The Hertella Coffee Machine Mounted on a Volkswagen Dashboard (1959): The Most European Car Accessory Ever Made

in Food & Drink, History, Technology | December 8th, 2020

Cur­rent auto-indus­try wis­dom holds that no car with­out cup hold­ers will sell in Amer­i­ca. Though this also seems to have become increas­ing­ly true across the rest of the world, I like to imag­ine there still exists a coun­try or two whose dri­ving pub­lic holds fast against that par­tic­u­lar design vul­gar­ism. Such places would, of course, lie deep in unre­con­struct­ed Europe, where nobody can go long with­out cof­fee. The solu­tion? The Hertel­la Auto Kaf­feema­chine, the first and only known dash­board-mount­ed cof­fee mak­er.

Man­u­fac­tured specif­i­cal­ly for the Volk­swa­gen Bee­tle, this high­ly civ­i­lized auto­mo­bile acces­so­ry has, 60 years after its intro­duc­tion, near­ly van­ished from exis­tence. Judg­ing by the few known exam­ples, it nev­er had the time to evolve past its tech­ni­cal short­com­ings. For one, it lacks a pow­er switch: “As soon as you plug it into the cig­a­rette lighter, it just gets hot,” writes The Dri­ve’s Peter Holderith. “And as far as the type of cof­fee machine that it is, well, you would have to be pret­ty des­per­ate for caf­feine to make cof­fee in this thing.”

“I always thought they were a per­co­la­tor, or espres­so machine like a Moka… but nope,” says Dave Hord of Clas­sic Car Adven­tures, who pur­chased his own Hertel­la Auto Kaf­feema­chine from an own­er in Ser­bia. It seems “you fill the ves­sel with water, put your cof­fee in the (dou­ble lay­er) screen, and heat up the unit. I pre­sume you heat the unit up with the cof­fee in it, which means this basi­cal­ly brews cof­fee as though it’s tea.” Per­haps only a transcon­ti­nen­tal road-trip­per in 1959 would grow des­per­ate enough to drink it.

Still, as Holderith notes, “the machine does have a few clever fea­tures. The porce­lain cups that came with it appar­ent­ly had a met­al disc on the bot­tom of them that allowed them to stick to the machine mag­net­i­cal­ly” and the unit itself “mounts to the dash with a sim­ple brack­et, allow­ing for the pot to quick­ly be removed and cleaned when nec­es­sary.” Per­haps today’s car design­ers, a group once again look­ing to the past for inspi­ra­tion, will resume the pur­suit of dash­board brew­ing begun by the Hertel­la Auto Kaf­feema­chine. If not, Wes Ander­son can sure­ly find a use for the thing.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Espres­so Mak­er Made in Le Corbusier’s Bru­tal­ist Archi­tec­tur­al Style: Raw Con­crete on the Out­side, High-End Parts on the Inside

The Cof­fee Pot That Fueled Hon­oré de Balzac’s Cof­fee Addic­tion

Wake Up & Smell the Cof­fee: The New All-in-One Cof­fee-Mak­er/Alarm Clock is Final­ly Here!

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

10 Essen­tial Tips for Mak­ing Great Cof­fee at Home

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations & Games from Extinction: Explore Them Online

in Animation, Archives, Internet Archive, Software, Technology | December 2nd, 2020

Flash is final­ly dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announce­ment of its end actu­al­ly came three years ago, “like a guil­lo­tine in a crowd­ed town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Giz­mo­do. It was a slow exe­cu­tion, but it was just. So use­ful in Web 1.0 days for mak­ing ani­ma­tions, games, and seri­ous pre­sen­ta­tions, Flash had become a vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, a viral car­ri­er that couldn’t be patched fast enough to keep the hack­ers out. “Adobe’s Flash died many deaths, but we can tru­ly throw some dirt on its grave and say our final good­byes because it’s get­ting the preser­va­tion treat­ment.” Like the ani­mat­ed GIF, Flash ani­ma­tions have their own online library.

All those love­ly Flash memes—the danc­ing bad­gers and the snake, peanut but­ter and jel­ly time—will be saved for per­plexed future gen­er­a­tions, who will use them to deci­pher the runes of ear­ly 2000’s inter­net-speak. How­ev­er sil­ly they may seem now, there’s no deny­ing that these arti­facts were once cen­tral con­stituents of pop cul­ture.

Flash was much more than a dis­trac­tion or frus­trat­ing brows­er crash­er. It pro­vid­ed a “gate­way,” Jason Scott writes at the Inter­net Archive blog, “for many young cre­ators to fash­ion near-pro­fes­sion­al-lev­el games and ani­ma­tion, giv­ing them the first steps to a lat­er career.” (Even if it was a career mak­ing “advergames.”)

A sin­gle per­son work­ing in their home could hack togeth­er a con­vinc­ing pro­gram, upload it to a huge clear­ing­house like New­grounds, and get feed­back on their work. Some cre­ators even made entire series of games, each improv­ing on the last, until they became full pro­fes­sion­al releas­es on con­soles and PCs.

Always true to its pur­pose, the Inter­net Archive has devised a way to store and play Flash ani­ma­tions using emu­la­tors cre­at­ed by Ruf­fle and the Blue­Max­i­ma Flash­point Project, who have already archived tens of thou­sands of Flash games. All those adorable Home­s­tar Run­ner car­toons? Saved from extinc­tion, which would have been their fate, since “with­out a Flash play­er, flash ani­ma­tions don’t work.” This may seem obvi­ous, but it bears some expla­na­tion. Where image, sound, and video files can be con­vert­ed to oth­er for­mats to make them acces­si­ble to mod­ern play­ers, Flash ani­ma­tions can only exist in a world with Flash. They are like Edison’s wax cylin­ders, with­out the charm­ing three-dimen­sions.

Scott goes into more depth on the rise and fall of Flash, a his­to­ry that begins in 1993 with Flash’s pre­de­ces­sor, SmartS­ketch, which became Future­Wave, which became Flash when it was pur­chased by Macro­me­dia, then by Adobe. By 2005, it start­ed to become unsta­ble, and could­n’t evolve along with new pro­to­cols. HTML5 arrived in 2014 to issue the “final death-blow,” kind of.… Will Flash be missed? It’s doubt­ful. But “like any con­tain­er, Flash itself is not as much of a loss as all the art and cre­ativ­i­ty it held.” The Archive cur­rent­ly hosts over 1,500 Flash ani­ma­tions from those turn-of-the-mil­len­ni­um inter­net days, and there are many more to come. Enter the Archive’s Flash col­lec­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

The U.S. Nation­al Archives Launch­es an Ani­mat­ed GIF Archive: See Whit­man, Twain, Hem­ing­way & Oth­ers in Motion

36,000 Flash Games Have Been Archived and Saved Before Flash Goes Extinct: Play Them Offline

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

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

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Watch Digital Dancers Electrify the Streets of Istanbul

in Animation, Dance, Technology, Travel | November 30th, 2020

Are you open to the idea of oth­er­world­ly beings mov­ing amongst us, benign but unseen?

Direc­tor Gökalp Gönen seems to be in the above video for jazz inno­va­tor Ilhan Ersahin’s “Hur­ri-Mitan­ni” (Good News).

Things kick off in a decid­ed­ly low key manner—a young woman sets off for a night­time stroll through the streets of Istan­bul, her face delib­er­ate­ly obscured by a snug­ly tied black and white cloth.

Turn­ing a cor­ner, she pass­es an anony­mous fig­ure, wrapped head to toe in sim­i­lar stripes.

Does this unex­pect­ed sight elic­it any dis­cernible reac­tion?

Our guess is no, but we can’t say for sure, as the cam­era los­es inter­est in the young woman, opt­ing to linger with the svelte and exu­ber­ant mum­my, who’s danc­ing like no one is watch­ing.

Else­where, oth­er increas­ing­ly col­or­ful beings per­form vari­a­tions on the mum­my’s box step, alone or in groups.

As their out­fits become more fan­ci­ful, Gönen employs CGI and 3D ani­ma­tion to unhitch them from the laws of physics and famil­iar bound­aries of human anato­my.

They pixel­late, sprout extra legs, project rays rem­i­nis­cent of string art, appear more veg­etable than ani­mal.…

Some grow to Godzil­la-like pro­por­tions, shed­ding lit­tle humanoid forms and bound­ing across the Bosporus.

A small spiky ver­sion ignores the paws of a curi­ous kit­ten.

These fan­tas­ti­cal, face­less beings are invis­i­ble to passer­by. Only one, per­form­ing on an out­door stage, seems eager for inter­ac­tion. None of them seen to mean any harm.

They just wan­na boo­gie…

…or do they?

The director’s state­ment is not eas­i­ly parsed in trans­la­tion:

A group of anony­mous wan­der­ing the streets. Every­where is very crowd­ed but iden­ti­ties are very few. Try­ing to be some­one is as dif­fi­cult as writ­ing your name on the waves left by this fast-mov­ing giant ship. Every­one is every­one and every­one is nobody any­more. This silence could only exist through glow­ing screens, even if it found itself nooks. On those loud screens, they remind­ed who actu­al­ly had the pow­er by enter­ing the places that were said to be inac­ces­si­ble. But they did­n’t even care about this pow­er. The areas where we had pas­sion­ate con­ver­sa­tions about it for days were a “now like this” place for us, but they looked like this to say “no, it was actu­al­ly like that” but they did not speak much. They had the charm of a cat. When they said, “Look, it was like this,” they became part of every­thing that made it “like this” and became unno­tice­able like paving stones. They just want­ed to have a lit­tle fun, to be able to live a few years with­out wor­ry. In five min­utes, fif­teen sec­onds at most, they exist­ed and left.

A few crea­tures who got left on the cut­ting room floor can be seen danc­ing on Gönen’s Insta­gram pro­file.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Rare Grooves on Vinyl from Around the World: Hear Curat­ed Playlists of Ara­bic, Brazil­ian, Bol­ly­wood, Sovi­et & Turk­ish Music

The Dance The­atre of Harlem Dances Through the Streets of NYC: A Sight to Behold

Istan­bul Cap­tured in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Hagia Sophia, Top­ka­ki Palace’s Impe­r­i­al Gate & More

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

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A Flying Car Took to the Skies Back in 1949: See the Taylor Aerocar in Action

in History, Technology | November 26th, 2020

“A secret ques­tion hov­ers over us, a sense of dis­ap­point­ment, a bro­ken promise we were giv­en as chil­dren about what our adult world was sup­posed to be like,” the late anthro­pol­o­gist David Grae­ber once wrote in the Baf­fler. This refers to “a par­tic­u­lar gen­er­a­tional promise — giv­en to those who were chil­dren in the fifties, six­ties, sev­en­ties, or eight­ies — one that was nev­er quite artic­u­lat­ed as a promise but rather as a set of assump­tions about what our adult world would be like.” In the con­fus­ing­ly dis­ap­point­ing future we now inhab­it, one ques­tion hov­ers above them all: “Where, in short, are the fly­ing cars?”

Even those of us not yet born in the mid-20th cen­tu­ry can sense the cul­tur­al import of the fly­ing car to that era, and not just from its sci­ence fic­tion. Chuck Berry was singing about fly­ing cars back in 1956: His song “You Can’t Catch Me” tells of rac­ing down the New Jer­sey Turn­pike in a cus­tom-made “air­mo­bile,” a “Flight DeV­ille with a pow­er­ful motor and some hide­away wings.”


This was­n’t whol­ly fan­tas­ti­cal, giv­en that an actu­al fly­ing car had been built sev­en years ear­li­er. Demon­strat­ed in the news­reel from that year at the top of  the post, the Aero­car came designed and built by a solo inven­tor, for­mer World War II pilot Moul­ton Tay­lor of Longview, Wash­ing­ton, who in 1959 would appear on the pop­u­lar game show I’ve Got a Secret.

The pro­gram’s pan­elists attempt to guess the nature of Tay­lor’s inven­tion as he puts it togeth­er onstage, for the Aero­car required some assem­bly. Though con­sid­er­ably more com­pli­cat­ed than the push-but­ton mech­a­nism imag­ined by Berry, the process took only five min­utes to con­vert from auto­mo­bile to air­plane, or so the inven­tor promised. Despite secur­ing the Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty’s approval for mass pro­duc­tion, Tay­lor could­n’t find a suf­fi­cient num­ber of buy­ers, and in the end only built six Aero­cars. But one of them still flies, as seen on the first episode of the 2008 series James May’s Big Ideas. “I wouldn’t have flown it if I’d seen the wings were attached with elab­o­rate paper­clips,” writes the for­mer Top Gear co-host, “but by the time I real­ized this, we were already at 2,000 feet.”

“As an air­plane, it was actu­al­ly pret­ty good,” May admits, “but then, it would be, because an air­plane is what it was.” As a car, “it was dia­bol­i­cal. Worse than the Bee­tle, to be hon­est, and not helped by the require­ment to drag all the unwant­ed air­planey bits behind you on a trail­er.” Still, the expe­ri­ence of fly­ing in the Aero­car clear­ly thrilled him, as it would any car or plane enthu­si­ast. Even in a non-air­wor­thy state the Aero­car cer­tain­ly thrills Matthew Burchette, cura­tor at Seat­tle’s Muse­um of Flight. In the video above he intro­duces the muse­um’s Aero­car III, the last one Tay­lor built. “If you’re about my age, you real­ly want­ed your jet­pack,” says the gray-haired Burchette, though a fly­ing car would also have done the trick. Alas, more than half a cen­tu­ry after Tay­lor’s ambi­tious project, human­i­ty seems to have made no appar­ent progress in that depart­ment; jet­packs, how­ev­er, seem to be com­ing along nice­ly.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New­ly Unearthed Footage Shows Albert Ein­stein Dri­ving a Fly­ing Car (1931)

The Time­less Beau­ty of the Cit­roën DS, the Car Mythol­o­gized by Roland Barthes (1957)

A Har­row­ing Test Dri­ve of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s 1933 Dymax­ion Car: Art That Is Scary to Ride

178,000 Images Doc­u­ment­ing the His­to­ry of the Car Now Avail­able on a New Stan­ford Web Site

NASA Puts 400+ His­toric Exper­i­men­tal Flight Videos on YouTube

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Polygraph: The Proto-Photocopy Machine Machine Invented in 1803 That Changed Thomas Jefferson’s Life

in History, Technology, Writing | November 24th, 2020

Today we asso­ciate the word poly­graph main­ly with the devices we call “lie detec­tors.” The unhid­den Greek terms from which it orig­i­nates sim­ply mean “mul­ti­ple writ­ing,” which seems apt enough in light of all those movie inter­ro­ga­tion scenes with their jud­der­ing par­al­lel nee­dles. But the first “poly­graph machine” mer­it­ing the name long pre­dates such cin­e­mat­ic clichés, and indeed cin­e­ma itself. Patent­ed in 1803 by an Eng­lish­man named John Isaac Hawkins, it con­sist­ed essen­tial­ly of twin pens, mount­ed side-by-side and con­nect­ed by means of levers and springs so as always to move in uni­son. The result, in the­o­ry, was that it would make an iden­ti­cal copy of a let­ter even as the writer wrote it.

“The poly­graph was push­ing tech­nol­o­gy to the absolute lim­it,” but for years “it was near­ly impos­si­ble to make it work cor­rect­ly.” So says Charles Mor­rill, a guide at Thomas Jef­fer­son­’s estate Mon­ti­cel­lo, in the video above.

Despite the pro­longed tech­ni­cal dif­fi­cul­ties, the third pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca fell in love with the poly­graph, “a device to dupli­cate let­ters, just the thing if you’re car­ry­ing on mul­ti­ple con­ver­sa­tions with dif­fer­ent peo­ple all over the world. You want to keep a copy of the let­ter to catch your­self up, to see what you had writ­ten to cause a response” — and, of spe­cial con­cern to a nation­al politi­cian, to check on the exact degree to which the press was mis­quot­ing you.

Image by the Smith­son­ian, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Jef­fer­son wrote near­ly 20,000 let­ters, one of them a com­plaint to John Adams about suf­fer­ing “under the per­se­cu­tion of Let­ters,” a con­di­tion ensur­ing that “from sun-rise to one or two o’clock, I am drudg­ing at the writ­ing table.” That the poly­graph reduced this drudgery some­what made it, in Jef­fer­son­’s words, “the finest inven­tion of the present age.” Like tech­no­log­i­cal ear­ly adopters today, Jef­fer­son acquired each new mod­el as it came out, the device hav­ing been con­tin­u­al­ly retooled by Amer­i­can rights-hold­er Charles Will­son Peale. By 1809 Peale had improved the poly­graph to the point that Jef­fer­son could write that it “has spoiled me for the old copy­ing press the copies of which are hard­ly ever leg­i­ble … I could not, now there­fore, live with­out the Poly­graph.” Imag­ine how he would’ve felt had Mon­ti­cel­lo been wired for e‑mail.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Thomas Jefferson’s Cut-and-Paste Ver­sion of the Bible, and Read the Curi­ous Edi­tion Online

Thomas Jefferson’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Great-Great Grand­son Pos­es for a Pres­i­den­tial Por­trait

Thomas Jefferson’s Hand­writ­ten Vanil­la Ice Cream Recipe

Dis­cov­er Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball” (Cir­ca 1881)

The First Music Stream­ing Ser­vice Was Invent­ed in 1881: Dis­cov­er the Théâtro­phone

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside Buckminster Fuller-Inspired Geodesic Domes

in Creativity, Design, Environment, Life, Technology | November 24th, 2020

Buck­min­ster Fuller had a dif­fi­cult time as an inven­tor in his ear­ly years. “Hav­ing been expelled from Har­vard for irre­spon­si­ble con­duct,” notes The Guardian, “he strug­gled to find a job and pro­vide a liv­ing for his young fam­i­ly in his ear­ly 30s.” Despite lat­er suc­cess­es, and a lat­er rep­u­ta­tion as leg­endary as Niko­la Tesla’s, he was often, like Tes­la, seen by crit­ics as a utopi­an vision­ary, whose visions were too imprac­ti­cal to real­ly change the world.

But his body of work remains a tes­ta­ment to an imag­i­na­tion that ris­es above the trends of indus­tri­al design and engi­neer­ing. After a peri­od of decline, for exam­ple, Fuller’s geo­des­ic domes expe­ri­enced a revival in the ear­ly 2000’s when “aging baby-boomers across Amer­i­ca” began “build­ing dream homes in the shape of geo­des­ic domes.” Mean­while in Corn­wall, Eng­land, a few years ahead of the curve, Dutch-born busi­ness­man and archae­ol­o­gist-turned-suc­cess­ful-music-pro­duc­er Sir Tim­o­thy Smit broke ground on what would become a far more British use of Ful­lerist prin­ci­ples.

In the late 90s, Smit start­ed work on an enor­mous com­plex of geo­des­ic bio­mes called the Eden Project, a facil­i­ty “akin to a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Vic­to­ri­an cre­ation: the Eng­lish green­house,” which reached its apex in the famed “Crys­tal Palace” built for the Great Exhi­bi­tion in Hyde Park in 1851. These were build­ings “born out of a play­ful, deca­dent imagination—yet in their archi­tec­ture and design they often opened new path­ways for the future.” So too do Fuller’s designs, in an appli­ca­tion meld­ing Vic­to­ri­an and Ful­lerist ideas about cura­tor­ship and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Look­ing like “clus­ters of soap bub­bles” the Eden Project slow­ly rose above an exhaust­ed clay pit and opened in 2001 (see a short time-lapse film of the con­struc­tion above). Each of the two huge cen­tral domes recre­ates an ecosys­tem. The Rain­for­est Bio­me allows vis­i­tors to get lost in near­ly 4 acres of trop­i­cal for­est and includes banana, cof­fee, and rub­ber plants. The Mediter­ranean Bio­me hous­es an acre and a half of olives and grape vines. Small­er adjoin­ing domes house thou­sands of addi­tion­al plant species. There is a per­for­mance space and a year­ly music fes­ti­val; sculp­tures and art exhi­bi­tions in both the indoor and out­door gar­dens. The facil­i­ty has host­ed well over a mil­lion vis­i­tors each year.

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2016, the Eden Project began plant­i­ng red­woods, intro­duc­ing a for­est of the North Amer­i­can trees to Europe for the first time. Next year, it will begin drilling for a geot­her­mal ener­gy project to turn heat from the gran­ite under­ground into pow­er, an under­tak­ing that, unlike frack­ing, will not release con­t­a­m­i­nants into the water sup­ply or addi­tion­al fos­sil fuels into the air and could pow­er and heat the facil­i­ty and 5000 addi­tion­al homes. In 2018, the project began con­struc­tion on Eden Project North, in More­cambe, Lan­cashire, with build­ings designed to look like giant mus­sels and a focus on marine envi­ron­ments.

Eden Project Inter­na­tion­al aims to build unique facil­i­ties all around the world, “to cre­ate new attrac­tions with a mes­sage of envi­ron­men­tal, social and eco­nom­ic regen­er­a­tion” and “to pro­tect and reju­ve­nate nat­ur­al land­scapes.” None of these ambi­tious expan­sions use the geo­des­ic domes of the orig­i­nal Eden Project, but that is not a reflec­tion on the domes’ struc­tur­al sound­ness. Many oth­er trans­par­ent uses of Fuller’s design have encoun­tered dif­fi­cul­ties with water tight­ness and heat flow. The Eden Project’s domes use inno­v­a­tive inflat­able, tri­an­gu­lar pan­els instead of glass to solve those prob­lems. Fuller sure­ly would have approved.

The project also rep­re­sents a poignant per­son­al vin­di­ca­tion for the Fuller fam­i­ly. Fuller “vowed to ded­i­cate his life to improv­ing stan­dards of liv­ing through good design,” The Guardian writes, after his daugh­ter Alexan­dra died in 1922. In 2009, his only sur­viv­ing child, Alle­gra Fuller Sny­der, then 82 and Chair­woman of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute, vis­it­ed the Eden Project. “Of all the projects relat­ed to my father’s work,” she remarked after­ward, “I would say that this is the one I am most aware of as being a pow­er­ful, com­pre­hen­sive project…. My father would have been just thrilled. He would feel that it is a mar­vel­lous appli­ca­tion of his think­ing.”

Learn more about the Eden Project, which reopens Decem­ber 3, here. And learn how to “cre­ate Eden wher­ev­er you are” with the project’s free resources for gar­den­ers at home.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

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

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Rubens’ Cupid Escapes His Painting & Flies Around Brussels Airport, Thanks to Projection Mapping Technology

in Art, Technology | November 17th, 2020

Peter Paul Rubens’ zaftig beau­ties and plump lit­tle angels burst with health. His “pow­er­ful and exu­ber­ant style,” notes one analy­sis of his tech­nique, “came to char­ac­ter­ize the Baroque art of north­ern Europe.” Rubens’ name became syn­ony­mous with fig­ures who were “real­is­tic, fleshy and indeed cor­pu­lent… set in dynam­ic com­po­si­tions that echo the grand orga­ni­za­tions of the Renais­sance mas­ters.”

An excel­lent exam­ple of such a com­po­si­tion is The Feast of Venus (1636), paint­ed in the “ecsta­t­ic inten­si­ty” of Rubens’ own style, writes the Kun­sthis­torisches Muse­um Wien, after a “descrip­tion in antiq­ui­ty of a Greek paint­ing in which a cult image of Aphrodite is dec­o­rat­ed by nymphs, with winged cupids danc­ing around it.” Venus may be at the cen­ter of the huge piece, but the cupids’ roly-poly arms and legs upstage her.

Rubens’ cupids already look like they’re going to pop off the can­vas. In the video at the top, one of them does—breaks right through the frame, scam­pers across the top and takes flight around the gallery over the heads of awed onlook­ers. Cupid retrieves a bow and arrows and begins fir­ing love darts around the room. The scene is Brus­sels Air­port, where a selec­tion of Rubens’ paint­ings recent­ly hung in an art-themed lounge.

The spec­ta­tors are pas­sen­gers wait­ing for their flights, and the escaped cupid is a trick of pro­jec­tion map­ping, cre­at­ed by the Bel­gian com­pa­ny SkullMap­ping and com­mis­sioned by the tourist agency Vis­it­Flan­ders. The cupid flew until April of last year, when the paint­ings were replaced by work from Brueghel as part of a larg­er project to pro­mote Flem­ish art and cul­ture in places where peo­ple are most like­ly to encounter it.

Would such small-scale pro­jec­tion maps, “mini-map­ping,” as it’s called, ever be employed in an actu­al gallery, to the work of revered old mas­ters? Might this be some­thing of an art world heresy? Or might we see in the near future huge, detailed can­vas­es of painters like Rubens and his role mod­el, Tit­ian, sud­den­ly burst into three dimen­sions, their sub­jects giv­en life, of some kind, and invit­ed to walk or fly around the halls?

Do these gim­micks triv­i­al­ize great art or renew appre­ci­a­tion for it? I’d wager that, if he were alive, Rubens might thrill to see his well-fed cupids and angels in motion, and he might just take to build­ing pro­jec­tion maps him­self. We have some small idea, at least, of what they might look like, above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

Bat­man & Oth­er Super Friends Sit for 17th Cen­tu­ry Flem­ish Style Por­traits

Artist Nina Katchadouri­an Cre­ates Flem­ish Style Self-Por­traits in Air­plane Lava­to­ry

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

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Watch Sassy Justice, the New Deepfake Satire Show Created by the Makers of South Park

in Comedy, Current Affairs, Technology, YouTube | November 16th, 2020

If any cul­tur­al, polit­i­cal, or tech­no­log­i­cal phe­nom­e­non of the past cou­ple of decades has­n’t been lam­pooned by South Park, it prob­a­bly did­n’t hap­pen. But the 21st cen­tu­ry has brought forth so much non­sense that even Trey Park­er and Matt Stone, cre­ators of that at once crude and mul­ti­di­men­sion­al­ly satir­i­cal car­toon show, have had to expand into fea­ture films and even onto Broad­way to ridicule it all. The lat­est project takes the hum­bler but unde­ni­ably more rel­e­vant form of a Youtube series, and one mod­eled on the form of ultra-local tele­vi­sion news. Sassy Jus­tice comes host­ed by anchor Fred Sassy, a flam­boy­ant “con­sumer advo­cate” for the peo­ple of Cheyenne, Wyoming — and one pos­sessed, come to think of it, of an odd­ly famil­iar face.

Fred Sassy is based on Sassy Trump, a cre­ation of voice actor Peter Ser­afi­now­icz. Despite his for­mi­da­ble skills as an impres­sion­ist, the trou­ble Ser­afi­now­icz had nail­ing the sound and man­ner of the cur­rent U.S. Pres­i­dent gave him the idea of dub­bing over real footage of the man with delib­er­ate­ly invent­ed char­ac­ter voic­es. This led to an inter­est in deep­fakes, videos cre­at­ed using dig­i­tal like­ness­es of real peo­ple with­out their actu­al par­tic­i­pa­tion.

The increas­ing­ly con­vinc­ing look of these pro­duc­tions once had a lot of peo­ple spooked, as you’ll recall if you can cast your mind back to 2019. Deep­fakes thus made per­fect sub­ject mat­ter for a Park­er-Stone project, but not long after they began col­lab­o­rat­ing with Ser­afi­now­icz on a deep­fake-sat­u­rat­ed Fred Sassy movie, the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic put an end to pro­duc­tion. From the ash­es of that project ris­es Sassy Jus­tice, which pre­miered last month.

This first episode (with a clip playlist here) also pro­vides a glimpse of the sure­ly enor­mous all-deep­fake cast to come. Uncan­ny ver­sions of Al Gore, Mark Zucker­berg (now a dial­y­sis-cen­ter mag­nate), and Julie Andrews (as com­put­er tech­ni­cian “Lou Xiang,” a ref­er­ence that if you get, you get) all make appear­ances, as do those of White House reg­u­lars Jared Kush­n­er, Ivan­ka Trump, and even Don­ald Trump, on whose voice Ser­afi­now­icz seems to have made progress. But “it’s impos­si­ble for a human to accu­rate­ly mim­ic some­one else’s voice to 100 per­cent,” as Sassy is assured by a Zoom inter­vie­wee, the oft-imi­tat­ed actor Michael Caine — or is it? Less able than ever to tell real from the fake, let alone the deep­fake, “we’re all going to have to trust our gut, that inner voice,” as Sassy advis­es in the episode’s final seg­ment. “It’s all we have now.” But then, all effec­tive satire is a lit­tle fright­en­ing.

via MIT Tech­nol­o­gy Review

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Zen Wis­dom of Alan Watts Ani­mat­ed by the Cre­ators of South Park, Trey Park­er and Matt Stone

Amer­i­can His­to­ry: An Off-Kil­ter 1992 Stu­dent Film from South Park Cre­ator Trey Park­er

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Brings to Life Fig­ures from 7 Famous Paint­ings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Cre­ates Real­is­tic Pho­tos of Peo­ple, None of Whom Actu­al­ly Exist

Long Before Pho­to­shop, the Sovi­ets Mas­tered the Art of Eras­ing Peo­ple from Pho­tographs — and His­to­ry 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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