Flem­ing Entered Pub­lic Domain in 2015 — But Welles, Achebe, and “Pur­ple Peo­ple Eater” Didn’t

Sher­lock Holmes Is Now in the Pub­lic Domain, Declares US Judge

The British Library Puts 1,000,000 Images into the Pub­lic Domain, Mak­ing Them Free to Reuse & Remix

A Cab­i­net of Curiosi­ties: Dis­cov­er The Pub­lic Domain Review’s New Book of Essays

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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31 Rolls of Film Taken by a World War II Soldier Get Discovered & Developed Before Your Eyes

in Photography | January 20th, 2015

Levi Bet­twieser runs the Res­cued Film Project, which sal­vages unde­vel­oped rolls of film from around the world, all shot some­where between the 1930s and the late 1990s. They have the abil­i­ty “to process film from all eras. Even film that has been degrad­ed by heat, mois­ture, and age. Or is no longer man­u­fac­tured.” And why do they take on these projects? Because, at some point, every image was spe­cial for some­one. “Each frame cap­tured, reflects a moment that was intend­ed to be remem­bered.”

Above you can watch Bet­twieser pro­cess­ing 31 rolls of film shot by an Amer­i­can sol­dier dur­ing World War II. Accord­ing to Petapix­el, the rolls were found at an Ohio auc­tion in late 2014, and they “were labeled with var­i­ous loca­tion names (i.e. Boston Har­bor, Lucky Strike Beach, LaHavre Har­bor).” But oth­er than that, Bet­twieser knows noth­ing more about the vet who took these shots.

The res­cue oper­a­tion and the pho­tographs it yield­ed are all fea­tured in a nice­ly craft­ed, 10-minute video.

via Peter B. Kauf­man

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Rare Footage of Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac & Other Beats Hanging Out in the East Village (1959)

in Film, Literature, Photography, Poetry | January 2nd, 2015

We don’t often think of the Beats as fam­i­ly men, and that’s because the most promi­nent of them weren’t, except William Bur­roughs for a time (a trag­ic sto­ry or two for anoth­er day). But friends of Gins­berg and Ker­ouac like Lucien and Francesca Carr and Robert and Mary Frank brought chil­dren into the poets’ lives, and you can see them all above, relax­ing at the Har­mo­ny Bar & Restau­rant in New York’s East Vil­lage in 1959.

This rare silent footage unites the three Carr and two Frank chil­dren in a rare appear­ance of the Beats togeth­er on film. The mus­ta­chioed Lucien Carr —a char­ac­ter with his own dark sto­ry—can be seen seat­ed next to Ker­ouac.  The Franks, père and mère, were both artists in their own right—London-born Mary a trained dancer, sculp­tor, and painter, and Robert an impor­tant Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­ph­er and doc­u­men­tary film­mak­er.

Dan­ger­ous Minds spec­u­lates that it’s Robert Frank behind the cam­era, both because we don’t see him in front of it and because Frank would that same year direct the short film Pull My Daisy (above), fea­tur­ing both Gins­berg and Ker­ouac and adapt­ed from Kerouac’s play Beat Gen­er­a­tion. (Frank appar­ent­ly denies he shot the footage at the top). Pull My Daisy also includes famous Beats like Gre­go­ry Cor­so, musi­cian David Amram, and Ginsberg’s part­ner, poet Peter Orlovsky. In a pre­vi­ous post on that film, Open Culture’s Col­in Mar­shall described it as craft­ed with “great delib­er­ate­ness, albeit the kind of delib­er­ate­ness meant to cre­ate the impres­sion of thrown-togeth­er, ram­shackle spon­tane­ity.”

To learn more about the Beats’ appear­ances on film—as them­selves, in char­ac­ter, and through their adapt­ed work, see this excel­lent fil­mog­ra­phy. And just above, watch a mash-up of most of those var­i­ous cin­e­mat­ic appear­ances in a trail­er pro­duced by Cine­fam­i­ly for the IFC and Sun­dance series “Beats on Film.”

via The Wall Break­ers/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pull My Daisy: 1959 Beat­nik Film Stars Jack Ker­ouac and Allen Gins­berg, Shot by Robert Frank

William S. Burrough’s Avant-Garde Movie ‘The Cut Ups’ (1966)

Bob Dylan and Allen Gins­berg Vis­it the Grave of Jack Ker­ouac (1975)

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

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George Harrison’s Mystical, Fisheye Self-Portraits Taken in India (1966)

in Music, Photography, Religion | December 1st, 2014

Harrison Fisheye1

The Bea­t­les’ sojourn in India can seem like a bit of a stunt, as much a rock n’ roll cliché as Led Zeppelin’s trashed hotel rooms or Fleet­wood Mac’s coke binges. Eas­i­ly par­o­died in, for exam­ple, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Sto­ry, the band’s turn East­ward looks in hind­sight like fad­dish spir­i­tu­al tourism. That impres­sion may not be so far off. As one writer puts it:

By the late 1960s, The Bea­t­les had engi­neered anoth­er pop cul­ture rev­o­lu­tion (at least in Europe and North Amer­i­ca) by wear­ing Indi­an-style cloth­ing, spout­ing reli­gious and philo­soph­i­cal apho­risms that seemed to bor­row from ‘East­ern’ thought, and lat­er even vis­it­ing India for a high­ly-pub­li­cized train­ing ses­sion to learn Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion with the fraud­u­lent ‘mys­tic’ Mahar­ishi Mahesh Yogi.

But while for John, Paul, and Ringo, “inter­est in Indian/Hindu cul­ture was rather fleet­ing and tem­po­ral […] for George, India com­plete­ly over­hauled and changed his life per­ma­nent­ly.” As Har­ri­son him­self would lat­er recount of his first jour­ney in 1966, “it was the first feel­ing I’d ever had of being lib­er­at­ed from being a Bea­t­le or a num­ber.” The rest of the band wouldn’t make the trip until two years lat­er.

Harrison Fisheye 2

Har­ri­son had prin­ci­pal­ly embarked to study sitar under Ravi Shankar and learn yoga, but this was also a peri­od of self-dis­cov­ery and escape from, as he says, the “mania.” Trav­el­ing, as he always did, with a cam­era, he doc­u­ment­ed his jour­ney. His pic­tures are far from ordi­nary tourist images.

While he describes in writ­ing the “mix­ture of unbe­liev­able things” he saw, he just as often turned the cam­era on him­self, his pho­to­graph­ic intro­spec­tion made even more pro­nounced by his use of a fish­eye lens.

Harrison Fisheye 3

Inter­est­ing­ly, in his rec­ol­lec­tion of the trip, Har­ri­son ref­er­ences the sur­re­al cult, sci-fi show The Pris­on­er as a prime illus­tra­tion of life as “a num­ber.” One of the show’s most mem­o­rable devices involves a huge, mys­te­ri­ous white bub­ble that cap­tures or kills any­one try­ing to escape the sin­is­ter orga­ni­za­tion that holds the main char­ac­ter cap­tive. In Harrison’s pho­tos, the bub­ble becomes a para­dox­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tion of his way out of fame’s fish­bowl, of the prison of Beat­le­ma­nia and an iden­ti­ty that felt con­trived and alien­at­ing.

Harrison Fisheye 4

Behind his steady, seri­ous gaze open up vis­tas that presage the breadth and depth of his immer­sion in Indi­an spir­i­tu­al prac­tices. What­ev­er one thinks of his con­ver­sion, there’s no doubt it was sin­cere, and life­long. Not long after this first trip, at the age of 24, he wrote to his moth­er, “I want to be self-real­ized. I want to find God. I’m not inter­est­ed in mate­r­i­al things, this world, fame.” Har­ri­son expressed the very same mys­ti­cal aspi­ra­tions in his final, 1997 inter­view, still play­ing and singing with his men­tor Ravi Shankar.

Harrison Fisheye 5

via Shoot­ing Film/Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ravi Shankar Gives George Har­ri­son a Sitar Les­son … and Oth­er Vin­tage Footage

Watch George Harrison’s Final Inter­view and Per­for­mance (1997)

Phil Spector’s Gen­tle Pro­duc­tion Notes to George Har­ri­son Dur­ing the Record­ing of All Things Must Pass

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

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