Customize Your Zoom Virtual Background with Free Works of Art

in Art, Technology | April 6th, 2020

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.”

From the Get­ty’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion Sham­berg offers such works suit­able for Zoom as Van Gogh’s Iris­es, Turn­er’s Van Tromp, going about to please his Mas­ters, Ships a Sea, get­ting a Good Wet­ting, and oth­er can­vass­es of such reli­ably pleas­ing set­tings as 18th-cen­tu­ry Venice and a 16th-cen­tu­ry for­est with a rab­bit. The Verge’s Natt Garun recent­ly round­ed up a few resources where you can find more promis­ing vir­tu­al-back­ground mate­r­i­al, from bin­go cards to beach­es to “pop cul­ture homes” includ­ing “Car­rie Bradshaw’s apart­ment from Sex and the City, your favorite Friends lofts, Sein­feld liv­ing rooms, and more.”

Here at Open Cul­ture, we’ll point you to the thir­ty world-class muse­ums that have put two mil­lion works of art online, many of which insti­tu­tions have made them avail­able for down­load. In this post appears, from the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai’s Under the Wave off Kana­gawa (whose evo­lu­tion to the sta­tus of an icon­ic ukiyo‑e print we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly cov­ered); from the Get­ty, an 18th-cen­tu­ry room “orig­i­nal­ly used as a bed­room or large cab­i­net in a pri­vate Parisian home at num­ber 18 place Vendôme”; and from the Los Ange­les Coun­ty Muse­um of Art, George Bel­lows’ The Com­ing Storm.

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.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Get­ty Dig­i­tal Archive Expands to 135,000 Free Images: Down­load High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of Paint­ings, Sculp­tures, Pho­tographs & Much Much More

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

LA Coun­ty Muse­um Makes 20,000 Artis­tic Images Avail­able for Free Down­load

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es

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 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 3D Tour Through Ancient Giza, Including the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx & More

in Architecture, History, Technology | March 31st, 2020

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.

via The Kid Should See This

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids Were Built: A New The­o­ry in 3D Ani­ma­tion

What the Great Pyra­mid of Giza Would’ve Looked Like When First Built: It Was Gleam­ing, Reflec­tive White

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Human All Too Human: A Roman Woman Vis­its the Great Pyra­mid in 120 AD, and Carves a Poem in Mem­o­ry of Her Deceased Broth­er

The Grate­ful Dead Play at the Egypt­ian Pyra­mids, in the Shad­ow of the Sphinx (1978)

A Drone’s Eye View of the Ancient Pyra­mids of Egypt, Sudan & Mex­i­co

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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A 5‑Hour, One-Take Cinematic Tour of Russia’s Hermitage Museum, Shot Entirely on an iPhone

in Museums, Technology | March 17th, 2020

In 2002, Russ­ian film­mak­er Alexan­der Sokurov made cin­e­ma his­to­ry with Russ­ian Ark, which dra­ma­tizes a wide swath of his home­land’s his­to­ry in a sin­gle, unbro­ken 96-minute shot. What’s more, he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors shot it all in a sin­gle loca­tion, one both rich with his­tor­i­cal res­o­nance and not exact­ly wide-open to movie shoots: St Peters­burg’s State Her­mitage Muse­um, whose com­plex includes the for­mer Win­ter Palace, offi­cial res­i­dence of Rus­si­a’s emper­ors from 1732 to until the 1917 rev­o­lu­tion. What view­er could for­get Russ­ian Ark’s breath­tak­ing final scene, which opens as the cam­era floats into the midst of a grand ball set in 1913 — tak­ing place in the very hall it would have in 1913?

Now, at least in terms of dura­tion, Apple has gone to the Her­mitage and done Sokurov one bet­ter: its new adver­tise­ment for the iPhone 11 Pro is a five-hour jour­ney through the entire muse­um, shot by film­mak­er Axinya Gog in one con­tin­u­ous take — all, of course, on the phone itself. Like Russ­ian Ark, it con­sti­tutes a cin­e­mat­ic achieve­ment not pos­si­ble before recent tech­no­log­i­cal advances. Sokurov demon­strat­ed the new pos­si­bil­i­ties of dig­i­tal video cam­era that could cap­ture film-like images; Gog demon­strates the new pos­si­bil­i­ties of a cam­era-phone with not only the bat­tery life to shoot five straight hours of video, but at a res­o­lu­tion that looks at least as good as the cut­ting-edge dig­i­tal video of 2002.

Just above appears the trail­er for the ad, which hints that what the full pro­duc­tion might lack in sto­ry­telling ambi­tions com­pared to a film like Russ­ian Ark, it makes up for in not just dura­tion but oth­er human ele­ments. Gog’s cam­era — or rather, iPhone — cap­tures a Her­mitage Muse­um with­out the usu­al crowds, strik­ing enough in itself, but also with the addi­tion of skilled dancers and musi­cians (even beyond those who record­ed the video’s score). This in addi­tion to no few­er than 588 works of art spread across 43 gal­leries, includ­ing paint­ings by Rem­brandt, Raphael, Car­avag­gio, and Rubens. The deep­er you go, the more you’ll real­ize that, even if you’ve spent seri­ous time in the Her­mitage your­self, you’ve nev­er had this kind of aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ence there before. It may sound exces­sive to say “watch to the end,” but if any five-hour video has ever mer­it­ed that insis­tence, here it is.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Romanovs’ Last Spec­tac­u­lar Ball Brought to Life in Col­or Pho­tographs (1903)

Russ­ian His­to­ry & Lit­er­a­ture Come to Life in Won­der­ful­ly Col­orized Por­traits: See Pho­tos of Tol­stoy, Chekhov, the Romanovs & More

The British Muse­um Is Now Open To Every­one: Take a Vir­tu­al Tour and See 4,737 Arti­facts, Includ­ing the Roset­ta Stone

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Brazil’s Nation­al Muse­um & Its Arti­facts: Google Dig­i­tized the Museum’s Col­lec­tion Before the Fate­ful Fire

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of The Uffizi Gallery in Flo­rence, the World-Famous Col­lec­tion of Renais­sance Art

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 or on Face­book.

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Paris Had a Moving Sidewalk in 1900, and a Thomas Edison Film Captured It in Action

in History, Technology | March 9th, 2020

It’s fair to say that few of us now mar­vel at mov­ing walk­ways, those stan­dard infra­struc­tur­al ele­ments of such util­i­tar­i­an spaces as air­port ter­mi­nals, sub­way sta­tions, and big-box stores. But there was a time when they astound­ed even res­i­dents of one of the most cos­mopoli­tan cities in the world. The inno­va­tion of the mov­ing side­walk demon­strat­ed at the Paris Expo­si­tion of 1900 (pre­vi­ous­ly seen here on Open Cul­ture when we fea­tured Lumière Broth­ers footage of that peri­od) com­mand­ed even Thomas Edis­on’s atten­tion. As Pale­o­fu­ture’s Matt Novak tells it at Smith­son­ian mag­a­zine, “Thomas Edi­son sent one of his pro­duc­ers, James Hen­ry White, to the Expo­si­tion and Mr. White shot at least 16 movies,” a clip of which footage you can see above.

White “had brought along a new pan­ning-head tri­pod that gave his films a new­found sense of free­dom and flow. Watch­ing the film, you can see chil­dren jump­ing into frame and even a man doff­ing his cap to the cam­era, pos­si­bly aware that he was being cap­tured by an excit­ing new tech­nol­o­gy while a fun nov­el­ty of the future chugs along under his feet.”

Novak also includes hand-col­ored pho­tographs from the Paris Exhi­bi­tion and quotes a New York Observ­er cor­re­spon­dent describ­ing the mov­ing side­walk as a “nov­el­ty” con­sist­ing of “three ele­vat­ed plat­forms, the first being sta­tion­ary, the sec­ond mov­ing at a mod­er­ate rate of speed, and the third at the rate of about six miles an hour.” Thus “the cir­cuit of the Expo­si­tion can be made with rapid­i­ty and ease by this con­trivance. It also affords a good deal of fun, for most of the vis­i­tors are unfa­mil­iar with this mode of tran­sit, and are awk­ward in its use.”

Novak fea­tures con­tem­po­rary images of the Paris Exhi­bi­tion’s mov­ing side­walk at Pale­o­fu­ture, found in the book Paris Expo­si­tion Repro­duced From the Offi­cial Pho­tographs. Its authors describe the trot­toir roulant as “a detached struc­ture like a rail­way train, arriv­ing at and pass­ing cer­tain points at stat­ed times” with­out a break. “In engi­neers’ lan­guage, it is an ‘end­less floor’ raised thir­ty feet above the lev­el of the ground, ever and ever glid­ing along the four sides of the square — a wood­en ser­pent with its tail in its mouth.” But the his­to­ry of the mov­ing walk­way did­n’t start in Paris: “In 1871 inven­tor Alfred Speer patent­ed a sys­tem of mov­ing side­walks that he thought would rev­o­lu­tion­ize pedes­tri­an trav­el in New York City,” as Novak notes, and the first one actu­al­ly built was built for Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Expo­si­tion — but it cost a nick­el to ride and “was unde­pend­able and prone to break­ing down,” mak­ing Paris’ ver­sion the more impres­sive spec­ta­cle.

Still, the Columbian Expo­si­tion’s vis­i­tors must have got a kick out of glid­ing down the pier with­out hav­ing to do the walk­ing them­selves. You can learn more about this first mov­ing walk­way and its suc­ces­sors, the one at the Paris Exhi­bi­tion includ­ed, from the Lit­tle Car video above. How­ev­er much these ear­ly mod­els may look like quaint turn-of-the cen­tu­ry nov­el­ties, some still see in the tech­nol­o­gy gen­uine promise for the future of pub­lic tran­sit. Mov­ing walk­ways work well, writes Tree­hug­ger’s Lloyd Alter, “when the walk­ing dis­tance and time is just a bit too long.” And they remind us that “trans­porta­tion should be about more than just get­ting from A to B; it should be a plea­sure as well.” Parisians “kept the Eif­fel Tow­er from the exhi­bi­tion” — it had been built for the 1889 World’s Fair — but “it is too bad they did­n’t keep this, a sort of mov­ing High Line that is both trans­porta­tion and enter­tain­ment.”

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pris­tine Footage Lets You Revis­it Life in Paris in the 1890s: Watch Footage Shot by the Lumière Broth­ers

Watch Scenes from Belle Époque Paris Vivid­ly Restored with Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence (Cir­ca 1890)

Beau­ti­ful, Col­or Pho­tographs of Paris Tak­en 100 Years Ago—at the Begin­ning of World War I & the End of La Belle Époque

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

How French Artists in 1899 Envi­sioned Life in the Year 2000: Draw­ing the Future

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 or on Face­book.

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Every Possible Melody Has Been Copyrighted, and They’re Now Released into the Public Domain

in Law, Music, Technology | March 4th, 2020

When Helen Keller was only twelve years old, she stood accused of pla­gia­riz­ing a short sto­ry. A tri­bunal acquit­ted her of the charges, but when her dear friend Mark Twain read about the inci­dent years lat­er, he stren­u­ous­ly protest­ed, exclaim­ing in a 1903 let­ter, “the ker­nel, the soul—let us go fur­ther and say the sub­stance, the bulk, the actu­al and valu­able mate­r­i­al of all human utterance—is pla­gia­rism.”

Giv­en the finite num­ber of pos­si­ble nar­ra­tives, and com­bi­na­tions of phras­es, words, and syl­la­bles, he’s got a point, though it wouldn’t hold up in court where the ques­tion of intent comes into play.

Liti­gious artists and their estates fre­quent­ly sue oth­er artists whose work is too close to what they claim as their own inven­tion. Twain might say (his own copy­rights aside) that the idea of invent­ing art from scratch is an “owlish­ly idi­ot­ic and grotesque” fan­ta­sy. He might say so, for exam­ple, of the recent legal deci­sion that keeps Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” a form of pri­vate prop­er­ty, despite its author’s desire for any­one and every­one to sing and record the song. (Guthrie’s daugh­ter Nora claims she is pro­tect­ing it from “evil forces” who would mis­use it.)

If lit­er­a­ture is most­ly pla­gia­rism, what about music? How is it pos­si­ble to copy­right melodies when they float through the cul­tur­al ether, appear­ing in sim­i­lar forms in song after song around the world? What would have become of the blues, blue­grass, and near­ly every form of tra­di­tion­al folk music from time immemo­r­i­al had copy­right law pre­vent­ed unau­tho­rized bor­row­ings? These are ques­tions judges and juries often pon­der when faced with two sim­i­lar sound­ing pieces of music.

In one recent case, for exam­ple, a jury found that pop star Katy Per­ry had “infringed upon the copy­right of Flame, a Chris­t­ian rap­per who’d post­ed a song” with the same melody as her song “Dark Horse,” even though Per­ry “insist­ed that she’d nev­er heard of the song or the rap­per” as Alex­is Madri­gal writes at The Atlantic. “For some musi­cians, musi­col­o­gists, and lawyers, the ver­dict felt scary; after all, large num­bers of songs now live on Sound­Cloud and YouTube. It became think­able to ask: Could the world run out of orig­i­nal melodies?”

This seems unlike­ly giv­en the “func­tion­al­ly infi­nite pos­si­bil­i­ties” for melodies result­ing from “all the notes and all the tra­di­tions of music around the world.” How­ev­er, when it comes to West­ern pop music and the more lim­it­ed para­me­ters that gov­ern its com­po­si­tion, the num­ber reach­es a more “com­pre­hen­si­ble part of fini­tude.” Pro­gram­mer, lawyer, and musi­cian Damien Riehl and his fel­low pro­gram­mer and musi­cian Noah Rubin decid­ed to “brute force” their way out of the prob­lem entire­ly, as Riehl tells Adam Neely above, using an algo­rithm that gen­er­at­ed all of the melodies in the range they’d seen in copy­right law­suits.

By gen­er­at­ing all pos­si­ble melodies above the middle‑C octave as MIDI files, the two artists hope to head off cost­ly infringe­ment lit­i­ga­tion that can hob­ble cre­ative free­dom. Riehl explains the inge­nious con­cept in the TEDx Min­neapo­lis talk at the top of the post, begin­ning with the issue of “sub­con­scious” copy­right infringe­ment that some­times forces artists to pay out mil­lions in dam­ages, as hap­pened to George Har­ri­son when he was sued for pla­gia­riz­ing “My Sweet Lord” from the Chif­fons’ “He’s So Fine.”

Maybe what the law has not con­sid­ered, says Riehl, is that “since the begin­ning of time, the num­ber of melodies is remark­ably finite.” Rather than invent­ing out of whole cloth, artists choose melodies from an already extant “melod­ic dataset” to which every­one poten­tial­ly has men­tal access. Now, every­one could poten­tial­ly have legal access. By com­mit­ting melod­ic data to a “tan­gi­ble for­mat,” Saman­tha Cole reports at Vice, “it’s con­sid­ered copy­right­ed.” Or as Riehl explains:

Under copy­right law, num­bers are facts, and under copy­right law, facts either have thin copy­right, almost no copy­right, or no copy­right at all. So maybe if these num­bers have exist­ed since the begin­ning of time and we’re just pluck­ing them out, maybe melodies are just math, which is just facts, which is not copy­rightable.

Riehl and Rubin have released their bil­lions of melodies under a Cre­ative Com­mons Zero license, mean­ing they have “no rights reserved” and are sim­i­lar to pub­lic domain. Avail­able as open-source down­loads on Github and the Inter­net Archive, along with the code for the algo­rithm the artists used to make them, the dataset might actu­al­ly have side­stepped the prob­lem of musi­cal copy­right infringe­ment with tech­nol­o­gy, though whether the law, writes Cole, with its “com­pli­cat­ed and often non­sen­si­cal” appli­ca­tion, will agree is anoth­er issue entire­ly.

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

Zep­pelin Took My Blues Away: An Illus­trat­ed His­to­ry of Zeppelin’s “Copy­right Indis­cre­tions”

Down­load Theft! A His­to­ry of Music, a New Free Graph­ic Nov­el Explor­ing 2,000 Years of Musi­cal Bor­row­ing

Pub­lic Domain Day Is Final­ly Here!: Copy­right­ed Works Have Entered the Pub­lic Domain Today for the First Time in 21 Years

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

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

in History, Technology | February 26th, 2020

“When I get back from school I basi­cal­ly bar­ri­cade myself in the apart­ment and nev­er go out at night,” says the nar­ra­tor of Michel Houelle­bec­q’s Les Par­tic­ules élé­men­taires. “Some­times I go on the Mini­tel and check out the sex sites, that’s about it.” Here those read­ing the Eng­lish trans­la­tion of the nov­el (in this case Frank Wyn­ne’s, called Atom­ised) will tilt their heads: the “Mini­tel”? Though he writes more or less real­is­tic nov­els, Houelle­becq does come out with the occa­sion­al sci­ence-fic­tion­al flour­ish. But in France, the Mini­tel was a very real tech­no­log­i­cal and cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. “What the TGV was to train trav­el, the Pom­pi­dou Cen­tre to art, and the Ari­ane project to rock­etry,” writes BBC News’ Hugh Schofield, “in the ear­ly 1980s the Mini­tel was to the world of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions.”

Com­bin­ing a mon­i­tor, key­board, and modem all in one beige plas­tic pack­age, the Mini­tel ter­mi­nal — known as the “Lit­tle French Box” — was once a com­mon sight in French house­holds. With it, writes Julien Mail­land in the Atlantic, “one could read the news, engage in mul­ti-play­er inter­ac­tive gam­ing, gro­cery shop for same-day deliv­ery, sub­mit nat­ur­al lan­guage requests like ‘reserve the­ater tick­ets in Paris,’ pur­chase said tick­ets using a cred­it card, remote­ly con­trol ther­mostats and oth­er home appli­ances, man­age a bank account, chat, and date.” All this at a time when, as Schofield puts it, “the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank man­ag­er or queue­ing for tick­ets at the sta­tion.” And what’s more, the French got their Mini­tel ter­mi­nals for free.

Con­ceived in the “white heat of Pres­i­dent Valery Gis­card d’Es­taing’s tech­no­log­i­cal great leap for­ward of the late 1970s,” Mini­tel appeared as one of the sig­nal efforts of a nation­wide devel­op­men­tal project. “France was lag­ging behind on telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions,” writes the Guardian’s Angelique Chrisafis, “with the nation’s homes under­served by tele­phones – par­tic­u­lar­ly in rur­al areas.” But soon after the roll­out of the Mini­tel, usage explod­ed such that, “at the height of its glo­ry in the mid-1990s, the French owned about 9m Mini­tel devices, with 25m users con­nect­ing to more than 23,000 ser­vices.” Ini­tial­ly pitched to the pub­lic as a replace­ment for the paper tele­phone direc­to­ry, the Mini­tel evolved to pro­vide many of the ser­vices for which most of the world now relies on the mod­ern inter­net.

Though devel­oped and imple­ment­ed by the French gov­ern­ment, Mini­tel incor­po­rat­ed ser­vices by inde­pen­dent providers. “The most lucra­tive ser­vice turned out to be some­thing no-one had envis­aged — the so-called Mini­tel Rose,” writes Schofield. “With names like 3615-Cum (actu­al­ly it’s from the Latin for ‘with’), these were sexy chat-lines in which men” — Houelle­becq-pro­tag­o­nist types and oth­er — “paid to type out their fan­tasies to anony­mous ‘dates.’ ” Not long before Minitel’s dis­con­tin­u­a­tion in 2012, when more than 800,000 ter­mi­nals were still active, “bill­boards fea­tur­ing lip-pout­ing lovelies adver­tis­ing the delights of 3615-some­thing were ubiq­ui­tous across the coun­try.” 3615, as every one­time Mini­tel user knows, were the most com­mon ini­tial dig­its for Mini­tel ser­vices, each of which had to be hand-dialed on a tele­phone before the ter­mi­nal could con­nect to it.

You can see this process in the Retro Man Cave video at the top of the post, which tells the sto­ry of the Mini­tel and shows how its ter­mi­nals actu­al­ly worked. (Retro-mind­ed Fran­coph­o­nes may also enjoy the 1985 TV doc­u­men­tary just above.) The host draws a com­par­i­son between Mini­tel and the much less suc­cess­ful Pres­tel, a sim­i­lar ser­vice launched in the Unit­ed King­dom in 1979. It might also remind Cana­di­ans of a cer­tain age of Telidon, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. But no oth­er oth­er pre-inter­net video­tex sys­tem made any­where the impact of Mini­tel, which lives on in France as a cul­tur­al touch­stone, if no longer as a fix­ture of every­day life. As Valérie Schafer, co-author of the book Mini­tel: France’s Dig­i­tal Child­hood puts it to Chri­asafis, “There’s a nos­tal­gia for an era when the French devel­oped new ideas, took risks on ideas that did­n’t just look to the US or out­side mod­els; a time when we want­ed to invent our own voice.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

Dis­cov­er the Lost Ear­ly Com­put­er Art of Telidon, Canada’s TV Pro­to-Inter­net from the 1970s

How to Send an E‑mail: A 1984 British Tele­vi­sion Broad­cast Explains This “Sim­ple” Process

The Sto­ry of Habi­tat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Play­ing Game (1986)

John Tur­tur­ro Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to the World Wide Web in 1999: Watch A Beginner’s Guide To The Inter­net

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 or on Face­book.

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Electronic Musician Shows How He Uses His Prosthetic Arm to Control a Music Synthesizer with His Thoughts

in Health, Music, Neuroscience, Technology | February 20th, 2020

The tech­no-futur­ist prophets of the late 20th cen­tu­ry, from J.G. Bal­lard to William Gib­son to Don­na Har­away, were right, it turns out, about the inti­mate phys­i­cal unions we would form with our machines. Har­away, pro­fes­sor emer­i­tus of the His­to­ry of Con­scious­ness and Fem­i­nist Stud­ies at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, San­ta Cruz, pro­claimed her­self a cyborg back in 1985. Whether read­ers took her ideas as metaphor or pro­lep­tic social and sci­en­tif­ic fact hard­ly mat­ters in hind­sight. Her voice was pre­dic­tive of the every­day bio­met­rics and mechan­ics that lay just around the bend.

It can seem we are a long way, cul­tur­al­ly, from the decade when Haraway’s work became required read­ing in “under­grad­u­ate cur­ricu­lum at count­less uni­ver­si­ties.” But as Hari Kun­zru wrote in 1997, “in terms of the gen­er­al shift from think­ing of indi­vid­u­als as iso­lat­ed from the ‘world’ to think­ing of them as nodes on net­works, the 1990s may well be remem­bered as the begin­ning of the cyborg era.” Three decades lat­er, net­worked implants that auto­mate med­ical data track­ing and analy­sis and reg­u­late dosages have become big busi­ness, and mil­lions feed their vitals dai­ly into fit­ness track­ers and mobile devices and upload them to servers world­wide.

So, fine, we are all cyborgs now, but the usu­al use of that word tends to put us in mind of a more dra­mat­ic meld­ing of human and machine. Here too, we find the cyborg has arrived, in the form of pros­thet­ic limbs that can be con­trolled by the brain. Psy­chol­o­gist, DJ, and elec­tron­ic musi­cian Bertolt Mey­er has such a pros­the­sis, as he demon­strates in the video above. Born with­out a low­er left arm, he received a robot­ic replace­ment that he can move by send­ing sig­nals to the mus­cles that would con­trol a nat­ur­al limb. He can rotate his hand 360 degrees and use it for all sorts of tasks.

Prob­lem is, the tech­nol­o­gy has not quite caught up with Meyer’s need for speed and pre­ci­sion in manip­u­lat­ing the tiny con­trols of his mod­u­lar syn­the­siz­ers. So Mey­er, his artist hus­band Daniel, and synth builder Chrisi of KOMA Elek­tron­ik set to work on bypass­ing man­u­al con­trol alto­geth­er, with a pros­thet­ic device that attach­es to Meyer’s arm where the hand would be, and works as a con­troller for his syn­the­siz­er. He can change para­me­ters using “the sig­nals from my body that nor­mal­ly con­trol the hand,” he writes on his YouTube page. “For me, this feels like con­trol­ling the synth with my thoughts.”

Mey­er walks us through the process of build­ing his first pro­to­types in an Inspec­tor Gad­get-meets-Kraftwerk dis­play of ana­logue inge­nu­ity. We might find our­selves won­der­ing: if a hand­ful of musi­cians, artists, and audio engi­neers can turn a pros­thet­ic robot­ic arm into a mod­u­lar synth con­troller that trans­mits brain­waves, what kind of cyber­net­ic enhancements—musical and otherwise—might be com­ing soon from major research lab­o­ra­to­ries?

What­ev­er the state of cyborg tech­nol­o­gy out­side Meyer’s garage, his bril­liant inven­tion shows us one thing: the human organ­ism can adapt to being plugged into the unlike­li­est of machines. Show­ing us how he uses the Syn­Limb to con­trol a fil­ter in one of his syn­the­siz­er banks, Mey­er says, “I don’t even have to think about it. I just do it. It’s zero effort because I’m so used to pro­duc­ing this mus­cle sig­nal.”

Advance­ments in bio­me­chan­i­cal tech­nol­o­gy have giv­en dis­abled indi­vid­u­als a sig­nif­i­cant amount of restored func­tion. And as gen­er­al­ly hap­pens with major upgrades to acces­si­bil­i­ty devices, they also show us how we might all become even more close­ly inte­grat­ed with machines in the near future.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Inge­nious Sign Lan­guage Inter­preters Are Bring­ing Music to Life for the Deaf: Visu­al­iz­ing the Sound of Rhythm, Har­mo­ny & Melody

Eve­lyn Glen­nie (a Musi­cian Who Hap­pens to Be Deaf) Shows How We Can Lis­ten to Music with Our Entire Bod­ies

Neu­rosym­pho­ny: A High-Res­o­lu­tion Look into the Brain, Set to the Music of Brain Waves

Twerk­ing, Moon­walk­ing AI Robots–They’re Now Here

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

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Scientist Creates a Working Rotary Cellphone

in Technology | February 17th, 2020

In pop­u­lar his­to­ries of the mobile phone, and of the smart­phone in par­tic­u­lar, you will rarely see men­tion of IBM’s 1992 Simon, a smart­phone invent­ed before the word “smart­phone.” “You could… use the Simon to send and receive emails, fax­es, and pages,” writes Busi­ness Insid­er. “There were also a suite of built-in fea­tures includ­ing a notes col­lec­tion you could write in [with a sty­lus], an address book that looked like a file fold­er, cal­en­dar, world clock, and a way to sched­ule appoint­ments.”

Nifty, eh? But the Simon was born too soon, it seems, and its unsexy design—like a cord­less hand­set with a long, rec­tan­gu­lar screen where the num­ber pad would be—proved less than entic­ing. “IBM did man­age to sell approx­i­mate­ly 50,000 units,” a piti­ful num­ber next to the iPhone’s first year sales of 6.1 mil­lion. The Simon was an evo­lu­tion­ary dead end, while the iPhone and its imi­ta­tors changed the def­i­n­i­tion of the word “phone.”

No longer is it nec­es­sary even to spec­i­fy that one’s tele­phone is of the “smart” vari­ety. We can spend all day on our devices with­out ever mak­ing or answer­ing a call. Is this devel­op­ment a good thing? No mat­ter how we ask or answer the ques­tion, it may do lit­tle to change the course of tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment or our depen­dence on the touch­screen com­put­ers in our pock­ets.

That is, unless we have the abil­i­ty to redesign our mobile phone our­selves, as Jus­tine Haupt—a sci­en­tist in the Instru­men­ta­tion Divi­sion at the Brookhaven Nation­al Lab­o­ra­to­ry—has done. You’ll find no men­tion of any­thing like her rotary cell­phone in any his­to­ry of mobile telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions. No one would have seri­ous­ly con­sid­ered build­ing such a thing, except as an anachro­nis­tic nov­el­ty.

But Haupt’s rotary cell­phone is not a visu­al gag or piece of con­cep­tu­al art. It’s a work­ing device she built, osten­si­bly, for seri­ous rea­sons. “In a finicky, annoy­ing, touch­screen world of hyper­con­nect­ed peo­ple using phones they have no con­trol over or under­stand­ing of,” she writes, “I want­ed some­thing that would be entire­ly mine, per­son­al, and absolute­ly tac­tile, while also giv­ing me an excuse for not tex­ting.”

Haup­t’s rea­son­ing calls to mind J.G. Bal­lard’s com­ments on the car as “the last machine whose basic tech­nol­o­gy and func­tion we can all under­stand.” She lays out the rotary cellphone’s impres­sive fea­tures in the bul­let­ed list below:

  • Real, remov­able anten­na with an SMA con­nec­tor. Recep­tions is excel­lent, and if I real­ly want to I could always attach a direc­tion­al anten­na.
  • When I want a phone I don’t have to nav­i­gate through menus to get to the phone “appli­ca­tion.” That’s bull­shit.
  • If I want to call my hus­band, I can do so by press­ing a sin­gle ded­i­cat­ed phys­i­cal key which is ded­i­cat­ed to him. No menus. The point isn’t to use the rotary dial every sin­gle time I want to make a call, which would get tire­some for dai­ly use. The peo­ple I call most often are stored, and if I have to dial a new num­ber or do some­thing like set the vol­ume, then I can use the fun and sat­is­fy­ing-to-use rotary dial.
  • Near­ly instan­ta­neous, high res­o­lu­tion dis­play of sig­nal strength and bat­tery lev­el. No sig­nal meter­ing lag, and my LED bar­graph gives 10 incre­ments of res­o­lu­tion instead of just 4.
  • The ePa­per dis­play is bista­t­ic, mean­ing it does­n’t take any ener­gy to dis­play a fixed mes­sage.
  • When I want to change some­thing about the phone’s behav­ior, I just do it.
  • The pow­er switch is an actu­al slide switch. No hold­ing down a stu­pid but­ton to make it turn off and not being sure it real­ly is turn­ing off or what.

I wouldn’t hold my breath for a pro­duc­tion run, but “it’s not just a show-and-tell piece,” Haupt insists. “It fits in a pock­et; it’s rea­son­ably com­pact; call­ing the peo­ple I most often call if faster than with my old phone, and the bat­tery lasts almost 24 hours.” For the rest of us, it’s a con­ver­sa­tion starter: in less obvi­ous­ly quirky, retro ways, how could we reimag­ine mobile phones to make them less “smart” (i.e. less dis­tract­ing and inva­sive) and more per­son­al and cus­tomiz­able, while also enhanc­ing their core func­tion­al­i­ty as devices that keep us con­nect­ed to impor­tant peo­ple in our lives?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

Film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Pho­tog­ra­phy

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

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

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