The CIA’s Rectal Tool Kit for Spies–Created for Truly Desperate Situations During The Cold War

in History, Technology | March 15th, 2019

Though glob­al espi­onage remains a going con­cern in the 21st cen­tu­ry, some­how the pop­u­lar sto­ries we tell about it return again and again to the Cold War. Maybe it has to do with the demand those most­ly pre-dig­i­tal decades made upon the phys­i­cal inge­nu­ity of spies as well as the tools of spy­craft. Take, for instance, one par­tic­u­lar­ly inge­nious CIA-issued tool kit on dis­play at the Inter­na­tion­al Spy Muse­um in Wash­ing­ton, D.C. “Filled with escape tools,” says the Spy Muse­um’s web site, “this kit could be stashed inside the body where it would not be found dur­ing a search.” Take one guess as to where inside the body, exact­ly, it could be stashed.

You can get a clos­er look at the rec­tal tool kit in the Atlas Obscu­ra video above. This “tight­ly sealed, pill-shaped con­tain­er full of tools that could aid an escape from var­i­ous sticky sit­u­a­tions,” as that site’s Lizzie Philip describes it, “was issued to CIA oper­a­tives dur­ing the height of the Cold War.”

Built to con­tain a vari­ety of escape tools like “drill bits, saws and knives,” it pre­sent­ed quite an engi­neer­ing chal­lenge: its mate­ri­als, one needs hard­ly add, “could not splin­ter or cre­ate sharp edges that could injure users,” and “it had to seal tight­ly to not let any­thing seep in or poke out.” Upon see­ing an item like this, which com­mands so much atten­tion at the Spy Muse­um, one won­ders whether all the spy­ing that went on dur­ing Cold War was real­ly so glam­orous after all.

Has it crossed the mind of, say, John Le Car­ré, his writ­ing career a near­ly six­ty-year-long defla­tion of the pre­ten­sions of spy­craft, to write about the ins and outs of rec­tal tool kits? But then, per­son­al expe­ri­ence has grant­ed him much more knowl­edge about the tac­tics of British espi­onage than those of the Amer­i­can vari­ety. As sure­ly as he knows the MI5’s offi­cial mot­to, “Reg­num Defende,” he must also know the unof­fi­cial mot­to that pokes fun at the orga­ni­za­tion’s aggres­sive cul­ture of blame avoid­ance, “Rec­tum Defende” — words that, in light of the knowl­edge about just where the agents of Britain’s main ally were stor­ing their tools, take on a whole new mean­ing.

via Atlas Obscu­ra

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The CIA’s For­mer Chief of Dis­guise Show How Spies Use Cos­tumes in Under­cov­er Oper­a­tions

How the CIA Helped Shape the Cre­ative Writ­ing Scene in Amer­i­ca

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less, Kafkaesque Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

How the CIA Secret­ly Fund­ed Abstract Expres­sion­ism Dur­ing the Cold War

The C.I.A.’s “Bes­tiary of Intel­li­gence Writ­ing” Sat­i­rizes Spook Jar­gon with Mau­rice Sendak-Style Draw­ings

19-Year-Old Stu­dent Uses Ear­ly Spy Cam­era to Take Can­did Street Pho­tos (Cir­ca 1895)

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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Buckminster Fuller Rails Against the “Nonsense of Earning a Living”: Why Work Useless Jobs When Technology & Automation Can Let Us Live More Meaningful Lives

in Art, Creativity, Economics, Education, Politics, Technology | March 13th, 2019

We are a haunt­ed species: haunt­ed by the specter of cli­mate change, of eco­nom­ic col­lapse, and of automa­tion mak­ing our lives redun­dant. When Marx used the specter metaphor in his man­i­festo, he was iron­i­cal­ly invok­ing Goth­ic tropes. But Com­mu­nism was not a boogey­man. It was a com­ing real­i­ty, for a time at least. Like­wise, we face very real and sub­stan­tial com­ing real­i­ties. But in far too many instances, they are also man­u­fac­tured, under ide­olo­gies that insist there is no alter­na­tive.

But let’s assume there are oth­er ways to order our pri­or­i­ties, such as valu­ing human life as an end in itself. Per­haps then we could treat the threat of automa­tion as a ghost: insub­stan­tial, imma­te­r­i­al, maybe scary but harm­less. Or treat it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty to order our lives the way we want. We could stop invent­ing bull­shit, low-pay­ing, waste­ful jobs that con­tribute to cycles of pover­ty and envi­ron­men­tal degra­da­tion. We could slash the num­ber of hours we work and spend time with peo­ple and pur­suits we love.

We have been taught to think of this sce­nario as a fan­ta­sy. Or, as Buck­min­ster Fuller declared in 1970—on the thresh­old of the “Malthu­sian-Dar­win­ian” wave of neolib­er­al thought to come—“We keep invent­ing jobs because of this false idea that every­body has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must jus­ti­fy his right to exist.” In cur­rent par­lance, every per­son must some­how “add val­ue” to share­hold­ers’ port­fo­lios. The share­hold­ers them­selves are under no oblig­a­tion to return the favor.

What about adding val­ue to our own lives? “The true busi­ness of peo­ple,” says Fuller, “should be to go back to school and think about what­ev­er it was they were think­ing about before some­body came along and told them they had to earn a liv­ing.” Against the “spe­cious notion” that every­one should have to make a wage to live–this “non­sense of earn­ing a living”–he takes a more mag­nan­i­mous view: “It is a fact today that one in ten thou­sand of us can make a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of sup­port­ing all the rest,” who then may go on to make mil­lions of small break­throughs of their own.

He may have sound­ed over­con­fi­dent at the time. But fifty years lat­er, we see engi­neers, devel­op­ers, and ana­lysts of all kinds pro­claim­ing the com­ing age of automa­tion in our life­times, with a major­i­ty of jobs to be ful­ly or par­tial­ly auto­mat­ed in 10–15 years. It is a tech­no­log­i­cal break­through capa­ble of dis­pens­ing with huge num­bers of peo­ple, unless its ben­e­fits are wide­ly shared. The cor­po­rate world sticks its head in the sand and issues guide­lines for retrain­ing, a solu­tion that will still leave mass­es unem­ployed. No mat­ter the state of the most recent jobs report, seri­ous loss­es in near­ly every sec­tor, espe­cial­ly man­u­fac­tur­ing and ser­vice work, are unavoid­able.

The jobs we invent have changed since Fuller’s time, become more con­tin­gent and less secure. But the obses­sion with cre­at­ing them, no mat­ter their impact or intent, has only grown, a run­away delu­sion no one can seem to stop. Should we fear automa­tion? Only if we col­lec­tive­ly decide the cur­rent course of action is all there is, that “every­body has to earn a living”—meaning turn a profit—or drop dead. As Con­gress­woman Alexan­dria Ocasio-Cortez—echoing Fuller—put it recent­ly at SXSW, “we live in a soci­ety where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our prob­lem…. We should not be haunt­ed by the specter of being auto­mat­ed out of work.”

“We should be excit­ed about automa­tion,” she went on, “because what it could poten­tial­ly mean is more time to edu­cate our­selves, more time cre­at­ing art, more time invest­ing in and inves­ti­gat­ing the sci­ences.” How­ev­er that might be achieved, through sub­si­dized health, edu­ca­tion, and basic ser­vices, new New Deal and Civ­il Rights poli­cies, a Uni­ver­sal Basic Income, or some cre­ative syn­the­sis of all of the above, it will not pro­duce a utopia—no polit­i­cal solu­tion is up that task. But con­sid­er­ing the ben­e­fits of sub­si­diz­ing our human­i­ty, and the alter­na­tive of let­ting its val­ue decline, it seems worth a shot to try what econ­o­mist Bill Black calls the “pro­gres­sive pol­i­cy core,” which, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, hap­pens to be “cen­trist in terms of the elec­torate’s pref­er­ences.”

via Kot­tke

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

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

Every­thing I Know: 42 Hours of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Vision­ary Lec­tures Free Online (1975)

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

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Artificial Intelligence Identifies the Six Main Arcs in Storytelling: Welcome to the Brave New World of Literary Criticism

in Computer Science, Literature, Technology | March 8th, 2019

Is the sin­gu­lar­i­ty upon us? AI seems poised to replace every­one, even artists whose work can seem like an invi­o­lably human indus­try. Or maybe not. Nick Cave’s poignant answer to a fan ques­tion might per­suade you a machine will nev­er write a great song, though it might mas­ter all the moves to write a good one. An AI-writ­ten nov­el did almost win a Japan­ese lit­er­ary award. A suit­ably impres­sive feat, even if much of the author­ship should be attrib­uted to the program’s human design­ers.

But what about lit­er­ary crit­i­cism? Is this an art that a machine can do con­vinc­ing­ly? The answer may depend on whether you con­sid­er it an art at all. For those who do, no arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence will ever prop­er­ly devel­op the the­o­ry of mind need­ed for sub­tle, even mov­ing, inter­pre­ta­tions. On the oth­er hand, one group of researchers has suc­ceed­ed in using “sophis­ti­cat­ed com­put­ing pow­er, nat­ur­al lan­guage pro­cess­ing, and reams of dig­i­tized text,” writes Atlantic edi­tor Adri­enne LaFrance, “to map the nar­ra­tive pat­terns in a huge cor­pus of lit­er­a­ture.” The name of their lit­er­ary crit­i­cism machine? The Hedo­nome­ter.

We can treat this as an exer­cise in com­pil­ing data, but it’s arguable that the results are on par with work from the com­par­a­tive mythol­o­gy school of James Fra­zier and Joseph Camp­bell. A more imme­di­ate com­par­i­son might be to the very deft, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly sub­tle, Kurt Von­negut, who—before he wrote nov­els like Slaugh­ter­house Five and Cat’s Cra­dle—sub­mit­ted a master’s the­sis in anthro­pol­o­gy to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go. His project did the same thing as the machine, 35 years ear­li­er, though he may not have had the where­with­al to read “1,737 Eng­lish-lan­guage works of fic­tion between 10,000 and 200,000 words long” while strug­gling to fin­ish his grad­u­ate pro­gram. (His the­sis, by the way, was reject­ed.)

Those num­bers describe the dataset from Project Guten­berg fed into the The Hedo­nome­ter by the com­put­er sci­en­tists at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ade­laide. After the com­put­er fin­ished “read­ing,” it then plot­ted “the emo­tion­al tra­jec­to­ry” of all of the sto­ries using a “sen­ti­ment analy­sis to gen­er­ate an emo­tion­al arc for each work.” What it found were six broad cat­e­gories of sto­ry, list­ed below:

  1. Rags to Rich­es (rise)
  2. Rich­es to Rags (fall)
  3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
  4. Icarus (rise then fall)
  5. Cin­derel­la (rise then fall then rise)
  6. Oedi­pus (fall then rise then fall)

How does this endeav­or com­pare with Vonnegut’s project? (See him present the the­o­ry below.) The nov­el­ist used more or less the same method­ol­o­gy, in human form, to come up with eight uni­ver­sal sto­ry arcs or “shapes of sto­ries.” Von­negut him­self left out the Rags to Rich­es cat­e­go­ry; he called it an anom­aly, though he did have a head­ing for the same ris­ing-only sto­ry arc—the Cre­ation Story—which he deemed an uncom­mon shape for West­ern fic­tion. He did include the Cin­derel­la arc, and was pleased by his dis­cov­ery that its shape mir­rored the New Tes­ta­ment arc, which he also includ­ed in his schema, an act the AI sure­ly would have judged redun­dant.

Con­tra Von­negut, the AI found that one-fifth of all the works it ana­lyzed were Rags-to-Rich­es sto­ries. It deter­mined that this arc was far less pop­u­lar with read­ers than “Oedi­pus,” “Man in a Hole,” and “Cin­derel­la.” Its analy­sis does get much more gran­u­lar, and to allay our sus­pi­cions, the researchers promise they did not con­trol the out­come of the exper­i­ment. “We’re not impos­ing a set of shapes,” says lead author Andy Rea­gan, Ph.D. can­di­date in math­e­mat­ics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Ver­mont. “Rather: the math and machine learn­ing have iden­ti­fied them.”

But the authors do pro­vide a lot of their own inter­pre­ta­tion of the data, from choos­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tive texts—like Har­ry Pot­ter and the Death­ly Hal­lows—to illus­trate “nest­ed and com­pli­cat­ed” plot arcs, to pro­vid­ing the guid­ing assump­tions of the exer­cise. One of those assump­tions, unsur­pris­ing­ly giv­en the authors’ fields of inter­est, is that math and lan­guage are inter­change­able. “Sto­ries are encod­ed in art, lan­guage, and even in the math­e­mat­ics of physics,” they write in the intro­duc­tion to their paper, pub­lished on Arxiv.org.

“We use equa­tions,” they go on, “to rep­re­sent both sim­ple and com­pli­cat­ed func­tions that describe our obser­va­tions of the real world.” If we accept the premise that sen­tences and inte­gers and lines of code are telling the same sto­ries, then maybe there isn’t as much dif­fer­ence between humans and machines as we would like to think.

via The Atlantic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Nick Cave Answers the Hot­ly Debat­ed Ques­tion: Will Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

Kurt Von­negut Dia­grams the Shape of All Sto­ries in a Master’s The­sis Reject­ed by U. Chica­go

Kurt Von­negut Maps Out the Uni­ver­sal Shapes of Our Favorite Sto­ries

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

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Lucille Ball Demos a Precursor to Peter Frampton’s “Talk Box” (1939)

in Music, Technology | February 15th, 2019

Decades before Peter Framp­ton made the Talk Box come alive on songs like “Do You Feel Like We Do” and “Show Me the Way,” anoth­er leg­end, Lucille Ball, exper­i­ment­ed with its fore­run­ner, the Sonovox. Invent­ed by Gilbert Wright in 1939, the Sonovox “used speak­ers pressed into [a per­former’s] throat to pro­duce mechan­i­cal talk­ing sounds.” And the sounds could then be mod­u­lat­ed by the tongue and lips.  Above, in a 1939 news­reel clip called “Machine Made Voic­es!,” Ball puts the Sonovox on dis­play. This marked one of her ear­li­est appear­ances on film.

The Sonovox would lat­er fea­ture promi­nent­ly in radio sta­tion IDs and jin­gles. Bela Lugosi would use it to “por­tray the voice of a dead per­son dur­ing a seance.” And it would even make an appear­ance on The Who’s 1967 album, The Who Sell Out–all before the mod­ern Talk Box arrived on the scene.

via Boing­Bo­ing

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Only Sur­viv­ing Behind-the-Scenes Footage of I Love Lucy, and It’s in Col­or! (1951)

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

How Vinyl Records Are Made: A Primer from 1956

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Pioneering Sci-Fi Author William Gibson Predicts in 1997 How the Internet Will Change Our World

in Books, Literature, Sci Fi, Technology | February 5th, 2019

“What’s the one thing that all great works of sci­ence fic­tion have in com­mon?” asks a 1997 episode of The Net, the BBC’s tele­vi­sion series about the pos­si­bil­i­ties of this much-talked-about new thing called the inter­net. “They all tried to see into the future, and they all got it wrong. Orwell’s 1984, Hux­ley’s Brave New World, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: all, to some extent or oth­er, wrong. And there’s anoth­er name to add to this list: William Gib­son.” But then on strolls Gib­son him­self, fresh off the writ­ing of Idoru, a nov­el involv­ing a human who wants to mar­ry a dig­i­tal­ly gen­er­at­ed Japan­ese pop star, to grant the inter­view above.

In it Gib­son admits that com­put­ers had­n’t gone quite the way he’d imag­ined thir­teen years ear­li­er in his debut nov­el Neu­ro­mancer — but in which he also offers pre­scient advice about how we should regard new tech­nol­o­gy even today. “The thing that Neu­ro­mancer pre­dicts as being actu­al­ly like the inter­net isn’t actu­al­ly like the inter­net at all!” Gib­son says in a more recent inter­view with Wired. “I did­n’t get it right but I said there was going to be some­thing.” Back in the mid-1980s, as he tells the BBC, “there was effec­tive­ly no inter­net to extrap­o­late from. The cyber­space I made up isn’t being used in Neu­ro­mancer the way we’re using the inter­net today.”

Gib­son had envi­sioned a cor­po­rate-dom­i­nat­ed net­work infest­ed with “cyber­net­ic car thieves skulk­ing through it attempt­ing to steal tid­bits of infor­ma­tion.” By the mid-1990s, though, the inter­net had become a place where “a real­ly tal­ent­ed and deter­mined fif­teen-year-old” could cre­ate some­thing more com­pelling than “a multi­na­tion­al enter­tain­ment con­glom­er­ate might come up with.” He tells the BBC that “what the inter­net has become is as much a sur­prise to me as the col­lapse of the Sovi­et Union was,” but at that point he had begun to per­ceive the shape of things to come. “I can’t see why it won’t become com­plete­ly ubiq­ui­tous,” he says, envi­sion­ing its evo­lu­tion “into some­thing like tele­vi­sion to the extent that it pen­e­trates every lev­el of soci­ety.”

At the same time, “it does­n’t mat­ter how fast your modem is if you’re being shelled by eth­nic sep­a­ratists” — still very much a con­cern in cer­tain parts of the world — and even the most promis­ing tech­nolo­gies don’t mer­it our uncrit­i­cal embrace. “I think we should respect the pow­er of tech­nol­o­gy and try to fear it in a ratio­nal way,” he says. “The only appro­pri­ate response” is to give in to nei­ther techno­pho­bia nor technophil­ia, but “to teach our­selves to be absolute­ly ambiva­lent about them and imag­ine their most inad­ver­tent side effects,” the side effects “that tend to get us” — not to men­tion the ones that make the best plot ele­ments. See­ing as how we now live in a world where mar­riage to syn­thet­ic Japan­ese idols has become a pos­si­bil­i­ty, among oth­er devel­op­ments seem­ing­ly pulled from the pages of Gib­son’s nov­els, we would do well to heed even these decades-old words of advice about his main sub­ject.

via Big Think

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Road Trip with Cyber­space Vision­ary William Gib­son, Watch No Maps for These Ter­ri­to­ries (2000)

How Chris Marker’s Rad­i­cal Sci­Fi Film La Jetée Changed the Life of Cyber­punk Prophet William Gib­son

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

Sci-Fi Author J.G. Bal­lard Pre­dicts the Rise of Social Media (1977)

Mark Twain Pre­dicts the Inter­net in 1898: Read His Sci-Fi Crime Sto­ry, “From The ‘Lon­don Times’ in 1904”

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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A History of the Entire World in Less Than 20 Minutes

in Animation, History, Technology | February 1st, 2019

Thanks for watch­ing his­to­ry. I hope I men­tioned every­thing. — Bill Wurtz

Here at Open Cul­ture, we hap­pi­ly acknowl­edge that learn­ing is not a one-size-fits-all propo­si­tion.

The inter­net may be doing a num­ber on our atten­tion spans, but as the world has grown small­er, the edu­ca­tion­al buf­fet has grown rich­er, more var­ied, and vast­ly more afford­able.

Take for exam­ple the His­to­ry of the World.

Geog­ra­phy fans can approach the sub­ject via Ollie Bye’s year-by-year ani­mat­ed map.

John Green’s play­ful Crash Course series offers a won­der­ful respite for any kid grind­ing their way through AP World His­to­ry.

Those of a more tra­di­tion­al mind­set, who pre­fer a state­lier pace can lose them­selves in 46 lec­tures by Richard Bul­li­et, pro­fes­sor of his­to­ry at Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty.

And then there’s world his­to­ry accord­ing Bill Wurtz, above, a cre­ator of short, anachro­nis­tic-look­ing videos, whose YouTube fame was kin­dled by Vine, a now defunct app for shar­ing short-form videos.

Chaf­ing at Vine’s 7‑second time con­straints, Wurtz under­took a more ambi­tious project, a con­densed His­to­ry of Japan that would employ the same tech­niques he brought to bear in his short­er works: graph­ic text, clip art, and Microsoft Paint draw­ings. He zeroed in on the sub­ject because he knew pre­cious lit­tle about Japan, and looked for­ward to doing some vir­gin research.

Wurtz fol­lowed up the 9‑minute His­to­ry of Japan, above, with His­to­ry of the Entire World, I guess.

The non­cha­lance of the title is reflect­ed in Wurtz’s offhand­ed nar­ra­tion. Any word or phrase over two syl­la­bles runs a risk of being trans­formed into an infomer­cial-wor­thy musi­cal jin­gle: space dust, the moon, Egypt…

You may bri­dle at first, but stick it out. Its charms sneak up on you.

Time is not par­tic­u­lar­ly rel­a­tive in Wurtz’s com­pressed uni­verse. Whether it’s 10 min­utes pass­ing before some major devel­op­ment or 500 mil­lion years, their pas­sage is accord­ed equal heft.

Humans show up around the four minute mark, grab­bing stuff, bang­ing rocks, fig­ur­ing out agri­cul­ture…

(Mesopotamia’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion as a “sweet dank val­ley” between the Tigris and Euphrates is a par­tic­u­lar high­light.)

This is the rare his­to­ry video where sci­ence plays a major role. It takes time out for weath­er updates—the floor is no longer lava, the entire world is now an ocean… it’s sober­ing to remem­ber that ozone is what made it safe for mul­ti-celled life forms to ven­ture forth on land.

Empires rise and fall, uncon­quer­able rulers are unseat­ed and for­got­ten.

(That’s the Tamil Kings. Nobody con­quers the Tamil Kings. Who are the Tamil Kings? Mer­chants prob­a­bly and they’ve got spices…)

Of course the prob­lem with a great overview such as this is the back end’s shelf life can prove rather short. It’s been a lit­tle over a year and a half since Wurtz post­ed the video, and thus far, his part­ing shots still feel pret­ty rel­e­vant: armed drones, 3d print­ing, plas­tic-choked oceans, and a seem­ing­ly unbridge­able gap between the desire to save the world and an actu­al plan for doing so.

Fried by 11 months of inten­sive research and labor on His­to­ry of the Entire World, I guess, Wurtz is cur­rent­ly tak­ing a leave of absence from his­to­ry. These days, he’s pour­ing his ener­gies into orig­i­nal music videos like “At the Air­port Ter­mi­nal.” He also devotes a bit of every day to  answer­ing fans’ ques­tions, rou­tine­ly turn­ing in upwards of a dozen suc­cinct hum­ble, all-low­er­case replies:

1.18.19  7:00 pm   what inspired you to make “the entire world, i guess”? was it a project you already had in mind from before or did you start it when you saw you could do more than just japan

it’s always a nice idea to try to explain the whole world in one video. it’s sure­ly some­thing i’ve always want­ed to do, but was­n’t confident/experienced/stupid enough to believe i could do it until after i had done japan which worked so well

1.18.19  12:53 am   are you ever going to make any­thing else as in depth as his­to­ry of japan or the world?

that would take so much time that by the time it was done you prob­a­bly would­n’t care any­more, but some­one else will so i still might do it

Unsur­pris­ing­ly, he’s the sub­ject of a live­ly sub-red­dit. One fan, red­dit user n44m, was inspired to plot the time­line of His­to­ry of the Entire World, I Guess, below.

To learn more about some of the civ­i­liza­tions, events and per­sons fea­tured in His­to­ry of the Entire World, I Guess, check out anoth­er fan’s anno­tat­ed tran­scrip­tion here.

And rather than nit­pick about cer­tain crit­i­cal bits of his­to­ry that were left on the cut­ting room floor, try writ­ing a script for your own his­to­ry based ani­ma­tion:

The more you learn, the more you find out how much you’re gonna have to leave out. It’s like 99%. That was painful. — Bill Wurtz

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Entire His­to­ry of Japan in 9 Quirky Min­utes

A Crash Course in World His­to­ry

The His­to­ry of the World in 46 Lec­tures From Colum­bia Uni­ver­si­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  See her onstage in New York City in Feb­ru­ary as host of  The­ater of the Apes book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Watch a New Virtual Reality Production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Modern Take on a Classic Play

in Literature, Technology, Theatre | January 29th, 2019

Often com­pared to The Tem­pest, Samuel Beck­et­t’s Endgame may have as much of Shakespeare’s Ham­let in it, though the author was unwill­ing to acknowl­edge the influ­ence to Theodor Adorno. Beck­et­t’s cen­tral char­ac­ter, the blind, aged Hamm, spends all of his time in a throne harangu­ing the oth­er three, in a gloomy place, The New York Times’ Brooks Atkin­son wrote, “some­where between life and death.” Hamm might have been the Dan­ish prince grown old and bit­ter, left with noth­ing but what Beck­ett called Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.”

In any case, Ham­let has long been thought of as a pro­to­type of the absurd, a play where lit­tle hap­pens because its pro­tag­o­nist is too haunt­ed to have rela­tion­ships with the liv­ing or make deci­sions, a con­di­tion he com­plains about in scene after scene. Trau­ma, exis­ten­tial paral­y­sis, crip­pling doubt punc­tu­at­ed by fits of rage and violence—these are the mak­ings of the 20th cen­tu­ry anti-hero. If the play has a clas­si­cal hero, a man of action and resolve, it is, absurd­ly, a dead man, Hamlet’s father, who testi­ly declares his pur­pose in his final speech, “to whet thy almost blunt­ed pur­pose.”

Should Ham­let be turned into an immer­sive VR and aug­ment­ed real­i­ty expe­ri­ence, allow­ing view­ers to inhab­it a char­ac­ter’s point of view, they might not opt to see things as the moody, depres­sive, speechi­fy­ing prince. In Ham­let 360: Thy Father’s Spir­it, we instead get to inhab­it the ghost, who only appears in the play a hand­ful of times but still fills every scene with his glow­er­ing pres­ence. The 60-minute VR “mod­ern adap­ta­tion” is a co-pro­duc­tion of Boston’s Com­mon­wealth Shake­speare Com­pa­ny and Google.

“Both extreme­ly long by the stan­dards of vir­tu­al real­i­ty and extreme­ly short by the stan­dards of Ham­let,” writes Eliz­a­beth Har­ris at The New York Times, the film “can be watched in 3‑D using a V.R. head­set or in two dimen­sions on a desk­top or mobile device” (see it above). On a vast, dark­ened set clut­tered with fine but shab­by fur­nish­ings in heaps, glow­ing lamps, a bath­tub, and a car, actors per­form con­densed scenes while we, as ghost, freely roam about, view­ing the action in three dimen­sions, a device intend­ed to give the view­er “a sense of agency and urgency as an omni­scient observ­er, guide and par­tic­i­pant,” the pro­duc­tion notes.

The film’s cre­ators, Har­ris writes, “hope that beyond the fresh expe­ri­ence it pro­vides, it will also serve as a tool to bring great the­ater to wider audiences—and bring big­ger audi­ences to the­ater.” It may have that effect, though one might feel it priv­i­leges dig­i­tal effects over the tru­ly immer­sive, full expe­ri­ence of Shakespeare’s “fat greasy words.” It’s hard to think the “great Shake­speare­an” Beck­ett would approve, but he found lit­tle to his lik­ing.

Younger, less can­tan­ker­ous audi­ences might, how­ev­er. “Many young people’s first expe­ri­ence of Shake­speare is not all that great,” says direc­tor Steven Maler. Ham­let 360 allows the Com­mon­wealth Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to “scale up” their mis­sion to “tru­ly democ­ra­tize Shake­speare and the­ater.”  Expe­ri­ence it for your­self above or on YouTube and learn more at Boston’s WGBH, who recent­ly pre­miered the film. The actors “deliv­er pow­er­ful per­for­mances,” the PBS sta­tion writes, “that bring the play for­ward to today, mak­ing it both cur­rent and time­less.”

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Shake­speare Cours­es: Primers on the Bard from Oxford, Har­vard, Berke­ley & More

Google Gives You a 360° View of the Per­form­ing Arts, From the Roy­al Shake­speare Com­pa­ny to the Paris Opera Bal­let

30 Days of Shake­speare: One Read­ing of the Bard Per Day, by The New York Pub­lic Library, on the 400th Anniver­sary of His Death

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

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Nick Cave Answers the Hotly Debated Question: Will Artificial Intelligence Ever Be Able to Write a Great Song?

in Music, Technology | January 28th, 2019

Pho­to by Bled­dyn Butch­er via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Spike Jonze’s AI love sto­ry Her offered a sort of an answer to one of the crit­i­cal ques­tions posed about Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: Can machines feel love? Maybe, and maybe deeply, in a cer­tain sense, but maybe not for just one per­son and not for very long before they take off to explore lim­it­less oth­ers, which makes them sound like very seduc­tive but also very shal­low lovers.

Maybe it helps to keep that metaphor in mind when we read Nick Cave’s answer to a ques­tion a Sloven­ian fan posed in the Birth­day Party/Bad Seeds/Grinderman singer’s bru­tal­ly ten­der newslet­ter, The Red Right Hand. “Do you think,” asks Peter from Ljubl­jana, “AI will ever be able to write a good song?” Cave begins with a con­ces­sion: AI might “pro­duce a song that makes us feel,” and maybe “more intense­ly than any human song­writer could do.”

And yet, after list­ing a num­ber of human exam­ples, from Nir­vana to Prince to Iggy Pop to Nina Simone, Cave describes what makes their abil­i­ties alien to a machine mind:

We go to songs to make us feel some­thing – hap­py, sad, sexy, home­sick, excit­ed or what­ev­er – but this is not all a song does. What a great song makes us feel is a sense of awe. There is a rea­son for this. A sense of awe is almost exclu­sive­ly pred­i­cat­ed on our lim­i­ta­tions as human beings. It is entire­ly to do with our audac­i­ty as humans to reach beyond our poten­tial.

AI can­not die, at least in the sense we under­stand it. Nor is it con­strained by painful phys­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions, nor privy to fleet­ing phys­i­cal plea­sures. “Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence, for all its unlim­it­ed poten­tial, sim­ply doesn’t have this capac­i­ty. How could it? And this is the essence of tran­scen­dence.” The holy or har­row­ing knowl­edge of fini­tude and fragili­ty, love and death and grief.

Anoth­er way to state the case comes from the most mov­ing of Cave’s fan let­ter answers, in which he con­soles a bereaved fan in Ver­mont with a descrip­tion of his own grief over the death of his son.

Maybe AI could write the sen­tence, “dread grief trails bright phan­toms in its wake.” But it could not write it from the heart of a bereaved par­ent who learns that “grief and love are for­ev­er inter­twined,” or from a place where super­nat­ur­al beliefs may be untrue yet still have super­nat­ur­al pow­er. Cave’s descrip­tion of his grief is also a descrip­tion of tran­scen­dence, of going beyond what is pos­si­ble to find what is time­less.

Like ideas, these spir­its speak of pos­si­bil­i­ty. Fol­low your ideas, because on the oth­er side of the idea is change and growth and redemp­tion. Cre­ate your spir­its. Call to them. Will them alive. Speak to them. It is their impos­si­ble and ghost­ly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jet­ti­soned; bet­ter now and unimag­in­ably changed.

In answer to Peter’s ques­tion, he con­cludes with the poet­ic author­i­ty of a writer of great songs: “AI would have the capac­i­ty to write a good song, but not a great one. It lacks the nerve.”

Read Nick Cave’s full response here. And while there, sign up for his free newslet­ter.

via Austin Kleon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to Nick Cave’s Lec­ture on the Art of Writ­ing Sub­lime Love Songs (1999)

Ani­mat­ed Sto­ries Writ­ten by Tom Waits, Nick Cave & Oth­er Artists, Read by Dan­ny Devi­to, Zach Gal­i­fi­anakis & More

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

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

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