The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, History, Technology | June 25th, 2021

Most of us know Rem­brandt’s mas­ter­piece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer orig­i­nal title: Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq. By the same token, the ver­sion of the paint­ing we’ve all seen — what­ev­er we hap­pen to call it — is small­er than the one Rem­brandt orig­i­nal­ly paint­ed in 1642. “In 1715, the mon­u­men­tal can­vas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times’ Nina Sie­gal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, the trimmed paint­ing has been housed in the Rijksmu­se­um, where it is dis­played as the museum’s cen­ter­piece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Hon­or.”

In recent years, the Rijksmu­se­um has hon­ored The Night Watch fur­ther with a thor­ough­go­ing restora­tion called Oper­a­tion Night Watch. This ambi­tious under­tak­ing has so far pro­duced attrac­tions like the largest and most detailed pho­to­graph of the paint­ing ever tak­en, zoom-in-able to the indi­vid­ual brush­stroke.

That phase required high imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy, to be sure, but it may appear down­right con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the just-unveiled recre­ation of the work’s three-cen­turies-miss­ing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the orig­i­nal at the Rijksmu­se­um for the next three months. This mak­ing-whole would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out a small copy made in the 17th cen­tu­ry — or the lat­est arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy of the 21st.

Image cour­tesy of the Rijksmu­se­um

“Rather than hir­ing a painter to recon­struct the miss­ing pieces, the museum’s senior sci­en­tist, Robert Erd­mann, trained a com­put­er to recre­ate them pix­el by pix­el in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Sie­gal. Erd­mann used “a rel­a­tive­ly new tech­nol­o­gy known as con­vo­lu­tion­al neur­al net­works, a class of arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence algo­rithms designed to help com­put­ers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shan­ti Escalante-De Mat­tei at ART­News, involved dig­i­tal­ly “split­ting up the paint­ing into thou­sands of tiles and plac­ing match­ing tiles from both the orig­i­nal and the copy side-by-side,” train­ing mul­ti­ple neur­al net­works to com­plete the paint­ing in a style as close as pos­si­ble to Rem­brandt’s rather than the copy­ist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a star­tling­ly dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Cap­tain Ban­ninck Cocq and his mili­ti­a­men: this, after all, is the por­trait they paid for.

You can watch videos on this Rijksmu­se­um page show­ing how the clas­sic paint­ing was restored.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

The Restora­tion of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstak­ing Process On-Site and Online

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

All the Rem­brandts: The Rijksmu­se­um Puts All 400 Rem­brandts It Owns on Dis­play for the First Time

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 the MiniDisc, Sony’s 1990s Audio Format That’s Gone But Not Forgotten

in Music, Technology | June 23rd, 2021

“If I had asked peo­ple what they want­ed, they would have said faster hors­es.” Whether or not pio­neer­ing car­mak­er Hen­ry Ford actu­al­ly uttered that quip, it has long held near-Bib­li­cal sta­tus in the realm of Amer­i­can busi­ness. On the oth­er side of the Pacif­ic, Sony founder Akio Mori­ta put it less mem­o­rably but more gen­er­al­ly: “If you ask the pub­lic what they think they’ll need, you’ll always be behind in this world. You’ll nev­er catch up unless you think one to ten years in advance, and cre­ate a mar­ket for the items you think the pub­lic will accept at that time.” And had Sony, cre­ator of the Walk­man and co-cre­ator of the Com­pact Disc, asked its cus­tomers what they want­ed in the late 1980s, they may well have said dig­i­tal cas­sette tapes.

In fact Philips, Sony’s part­ner in the devel­op­ment of the Com­pact Disc, did want to make a dig­i­tal cas­sette tape. But Sony saw the future dif­fer­ent­ly, imag­in­ing opti­cal discs that were even more com­pact, and rewritable to boot. The result was Mini­Disc, which with­in a few years of its launch in 1992 man­aged to see off the Dig­i­tal Com­pact Cas­sette, the com­pet­ing for­mat Philips end­ed up devel­op­ing with Mat­sushi­ta. But then the sto­ry gets even more inter­est­ing, and you can see it told in detail by the half-hour This Does Not Com­pute doc­u­men­tary above. Though the Mini­Disc was­n’t a straight­for­ward suc­cess, it turns out nei­ther to have been the sort of Beta­max-style fail­ure many Amer­i­cans seem to remem­ber today.

As a con­sumer audio for­mat, Mini­Disc actu­al­ly became a mas­sive phe­nom­e­non, at least back in Sony’s home­land of Japan. The pecu­liar eco­nom­ics of the Japan­ese music mar­ket, espe­cial­ly back in the 1990s, made CDs about twice as expen­sive there as they were in the Unit­ed States. Enter the music-rental shop, where cus­tomers could check out a dozen albums for the cost of buy­ing a sin­gle one of them, then go home and copy them all to their Mini­Discs. Ver­i­ta­bly print­ing mon­ey, Sony and oth­er Mini­Disc hard­ware man­u­fac­tur­ers came to the defense of music-rental chains when the dis­pleased Japan­ese record indus­try took them to court. By the time the issue was set­tled, Mini­Disc had already entrenched itself in the Japan­ese mar­ket to the point that its devices sur­passed CD play­ers in sales.

Con­fused by the sud­den pre­pon­der­ance of options, most of them pricey and of uncer­tain val­ue, Amer­i­can music con­sumers of the ear­ly 1990s stuck with what they knew: the high-qual­i­ty CD for home lis­ten­ing, and the “good-enough” ana­log cas­sette tape else­where. In the world of pro­fes­sion­al audio, and espe­cial­ly among radio pro­duc­ers, the flex­i­bil­i­ty, reli­a­bil­i­ty, con­ve­nience, and clar­i­ty of Mini­Disc proved unde­ni­able. But nev­er cheap or wide­spread enough for the aver­age lis­ten­er, nor quite high-fideli­ty enough for the exact­ing audio­phile, it spent most of its life in the West as a niche prod­uct. Today, a decade after its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion, the his­to­ry of tech­nol­o­gy has come to rec­og­nize Mini­Disc as the evo­lu­tion­ary link between the Walk­man and the iPod, each of which rev­o­lu­tion­ized the way we lis­ten to music. And what with the new­ly retro appeal of 1990s tech­nol­o­gy, its aes­thet­ic stock has nev­er been high­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sto­ry of How Beethoven Helped Make It So That CDs Could Play 74 Min­utes of Music

All Praise Lou Ottens: The Inven­tor of the Cas­sette Tape Dies at Age 94

Home Tap­ing Is Killing Music: When the Music Indus­try Waged War on the Cas­sette Tape in the 1980s, and Punk Bands Fought Back

A Cel­e­bra­tion of Retro Media: Vinyl, Cas­settes, VHS, and Polaroid Too

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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AI & X‑Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

in Art, Technology | June 22nd, 2021

You see above a paint­ing by Amedeo Modigliani, a por­trait of the artist’s lover Beat­rice Hast­ings, unseen by the pub­lic until its redis­cov­ery just this year. Or at any rate, some see that: in anoth­er sense, the image is a new or almost-new artis­tic cre­ation, based on X‑rays of Modiglian­i’s Por­trait of a Girl. Under­neath the paint that makes up that cel­e­brat­ed work lie traces enough to estab­lish the pres­ence of a dif­fer­ent, ear­li­er one beneath. But only now, after the employ­ment of neur­al net­works fed with enough of the artist’s acknowl­edged work to rec­og­nize and repli­cate his sig­na­ture style, do we have a sense of what it could have looked like.

“Antho­ny Bourached and George Cann, both PhD can­di­dates, are head­ing the ‘Neo­Mas­ters’ project through a com­pa­ny called Oxia Palus,” writes The Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “They have ambi­tious plans to redis­cov­er fur­ther hid­den paint­ings on can­vas­es that were reused by artists, who were per­haps too impov­er­ished to buy sup­plies or dis­sat­is­fied with ini­tial com­po­si­tions.”

Modigliani was cer­tain­ly impe­cu­nious enough to have done so more than once, and his rela­tion­ship with Hast­ings — a long affair that was volatile even by the stan­dards of the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Parisian bohemia they inhab­it­ed — did pro­vide mate­r­i­al for oth­er por­traits.

Spe­cial­ists, respec­tive­ly, in neu­ro­science and the sur­face of Mars (their com­pa­ny’s name refers to a region of that plan­et), Bourached and Cann have proven enter­pris­ing in this art-ori­ent­ed endeav­or. “A 3D-print­ed phys­i­cal ren­der­ing of their cre­ation, com­plete with com­put­er-sim­u­lat­ed ‘brush­strokes’ and tex­ture, will soon go on dis­play at London’s Leben­son Gallery as part of the duo’s ‘Neo­Mas­ters’ project,” writes Nora McGreevy at Smithsonian.com. Ear­li­er this year, McGreevy also cov­ered Oxia Palus’ dig­i­tal­ly assist­ed recov­ery of a Barcelona land­scape pos­si­bly paint­ed by the Span­ish poet, play­wright, and artist San­ti­a­go Rusiñol — before it was paint­ed over by Pablo Picas­so.

This dis­cov­ery actu­al­ly goes back to 1992, when con­ser­va­tors first deter­mined the exis­tence of anoth­er image beneath Picas­so’s lit­tle-known La Mis­éreuse accroupie, or The Crouch­ing Beg­gar. “Researchers sus­pect that Picas­so used the moun­tains in Rusiñol’s land­scape to shape the con­tours of his female subject’s back,” writes McGreevy. “A 2018 X‑ray of that less­er-known work by the Art Gallery of Toron­to pro­vid­ed Oxia Palus what they need­ed to start work on their A.I.-assisted recre­ation. Not only did Bourached and Cann 3D print 100 phys­i­cal copies of the final prod­uct, they linked each one to a unique non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT), the new kind of dig­i­tal arti­fact that has become some­thing of a craze in the art world — sure­ly an unimag­in­able after­life for these images Modigliani and Picas­so must have assumed they’d oblit­er­at­ed for good.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

Sci­en­tists Cre­ate a New Rem­brandt Paint­ing, Using a 3D Print­er & Data Analy­sis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

A 10 Bil­lion Pix­el Scan of Vermeer’s Mas­ter­piece Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring: Explore It Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

in Art, Technology | June 16th, 2021

Dil­bert cre­ator Scott Adams once wrote of his ear­ly expe­ri­ences intro­duc­ing the World Wide Web to oth­ers. “In 1993, there were only a hand­ful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smith­so­ni­an’s exhib­it of gems. Those pages were slow to load and crashed as often as they worked.” But those who wit­nessed this tech­nol­o­gy in action would invari­ably “get out of their chairs their eyes like saucers, and they would approach the key­board. They had to touch it them­selves. There was some­thing about the inter­net that was like cat­nip.” In the inter­ven­ing decades, the tech­nol­o­gy pow­er­ing the inter­net has only improved, and we’ve all felt how great­ly that cat­nip-like effect has inten­si­fied. And the Smith­son­ian, as we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, is still there — now with much more online than gems.

Today, the Smith­so­ni­an’s impres­sive online col­lec­tions are acces­si­ble through Artvee, a new search engine for down­load­able high-res­o­lu­tion, pub­lic domain art­works. So are the col­lec­tions of more than 40 oth­er inter­na­tion­al insti­tu­tions, from the New York Pub­lic Library and the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go to the Rijksmu­se­um and Paris Musées, many of which had lit­tle or no online pres­ence back in the ear­ly 1990s.

In recent years, they’ve got­ten quite seri­ous indeed about dig­i­tiz­ing their hold­ings and mak­ing those dig­i­ti­za­tions freely avail­able to the world, upload­ing them by the thou­sand, even by the mil­lion. With so many art­works and arti­facts already up, and sure­ly much more to come, the ques­tion becomes how best to nav­i­gate not just one of these col­lec­tions, but all of them.

Artvee con­sti­tutes one answer to this ques­tion. Using its search engine, writes Denise Tem­pone at Domesti­ka, “you can fil­ter cat­e­gories such as abstract art, land­scape, mythol­o­gy, draw­ings, illus­tra­tions, botany, fash­ion, fig­u­ra­tive art, reli­gion, ani­mal, desserts, his­to­ry, Japan­ese art, and still life. The site also gives you the option to search by artist. You will find works by Rem­brandt van Rijn, Claude Mon­et, Raphael, and San­dro Bot­ti­cel­li in this amaz­ing gallery.” Oth­er col­lec­tions, cre­at­ed by Artvee itself as well as by its users, include “illus­tra­tions from fairy tales; cov­ers of pop­u­lar Amer­i­can songs; and some even more pecu­liar ones, such as adverts sell­ing bicy­cles that are over a hun­dred years old.”

The vari­ety of artists brows­able on Artvee also includes Alphonse Mucha, Edvard Munch, and Hilma af Kint; oth­er col­lec­tions offer the won­ders of polit­i­cal illus­tra­tions, book pro­mo posters, and NASA’s visions of the future. All of the items with­in, it bears repeat­ing, are in the pub­lic domain or dis­trib­uted under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, mean­ing you can use them not just as sources of inspi­ra­tion but as ingre­di­ents in your own work as well, a pos­si­bil­i­ty few us could have imag­ined at the dawn of the Web. Back then, you’ll recall, we all used a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tools and por­tals to nav­i­gate the inter­net, accord­ing to per­son­al pref­er­ence. The emerg­ing field of art search engines, which includes not just Artvee but oth­er options like Museo, may remind us of those days — and how far the inter­net has come since.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

Vis­it 2+ Mil­lion Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Muse­ums Free Online

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

14 Paris Muse­ums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Down­load Clas­sics by Mon­et, Cézanne & More

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

Flim: a New AI-Pow­ered Movie-Screen­shot Search Engine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Blockchain and Money: A Free Online Course from MIT

in Finance, MIT, Online Courses, Technology | June 13th, 2021

Taught by MIT pro­fes­sor Gary Gensler, Blockchain and Mon­ey is “for stu­dents wish­ing to explore blockchain tech­nol­o­gy’s poten­tial use—by entre­pre­neurs and incumbents—to change the world of mon­ey and finance. The course begins with a review of Bit­coin and an under­stand­ing of the com­mer­cial, tech­ni­cal, and pub­lic pol­i­cy fun­da­men­tals of blockchain tech­nol­o­gy, dis­trib­uted ledgers, and smart con­tracts. The class then con­tin­ues on to cur­rent and poten­tial blockchain appli­ca­tions in the finan­cial sec­tor.”

You can watch all 23 lec­tures above, or on YouTube. A syl­labus and oth­er course mate­ri­als can be found on MIT’s web­site. More relat­ed cours­es are list­ed below.

Blockchain and Mon­ey has been added to our list of Free Busi­ness Cours­es, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent 

What Actu­al­ly Is Bit­coin? Princeton’s Free Online Course “Bit­coin and Cur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies” Pro­vides Much-Need­ed Answers

Bit­coin and Cryp­tocur­ren­cy Tech­nolo­gies: A Free Course from Prince­ton

Cryp­tocur­ren­cy and Blockchain: An Intro­duc­tion to Dig­i­tal Currencies–A Free Online Cours­es from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Penn­syl­va­nia

The Prince­ton Bit­coin Text­book Is Now Free Online

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Sci-Fi “Portal” Connects Citizens of Lublin & Vilnius, Allowing Passersby Separated by 376 Miles to Interact in Real Time

in Art, Technology, Travel | June 9th, 2021

Can we ever tran­scend our ten­den­cy to divide up the world into us and them? The his­to­ry of Europe, which polit­i­cal the­o­rist Ken­neth Minogue once called “plau­si­bly summed up as prepar­ing for war, wag­ing war, or recov­er­ing from war,” offers few con­sol­ing answers. But per­haps it isn’t for his­to­ry, much less for the­o­ry or pol­i­tics, to dic­tate the future prospects for the uni­ty of mankind. Art and tech­nol­o­gy offer anoth­er set of views on the mat­ter, and it’s art and tech­nol­o­gy that come togeth­er in Por­tal, a recent­ly launched project that has con­nect­ed Vil­nius, Lithua­nia and Lublin, Poland with twin instal­la­tions. More than just a sculp­tur­al state­ment, each city’s por­tal offers a real-time, round-the-clock view of the oth­er.

“In both Vil­nius and Lublin,” writes My Mod­ern Met’s Sara Barnes, “the por­tals are with­in the urban land­scape; they are next to a train sta­tion and in the city cen­tral square, respec­tive­ly. This allows for plen­ty of engage­ment, on either end, with the peo­ple of a city 376 miles apart. And, in a larg­er sense, the por­tals help to human­ize cit­i­zens from anoth­er place.”

Images released of the inter­ac­tion between passer­by and their local por­tal show, among oth­er actions, wav­ing, cam­era phone-shoot­ing, syn­chro­nized jump­ing, and just plain star­ing. Though more than one com­par­i­son has been made to the Star­gate, the image also comes to mind of the apes around the mono­lith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, react­ing as best they can to a pre­vi­ous­ly unimag­ined pres­ence in their every­day envi­ron­ment.

Iron­i­cal­ly, the basic tech­nol­o­gy employed by the Por­tal project is noth­ing new. At this point we’ve all looked into our phone and com­put­er screens and seen a view from per­haps much far­ther than 376 miles away, and been seen from that dis­tance as well. But the coro­n­avirus-induced world­wide expan­sion of tele­con­fer­enc­ing has, for many, made the under­ly­ing mechan­ics seem some­what less than mirac­u­lous. Con­ceived years before trav­el restric­tions ren­dered next to impos­si­ble the actu­al vis­it­ing of human beings else­where on the con­ti­nent, let alone on the oth­er side of the world, Por­tal has set up its first instal­la­tions at a time when they’ve come to feel like some­thing the world needs. “Res­i­dents in Reyk­javik, Ice­land, and Lon­don, Eng­land can expect a por­tal in their city in the future,” notes Barnes — and if those two can feel tru­ly con­nect­ed with Europe, there may be hope for the one­ness of the human race yet.

via Colos­sal/MyMod­ern­Met

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Street Artist Cre­ates an Opti­cal Illu­sion That Lets Peo­ple See the Art Inside a Shut­tered Muse­um in Flo­rence

This Huge Crash­ing Wave in a Seoul Aquar­i­um Is Actu­al­ly a Gigan­tic Opti­cal Illu­sion

See Web Cams of Sur­re­al­ly Emp­ty City Streets in Venice, New York, Lon­don & Beyond

Dis­cov­er Euro­peana Col­lec­tions, a Por­tal of 48 Mil­lion Free Art­works, Books, Videos, Arti­facts & Sounds from Across Europe

The His­to­ry of Europe from 400 BC to the Present, Ani­mat­ed in 12 Min­utes

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Nov­els Sold in Pol­ish Vend­ing Machines

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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 Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery: A New Site Presents 403 Paintings from The Joy of Painting Series

in Art, Data, Technology, Television | June 7th, 2021

“We don’t make mis­takes. We have hap­py acci­dents,” the late Bob Ross soothed fans paint­ing along at home, while brush­ing an alarm­ing amount of black onto one of his sig­na­ture nature scenes.

His mel­low on-cam­era demeanor and flow­ing, wet-on-wet oil paint­ing style were per­fect­ly cal­i­brat­ed to help tight­ly-wound view­ers relax into a right-brained groove.

The cre­ators of the Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery take a more left brained approach.

Hav­ing col­lect­ed data on Ross’ ever­green series, The Joy of Paint­ing, they ana­lyzed it for fre­quen­cy of col­or use over the show’s 403 episodes, as well as the num­ber of col­ors applied to each can­vas.

For those keep­ing score, after black and white, alizarin crim­son was the col­or Ross favored most, and 1/4 of the paint­ings made on air boast 12 col­ors.

The data could be slight­ly skewed by the con­tri­bu­tions of occa­sion­al guest artists such as Ross’ for­mer instruc­tor, John Thamm, who once coun­seled Ross to “paint bush­es and trees and leave por­trait paint­ing to some­one else.” Thamm availed him­self of a sin­gle col­or — Van Dyke Brown — to demon­strate the wipe out tech­nique. His con­tri­bu­tion is one of the few human like­ness­es that got paint­ed over the show’s 11-year pub­lic tele­vi­sion run.

The Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery has sev­er­al options for view­ing the data.

Mouse over a grid of grey rec­tan­gles to see the 403 art­works pre­sent­ed in chrono­log­i­cal order, along with titles and episode num­bers.

(This has all the mak­ings of a thump­ing good mem­o­ry game, à la Con­cen­tra­tion… flip all the rec­tan­gles, study them, then see if you can nav­i­gate back to all the cab­ins or mead­ows.)

A bar graph, sim­i­lar­ly com­posed of rec­tan­gles, reveals the col­ors that went into each paint­ing.

Anoth­er chart ana­lyzes Ross’ use of col­or over time, as he moved away from Burnt Umber and eased up on Pftha­lo Green.

 

Indi­an Red was accord­ed but a sin­gle use, in sea­son 22’s first episode, “Autumn Images.” (“Let’s sparkle this up. We’re gonna have fall col­ors. Let’s get crazy.”)

For art lovers crav­ing a more tra­di­tion­al gallery expe­ri­ence, site cre­ator Con­nor Roth­schild has installed a vir­tu­al bench fac­ing a frame capa­ble of dis­play­ing all the paint­ings in ran­dom or chrono­log­i­cal order, with dig­i­tal swatch­es rep­re­sent­ing the paints that went into them and YouTube links to the episodes that pro­duced them.

And for those who’d rather gaze at data sci­ence, the code is avail­able on GitHub.

Explore the Bob Ross Vir­tu­al Art Gallery here. Scroll down to take advan­tage of all the options.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Every Episode of Bob Ross’ The Joy Of Paint­ing Free Online: 403 Episodes Span­ning 31 Sea­sons

The Joy of Paint­ing with Bob Ross & Banksy: Watch Banksy Paint a Mur­al on the Jail That Once Housed Oscar Wilde

Expe­ri­ence the Bob Ross Expe­ri­ence: A New Muse­um Open in the TV Painter’s For­mer Stu­dio Home

Bob Ross’ Christ­mas Spe­cial: Cel­e­brate, Relax, Nod Off

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain: The Peri­od­i­cal Cica­da, a free vir­tu­al vari­ety show hon­or­ing the 17-Year Cicadas of Brood X. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Meet the Inventor of Karaoke, Daisuke Inoue, Who Wanted to “Teach the World to Sing”

in History, Music, Technology | June 1st, 2021

Daisuke Inoue has been hon­ored with a rare, indeed almost cer­tain­ly unique com­bi­na­tion of lau­rels. In 1999, Time mag­a­zine named him among the “Most Influ­en­tial Asians of the Cen­tu­ry.” Five years lat­er he won an Ig Nobel Prize, which hon­ors par­tic­u­lar­ly strange and ris­i­ble devel­op­ments in sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, and cul­ture. Inoue had come up with the device that made his name decades ear­li­er, in the ear­ly 1970s, but its influ­ence has proven endur­ing still today. It is he whom his­to­ry now cred­its with the inven­tion of the karaoke machine, the assist­ed-singing device that the Ig Nobel com­mit­tee, award­ing its Peace Prize, described as “an entire­ly new way for peo­ple to learn to tol­er­ate each oth­er.”

The achieve­ment of an Ig Nobel recip­i­ent should be one that “makes peo­ple laugh, then think.” Over its half-cen­tu­ry of exis­tence, many have laughed at karaoke, espe­cial­ly as osten­si­bly prac­ticed by the drunk­en salary­men of its home­land. But upon fur­ther con­sid­er­a­tion, few Japan­ese inven­tions have been as impor­tant.

Hence its promi­nent inclu­sion in Japa­nol­o­gist Matt Alt’s recent book Pure Inven­tion: How Japan’s Pop Cul­ture Con­quered the World. As Alt tells its sto­ry, the karaoke machine emerged out of San­nomiya, Kobe’s red-light dis­trict, which might seem an unlike­ly birth­place — until you con­sid­er its “some four thou­sand drink­ing estab­lish­ments crammed into a clus­ter of streets and alleys just a kilo­me­ter in radius.”

In these bars Inoue worked as a hiki-katari, a kind of free­lance musi­cian who spe­cial­ized in “sing-alongs, retun­ing their performances­ on­ the ­fly­ to ­match ­the­ singing­ abil­i­ties ­and­ sobri­ety ­levels­ of pay­ing cus­tomers.” This was karaoke (the Japan­ese term means, lit­er­al­ly, “emp­ty orches­tra”) before karaoke as we know it. Inoue had mas­tered its rig­ors to such an extent that he became known as “Dr. Sing-along,” and the sheer demand for his ser­vices inspired him to cre­ate a kind of auto­mat­ic replace­ment he could send to extra gigs. The 8 Juke, as he called it, amount­ed to an 8‑track car stereo con­nect­ed to a micro­phone, reverb box, and coin slot. Pre-loaded with instru­men­tal cov­ers of bar-goers’ favorite songs, the 8 Jukes Inoue made soon start­ed tak­ing in more coins than they could han­dle.

“When I made the first Juke 8s, a broth­er-in-law sug­gest­ed I take out a patent,” Inoue said in a 2013 inter­view. “But at the time, I didn’t think any­thing would come of it.” Hav­ing assem­bled his inven­tion from off-the-shelf com­po­nents, he did­n’t think there was any­thing patentable about it, and unknown to him, at least one sim­i­lar device had already been built else­where in Japan. But what Inoue invent­ed, as Alt puts it, was “the total pack­age of hard­ware and cus­tom soft­ware that allowed karaoke to grow from a local fad into an enor­mous glob­al busi­ness.” Had it been patent­ed, says Inoue him­self, “I don’t think karaoke would have grown like it did.” Would it have grown to have, as Alt puts  it, “profound­ effects­ on­ the­ fantasy­ lives­ of­ Japanese­ and­ West­ern­ers ­both”? And would Inoue have found him­self onstage more than 30 years lat­er at the Ig Nobels, lead­ing a crowd of Amer­i­cans in a round of “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing”?

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Author Rob Sheffield Picks Karaoke Songs for Famous Authors: Imag­ine Wal­lace Stevens Singing the Vel­vet Underground’s “Sun­day Morn­ing”

Japan­ese Bud­dhist Monk Cov­ers Ramones’ “Teenage Lobot­o­my,” “Queen’s “We Will Rock You,” Bea­t­les’ “Yel­low Sub­ma­rine” & More

The 10 Com­mand­ments of Chindōgu, the Japan­ese Art of Cre­at­ing Unusu­al­ly Use­less Inven­tions

This Man Flew to Japan to Sing ABBA’s “Mam­ma Mia” in a Big Cold Riv­er

Karaoke-Style, Stephen Col­bert Sings and Struts to The Rolling Stones’ “Brown Sug­ar”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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