Enthusiasm for British television is a force of nature. That goes even more so for British television fandom outside Britain. All of us have known someone, or indeed been someone, who shifted their cultural allegiances wholesale after watching a single episode of, say, Monty Python’s Flying Circus. But even that hugely influential comedy series commands only low-intensity worldwide devotion when set alongside Doctor Who, which has aired on the BBC in one form or another since 1963. One can express one’s membership in the global Doctor Who fandom in many ways, now including, in this period of all-digital professional and social interaction, one’s choice of virtual backgrounds on Zoom or other videoconferencing software.
You can, in other words, make a call from inside the TARDIS. The expansive interior of the Doctor’s time-traveling space ship — which, as fans know, materializes in different lands and eras as a humble London police box — is just one of the free virtual backgrounds now offered by the BBC.
In fact, they’ve made available not just one TARDIS background but six: the 1980 version, the 1983 version, twoviews of the 2019 version, and twoviews of it as it appeared in the 1976 serial-within-the-series The Masque of Mandragora. If none of this means anything to you, you might consider browsing the BBC’s other virtual-background categories, which feature empty sets from the network’s other science-fiction productions as well as its sitcoms, light-entertainment programs, children’s shows, and sports broadcasts.
No Brits will be surprised at the presence of an entire category of backgrounds from the long-running soap opera EastEnders: the laundrette, the Branning Brothers car lot, and of course the Queen Victoria pub. But non-Brits will probably opt to make their video calls from familiar places created for more widely traveled programs, like the dining room at Fawlty Towers or Eddy and Patsy’s wine-filled refrigerator. Personally, I yield to none — or at least to no other American — in my appreciation of Yes Minister, a political satire that has only grown more incisive over the decades; I’d surely make my calls from one of the fiveWhitehallofficesets the BBC has put up. Browsing its complete selection of virtual backgrounds, even the most obsessive British-TV aficionados will come across sets from shows of which they’ve never even heard. Luckily, many of us now have the time to binge-watch them all.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
No image is more closely associated with the birth of the motion picture than a train pulling into the French coastal town of La Ciotat. Captured by cinema pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumière, the 50-second clip frightened the audience at its first screening in 1896, who thought a real locomotive was hurtling toward them — or so the legend goes. Those early viewers may simply have felt a technological astonishment we can no longer muster today, and certainly not in response to such a mundane sight. That goes double for the slightly shorter and older Lumière Brothers production La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière a Lyon. Though it depicts nothing more than workers leaving a factory at the end of the day, it has long been referred to as “the first real motion picture ever made.”
That qualifier “real,” of course, hints at the existence of a predecessor. Whereas La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière a Lyon premiered in 1895, Louis Le Prince’s Roundhay Garden Scene dates to 1888. With its runtime under two seconds, this depiction of a moment in the life of four figures, a younger man and woman and an older man and woman, would even by the standards of the Lumière Brothers’ day barely count as a movie at all.
Equally disqualifying is its low frame rate: just seven to twelve per second (which one it is has been a matter of some dispute), which strikes our eyes more as a rapid sequence of still photographs than as continuous motion. Even so, it must have been a thrill of a result for Le Prince, an England-based French artist-inventor who had been developing his motion-photography system in secrecy since early in the decade.
We now have a clearer sense of the action captured in Roundhay Garden Scene thanks to the efforts Youtube-based film restorationist Denis Shiryaev, who’s used neural networks to bring the historic filmmore fully to life. Taking a scan of Le Prince’s original paper film, Shiryaev “manually cut this scan into individual frames and centered each image in the frame,” he says in the video at the top of the post. He then “added a stabilization algorithm and applied an aggressive face recognition neural network in order to add more details to the faces.” There followed adjustments for consistency in brightness, damage repairs, and the work of “an ensemble of neural networks” to upscale the footage to as high a resolution as possible, interpolating as many frames as possible. We may feel startled by the lifelike quality of the result in much the same way as 19th-century viewers by the Lumière Brothers’ train — which, as we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture, has also received the Shiryaev treatment.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
When we consider the many identities of David Bowie — Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, the Thin White Duke — we often neglect to include his transformation into an internet entrepreneur. In line with Bowie’s reputation for being ahead of his time in all endeavors, it happened several tech booms ago, in the late 1990s. Foreseeing the internet’s potential as a cultural and commercial force, he got ahead of it by launching not just his own web site (which some major artists lacked through the end of the century), but his own internet service provider. For $19.95 a month (£10.00 in the UK), BowieNet offered fans access not just to “high-speed” internet but to “David Bowie, his world, his friends, his fans, including live chats, live video feeds, chat rooms and bulletin boards.”
So announced the initial BowieNet press release published in August 1998, which also promised “live in-studio video feeds,” “text, audio and video messages from Bowie,” “Desktop themes including Bowie screensavers, wallpaper and icons,” and best of all, a “davidbowie e‑mail address (your na**@********ie.com).” While the dial-up of the internet connections of the day wasn’t quite equal to the task of reliably streaming video, many of BowieNet’s approximately 100,000 members still fondly remember the community cultivated on its message boards. “This was in effect a music-centric social network,” writes The Gardian’s Keith Stuart, “several years before the emergence of sector leaders like Friendster and Myspace.”
Unlike on the the vast social networks that would later develop, the man himself was known to drop in. Under the alias “Sailor,” writes Newsweek’s Zach Schonfeld, “Bowie would sometimes share updates and recommendations or respond to fan queries.” He might endorse an album (Arcade Fire’s debut Funeral earned a rave), express incredulity at rumors (of, say, his playing a concert with Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson to be beamed into outer space), crack jokes, or tell stories (of, say, the time he and John Lennon sat around calling into radio stations together). As Ars Technica’s interview with BowieNet co-founder Ron Roy confirms, Bowie didn’t just lend the enterprise his brand but was “tremendously involved from day one.” As Roy tells it, Bowie kept BowieNet fresh “by exploring new technologies to keep fans engaged and excited. He always preached [that] it’s about the experience, the new.”
It helped that Bowie wasn’t simply looking to capitalize on the rise of the internet. As the 1999 ZDTV interview at the top of the post reveals, he was already hooked on it himself. “The first thing I do is get e‑mails out of the way,” he says, describing the average day in his online life. “I’m e‑mail crazy. And then I’ll spend probably about an hour, maybe more, going through my site.” Even in the early days of “the controversial mp3 format,” he showed great enthusiasm for putting his music online. He continued doing so even after technology surpassed BowieNet, which discontinued its internet service in 2006. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic keeps much of the world at home, many high-profile artists have taken to the internet to keep the show going. David Bowie fans know that, were he still with us, he’d have been the first to do it — and do it, no doubt, the most interestingly.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Increasingly many of us in the 21st century have never used a typewriter — indeed, have never seen one in real life. But despite being deep into its obsolescence, the machine has a long cultural half-life. Seeing typewriters in classic and period films, for example, keeps an idea of their look and feel in our minds. Naturally it gets entangled with the romance of the writer, or rather the Writer, whom we imagine pounding away on a culturally iconic model: an Underwood, an Olvetti. “If Olivettis could talk, you’d get the novelist naked,” writes Philip Roth in The Anatomy Lesson. From the then-new electric IBM typewriters, however, you’d hear “only the smug, puritanical workmanlike hum telling of itself and all its virtues: I am a Correcting Selectric II. I never do anything wrong.”
Yet we underestimate the influence of the IBM Selectric, on not just writing but late-20th-century American life in general, at our peril. Introduced in 1961, this technologically revolutionary typewriter replaced the old “typebars” — those thin metal arms that whack a letter onto the page with each keystroke — with a “typeball,” a “compact unit containing all the letters and symbols of a keyboard, rotated and pivoted to the correct position before striking.”
So writes IBM’s Justine Jablonska in an essay on the versatility of the typeball, which could be swapped out and modified according to the needs of the user. In 1973, IBM could say even to those users who needed to type out not words, sentences, and paragraphs but dances that, yes, there’s a typeball for that.
Developed in collaboration with New York City’s Dance Notation Bureau, this unusual typeball “had special Labanotation symbols, developed in the 1920s by Hungarian dancer/choreographer Rudolf Laban to analyze and record movement and dance.” Each symbol’s location “showed which part of the body — arm, leg, torso — was to be used. The symbol’s shape indicated direction. The symbol’s shading showed the level of an arm or leg. And its length controlled the time value of a movement.” In total, writes Karen Hill at Zippy Facts, Labanotation had “88 different symbols, which could be arranged to form a complete vocabulary for recording movement of any kind, from ballet and modern to ethnic, even folk.” Beyond dance, the system could also record “movements in areas like sports, behavioral sciences, physical therapy, and even industrial operations.”
This particular typeball showcased the Selectric’s versatility, but some had higher hopes. In a 1975 paper, dance scholar Drid Williams compares its potential impact to that of “Gutenberg’s invention several centuries ago,” signaling that “the graphic linguistic sign can now be joined by its obvious counterpart, the printed human action sign.” But she also expresses regret that “ ‘the ball’ is being looked on by many as a mere practical aid to recording human movement and it is being associated with specialist fields like dance. As usual, concern with the syntagmata obscures the real issues of the paradigms.” Indeed. A more practical-minded assessment comes from Charles Ditchendorf, employed at the time at IBM’s Office Products Division. “To the best of my knowledge,” Jablonska quotes him as saying, I didn’t sell one.” But then, when has dance ever been enslaved to the market?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
While there are obviously much greater tragedies unfolding daily, it’s hard not to empathize with students who have watched countless special events—proms, commencements, spring sports, performances, hotly anticipated rites of passage—go poof.
In New York City, students in Parsons School of Design’s Narrative Spaces: Design Tools for Spatial Storytelling course were crestfallen to learn that their upcoming open-to-the-public exhibition of group and solo projects in the West Village—the centerpiece of the class and a huge opportunity to connect with an audience outside of the classroom—was suddenly off the menu.
Multidisciplinary artist Jeff Stark, who co-teaches the class with Pamela Parker, was disappointed on their behalves.
Stark’s own work, from Empire Drive In to Miss Rockaway Armada, is rooted in live experience, and New York City holds a special place in his heart. (He also edits the weekly email list Nonsense NYC, an invaluable resource for independent art and Do-It-Yourself events in the city.)
Student Rylie Cooke, an Australian who aspires to launch a design company, found that her research deepened her connection to artifacts she encountered at the Reliquary, as she came to appreciate the fabled Copacabana’s influence on the popular culture, food, and music of the period:
… with COVID-19 it became important to have this connection to the artifacts as I wasn’t able to physically touch or look at them when Parsons moved to online for the semester. I am a very hands-on creative and I love curating things, especially in an exhibit format.
Rather than scrap their goal of public exhibition, the class decided to take things into the virtual realm, hustling to adapt their original concepts to a purely screen-based experience, The New York Supper Club: From Nightlife to Social Distancing.
The plan to wow visitors with a period-appropriate table in the center of their West Village exhibition space became a grid of digital placemats that serve as portals to each project.
Cooke’s contribution, A Seat at the Copacabana, begins with an interview in which baseball great Mickey Mantle recounts getting into a cloakroom brawl as he and fellow New York Yankees celebrated a birthday with a Sammy Davis Jr. set. Recipes for steak and potatoes, Chicken a la King, rarebit, and arroz con pollo provide flavor for a floorshow represented by archival footage of “Let’s Do the Copacabana” starring Carmen Miranda, a Martin and Lewis appearance, and a dance rehearsal from 1945. The tour ends at the Copa’s current incarnation in Times Square, with a vision of pre-socially distanced contemporary merrymakers salsa-ing the night away.
(Navigate this exhibit using toolbar arrows at the bottom of the screen.)
Student Hongxi Chen’s investigations into The China Doll nightclub resulted in an elaborate interactive immersive experience on the topic of cultural appropriation:
The China Doll… was founded in 1946 by Caucasian stage producer Tom Ball, who deemed it the only “all-oriental” night club in New York. While the club sometimes played off “Oriental” stereotypes, and titled one of its shows “Slant-Eyed Scandals,” they featured Asian dancers and Asian singers presenting popular songs in a way New Yorkers had never seen before. The Dim interactive experience unfolds with the story of Thomas, a waiter at the China Doll.
As a junior in Parsons’ Design and Technology program, Chen had plenty of previous experience forging virtual environments, but working with a museum collection was new to him, as was collaborating on a virtual platform.
He sought Stark’s advice on creating vivid dialogue for his fictional waiter.
Chen stayed up until 7 am for two weeks, devouring open source tutorials in an attempt to wrangle and debug the many elements of his ambitious project—audio, video, character models and animation, software, game engines, and game server platform.
As Chen noted at the exhibition’s recent Zoom opening (an event that was followed by a digital dance party), the massive game can be a bit slow to load. Don’t worry, it’s worth the wait, especially as you will have a hand in the story, steering it to one of five different endings.
Chen, an international student, could not safely return to China and has not left his student apartment since mid-March, but gamely states that remaining in the same time zone as his school allowed him to communicate efficiently with his professors and the majority of his classmates. (Cooke is back home in Australia.)
Adds Chen:
Even though we are facing a difficult circumstance under the pandemic and had to pivot our original ideas into a virtual presentation, I’m glad that our class was able to quickly change plans and adapt to the situation. This… actually inspired me a lot and opened up ways to invite and connect people with virtual artwork.
(Apparently, I’m headed to Cafe Zanzibar, below, where the drinks are cheap, the aspirin is free, and Cab Calloway is a frequent headliner.)
Stark admits that initially, his students may not have shared his swooning response to the source material, but they share his love of New York City and the desire to “get in the thick of it.” By bringing a Generation Z perspective to this historical ephemera, they stake a claim, making work that could help the City Reliquary connect to a new audience.
Enter The New York Supper Club: From Nightlife to Social Distancing here.
Explore the City Reliquary online here, and join in the civic pride by participating in its weekly Instagram Live events, including Thursday Collectors’ Nights.
(All images used with permission of the artists and The City Reliquary)
However forward-looking its full-featured online presence made the Van Gogh Museum seem before, this particular moment has made it look like an even more prescient institution. With it and so many other brick-and-mortar museums temporarily closed due to the coronavirus pandemic, online is the only way any of us can enjoy them.
In addition to its existing resources on the web, the Van Gogh Museum has over the past month been uploading a private tour, all shot in 4K video. Much like the five-hour iPhone ad shot in the Hermitage about which we posted last month, this series provides a drifting, floating view of the museum’s galleries and the works they proudly display, all quite unlike any experience one could ever have had there in person.
In the six parts of the series that have gone up so far, with a seventh and final installment to come next, not a single other person appears to get between you and Van Gogh’s portraits, Van Gogh’s still lifes, Van Gogh’s scenes urban and rural. But you do get some accompaniment in the form of a full musical score, an element that has become quite important for this now-emerging form of cinematic, high-resolution museum tour video.
Though brief, this Van Gogh Museum tour in 4K covers a wide swath of the artist’s work, and will surely only whet the appetite of viewers who’ve been meaning to make the trip to Amsterdam themselves. Until then, we can take in Van Gogh’s “art of the future” using the technology of the present — the likes of which wouldn’t have appeared in even his wildest visions.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Limitations stimulate creativity. While that phrasing is credited to business-management scholar Henry Mintzberg, the idea itself has a long history. We know we work more fruitfully when we work within boundaries, and we’ve known ever since our capabilities were limited in ways barely imaginable today. With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic having temporarily redrawn the boundaries of our lives, many of us have already begun to rediscover our own creativity. Some have even done it on Zoom, the teleconferencing software used by businesses and institutions to keep their meetings and classes going even in a time of social distancing.
Instead of their bedrooms or offices, students and office workers have started appearing in settings like a 1970s disco, the Taj Mahal, and the starship Enterprise. The technology making this possible is the “virtual background,” explained in the official Zoom instructional video down below.
Word of the virtual background’s possibilities has spread through institutions everywhere. It certainly has at the Getty, whose digital editor Caitlin Shamberg notes that “the Getty’s Open Content program includes over 100,000 images that are free and downloadable. This means they’re also fair game to use as your own custom background.”
That last work, pictured above, has a certain metaphorical resonance with the situation the world now finds itself in, hoping though we are that the storm of COVID-19 is now passing rather than still coming. But while we’re sheltering from it — and continuing to carry on business as usual as best we can — we might as well get take every opportunity to get artistic. Find many more artistic images to download here.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
Imagine the pyramids of ancient Egypt, and a vivid image comes right to mind. But unless you happen to be an Egyptologist, that image may possess a great deal more vividness than it does detail. We all have a rough sense of the pyramids’ size (impressively large), shape (pyramidical), texture (crumbly), and setting (sand), almost wholly derived from images captured over the past century. But what about the pyramids in their heyday, more than 4,500 years ago? Do we know enough even to begin imagining how they looked, let alone how people made use of them? Harvard Egyptologist Peter Der Manuelian does, and in the video above he gives us a tour through 3D models that reconstruct the Giza pyramid complex (also known as the Giza necropolis) using both the best technology and the fullest knowledge available today.
“You’ll see we’ve had to remove modern structures and excavators, debris dumps,” says Der Manuelian as the camera flies, dronelike, in the direction of the Great Sphinx. “We studied the Nile, and we had to move it much closer to the Giza pyramids, because in antiquity, the Nile did flow closer. And we’ve tried to rebuild each and every structure.”
Of the Sphinx, this model boasts “the most accurate reconstruction that has ever been attempted so far,” and Der Manuelian shows it in two possible colors schemes, one with only the head painted, one with the entire body painted in “the reddish brown reserved for male figures.” He also shows the pyramid temple of Khafre, both in the near-completely ruined state in which it exists today, and in full digital reconstruction, complete with seated statues the Fourth-Dynasty pharaoh Khafre himself.
The model accommodates more than just the built environment. Der Manuelian shows a model bark with another statue being carried into one of the chambers, explaining that it allows researchers to determine “whether or not it’s big enough or small enough to actually fit between the doors of the temple.” Elsewhere in the model we see a re-enactment of the “Opening of the Mouth ceremony,” the “reanimation ceremony for the deceased king, meant to magically and ritually bring him back to life for the netherworld.” The rendering takes place inside the temple of the Pyramid of Khufu, peopled with human characters. But “how many should there be? What should they be wearing? Where are the regular Egyptians? Are they allowed anywhere near this ceremony, or indeed are they allowed anywhere near Giza at all?” The greater the detail in which researchers reconstruct the ancient world, the more such questions come to the surface.
In the video just above, Der Manuelian explains more about the importance of 3D modeling to Egyptology: how it uses the existing research, what it has helped modern researchers understand, and the promise it holds for the future. The latter includes much of interest even to non-Egyptologists, such as tourists who might like to familiarize themselves with Giza necropolis in the days when the Opening of the Mouth ceremonies still took place — or any era of their choice — before setting foot there themselves. These videos come from “Pyramids of Giza: Ancient Egyptian Art and Archaeology,” Der Manuelian’s online course at edX, a worthwhile learning experience if you’ve got your own such trip planned — or just the kind of fascination that has gripped people around the world since the Egyptomania of the nineteenth century. The technology with which we study Egypt has advanced greatly since then, but for many, the mysteries of ancient Egypt itself have only become more compelling.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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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