The World’s First Medieval Electronic Instrument: The EP-1320 Lets You Play the Sounds of Hurdy-Gurdies, Lutes, Gregorian Chants & More

in History, Music, Technology | August 8th, 2024

At this time of the year, the Swedish island of Got­land puts on Medeltidsveck­an, or “Medieval Week,” the coun­try’s largest his­tor­i­cal fes­ti­val. Accord­ing to its offi­cial About page, it offers its vis­i­tors the chance to “watch knights on horse­back, drink some­thing cold, take a craft­ing course, prac­tice archery, lis­ten to a con­cert or pic­nic along the beach, while wait­ing for some ruin show or per­for­mance in some moat!” If next year’s Medeltidsveck­an incor­po­rates elec­tron­ic-music ses­sions as well, it will sure­ly be thanks to inspi­ra­tion from the EP-1320 sam­pler, or instru­men­tal­is elec­tron­icum, just released by Swedish elec­tron­ics com­pa­ny Teenage Engi­neer­ing.

Billed as “the world’s first medieval elec­tron­ic instru­ment,” the EP-1320 is mod­eled on Teenage Engi­neer­ing’s suc­cess­ful EP-133 drum sampler/composer, but pre-loaded with a selec­tion of playable musi­cal instru­ments from the Mid­dle Ages, from frame drums, bat­tle toms, and coconut horse hooves to bag­pipes, bowed harps, and, yes, hur­dy-gur­dies.

Users can also evoke a com­plete medieval world — or at least a cer­tain idea of one, not untaint­ed by fan­ta­sy — with swords, live­stock, witch­es, “row­dy peas­ants,” and “actu­al drag­ons.” To get a sense of how it works, have a look at the video at the top of the post from B&H Pho­to Video Pro Audio, which offers a run­down of its many tech­ni­cal and aes­thet­ic fea­tures.

“Even the design of the sam­pler and music com­pos­er looks medieval, from the font style all over the board” — often used to label but­tons and oth­er con­trols in Latin, or Latin of a kind — “to the col­or, pre­sen­ta­tion, pack­ag­ing, and imagery,” writes Design­boom’s Matthew Bur­gos. “The elec­tron­ic instru­ment is portable too, and the design team includes a quilt­ed hard­cov­er case, t‑shirt, key­chain, and a vinyl record fea­tur­ing songs and sam­ples.” Clear­ly, the EP-1320 isn’t just a piece of nov­el­ty stu­dio gear, but a sym­bol of its own­er’s appre­ci­a­tion for the trans­po­si­tion of all things medieval into our mod­ern dig­i­tal world. It’s worth con­sid­er­ing as a Christ­mas gift for the elec­tron­ic-music cre­ator in your life; just imag­ine how they could use it to rein­ter­pret the clas­sic songs of the hol­i­day sea­son with not just lutes, trum­pets, and citoles at their com­mand, but “tor­ture-cham­ber reverb” as well.

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed con­tent:

Meet the Hur­dy Gur­dy, the Hand-Cranked Medieval Instru­ment with 80 Mov­ing Parts

Hear Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spir­it” Per­formed in Clas­si­cal Latin

With Medieval Instru­ments, Band Per­forms Clas­sic Songs by The Bea­t­les, Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, Metal­li­ca & Deep Pur­ple

The Medieval Ban Against the “Devil’s Tri­tone”: Debunk­ing a Great Myth in Music The­o­ry

The Flute of Shame: Dis­cov­er the Instrument/Device Used to Pub­licly Humil­i­ate Bad Musi­cians Dur­ing the Medieval Peri­od

A Brief His­to­ry of Sam­pling: From the Bea­t­les to the Beast­ie Boys

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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How Olivetti Designed the First Personal Computer in History, the Programma 101 (1965)

in Computer Science, History, Technology | August 7th, 2024

If you were to come across an Olivet­ti Pro­gram­ma 101, you prob­a­bly would­n’t rec­og­nize it as a com­put­er. With its 36 keys and its paper-strip print­er, it might strike you as some kind of over­sized adding machine, albeit an unusu­al­ly hand­some one. But then, you’d expect that qual­i­ty from Olivet­ti, a com­pa­ny best remem­bered for its enor­mous­ly suc­cess­ful type­writ­ers that now occu­py prime space in muse­ums of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry design. Among its less­er-known prod­ucts, at least out­side its native Italy, are its com­put­ers, a line that began with main­frames in the mid-nine­teen-fifties and end­ed with IBM PC clones in the nineties, reach­ing the height of its inno­va­tion with the Pro­gram­ma 101 in 1965.

The Pro­gram­ma 101 is also known as the P101 or the Per­ot­ti­na, a name derived from that of its inven­tor, engi­neer Pier Gior­gio Per­ot­to. “I dreamed of a friend­ly machine to which you could del­e­gate all those menial tasks which are prone to errors,” he lat­er said, “a machine that could qui­et­ly learn and per­form tasks, that could store sim­ple data and instruc­tions, that could be used by any­one, that would be inex­pen­sive and the size of oth­er office prod­ucts which peo­ple used.”

To real­ize that vision required not just a tech­ni­cal effort but also an aes­thet­ic one, which fell to the young archi­tect and indus­tri­al design­er Mario Belli­ni, who had fol­lowed his col­league (and lat­er Mem­phis Group founder) Ettore Sottsass into con­sult­ing work for Olivet­ti.

All this work took place at a time of cri­sis for the com­pa­ny. Fol­low­ing the death of its head Adri­ano Olivet­ti in 1960, writes Opin­ion­at­ed Design­er, it “got into severe finan­cial dif­fi­cul­ties after buy­ing the giant US Under­wood com­pa­ny, and the elec­tron­ics divi­sion was sold off to Gen­er­al Elec­tric ear­ly in 1965.” Olivet­ti’s son Rober­to had already “giv­en the go-ahead in 1962 for the devel­op­ment of a small ‘desk-top’ com­put­er.” In order “to avoid their project being swal­lowed up by GE, Perotto’s team changed some of the spec­i­fi­ca­tions of the 101 to make it appear to be a ‘cal­cu­la­tor’ rather than a ‘com­put­er’ which meant the project could stay with Olivet­ti.” Yet on a tech­ni­cal lev­el, the Per­ot­ti­na remained very much a com­put­er indeed.

In addi­tion to sub­trac­tion, mul­ti­pli­ca­tion, and divi­sion, “it could also per­form log­i­cal oper­a­tions, con­di­tion­al and uncon­di­tion­al jumps, and print the data stored in a reg­is­ter, all through a cus­tom-made alphanu­mer­ic pro­gram­ming lan­guage,” writes Ric­car­do Bian­chi­ni at Inex­hib­it. In the video above, enthu­si­ast Wladimir Zaniews­ki demon­strates its capa­bil­i­ties with a sim­ple alphanu­mer­ic lunar-lan­der game: a his­tor­i­cal­ly apt project, since NASA bought ten of them for use in plan­ning the Apol­lo 11 moon land­ing. Yet even more impor­tant was the device’s com­par­a­tive­ly down-to-earth achieve­ment of being, in Bian­chini’s words, “an unin­tim­i­dat­ing object every­one could use, even at home. In that sense, there is no doubt that the Olivet­ti Pro­gram­ma 101 tru­ly is the first per­son­al com­put­er in his­to­ry.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch the World’s Old­est Work­ing Dig­i­tal Com­put­er — the 1951 Har­well Deka­tron — Get Fired Up Again

Dis­cov­ered: The User Man­u­al for the Old­est Sur­viv­ing Com­put­er in the World

How British Code­break­ers Built the First Elec­tron­ic Com­put­er

When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor Syn­the­siz­er — to Play Their Song “Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor” (1981)

How France Invent­ed a Pop­u­lar, Prof­itable Inter­net of Its Own in the 80s: The Rise and Fall of Mini­tel

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Brilliant Engineering That Made Venice: How a City Was Built on Water

in History, Technology | August 5th, 2024

Many of us have put off a vis­it to Venice for fear of the hordes of tourists who roam its streets and boat down its canals day in and day out. To judge by the most vis­i­ble of its eco­nom­ic activ­i­ty, the once-mighty city-state now exists almost sole­ly as an Insta­gram­ming des­ti­na­tion. It was­n’t always this way. “Despite hav­ing no roads, no land, and no fresh water, the Vene­tians man­aged to turn a mud­dy swamp into the most pow­er­ful and wealth­i­est city of its time,” says the nar­ra­tion of the Pri­mal Space video above. Its “unique lay­out of canals and bridges woven through hun­dreds of islands made Venice incred­i­bly acces­si­ble, and it became the epi­cen­ter of all busi­ness.”

Venice, in oth­er words, was at its height what world cap­i­tals like Lon­don or New York would become in lat­er eras. But on a phys­i­cal lev­el, it faced chal­lenges unknown in those cities, chal­lenges that demand­ed a vari­ety of inge­nious medieval engi­neer­ing solu­tions, most of which still func­tion today. First, the builders of Venice had to bring tim­ber from the forests of Croa­t­ia and dri­ve it into the soft soil, cre­at­ing a plat­form stur­dy enough to bear the weight of an entire urban built envi­ron­ment. Con­struc­tion of the build­ings on top proved to be a tri­al-and-error affair, which came around to using bricks with lime mor­tar to ensure flex­i­bil­i­ty on the slow­ly shift­ing ground.

“Instead of expand­ing out­wards like most cities,” Venice’s islands “expand­ed into each oth­er.” Even­tu­al­ly, they had to be con­nect­ed, though “there were no bridges for the first 500 years of Venice’s exis­tence,” not until the Doge offered a prize for the best design that could link the finan­cial cen­ter of Rial­to to the rest of the city. But what real­ly mat­tered was the test of time, one long since passed by the Ponte di Rial­to, which has stood fun­da­men­tal­ly unal­tered since it was rebuilt in stone in 1591. The com­bi­na­tion of bridges and canals, with what we would now call their sep­a­ra­tion of traf­fic, did its part to make Venice “the most pow­er­ful and rich­est city in Europe” by the fif­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Even the rich­est and most pow­er­ful cities need water, and Venice had an abun­dance of only the “extreme­ly salty and undrink­able” kind. To meet the needs of the city’s fast-grow­ing pop­u­la­tion, engi­neers built wells sur­round­ed by sand-and-stone fil­tra­tion sys­tems into Venice’s char­ac­ter­is­tic squares, turn­ing the city into “an enor­mous fun­nel.” The relat­ed prob­lem of waste man­age­ment neces­si­tat­ed the con­struc­tion of “a net­work of under­ground tun­nels” direct­ed into canals, flushed out by the motion of the tides. Venice’s plumb­ing has since been brought up to mod­ern stan­dards, among oth­er ambi­tious engi­neer­ing projects. But on the whole, the city still works as it did in the days of the Doge, and that fact alone makes it a sight worth see­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Venice Explained: Its Archi­tec­ture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Expe­ri­ence Them All

How Venice Works: 124 Islands, 183 Canals & 438 Bridges

Watch Venice’s New $7 Bil­lion Flood Defense Sys­tem in Action

A Relax­ing 3‑Hour Tour of Venice’s Canals

Venice’s Canals Have Run Dry Dur­ing a Win­ter Drought, Leav­ing Gon­do­las Stuck in the Mud

Pink Floyd Plays in Venice on a Mas­sive Float­ing Stage in 1989; Forces the May­or & City Coun­cil to Resign

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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David Bowie Predicts the Good & Bad of the Internet in 1999: “We’re on the Cusp of Something Exhilarating and Terrifying”

in Music, Technology | July 31st, 2024

“We’re on the cusp of some­thing exhil­a­rat­ing and ter­ri­fy­ing.”

The year is 1999 and David Bowie, in shag­gy hair and groovy glass­es, has seen the future and it is the Inter­net.

In this short but fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view with BBC’s stal­wart and with­er­ing inter­roga­tor cum inter­view­er Jere­my Pax­man, Bowie offers a fore­cast of the decades to come, and gets most of it right, if not all. Pax­man dole­ful­ly plays devil’s advo­cate, although I sus­pect he did real­ly see the Net as a “tool”– sim­ply a repack­ag­ing of an exist­ing medi­um.

“It’s an alien life form that just land­ed,” Bowie coun­ters.

Bowie, who had set up his own bowie.net as a pri­vate ISP the pre­vi­ous year, begins by say­ing that if he had start­ed his career in 1999, he would not have been a musi­cian, but a “fan col­lect­ing records.”

It sound­ed provoca­tive at the time, but Bowie makes a point here that has tak­en on more cre­dence in recent years–that the rev­o­lu­tion­ary sta­tus of rock in the ‘60s and ‘70s was tied to its rar­i­ty, that the inabil­i­ty to read­i­ly hear music gave it pow­er and cur­ren­cy. Rock is now “a career oppor­tu­ni­ty,” he says, and the Inter­net now has the allure that rock once did.

What Bowie might not have seen is how quick­ly that allure would wear off. The Inter­net no longer has a mys­tery to it. It’s clos­er to a pub­lic util­i­ty, odd­ly a point that Bowie makes lat­er when talk­ing about the inven­tion of the tele­phone.

Bowie also approved of the demys­ti­fi­ca­tion between the artist and audi­ence that the Inter­net was pro­vid­ing. In his final decade, how­ev­er, he would seek out anonymi­ty and pri­va­cy, drop­ping his final two albums sud­den­ly with­out fan­fare and refus­ing all inter­views. He also didn’t fore­see the kind of trolling that sends celebri­ties and artists off of social media.

Pax­man sees the frag­men­ta­tion of the Inter­net as a prob­lem; Bowie sees it as a plus.

“The poten­tial of what the Inter­net is going to do to soci­ety, both good and bad, is unimag­in­able.”

There’s a lot more to unpack in this seg­ment, and let your dif­fer­ing view­points be known in the com­ments. It’s what Bowie would have want­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

David Bowie Offers Advice for Aspir­ing Artists: “Go a Lit­tle Out of Your Depth,” “Nev­er Ful­fill Oth­er People’s Expec­ta­tions”

David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Any­way (1998)

Watch David Bowie Per­form “Star­man” on Top of the Pops: Vot­ed the Great­est Music Per­for­mance Ever on the BBC (1972)

How David Bowie Used William S. Bur­roughs’ Cut-Up Method to Write His Unfor­get­table Lyrics

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Stephen Fry Explains Why Artificial Intelligence Has a “70% Risk of Killing Us All”

in Artificial Intelligence, Technology | July 26th, 2024

Apart from his comedic, dra­mat­ic, and lit­er­ary endeav­ors, Stephen Fry is wide­ly known for his avowed technophil­ia. He once wrote a col­umn on that theme, “Dork Talk,” for the Guardian, in whose inau­gur­al dis­patch he laid out his cre­den­tials by claim­ing to have been the own­er of only the sec­ond Mac­in­tosh com­put­er sold in Europe (“Dou­glas Adams bought the first”), and nev­er to have “met a smart­phone I haven’t bought.” But now, like many of us who were “dip­py about all things dig­i­tal” at the end of the last cen­tu­ry and the begin­ning of this one, Fry seems to have his doubts about cer­tain big-tech projects in the works today: take the “$100 bil­lion plan with a 70 per­cent risk of killing us all” described in the video above.

This plan, of course, has to do with arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence in gen­er­al, and “the log­i­cal AI sub­goals to sur­vive, deceive, and gain pow­er” in par­tic­u­lar. Even in this rel­a­tive­ly ear­ly stage of devel­op­ment, we’ve wit­nessed AI sys­tems that seem to be alto­geth­er too good at their jobs, to the point of engag­ing in what would count as decep­tive and uneth­i­cal behav­ior were the sub­ject a human being. (Fry cites the exam­ple of a stock mar­ket-invest­ing AI that engaged in insid­er trad­ing, then lied about hav­ing done so.) What’s more, “as AI agents take on more com­plex tasks, they cre­ate strate­gies and sub­goals which we can’t see, because they’re hid­den among bil­lions of para­me­ters,” and qua­si-evo­lu­tion­ary “selec­tion pres­sures also cause AI to evade safe­ty mea­sures.”

In the video, MIT physi­cist, and machine learn­ing researcher Max Tegmark speaks por­ten­tous­ly of the fact that we are, “right now, build­ing creepy, super-capa­ble, amoral psy­chopaths that nev­er sleep, think much faster than us, can make copies of them­selves, and have noth­ing human about them what­so­ev­er.” Fry quotes com­put­er sci­en­tist Geof­frey Hin­ton warn­ing that, in inter-AI com­pe­ti­tion, “the ones with more sense of self-preser­va­tion will win, and the more aggres­sive ones will win, and you’ll get all the prob­lems that jumped-up chim­panzees like us have.” Hin­ton’s col­league Stu­art Rus­sell explains that “we need to wor­ry about machines not because they’re con­scious, but because they’re com­pe­tent. They may take pre­emp­tive action to ensure that they can achieve the objec­tive that we gave them,” and that action may be less than impec­ca­bly con­sid­er­ate of human life.

Would we be bet­ter off just shut­ting the whole enter­prise down? Fry rais­es philoso­pher Nick Bostrom’s argu­ment that “stop­ping AI devel­op­ment could be a mis­take, because we could even­tu­al­ly be wiped out by anoth­er prob­lem that AI could’ve pre­vent­ed.” This would seem to dic­tate a delib­er­ate­ly cau­tious form of devel­op­ment, but “near­ly all AI research fund­ing, hun­dreds of bil­lions per year, is push­ing capa­bil­i­ties for prof­it; safe­ty efforts are tiny in com­par­i­son.” Though “we don’t know if it will be pos­si­ble to main­tain con­trol of super-intel­li­gence,” we can nev­er­the­less “point it in the right direc­tion, instead of rush­ing to cre­ate it with no moral com­pass and clear rea­sons to kill us off.” The mind, as they say, is a fine ser­vant but a ter­ri­ble mas­ter; the same holds true, as the case of AI makes us see afresh, for the mind’s cre­ations.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Stephen Fry Voic­es a New Dystopi­an Short Film About Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence & Sim­u­la­tion The­o­ry: Watch Escape

Stephen Fry Reads Nick Cave’s Stir­ring Let­ter About Chat­G­PT and Human Cre­ativ­i­ty: “We Are Fight­ing for the Very Soul of the World”

Stephen Fry Explains Cloud Com­put­ing in a Short Ani­mat­ed Video

Stephen Fry Takes Us Inside the Sto­ry of Johannes Guten­berg & the First Print­ing Press

Stephen Fry on the Pow­er of Words in Nazi Ger­many: How Dehu­man­iz­ing Lan­guage Laid the Foun­da­tion for Geno­cide

Neur­al Net­works for Machine Learn­ing: A Free Online Course Taught by Geof­frey Hin­ton

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Buckminster Fuller Tells the World “Everything He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lecture Series (1975)

in Architecture, Design, Science, Technology | July 23rd, 2024

His­to­ry seems to have set­tled Buck­min­ster Fuller’s rep­u­ta­tion as a man ahead of his time. He inspires short, wit­ty pop­u­lar videos like YouTu­ber Joe Scott’s “The Man Who Saw The Future,” and the ongo­ing lega­cy of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute (BFI), who note that “Fuller’s ideas and work con­tin­ue to influ­ence new gen­er­a­tions of design­ers, archi­tects, sci­en­tists and artists work­ing to cre­ate a sus­tain­able plan­et.”

Bril­liant futur­ist though he was, Fuller might also be called the man who saw the present and the past—as much as a sin­gle indi­vid­ual could seem­ing­ly hold in their mind at once. He was “a man who is intense­ly inter­est­ed in almost every­thing,” wrote Calvin Tomkins at The New York­er in 1965, the year of Fuller’s 70th birth­day. Fuller was as eager to pass on as much knowl­edge as he could col­lect in his long, pro­duc­tive career, span­ning his ear­ly epipha­nies in the 1920s to his final pub­lic talks in the ear­ly 80s.

“The some­what over­whelm­ing effect of a Fuller mono­logue,” wrote Tomkins, “is well known today in many parts of the world.” His lec­tures leapt from sub­ject to sub­ject, incor­po­rat­ing ancient and mod­ern his­to­ry, math­e­mat­ics, lin­guis­tics, archi­tec­ture, archae­ol­o­gy, phi­los­o­phy, reli­gion, and—in the exam­ple Tomkins gives—“irrefutable data on tides, pre­vail­ing winds,” and “boat design.” His dis­cours­es issue forth in wave after wave of infor­ma­tion.

Fuller could talk at length and with author­i­ty about vir­tu­al­ly anything—especially about him­self and his own work, in his own spe­cial jar­gon of “unique Bucky-isms: spe­cial phras­es, ter­mi­nol­o­gy, unusu­al sen­tence struc­tures, etc.,” writes BFI. He may not always have been par­tic­u­lar­ly hum­ble, yet he spoke and wrote with a lack of prej­u­dice and an open curios­i­ty and that is the oppo­site of arro­gance. Such is the impres­sion we get of Fuller in the series of talks he record­ed ten years after Tomkin’s New York­er por­trait.

Made in Jan­u­ary of 1975, Buck­min­ster Fuller: Every­thing I Know cap­tured Fuller’s “entire life’s work” in 42 hours of “think­ing out loud lec­tures [that exam­ine] in depth all of Fuller’s major inven­tions and dis­cov­er­ies from the 1927 Dymax­ion car, house, car and bath­room, through the Wichi­ta House, geo­des­ic domes, and tenseg­ri­ty struc­tures, as well as the con­tents of Syn­er­get­ics. Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal in parts, Fuller recounts his own per­son­al his­to­ry in the con­text of the his­to­ry of sci­ence and indus­tri­al­iza­tion.”

He begins, how­ev­er, in his first lec­ture at the top, not with him­self, but with his pri­ma­ry sub­ject of con­cern: “all human­i­ty,” a species that begins always in naked­ness and igno­rance and man­ages to fig­ure it out “entire­ly by tri­al and error,” he says. Fuller mar­vels at the advances of “ear­ly Hin­du and Chi­nese” civilizations—as he had at the Maori in Tomkin’s anec­dote, who “had been among the first peo­ples to dis­cov­er the prin­ci­ples of celes­tial nav­i­ga­tion” and “found a way of sail­ing around the world… at least ten thou­sand years ago.”

The leap from ancient civ­i­liza­tions to “what is called World War I” is “just a lit­tle jump in infor­ma­tion,” he says in his first lec­ture, but when Fuller comes to his own life­time, he shows how many “lit­tle jumps” one human being could wit­ness in a life­time in the 20th cen­tu­ry. “The year I was born Mar­coni invent­ed the wire­less,” says Fuller. “When I was 14 man did get to the North Pole, and when I was 16 he got to the South Pole.”

When Fuller was 7, “the Wright broth­ers sud­den­ly flew,” he says, “and my mem­o­ry is vivid enough of sev­en to remem­ber that for about a year the engi­neer­ing soci­eties were try­ing to prove it was a hoax because it was absolute­ly impos­si­ble for man to do that.” What it showed young Bucky Fuller was that “impos­si­bles are hap­pen­ing.” If Fuller was a vision­ary, he rede­fined the word—as a term for those with an expan­sive, infi­nite­ly curi­ous vision of a pos­si­ble world that already exists all around us.

See Fuller’s com­plete lec­ture series, Every­thing I Know, at the Inter­net Archive, and read edit­ed tran­scripts of his talks at the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute.

Every­thing I Know will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bertrand Rus­sell & Buck­min­ster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

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

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

Buck­min­ster Fuller Doc­u­ment­ed His Life Every 15 Min­utes, from 1920 Until 1983

Buck­min­ster Fuller, Isaac Asi­mov & Oth­er Futur­ists Make Pre­dic­tions About the 21st Cen­tu­ry in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

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

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Eno: The New “Generative Documentary” on Brian Eno That’s Never the Same Movie Twice

in Art, Film, Music, Technology | July 15th, 2024

Bri­an Eno once wrote that “it’s pos­si­ble that our grand­chil­dren will look at us in won­der and say, ‘You mean you used to lis­ten to to exact­ly the same thing over and over again?’ ” That spec­u­la­tion comes from an essay on what he calls “gen­er­a­tive music,” which is auto­mat­i­cal­ly pro­duced by dig­i­tal sys­tems in accor­dance with human-set rules and pref­er­ences: “like live music, it is always dif­fer­ent. Like record­ed music, it is free of time-and-place lim­i­ta­tions.” These words were first pub­lished near­ly 30 years ago, in his book A Year with Swollen Appen­dices. Today, he has at least one grand­child, whose hand­writ­ing fig­ures in one of the music videos from his lat­est solo album. That par­tic­u­lar work may be non-gen­er­a­tive, but his inter­est in the con­cept of the gen­er­a­tive in art endures.

This year, Eno even stars in a gen­er­a­tive doc­u­men­tary about his life as an artist, music pro­duc­er, and “son­ic land­scap­er” direct­ed by Gary Hus­twit, best known for Hel­veti­ca and oth­er non-fic­tion films on design. The New York Times’ Rob Tan­nen­baum writes that Eno “is unlike any oth­er por­trait of a musi­cian. It’s not even a por­trait, because it isn’t fixed or sta­t­ic. Instead, Hus­twit used a pro­pri­etary soft­ware pro­gram that recon­fig­ures the length, struc­ture and con­tents of the movie.” This suit­ed both Eno’s pro­fes­sion­al phi­los­o­phy and his antipa­thy to the con­ven­tion­al doc­u­men­tary form. “Our lives are sto­ries we write and rewrite,” Tan­nen­baum quotes him as writ­ing in an e‑mail. ‘There is no sin­gle reli­able nar­ra­tive of a life.”

In fact, there are about 52 quin­til­lion dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives, to go by the esti­mate of pos­si­ble per­mu­ta­tions of Eno Hus­twit has giv­en in inter­views. “We could make a 10-hour series about Bri­an, and we still wouldn’t be scratch­ing the sur­face of every­thing he’s done,” he told The Verge. “I just added a bunch of footage this past week that’s going into the Film Forum week two runs, which has nev­er been in the sys­tem before.” Not only do “we get to keep dig­ging into the footage and bring­ing new things into it, but we also get to keep chang­ing the soft­ware. And I don’t know, in a year from now, what the film will look like or what the stream­ing ver­sions of it will be.”

What Eno did­n’t have to clar­i­fy in 1996, but Hus­twit has to clar­i­fy in 2024, is that this kind of gen­er­a­tive film isn’t gen­er­at­ed by arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Empha­siz­ing that “the data set is all our mate­r­i­al,” includ­ing 30 hours of inter­views and 500 hours of con­ven­tion­al­ly shot film, Hus­twit frames his enter­prise’s cus­tom soft­ware, acronymi­cal­ly called Brain One, “as more like gar­den­ing.” That metaphor could have come straight from Eno him­self, who’s spo­ken about “chang­ing the idea of the com­pos­er from some­body who stood at the top of a process and dic­tat­ed pre­cise­ly how it was car­ried out, to some­body who stood at the bot­tom of a process who care­ful­ly plant­ed some rather well-select­ed seeds.” Even­tu­al­ly, “you stop think­ing of your­self as me, the con­troller, you the audi­ence, and you start think­ing of all of us as the audi­ence, all of us as peo­ple enjoy­ing the gar­den togeth­er.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Eno: A 1973 Mini-Doc Shows Bri­an Eno at the Begin­ning of His Solo Career

Watch Bri­an Eno’s “Video Paint­ings,” Where 1980s TV Tech­nol­o­gy Meets Visu­al Art

Bri­an Eno on Cre­at­ing Music and Art As Imag­i­nary Land­scapes (1989)

How David Byrne and Bri­an Eno Make Music Togeth­er: A Short Doc­u­men­tary

Watch Anoth­er Green World, a Hyp­not­ic Por­trait of Bri­an Eno (2010)

Watch Bri­an Eno’s Exper­i­men­tal Film “The Ship,” Made with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Amazing Engineering of Roman Baths

in Architecture, History, Technology | June 19th, 2024

Few depic­tions of ancient Roman life neglect to ref­er­ence all the time ancient Romans spent at the baths. One gets the impres­sion that their civ­i­liza­tion was obsessed with clean­li­ness, in con­trast to most of the soci­eties found around the world at the time, but that turns out hard­ly to be the case. In fact, bathing seems to have been a sec­ondary activ­i­ty at Roman baths, which were “places to meet friends, make con­nec­tions, per­haps even score a din­ner invi­ta­tion”; “places to buy a snack, have a mas­sage, or face the dread­ed tweez­ers of the hair remover”; “places to escape from a harsh and sta­tus-dri­ven world; “places to be Roman.”

So says Gar­rett Ryan, cre­ator of the ancient-his­to­ry Youtube chan­nel Told in Stone, in the new video above. He might have added that Roman baths were “third places.” Pop­u­lar­ized by the late soci­ol­o­gist Ray Old­en­burg with the 1989 book The Great Good Place, the con­cept of the third place stands in con­trast to our first and sec­ond places, home and work.

A book­store could be a third place, or a café, or any “hang­out” occu­py­ing that hard-to-define (and by the late twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry in Amer­i­ca, hard-to-find) realm between pub­lic and pri­vate. If it makes you feel con­nect­ed to the com­mu­ni­ty in which you live — indeed, if it makes you feel like you live in a com­mu­ni­ty at all — it may well be a third place.

Roman baths weren’t just impres­sive soci­o­log­i­cal­ly, but also tech­no­log­i­cal­ly. Ryan explains their archi­tec­ture, water sup­ply, heat­ing sys­tems, and clean­ing pro­ce­dures, such as they were. He quotes Mar­cus Aure­lius as describ­ing bath water as “a repul­sive blend of oil, sweat, and filth”; in all like­li­hood, it was “only changed when it became so cloudy that it repelled bathers.” San­i­ta­tion prac­tices appear much improved at Ham­mam Essal­i­hine in Alge­ria, one of the very few ancient Roman baths in con­tin­u­ous use since its con­struc­tion. Ryan doc­u­ments his trip there in the video just above from his oth­er chan­nel Scenic Routes to the Past. Though cap­ti­vat­ed by the sight of a real Roman bath func­tion­ing just as designed, he must have been too con­sumed by thoughts of antiq­ui­ty to remem­ber to pack that mod­ern neces­si­ty, a swim­suit.

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Did Roman Aque­ducts Work?: The Most Impres­sive Achieve­ment of Ancient Rome’s Infra­struc­ture, Explained

The Mys­tery Final­ly Solved: Why Has Roman Con­crete Been So Durable?

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er an Ancient Roman Snack Bar in the Ruins of Pom­peii

An Ani­mat­ed Recon­struc­tion of Ancient Rome: Take A 30-Minute Stroll Through the City’s Vir­tu­al­ly-Recre­at­ed Streets

Behold 3D Recre­ations of Pompeii’s Lav­ish Homes — As They Exist­ed Before the Erup­tion of Mount Vesu­vius

How Toi­lets Worked in Ancient Rome and Medieval Eng­land

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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