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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Futurist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001: Opera by Telephone, Free College & Pneumatic Tubes Aplenty

in History, Magazines, Technology | November 12th, 2020

Just shy of 120 years ago, “the wis­est and most care­ful men in our great­est insti­tu­tions of sci­ence and learn­ing” told Amer­i­ca what would change by the far-flung dawn of 2001. C, X and Q gone from the alpha­bet; “Air-Ships” in the skies, strict­ly for mil­i­tary pur­pos­es (pas­sen­ger traf­fic being han­dled by “fast elec­tric ships”); straw­ber­ries as large as apples; uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion “free to every man and woman”: these are just a few of the details of life in the com­ing 21st cen­tu­ry. We for whom the year 2001 is now firm­ly in the past will get a laugh out of all this. But as with any set of pre­dic­tions, amid the miss­es come par­tial hits. We don’t get our “hot and cold air from spig­ots,” but we do get it from air-con­di­tion­ing and heat­ing sys­tems. We don’t send pho­tographs across the world by tele­graph, but the device we all keep in our pock­ets does the job well enough.

Writ­ten by a civ­il engi­neer named John Elfreth Watkins, Jr. (pre­sum­ably the son of Smith­son­ian Cura­tor of Mechan­i­cal Tech­nol­o­gy John Elfreth Watkins, Sr.), “What May Hap­pen in the Next Hun­dred Years” ran in the Decem­ber 1900 issue of that renowned futur­o­log­i­cal organ Ladies’ Home Jour­nal. You can hear it read aloud, and see it accom­pa­nied by his­tor­i­cal film clips, in the Voic­es of the Past video above.

A few years ago the piece came back into cir­cu­la­tion on the inter­net (which goes unmen­tioned by its experts, more con­cerned as they were with pro­lif­er­a­tion of tele­phone lines and pneu­mat­ic tubes) and its pre­dic­tions were put to the test. At the Sat­ur­day Evening Post, Jeff Nils­son gives Watkins (once a Post con­trib­u­tor him­self) points for less out­landish prophe­cies, such as a rise in human­i­ty’s life expectan­cy and aver­age height.

Watkins describes his sources as “the most learned and con­ser­v­a­tive minds in Amer­i­ca.” In some areas they were too con­ser­v­a­tive: they fore­see “Trains One Hun­dred and Fifty Miles an Hour,” but as Nils­son notes, today’s “high-speed trains are trav­el­ing over 300 mph. Just not in the Unit­ed States.” Amer­i­cans did lose their street­cars as pre­dict­ed, but not due to their replace­ment by sub­ways and mov­ing side­walks — and what would these experts make of the street­car’s 21st-cen­tu­ry renais­sance? When Watkins writes that “grand opera will be tele­phoned to pri­vate homes,” we may think of the Met’s cur­rent COVID-prompt­ed stream­ing, a sce­nario that would have occurred to few in a world yet to expe­ri­ence even the Span­ish flu pan­dem­ic of 1918. But then, the future’s defin­ing qual­i­ty has always been its very unknowa­bil­i­ty: con­sid­er how much has come to pass since we last post­ed about these pre­dic­tions here on Open Cul­ture — not least the end of Ladies Home Jour­nal itself.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

In 1900, Ladies’ Home Jour­nal Pub­lish­es 28 Pre­dic­tions for the Year 2000

1902 French Trad­ing Cards Imag­ine “Women of the Future”

In 1911, Thomas Edi­son Pre­dicts What the World Will Look Like in 2011: Smart Phones, No Pover­ty, Libraries That Fit in One Book

Niko­la Tesla’s Pre­dic­tions for the 21st Cen­tu­ry: The Rise of Smart Phones & Wire­less, The Demise of Cof­fee, The Rule of Eugen­ics (1926/35)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing 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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

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When Billy Idol Went Cyberpunk: See His Tribute to Neuromancer, His Recording Session with Timothy Leary, and His Limited-Edition Floppy Disk (1993)

in History, Music, Technology | October 27th, 2020

Bil­ly Idol has long evad­ed straight­for­ward musi­cal clas­si­fi­ca­tion, being a full-on star but one ful­ly belong­ing to nei­ther rock nor pop. He may have come up in the 1970s as the front­man of Gen­er­a­tion X, the first punk band to play Top of the Pops, but the hits he went on to make as an MTV-opti­mized solo artist in the 80s and 90s — “Eyes With­out a Face,” “Cra­dle of Love” — sit less than eas­i­ly with those ori­gins. But as the end of the mil­len­ni­um approached and the zeit­geist grew increas­ing­ly high-tech­no­log­i­cal, it seems to have occurred to the for­mer William Michael Albert Broad that, if he could­n’t be a punk, he could per­haps be a cyber-punk instead.

As bad luck would have it, the bio­me­chan­i­cal had already intrud­ed onto Idol­’s life in the form of a steel rod implant­ed in his leg after a motor­cy­cle acci­dent. This lost him the role of T‑1000, the killer cyborg in Ter­mi­na­tor 2, but it inspired him in part to record the ambi­tious con­cept album Cyber­punk in 1993. Like Pete Town­shend’s Psy­choderelict or Don­ald Fagen’s Kamakiri­ad from that same year (or David Bowie’s Out­side from 1995), Cyber­punk is built on a dystopi­an nar­ra­tive in which “the future has implod­ed into the present” and “mega-cor­po­ra­tions are the new gov­ern­ments. Com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed info-domains are the new fron­tiers.” Thus speaks Idol in the album’s open­ing man­i­festo.

“Though there is bet­ter liv­ing through sci­ence and chem­istry, we’re all becom­ing cyborgs. The com­put­er is the new cool tool. Though we say all infor­ma­tion should be free, it is not. Infor­ma­tion is pow­er and cur­ren­cy of the vir­tu­al world we inhab­it.” Here, “cyber­punks are the true rebels.” This would have sound­ed famil­iar to read­ers of William Gib­son, whose Neu­ro­mancer pop­u­lar­ized the aes­thet­ic and ethos of “high tech meets low life” — and shares a title with one of Cyber­punk’s songs. In fact, as Gib­son lat­er recalled, Idol “made it a con­di­tion of get­ting an inter­view with him, that every jour­nal­ist had to have read Neu­ro­mancer.” They did, “but when they met with Bil­ly, the first thing that became real­ly appar­ent was that Bil­ly had­n’t read it.”

What­ev­er his intel­lec­tu­al invest­ment in cyber­punk, Idol threw him­self into what he saw as the cul­ture sur­round­ing it. This effort involved fre­quent­ing Usenet’s alt.cyberpunk news­group; read­ing Mon­do 2000; and con­nect­ing with fig­ures like Gareth Bran­wyn, author of cyber­punk man­i­festos, and Mark Frauen­felder, co-founder of Boing Boing. “We are merg­ing with machines to become smarter, faster, and more pow­er­ful,” writes Frauen­felder in an essay includ­ed among the “mul­ti­me­dia” con­tents of the 3.5″ flop­py disk orig­i­nal­ly bun­dled with Cyber­punk. “Are you going to ignore tech­nol­o­gy, turn your back on it, and let author­i­ty enslave you with it, or are you going to learn every­thing you can about sur­viv­ing in the dig­i­tal age?”

Cyber­punk con­sti­tutes Idol­’s affir­ma­tive answer to that ques­tion. Much of his excite­ment about per­son­al tech­nol­o­gy sure­ly owes to the lib­er­at­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of the pro­fes­sion­al-grade home record­ing stu­dio. “I’d always real­ly sort of worked through a team of a pro­duc­er and an engi­neer,” he said in one inter­view, “and in the end I think real­ly you felt like you weren’t get­ting as close to your ideas as you could be.” From his own home stu­dio he wit­nessed the 1992 Los Ange­les riots, which prompt­ed him then and there to rewrite the song “Shock to the Sys­tem” to reflect the tur­moil roil­ing out­side his door. (Film­mak­er Kathryn Bigelow would explore at greater length that explo­sion of urban dis­con­tent’s inter­sec­tion with cyber­punk cul­ture in 1995’s Strange Days.)

See­ing cyber­punk as the lat­est man­i­fes­ta­tion of a broad­er coun­ter­cul­ture, Idol cast a wide net for col­lab­o­ra­tors and inspi­ra­tions. He invit­ed Tim­o­thy Leary, the “cyberdel­ic” cul­tur­al icon who dreamed of mak­ing a Neu­ro­mancer com­put­er game, not just to inter­view him about the project but par­tic­i­pate in its record­ing. The album’s cen­ter­piece is a cov­er of the Vel­vet Under­ground’s “Hero­in,” and a dance cov­er at that. Though remem­bered as nei­ther an artis­tic nor a com­mer­cial suc­cess (the rea­sons for which Youtube music crit­ic Todd in the Shad­ows exam­ines in the video at the top of the post), Cyber­punk set some­thing of a prece­dent for main­stream musi­cians keen to use cut­ting-edge record­ing and pro­duc­tion tech­nol­o­gy to go ful­ly D.I.Y. — to go, as it were, cyber-punk.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Cyber­punk: 1990 Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing William Gib­son & Tim­o­thy Leary Intro­duces the Cyber­punk Cul­ture

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

William Gibson’s Sem­i­nal Cyber­punk Nov­el, Neu­ro­mancer, Dra­ma­tized for Radio (2002)

Dis­cov­er Rare 1980s CDs by Lou Reed, Devo & Talk­ing Heads That Com­bined Music with Com­put­er Graph­ics

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

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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Phone Relief: The Ultimate Hands-Free Headset (1993)

in Random, Technology | October 20th, 2020

We have fea­tured some great acts of imag­i­na­tion when it comes to tele­phone technology–from the worlds’ first mobile phone shown in this 1922 British Pathé news­reel, to when Fritz Lang “invent­ed” the video phone in Metrop­o­lis in 1927. “Phone Relief,” the ulti­mate hands-free head­set mar­ket­ed in 1993, will nev­er qual­i­fy as a great act of imag­i­na­tion. But it does make for a great kitschy ad.

via @moodvintage

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The World’s First Mobile Phone Shown in 1922 Vin­tage Film

When We All Have Pock­et Tele­phones (1923)

How to Use the Rotary Dial Phone: A Primer from 1927

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The Great Illustration That Accompanied Eddie Van Halen’s Application to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (1987)

in Music, Technology | October 12th, 2020

Through­out the past week, we’ve read many trib­utes to Eddie Van Halen and his end­less capac­i­ty for inno­va­tion. Styl­is­ti­cal­ly, EVH changed the sound of rock with tap­ping, a tech­nique that let him play rapid arpeg­gios with two hands on the gui­tar’s fret­board. (Exhib­it A is here.) Tech­ni­cal­ly, he cre­at­ed a unique sound by fash­ion­ing his own gui­tar, the Franken­strat, which meld­ed the sounds of Gib­son and Fend­er gui­tars. And what’s more, he patent­ed three inven­tions, one of which came with the daz­zling illus­tra­tion above. Edward L. Van Halen’s 1987 patent for a “musi­cal instru­ment sup­port” was described as fol­lows:

A sup­port­ing device for stringed musi­cal instru­ments, for exam­ple, gui­tars, ban­jos, man­dolins and the like… The sup­port­ing device is con­struct­ed and arranged for sup­port­ing the musi­cal instru­ment on the play­er to per­mit total free­dom of the play­er’s hands to play the instru­ment in a com­plete­ly new way, thus allow­ing the play­er to cre­ate new tech­niques and sounds pre­vi­ous­ly unknown to any play­er. The device, when in its oper­a­tional posi­tion, has a plate which rests upon the play­er’s leg leav­ing both hands free to explore the musi­cal instru­ment as nev­er before. Because the musi­cal instru­ment is arranged per­pen­dic­u­lar to the play­er’s body, the play­er has max­i­mum vis­i­bil­i­ty of the instru­men­t’s entire play­ing sur­face.

What would this device look like? The graph­ic above visu­al­izes it all. Find the illus­tra­tion in the patent appli­ca­tion here.

Back in 2015, Van Halen wrote a piece in Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics dis­cussing his patents and oth­er tech­ni­cal work on gui­tars and amps. For those who want to delve deep­er into his tin­ker­ing, read the arti­cle here.

via Brad­ford Peter­son & Boing Boing

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Some of Eddie Van Halen’s (RIP) Great­est Per­for­mances: “Shred­ding Was Eddie’s Very Essence”

15-Year-Old French Gui­tar Prodi­gy Flaw­less­ly Rips Through Solos by Eddie Van Halen, David Gilmour, Yng­wie Malm­steen & Steve Vai

Musi­cal Come­di­an Reg­gie Watts Rein­vents Van Halen’s Clas­sic, “Pana­ma”

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