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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Why Public Transit Sucks in the United States: Four Videos Tell the Story

in History, Politics, Technology | February 12th, 2021

Many dif­fer­ent words could describe the state of pub­lic trans­porta­tion in Amer­i­ca today. In recent decades, more and more of a con­sen­sus seems to have set­tled around one word in par­tic­u­lar: that it “sucks.” Giv­en its “anti­quat­ed tech­nol­o­gy, safe­ty con­cerns, crum­bling infra­struc­ture,” and often “nonex­is­tence,” says the nar­ra­tor of the video above, “it’s not hard to argue that the U.S. pub­lic trans­porta­tion net­work is just not good.” That nar­ra­tor, Sam Den­by, is the cre­ator of Wen­dover Pro­duc­tions, a Youtube chan­nel all about geog­ra­phy, tech­nol­o­gy, eco­nom­ics, and the infra­struc­ture where all three inter­sect. He believes not only that Amer­i­ca’s pub­lic tran­sit sucks, but that the coun­try’s “lack of sol­id pub­lic trans­porta­tion almost defines Amer­i­can cul­ture.”

This would make a cer­tain sense in a poor, small, strug­gling coun­try — but not in the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, described not long ago by Anne Apple­baum in the Atlantic as “accus­tomed to think­ing of itself as the best, most effi­cient, and most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly advanced soci­ety in the world.”

As any­one mak­ing their first vis­it will expe­ri­ence, Amer­i­ca’s still-for­mi­da­ble wealth and pow­er does­n’t square with the expe­ri­ence on the ground, or indeed under it: whether by sub­way, bus, or street­car, the task of nav­i­gat­ing most U.S. cities is char­ac­ter­ized by incon­ve­nience, dis­com­fort, and even impos­si­bil­i­ty. This in a coun­try whose pub­lic trans­porta­tion once real­ly was the envy of the world: at the turn of the 20th cen­tu­ry, its cities boast­ed 11,000 miles of street­car track alone.

In the mid-2010s, by Den­by’s reck­on­ing, “the com­bined mileage of every tram, sub­way, light rail, and com­muter rail sys­tem” added up only to 5,416. What hap­pened in the hun­dred or so years between? He cites among oth­er fac­tors the pro­duc­tion of the first wide­ly afford­able auto­mo­biles in the 1920s, and lat­er that of bus­es, with their low­er oper­at­ing costs than street­cars — but as com­mon­ly oper­at­ed today, their low­er-qual­i­ty tran­sit expe­ri­ence as well. (Resent­ment about this large-scale replace­ment of urban street­car sys­tems runs deep enough to make some con­sid­er it a con­spir­a­cy.) The U.S. “grew up as the car grew up, so its cities were built for cars,” espe­cial­ly in its more recent­ly set­tled west. Indi­rect sub­sides low­ered the cost of gas, and from the 1950s the build­ing of the Inter­state High­way Sys­tem made it easy, at least for at time, to com­mute between city and sub­urb.

As point­ed out in the Vox videos “Why Amer­i­can Pub­lic Tran­sit Is So Bad” and “How High­ways Wrecked Amer­i­can Cities,” these mas­sive roads ran not around or under cities (as they do in much of Europe and Asia) but straight through their cen­ters, part of a larg­er process of “urban renew­al” that iron­i­cal­ly destroyed quite a few of what dense urban neigh­bor­hoods the U.S. had. More than half a cen­tu­ry of high­way-build­ing, sub­ur­ban­iza­tion, and strict zon­ing lat­er, most Amer­i­cans find them­selves unable to get where they need to go with­out buy­ing a car and dri­ving them­selves. The sit­u­a­tion is even worse for those trav­el­ing between cities, as exam­ined above in Wen­dover Pro­duc­tions’ “Why Trains Suck in Amer­i­ca.” As an Amer­i­can, I take a cer­tain sat­is­fac­tion in hear­ing these ques­tions addressed — but I take an even greater one in being an Amer­i­can liv­ing abroad.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Sub­way Ride Through New York City: Watch Vin­tage Footage from 1905

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

Archive of 5,000 Images Doc­u­ment the His­to­ry of San Fran­cis­co and the Vehi­cles That Put It in Motion

Trips on the World’s Old­est Elec­tric Sus­pen­sion Rail­way in 1902 & 1917 Show How a City Changes Over a Cen­tu­ry

A Brief His­to­ry of the Great Amer­i­can Road Trip

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

in Art, Technology | January 22nd, 2021

We admire Johannes Ver­meer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring for many rea­sons, not least that it looks exact­ly like a girl with a pearl ear­ring. Or at least it does from a dis­tance, as the mas­ter of light him­self no doubt stepped back to con­firm count­less times dur­ing the paint­ing process, at any moment of which he would have been more con­cerned with the brush­strokes con­sti­tut­ing only a small part of the image. But even Ver­meer him­self could have per­ceived only so much detail of the paint­ing that would become his mas­ter­piece.

Now, more than 350 years after its com­ple­tion, we can get a clos­er view of Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring than any­one has before through a new­ly released 10 bil­lion-pix­el panora­ma. At this res­o­lu­tion, writes Petapix­el’s Jason Schnei­der, we can “see the paint­ing down to the lev­el of 4.4‑microns per pix­el.”

Under­tak­en by Emi­lien Leon­hardt and Vin­cent Sabati­er of 3D micro­scope mak­er Hirox Europe “in order to eval­u­ate the sur­face con­di­tion of the paint­ing, mea­sure cracks, and see the topog­ra­phy of var­i­ous key areas while assess­ing past restora­tions,” the project required tak­ing 9,100 pho­tos, which “were auto­mat­i­cal­ly cap­tured and stitched togeth­er to form one fin­ished panora­ma image where one pix­el equals 4.4 microns.”

You’ll under­stand what this means if you view the panora­ma and click the plus sym­bol on the bot­tom con­trol bar to zoom in — and click it again, and again, and again. (Or just click it and hold it down.) Before long, Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring will look less like a girl with a pearl ear­ring than what she real­ly is: cen­turies-old oil paints on a cen­turies-old can­vas. The phys­i­cal­i­ty of this work of art, one so often held up as the real­iza­tion of aes­thet­ic ide­al, becomes even less ignor­able if you click the “3D” but­ton. This presents ten indi­vid­ual sec­tions of the paint­ing scanned in three dimen­sions, which you can freely rotate and even light from all direc­tions.

The 3D-scanned por­tions include the tit­u­lar pearl ear­ring, which appears to have a bit of a gouge in it. They’re more clear­ly vis­i­ble in 5x topo­graph­i­cal view­ing mode (selec­table on the top con­trol bar). This offi­cial Hirox video offers a glimpse of the pro­ce­dure required to achieve the kind of unprece­dent­ed­ly high-res­o­lu­tion view of Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring that allows us to behold details hereto­fore prac­ti­cal­ly invis­i­ble. At more than 10,000 megapix­els, the back­ground reveals itself to be in fact a dark green cur­tain, and the girl her­self has clear­ly defined eye­lash­es. But as for her long-spec­u­lat­ed-about iden­ti­ty, well, there are some things microscopy can’t deter­mine. Take a close look at Ver­meer’s paint­ing here. And if you’d like to take a sim­i­lar look at Rem­brandt’s The Night Watch, click here.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why is Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring Con­sid­ered a Mas­ter­piece?: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Mas­ter of Light: A Close Look at the Paint­ings of Johannes Ver­meer Nar­rat­ed by Meryl Streep

Down­load All 36 of Jan Vermeer’s Beau­ti­ful­ly Rare Paint­ings (Most in Bril­liant High Res­o­lu­tion)

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­terBooks 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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Take a New Virtual Reality Tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

in Museums, Technology | January 15th, 2021

You can go to the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art today, and in real life at that. This isn’t true of all the world’s great art insti­tu­tions, still shut down as many are by mea­sures in response to the past year’s coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic. But then, none of them have offered a dig­i­tal vis­it­ing expe­ri­ence quite like The Met Unframed, recent­ly launched in part­ner­ship with cell­phone ser­vice provider Ver­i­zon. For a peri­od of five weeks, any­one can join and freely roam a vir­tu­al recon­struc­tion, or rather reimag­in­ing, of the Met and its gal­leries. There they’ll encounter paint­ings by Pol­lock, Van Gogh, and Rem­brandt, as well as work by cur­rent artists and majes­tic arti­facts from antiq­ui­ty.

“Upon enter­ing the web­site, vis­i­tors are wel­comed to the museum’s Great Hall with a view of Kent Monkman’s dip­tych mist­ikôsi­wak: Wood­en Boat Peo­ple (2019),” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Hakim Bishara. “From there, ban­ners offer broad the­mat­ic con­cepts — Pow­er, Home, Nature, and Jour­ney — through which vis­i­tors can explore the gal­leries.”

Embed­ded in cer­tain pieces of art, you’ll find not just his­tor­i­cal details and audio-tour expla­na­tions but mini-games, which “include triv­ia ques­tions and rid­dles that encour­age close obser­va­tion of the art­works and labels. A game called ‘Analy­sis’ uses the Met’s infrared and X‑ray con­ser­va­tion scans of paint­ings to reveal under­draw­ings and oth­er hid­den details of well-known paint­ings.”

Win enough such games, and you’ll get the chance to “bor­row” the art­work you’ve clicked to dis­play, through aug­ment­ed real­i­ty, in your space of choice — for fif­teen min­utes, at least. At Art­net, crit­ic Ben Davis writes of plac­ing here and there around his apart­ment Fred­er­ic Edwin Church’s Heart of the Andes, Jacob Lawrence’s The Pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and a Baby Yoda-scaled ver­sion of Rem­brandt’s Self-Por­trait. He even makes a seri­ous if ulti­mate­ly frus­trat­ed effort to win dig­i­tal bor­row­ing rights to the ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple of Den­dur, one of the Met’s pièces de résis­tance since the late 1970s.

To expe­ri­ence The Met Unframed for your­self, just head over to its web site and use your phone to scan the QR code that comes up (if you’re not brows­ing on your phone in the first place). You’ll then be tak­en straight to the vir­tu­al Great Hall, which you can nav­i­gate by swip­ing in any direc­tion — or phys­i­cal­ly mov­ing your phone around, if you’ve enabled gyro­scope mode — and tap­ping the icons glow­ing along the ground or on the walls. The com­bi­na­tion of high tech­nol­o­gy, his­tor­i­cal ref­er­ence, depop­u­lat­ed but ele­gant­ly designed set­tings, puz­zle chal­lenges, and a score in which syn­the­siz­ers meet ambi­ent noise will remind vis­i­tors of a cer­tain age of noth­ing so much as the adven­ture games of the ear­ly 1990s, espe­cial­ly Myst and its clones. But then, what does a muse­um do if not unite the past and the present?

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Unbe­liev­ably Detailed, Hand-Drawn Map Lets You Explore the Rich Col­lec­tions of the Met Muse­um

Down­load 584 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Down­load 50,000 Art Books & Cat­a­logs from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art’s Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tions

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of 30 World-Class Muse­ums & Safe­ly Vis­it 2 Mil­lion Works of Fine Art

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­terBooks 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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How Lava Lamps Help Secure the Internet

in Technology | January 12th, 2021

Try not to think too hard about the con­cept of ran­dom­ness — and espe­cial­ly about the ques­tion of how, exact­ly, one gen­er­ates a ran­dom num­ber. Most of us, of course, sim­ply ask a com­put­er to do it. But how can a com­put­er, which by its very nature fol­lows unam­bigu­ous direc­tions in a pre­dictable man­ner, come up with a tru­ly ran­dom num­ber, in the lit­er­al sense of the word? As far as the every­day pur­pos­es for which we might need “ran­dom” num­bers — set­ting the com­bi­na­tion on a lock, for instance — mere­ly unpre­dictable num­bers suf­fice. But where, exact­ly, can we draw the line between unpre­dictabil­i­ty and ran­dom­ness?

Albert Ein­stein famous­ly pro­nounced that “God does not play dice with the uni­verse,” draw­ing on a metaphor still cen­tral to human­i­ty’s con­cep­tion of ran­dom­ness. Dice pro­vide “ran­dom” num­bers in that, when thrown, they’re sub­ject to too many phys­i­cal fac­tors — an area of some inter­est for Ein­stein — for us to reli­ably guess which way they’ll land. And so we find our­selves again deliv­ered back from ran­dom­ness into unpre­dictabil­i­ty. But achiev­ing ever-greater unpre­dictabil­i­ty, which has proven invalu­able to fields like cryp­tog­ra­phy, has neces­si­tat­ed com­bin­ing com­put­ers with ana­log phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­na essen­tial­ly sim­i­lar to the rolling of dice.

Using a some­what less ancient tech­nol­o­gy, inter­net secu­ri­ty provider Cloud­flare has tak­en a step clos­er to gen­uine ran­dom­ness. “Every time you log in to any web­site, you’re assigned a unique iden­ti­fi­ca­tion num­ber,” explains Wired’s Ellen Airhart. “It should be ran­dom, because if hack­ers can pre­dict the num­ber, they’ll imper­son­ate you.” But who could pre­dict “the goopy mes­mer­ic swirlings of oil, water, and wax” with­in a lava lamp, let alone an entire wall cov­ered with them? “Cloud­flare films the lamps 24/7 and uses the ever-chang­ing arrange­ment of pix­els to help cre­ate a super­pow­ered cryp­to­graph­ic key.”

The­o­ret­i­cal­ly, Airhart acknowl­edges, “bad guys could sneak their own cam­era into Cloudflare’s lob­by to cap­ture the same scene,” but the com­pa­ny also “films the move­ments of a pen­du­lum in its Lon­don office and records the mea­sure­ments of a Geiger counter in Sin­ga­pore to add more chaos to the equa­tion. Crack that, Rus­sians.” Con­stant vig­i­lance against a threat from Rus­sia aid­ed by psy­che­del­ic bed­room light fix­tures? You’d be for­giv­en for feel­ing unstuck in time, par­tial­ly trans­port­ed to the real­i­ty of half a cen­tu­ry ago. But then, Cloud­flare is head­quar­tered in San Fran­cis­co — a city where the ground­break­ing and the groovy haven’t part­ed ways just yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

“The Bay Lights,” The World’s Largest LED Light Sculp­ture, Debuts in San Fran­cis­co

How Art Nou­veau Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic Designs of the 1960s

Visu­al­iz­ing WiFi Sig­nals with Light

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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Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People Hear Poems Read by Patti Smith, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg & More (1968)

in Poetry, Technology | January 4th, 2021

Thanks for allow­ing me to be a poet. A noble effort, doomed, but the only choice. —John Giorno, Thanx for Noth­ing

Dial­ing a poem today, I’m con­nect­ed to Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS-relat­ed pneu­mo­nia in 1994, read­ing an excerpt of “I Remem­ber.” He stum­bles over some words. It’s excit­ing. There’s a feel­ing of imme­di­a­cy. When the read­ing ends in an old-fash­ioned dial tone, I imme­di­ate­ly think of a half-dozen friends I’d like to call (assum­ing they respond to some­thing that’s not a tag or text).

“Take down this num­ber,” I’d say. “641–793-8122. Don’t ask ques­tions. Just call it. You’ll love it.”

And they prob­a­bly would, though they wouldn’t hear the same record­ing I did.

As Dial-A-Poem’s founder, the late John Giorno, remarked in a 2012 inter­view:

 A per­son asked me the oth­er day: “What hap­pens if I lis­ten to a poem and I want to tell a friend to lis­ten to it?” I told him: “Well, she can’t.” [laughs] That’s the point. What hap­pens is, when things are real­ly suc­cess­ful, you cre­ate desire that is unful­fil­l­able. That’s what makes some­thing work.

Giorno estab­lished Dial-A-Poem in 1968, plac­ing ten land­lines con­nect­ed to reel-to-reel answer­ing machines in a room in New York City’s Archi­tec­tur­al League:

I sort of stum­bled on [the con­cept] by chance… I was talk­ing to some­one on the tele­phone one morn­ing, and it was so bor­ing. I prob­a­bly had a hang­over and was prob­a­bly crash­ing, and I got irri­ta­ble and said to myself at that moment, “Why can’t this be a poem?” That’s how the idea came to me. And we got a quar­ter of a page in The New York Times with the tele­phone num­ber you could dial. 

In its first four-and-a-half months of oper­a­tion, Dial-A-Poem logged 1,112,237 incom­ing calls, includ­ing some from lis­ten­ers over­seas. (The orig­i­nal phone num­ber was 212–628-0400.) The hours of heav­i­est traf­fic sug­gest­ed that a lot of bored office work­ers were sneak­ing a lit­tle poet­ry into their 9‑to‑5 day.

Dial-A-Poem recon­ceived of the tele­phone as a new media device:

Before Dial-A-Poem, the tele­phone was used one-to-one. Dial-A-Poem’s suc­cess gave rise to a Dial-A-Some­thing indus­try: from Dial-A-Joke, Dial-A-Horo­scope, Dial-A-Stock Quo­ta­tion, Dial Sports, to the 900 num­ber pay­ing for a call, to phone sex, and ever more extra­or­di­nary tech­nol­o­gy. Dial-A-Poem, by chance, ush­ered in a new era in telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions.

Fea­tured poets includ­ed such heavy hit­ters as William S. Bur­roughs, Pat­ti Smith, Allen Gins­berg, Ted Berri­g­an, Robert Cree­ley, Sylvia Plath, Charles Bukowski, and Frank O’Hara (who “only liked you if you wrote like him”).

The con­tent was risqué, polit­i­cal, a direct response to the Viet­nam War, the polit­i­cal cli­mate, and social con­ser­vatism. No one both­ered with rhymes, and inspi­ra­tion was not nec­es­sar­i­ly the goal.

Unlike Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and oth­er career-mind­ed artists who he hung out with (and bed­ded), Giorno nev­er made a secret of his homo­sex­u­al­i­ty. Sex­u­al­ly explic­it and queer con­tent had a home at Dial-a-Poem.

Mean­while, Dial-a-Poem was fea­tured in Junior Scholas­tic Mag­a­zine, and dial­ing in became a home­work assign­ment for many New York City Pub­lic School stu­dents.

Two twelve-year-old boys near­ly scup­pered the project when one of their moth­ers caught them gig­gling over the Jim Car­roll poem, above, and raised a ruckus with the Board of Ed, who in turn put pres­sure on the tele­phone com­pa­ny to dis­con­tin­ue ser­vice. The New York State Coun­cil on the Arts’ lawyers inter­vened, a win for horny mid­dle school­ers… and poet­ry!

For any­one inter­est­ed, an album called You’re A Hook: The 15 Year Anniver­sary Of Dial-A-Poem (1968–1983) was released in 1983. Vinyl copies are still float­ing around.

If you dial 641.793.8122, you can still access record­ings from an archive of poet­ry, notes SFMo­MA.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Stream Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings from Harvard’s Rich Audio Archive: From W.H. Auden to Dylan Thomas

Library of Con­gress Launch­es New Online Poet­ry Archive, Fea­tur­ing 75 Years of Clas­sic Poet­ry Read­ings

Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry Reveals the Best Way to Mem­o­rize Poet­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She most recent­ly appeared as a French Cana­di­an bear who trav­els to New York City in search of food and mean­ing in Greg Kotis’ short film, L’Ourse.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Technology Arbitrage: Amazon is Selling Airpods Pro Headphones for $50 Less Than Apple

in Deals, Technology | December 31st, 2020

Psst. Ama­zon cur­rent­ly has Air­Pods Pro head­phones for $199, while Apple has them list­ed for $249. It’s the deal of the day for any­one look­ing for wire­less Blue­tooth ear­buds, with noise-can­celling, immer­sive sound.

H/T Rolling Stone

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