Listen to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen” Played on a 1914 Fairground Organ

in History, Music, Technology | April 16th, 2021

To tru­ly appre­ci­ate the spec­ta­cle of ABBA’s “Danc­ing Queen” played on a 1914 Hooghuys fair­ground organ, we rec­om­mend you read Angus Harrison’s 2016 VICE essay, “Why Abba’s ‘Danc­ing Queen’ Is the Sad­dest Record Ever Made”:

Make no mis­take. This song is about the danc­ing queen, but it is most def­i­nite­ly not sung by her. Here­in lies the tragedy. Our nar­ra­tor has real­ized that she is no longer the Danc­ing Queen. She is no longer young, no longer sweet, no longer 17. Now, instead, she watch­es from the bar; the dance­floor a mael­strom of lost faith, mem­o­ries, and missed oppor­tu­ni­ties. She was once 17, and as such was total­ly obliv­i­ous that the moment would ever end.

Could such sen­ti­ments apply to the above instru­ment, whose carved fig­urines, ornate scroll­work, and dis­tinc­tive sound def­i­nite­ly sug­gest that how­ev­er lov­ing­ly it’s been main­tained, its prime is long past.

This 105-year-old organ was already 62 when “Danc­ing Queen” was released at the height of the dis­co craze in 1976.

The tune quick­ly soared to the top of the charts world­wide, as fans raced to the record store to pick up a 45, or the full album, Arrival, on vinyl, cas­sette, or 8‑track.

But pro­duc­tion of punched, card­board scrolls such as the ones these metic­u­lous­ly hand built instru­ments — no two alike! — use had long since ceased.

A site ded­i­cat­ed to Hooghuys organs ties their decline to the end of WWI, cit­ing the neces­si­ty of cheap­er post-war pro­duc­tion. When the founder of the fam­i­ly busi­ness died, short­ly there­after, the firm ceased to exist.

Flash for­ward to this mil­len­ni­um, when a mechan­i­cal music afi­ciona­do named Alex­ey Rom used MIDI — Musi­cal Instru­ment Dig­i­tal Inter­face — to give the aged organ new life, pro­gram­ming his own arrange­ment, then using an auto­mat­ic punch to cre­ate card­board cards the instru­ment was capa­ble of read­ing.

His first such tri­umph came when he equipped a sim­i­lar organ to cov­er Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody.” “Danc­ing Queen,” and many oth­er pop­u­lar favorites that didn’t exist in the organs’ hey­day fol­lowed. (We’re pret­ty par­tial to “Mack the Knife” played on an 81-key Marenghi organ from 1905…)

Below Rom shares a tiny peek into his process.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1910 Fair­ground Organ Plays Queen’s “Bohemi­an Rhap­sody,” and It Works Like a Charm

When ABBA Wrote Music for the Cold War-Themed Musi­cal, Chess: “One of the Best Rock Scores Ever Pro­duced for the The­atre” (1984)

Bach’s Most Famous Organ Piece Played on Wine Glass­es

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

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

in History, Technology | April 12th, 2021

We revere Leonar­do da Vin­ci for his indus­try, but even more so for his imag­i­na­tion. Most of us would envi­sion our­selves, had we lived in the late 15th or ear­ly 16th cen­tu­ry, being per­fect­ly con­tent with hav­ing paint­ed the Mona Lisa. But Leonar­do had designs on a host of oth­er domains as well, most of them not strict­ly artis­tic. His ven­tures into sci­ence and engi­neer­ing made him the arche­typ­al poly­math “Renais­sance man,” but he was also a man before his time: most of the inven­tions he came up with and doc­u­ment­ed in his writ­ings could­n’t have been built when he lived.

Over the past six cen­turies, how­ev­er tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ments have turned more and more of Leonar­do’s machines pos­si­ble — or at least con­ceiv­able to the non-vision­ary. Take, for instance, the bridge only put suc­cess­ful­ly to the test when MIT researchers 3D-print­ed it in 2019.

Alas, how­ev­er advanced our mate­ri­als in the 21st cen­tu­ry, they have yet to prove equal to the ornithopter, a rig meant to bestow upon man the pow­er of flight by giv­ing him a pair of bird­like wings. But you can see it in action in the short video at the top of this post, the first in a series called “Da Vin­ci Reborn.”

Pro­duced by the 3D soft­ware-mak­er Das­sault Sys­tèmes, these videos reveal the inner work­ings of Leonar­do’s inven­tions, built and unbuilt. Apart from his fan­ci­ful ornithopter, they real­is­ti­cal­ly ren­der his odome­ter, self-cen­ter­ing drill, aer­i­al screw, and self-sup­port­ing bridge (which, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, you can actu­al­ly build your­self). It’s one thing to see these machines dia­grammed and hear them explained, but quite anoth­er to wit­ness them put into com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed action.

Even as these videos help us under­stand how Leonar­do’s inge­nious cre­ations worked, they remind us that Leonar­do him­self had to invent them with­out the ben­e­fit of com­put­er-aid­ed design — with lit­tle more, in fact, than pen, paper, and the Renais­sance-era tools at hand. For him, when the self-cen­ter­ing drill bored straight through a log or the aer­i­al screw took to the air, they did so only in his imag­i­na­tion. It was only there that he could test, refine, and reassem­ble the mech­a­nisms that togeth­er con­sti­tut­ed many of the inven­tions that still impress us today.

It must be some­thing like step­ping into Leonar­do’s mind, then, to expe­ri­ence the Das­sault-designed Da Vin­ci Cas­tle play­ground, which vir­tu­al­ly places these inven­tions and oth­ers on the lawn in front of the Château du Clos Lucé. It was there that the great Renais­sance man came to the end of his life in 1619, hav­ing entered the ser­vice of King Fran­cis I’s ser­vice after the French monarch recap­tured Milan four years ear­li­er. Leonar­do him­self would sure­ly appre­ci­ate this geo­graph­i­cal touch — and even more so, the fact that human­i­ty is still bring­ing such high tech­nol­o­gy to bear on the project of under­stand­ing his work.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inven­tions Come to Life as Muse­um-Qual­i­ty, Work­able Mod­els: A Swing Bridge, Scythed Char­i­ot, Per­pet­u­al Motion Machine & More

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imag­ined by Leonar­do da Vin­ci in 1502— and Prove That It Actu­al­ly Works

Leonar­do da Vin­ci Draws Designs of Future War Machines: Tanks, Machine Guns & More

Watch Leonar­do da Vinci’s Musi­cal Inven­tion, the Vio­la Organ­ista, Being Played for the Very First Time

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

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 Mathematics Behind Origami, the Ancient Japanese Art of Paper Folding

in Art, Math, Technology, TED Talks | March 23rd, 2021

The two char­ac­ters at the core of origa­mi (折り紙), one of the best-known Japan­ese words around the world, mean “fold­ing” and “paper.” You might well have guessed that, but giv­en the vari­ety and elab­o­rate­ness of the con­struc­tions pro­duced by origa­mi mas­ters over the past few cen­turies, the sim­plic­i­ty of the prac­tice’s basic nature bears repeat­ing. Those mas­ters must devel­op no slight degree of man­u­al dex­ter­i­ty, it goes with­out say­ing, but also a for­mi­da­ble math­e­mat­i­cal under­stand­ing of their medi­um. In many cas­es that under­stand­ing is intu­itive; in the TED-Ed les­son above, origa­mi artist Evan Zodl makes it explic­it.

Zodl’s les­son explains that “though most origa­mi mod­els are three-dimen­sion­al, their crease pat­terns are usu­al­ly designed to fold flat, with­out intro­duc­ing any new creas­es or cut­ting the paper.”(Incidentally, the Japan­ese word for paper art involv­ing cuts is kiriga­mi, or 切り紙.)

An “abstract, 2D design” thus becomes, in the origa­mi mas­ter’s hands, “a 3D form,” but only in accor­dance with a set of four sim­ple rules Zodl explains. He does so clear­ly and under­stand­ably — and in a way that for many of us may exhume buried geom­e­try-class mem­o­ries — but like actu­al works of origa­mi, they’re bet­ter shown than described: hence the vivid accom­pa­ny­ing ani­ma­tions of Char­lotte Arene.

Origami’s prin­ci­ples and prod­ucts may be fas­ci­nat­ing to con­tem­plate, but “the abil­i­ty to fold a large sur­face into a com­pact shape” has also proven to have seri­ous real-world appli­ca­tions. Zodl points to an origa­mi-based re-imag­i­na­tion of “the tra­di­tion­al stent graft, a tube used to open and sup­port dam­aged blood ves­sels.” This in addi­tion to “airbags, solar arrays, self-fold­ing robots, and even DNA nanos­truc­tures” — as well as a mas­sive “star shade” for space tele­scopes that blocks the glare of near­by stars. If you’d like to get start­ed on your own tac­tile under­stand­ing of all this, do have a look at Zodl’s own Youtube chan­nel, as well as oth­ers like Origa­mi Instruc­tions. Don’t let the elab­o­rate­ly fold­ed flow­ers, boats, or ani­mals you’ve seen intim­i­date you; start with a sim­ple box and work your way up from there. If origa­mi shows us any­thing, after all, it’s that com­plex­i­ty begins with sim­plic­i­ty.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Origa­mi Samu­rai Made from a Sin­gle Sheet of Rice Paper, With­out Any Cut­ting

A Data­base of Paper Air­plane Designs: Hours of Fun for Kids & Adults Alike

MIT Cre­ates Amaz­ing Self-Fold­ing Origa­mi Robots & Leap­ing Chee­tah Robots

Design­er Cre­ates Origa­mi Card­board Tents to Shel­ter the Home­less from the Win­ter Cold

The Art of Let­ter­lock­ing: The Elab­o­rate Fold­ing Tech­niques That Ensured the Pri­va­cy of Hand­writ­ten Let­ters Cen­turies Ago

The Mak­ing of Japan­ese Hand­made Paper: A Short Film Doc­u­ments an 800-Year-Old Tra­di­tion

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

in Art, Technology | March 18th, 2021

Even before the pan­dem­ic, muse­ums were putting their art online. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve cov­ered such ambi­tious efforts of dig­i­ti­za­tion and mak­ing-avail­able on the part of the Rijksmu­se­um, the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, and oth­er major insti­tu­tions, some of whom have gone so far as to upload their hold­ings under Cre­ative Com­mons licens­es or in oth­er free-to-use forms. And now you can call forth art­works from the open online col­lec­tions and oth­ers all at once with the search engine Museo.

“Museo is a visu­al search engine that con­nects you with the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, the Rijksmu­se­um, the Min­neapo­lis Insti­tute of Art and the New York Pub­lic Library Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion,” writes cre­ator Chase McCoy, who also empha­sizes that con­nec­tions with more such col­lec­tions are to come.

“Every image you find here is in the pub­lic domain and com­plete­ly free to use, although cred­it­ing the source insti­tu­tion is rec­om­mend­ed!”

Imag­ine you need images to illus­trate an essay about, say, trav­el. Punch that word into Museo (or a relat­ed one like “jour­ney”) and out come a vari­ety of paint­ings, prints, draw­ings, sculp­tures, books, maps, house­wares, and oth­er items found in muse­ums. Here we have Adolph Men­zel’s In a Rail­way Car­riage (After a Night’s Jour­ney) from 1851, Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s The East­ern Jour­ney of the Cel­e­brat­ed Poet Ari­wara no Nar­i­hi­ra from 1806, Ael­bert Cuyp’s Riv­er Land­scape with Rid­ers from the mid-1650s, Seth East­man’s Indi­ans Trav­el­ling from 1850, and Richard New­ton’s On a Jour­ney to a Courtship in Wales from 1795.

The results are hard­ly lim­it­ed to con­ven­tion­al works like these: you’ll also find such curiosi­ties as an ear­ly 19th-cen­tu­ry trav­el­ing desk; a portable bank from 1904 called the “trav­el­ing teller”; a 1920 image “show­ing the earth bisect­ed cen­tral­ly through the polar open­ings and at right angles to the equa­tor, giv­ing a clear view of the cen­tral sun and the inte­ri­or con­ti­nents and oceans”; Hen­ry Cor­ry Row­ley Becher’s 1880 trav­el­ogue A Trip to Mex­i­co; and the Auto­mo­bile Club of Hart­ford’s 1922 Motor Trips guide to New Eng­land and east­ern New York.

Most of the art avail­able through Museo comes, as pub­lic-domain mate­r­i­al tends to, from times long past. But that, in its own way, encour­ages their cre­ative use: many of the images returned for “enter­tain­ment,” “food,” “sports,” and even “tech­nol­o­gy” fair­ly demand sur­pris­ing 21st-cen­tu­ry recon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion. As its net­work of col­lec­tions expands, do make a point of vis­it­ing Museo every so often to search for your own sub­jects of inter­est; your next big idea may well be inspired by art from a cen­tu­ry or two (or three, or four) ago.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Makes 375,000 Images of Fine Art Avail­able Under a Cre­ative Com­mons License: Down­load, Use & Remix

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

Rijksmu­se­um Dig­i­tizes & Makes Free Online 361,000 Works of Art, Mas­ter­pieces by Rem­brandt Includ­ed!

The New York Pub­lic Library Lets You Down­load 180,000 Images in High Res­o­lu­tion: His­toric Pho­tographs, Maps, Let­ters & More

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 Letters of Mozart’s Sister Maria Anna Get Transformed into Music

in Music, Technology | March 15th, 2021

The tal­ent of an indi­vid­ual may not always run in the fam­i­ly, but we can nev­er dis­count the pos­si­bil­i­ty of its doing so. This is true even in the case of Wolf­gang Amadeus Mozart, not just one of the best-known com­posers ever to live, but a byword for deep, innate, and unre­peat­able genius. Mozart was com­pos­ing orig­i­nal music at the age of of four or five, an aston­ish­ing fact we know today in part because his old­er sis­ter wit­nessed and lat­er attest­ed to it. Known as Nan­nerl, Maria Anna Mozart pre­ced­ed her both­er into key­board lessons from their father Leopold, a com­pos­er and teacher. Togeth­er Wolf­gang and Maria Anna toured Europe as a per­form­ing duo of child prodi­gies, until Maria Anna’s attain­ment of mar­riage­able age took her off the cir­cuit.

If Maria Anna ever com­posed music of her own, none of it has sur­vived. But she did leave behind a fair few diaries and let­ters, many of the lat­ter exchanged with her broth­er. These writ­ings pro­vid­ed the mate­r­i­al for pianist Heloísa Fer­nan­des to cre­ate a piece in trib­ute to the less­er-known Mozart sib­ling.

“The writ­ing, all in Ger­man, under­went painstak­ing analy­sis so that its tone and pro­nun­ci­a­tion could be trans­lat­ed into musi­cal notes,” says Lit­tle Black Book. “A Ger­man inter­preter was invit­ed to read the let­ters and diary of Maria Anna Mozart out loud,” and a piece of soft­ware “trans­lat­ed the record­ing into musi­cal notes by tun­ing the syl­la­bles. If a spo­ken syl­la­ble hit 387 Hz, for exam­ple, the pro­gram inter­pret­ed it as G.” Thus were Nan­ner­l’s words trans­formed into music.

The result­ing piece, “Das Kön­i­gre­ich Rück­en,” is named after “an imag­i­nary king­dom that Maria and Wolf­gang made ref­er­ence to in their let­ters to each oth­er,” as Sara Spary notes in Adweek — a pub­li­ca­tion that would nat­u­ral­ly cov­er it, com­mis­sioned as it was by an ad cam­paign for LG Elec­tron­ics. Devel­oped by Brazil­ian firm AlmapBB­DO in coop­er­a­tion with the pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny Super­sôni­ca, “Pro­jec­to Ms. Mozart” is meant to pro­mote LG’s XBOOM Go Blue­tooth speak­er. But whichev­er device you use to hear “Das Kön­i­gre­ich Rück­en,” you’ll sure­ly find that it sounds quite unlike any piece you’ve heard before. Fans of Maria Anna Mozart as a his­tor­i­cal fig­ure will lis­ten and won­der what could have been, and even those igno­rant of her can’t but wel­come these three addi­tion­al min­utes of Mozart into the world.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Maria Anna Mozart Was a Musi­cal Prodi­gy Like Her Broth­er Wolf­gang, So Why Did She Get Erased from His­to­ry?

Mozart’s Diary Where He Com­posed His Final Mas­ter­pieces Is Now Dig­i­tized and Avail­able Online

Hear the Pieces Mozart Com­posed When He Was Only Five Years Old

See Mozart Played on Mozart’s Own Fortepi­ano, the Instru­ment That Most Authen­ti­cal­ly Cap­tures the Sound of His Music

12-Year-Old Piano Prodi­gy Takes Four Notes Ran­dom­ly Picked from a Hat and Instant­ly Uses Them to Impro­vise a Sonata

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 Iconic Dance Scene from Hellzapoppin’ Presented in Living Color with Artificial Intelligence (1941)

in Dance, Film, Technology | March 10th, 2021

After Charles Lind­bergh “hopped” the Atlantic in 1927, his his­to­ry-mak­ing solo flight set off a craze for all things “Lindy.” Of the count­less songs, foods, prod­ucts, and trends cre­at­ed or named in hon­or of the famous one­time U.S. Air Mail pilot, only one remains rec­og­niz­able these more than 90 years lat­er: the Lindy Hop. Devel­oped on the streets and in the clubs of Harlem, the dance proved explo­sive­ly pop­u­lar, though it took Hol­ly­wood a few years to cap­i­tal­ize on it. In the late 1930s, the musi­cal Hel­lza­pop­pin’ brought the Lindy Hop to Broad­way, and in 1941, Uni­ver­sal Pic­tures turned that stage show into a major motion pic­ture direct­ed by H.C. Pot­ter (now best known for Mr. Bland­ings Builds His Dream House).

An often sur­re­al, fourth-wall-break­ing affair, Hel­lza­pop­pin’ is remem­bered main­ly for the five-minute Lindy Hop musi­cal num­ber that comes about halfway through the film. It fea­tures a dance troupe called the Harlem Con­ga­roos, played by the real-life Whitey’s Lindy Hop­pers, a group of pro­fes­sion­al swing dancers found­ed at Harlem’s Savoy Ball­room, the ori­gin point of the Lindy Hop as we know it today.

Its appear­ing mem­bers include Frankie Man­ning, whose name had become syn­ony­mous with the Lindy Hop in the 1930s, and Nor­ma Miller, who as a twelve-year-old girl famous­ly did the dance out­side the Savoy for tips. Hel­lza­pop­pin’ pre­serves their ath­leti­cism and vital­i­ty for all time — with a hot jazz sound­track to boot.

Like most Hol­ly­wood musi­cals of the ear­ly 1940s, Hel­lza­pop­pin’ was shot in black-and-white, and cinephiles will main­tain that it’s best seen that way. But just as the tech­nol­o­gy pow­er­ing long-haul flights has devel­oped great­ly since the days of Charles Lind­bergh, so has the tech­nol­o­gy of film col­oriza­tion. Take DeOld­ify, the “open-source, Deep Learn­ing based project to col­orize and restore old images and film footage” that “uses AI neur­al net­works trained with thou­sands of ref­er­ence pic­tures” – and that was used to pro­duce the ver­sion of Hel­lza­pop­pin’s Lindy Hop num­ber seen at the top of the post. It all looks much more con­vinc­ing than when Ted Turn­er attempt­ed to col­orize Cit­i­zen Kane, but in lovers of dance, what­ev­er sense of real­ism DeOld­ify con­tributes will main­ly inspire a deep­er long­ing to expe­ri­ence the cul­ture of Harlem as it real­ly was in the 1920s.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

1944 Instruc­tion­al Video Teach­es You the Lindy Hop, the Dance That Orig­i­nat­ed in 1920’s Harlem Ball­rooms

One of the Great­est Dances Sequences Ever Cap­tured on Film Gets Restored in Col­or by AI: Watch the Clas­sic Scene from Stormy Weath­er

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Rita Hay­worth, 1940s Hol­ly­wood Icon, Dances Dis­co to the Tune of The Bee Gees Stayin’ Alive: A Mashup

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

in Film, Technology | February 25th, 2021

There was a time when cinephile short­hand con­sist­ed most­ly of quo­ta­tions from movies — from movies’ dia­logue, to be pre­cise. The dis­tinc­tion mat­ters these days, now that the inter­net has enabled us to com­mu­ni­cate just as eas­i­ly with visu­al quo­ta­tions as ver­bal ones. While some of us go the extra mile by man­u­al­ly comb­ing through our film col­lec­tions and tak­ing the screen­shots that best reflect our per­son­al sen­ti­ments, most of us have long relied on the results, how­ev­er approx­i­mate, served up by search engines like Google Images.

Now a promis­ing new solu­tion has emerged, called Flim (not to be con­fused with “film”). Described on its about page as “a con­stant­ly evolv­ing data­base of HD screen­shots,” with a claim of 50,000 pro­vid­ed dai­ly, Flim uses arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence to per­form col­or analy­sis and detect “objects, clothes, char­ac­ters, etc.”

This means that when you enter terms like “tree,” “gui­tar,” “tuxe­do,” or “piz­za,” you get a selec­tion of images includ­ing trees, gui­tars, tuxe­dos, and piz­zas, all tak­en straight from a range of motion pic­tures wide enough to include The Night­mare Before Christ­mas and An Amer­i­can Were­wolf in Lon­don, Easy Rid­er and Wayne’s World 2, Mélo and Wed­ding Crash­ers.

Arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence has come a long way in recent years, espe­cial­ly in its capac­i­ty to rec­og­nize the con­tent of images. The one dri­ving Flim does seem to have com­mit­ted the occa­sion­al amus­ing mis­file, but it’s still ear­ly days. And though cinephiles will be quick to notice the omis­sions in its data­base, they’ll find a great deal of visu­al mate­r­i­al from the work of their favorite auteurs: more than 100 screen­shots from that of David Lynch, more than 300 from that of Éric Rohmer, more than a thou­sand from that of Stan­ley Kubrick, and near­ly 1,500 from that of Alfred Hitch­cock.

“I would love for the screen­shot detail pages to include time­codes,” sug­gests Jason Kot­tke. It would make this an amaz­ing tool for cre­at­ing super­cuts, film analy­sis videos, and oth­er sorts of media. Imag­ine how much eas­i­er Chris­t­ian Marclay’s job would have been with ‘clock’ and ‘watch’ search­es on Flim.” Cer­tain­ly I could have used it while mak­ing my own video essay on Los Ange­les’ Bonaven­ture Hotel, a notable film-shoot loca­tion over the past few decades — though as yet the Bonaven­ture’s name returns no results, nor do the names of any oth­er real-world build­ings that come to mind.

Still, if Flim expands apace, it will become a valu­able resource for cinephiles and non-cinephiles alike, as well as film­mak­ers them­selves: No Film School’s Jason Heller­man describes it as a poten­tial­ly rev­o­lu­tion­ary aid for the assem­bly of “mood boards” and “look­books,” indus­try-stan­dard ele­ments of pitch pre­sen­ta­tions for “music videos, fea­tures, and com­mer­cials.” As with any new­ly devel­oped tool of this kind, though, the most inter­est­ing uses will sure­ly be the least obvi­ous ones. In time, Flim could even prove to be a trust­ed source of read­ing rec­om­men­da­tions.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stu­dio Ghi­b­li Makes 1,178 Images Free to Down­load from My Neigh­bor Totoro, Spir­it­ed Away & Oth­er Beloved Ani­mat­ed Films

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

Down­load 6600 Free Films from The Prelinger Archives and Use Them How­ev­er You Like

Down­load for Free 2.6 Mil­lion Images from Books Pub­lished Over Last 500 Years on Flickr

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

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

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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Wired Co-Founder Kevin Kelly Gives 36 Lectures on Our Future World: Education, Movies, Robots, Autonomous Cars & More

in Education, Technology | February 22nd, 2021

Giv­en recent events, 2019 may now seem to us like the dis­tant past. But to those who were think­ing hard about the future the year before last, noth­ing that has hap­pened since has been whol­ly unex­pect­ed — and espe­cial­ly not to those who’d already been think­ing hard about the future for decades. Take Kevin Kel­ly, co-founder of Wired mag­a­zine and writer on tech­nol­o­gy as well as a host of oth­er sub­jects. It was in 2019 that state telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pa­ny Chi­na Mobile com­mis­sioned him to give a series of 36 short video lec­tures on the “Future of X”: not the future of the inter­net in Chi­na and the future of India in com­pe­ti­tion with Chi­na, but a range of top­ics that will sure­ly affect us all, no mat­ter our part of the world.

Self-dri­ving cars, vir­tu­al real­i­ty, 5G, robots: Kel­ly has giv­en con­sid­er­a­tion to all these much-dis­cussed tech­nolo­gies and the roles they may come to play in our lives. But the impor­tant thing about them isn’t to know what form they’ll take in the future, since by def­i­n­i­tion no one can, but to devel­op habits of mind that allow you to grasp as wide a vari­ety of their pos­si­bil­i­ties as you can right now.

The future, as Kel­ly frames it in his talk on uncer­tain­ties, con­sists of “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Those last, bet­ter known as “black swans,” are events “com­plete­ly unex­pect­ed by any­body” that “change the world for­ev­er.” As exam­ples of pos­si­ble black swans to come he names World War Three, the dis­cov­ery of cheap fusion ener­gy, and, yes, a pan­dem­ic.

Soci­etal prepa­ra­tion for the future, to Kel­ly’s mind, will involve devel­op­ing “a very sys­tem­at­ic way of col­lect­ing these unknown unknowns and turn­ing them into known unknowns.” Per­son­al prepa­ra­tion for the future, accord­ing to his talk on schools and learn­ing, will involve cease­less acqui­si­tion and refine­ment of knowl­edge and under­stand­ing.

If we want to thrive in an uncer­tain future, he argues, we should “adopt a method of learn­ing called delib­er­ate prac­tice, falling for­ward or fail­ing for­ward,” in which we keep push­ing our­selves into unknown intel­lec­tu­al ter­ri­to­ry, always remain­ing “new­bies” at some­thing, assist­ed all the while by tech­nol­o­gy.

Just a cou­ple of decades into the 21st cen­tu­ry, we’ve already caught a glimpse of what tech­nol­o­gy can do to opti­mize our learn­ing process — or sim­ply to enable learn­ing where it would­n’t hap­pen oth­er­wise. “I don’t imag­ine that we’re going to go away from a class­room,” Kel­ly says, but we also “have the online video world, and more and more peo­ple today are learn­ing how to do an amaz­ing vari­ety of things, that we would­n’t have thought would work on video.”

Of course, since he spoke those words, one black swan in par­tic­u­lar has pushed much of human­i­ty away from the class­room, and we’ve found out a good deal more about what kind of learn­ing works (and does­n’t) over the inter­net. The future, it seems, is now.

You can watch the full playlist of videos, all 36 of them, below. We also rec­om­mend his very insight­ful book, The Inevitable: Under­stand­ing the 12 Tech­no­log­i­cal Forces That Will Shape Our Future.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Tech­nol­o­gy Wants: Kevin Kel­ly @ Google

The Best Mag­a­zine Arti­cles Ever, Curat­ed by Kevin Kel­ly

What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion?: Lists by Bri­an Eno, Stew­art Brand, Kevin Kel­ly & Oth­er For­ward-Think­ing Minds

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

9 Sci­ence-Fic­tion Authors Pre­dict the Future: How Jules Verne, Isaac Asi­mov, William Gib­son, Philip K. Dick & More Imag­ined the World Ahead

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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