There’s still something to be said for the old ways, though.
Graphic designer Scott Reinhard has all the latest technological advances at his disposal, but it took combining them with hundred-year-old maps for him to get a truly 3‑D appreciation for locations he has visited around the United States, as well as his childhood home.
When I began rendering the elevation data for the state, the story of the land emerged. The glaciers that receded across the northern half of the state after the last ice age scraped and gouged and shaped the land in a way that is spectacularly clear…I felt empowered by the ability to collect and process the vast amounts of information freely available, and create beautiful images.
(The government shut-down has not damaged the accuracy of Reinhard’s maps, but the U.S. Geological Survey’s website does warn the public that the effects of any earthquakes or other force majeure occurring during this black-out period will not immediately be reflected in their topos.)
(Nor are they able to respond to any inquiries, which puts a damper on holiday weekend plans for making salt dough maps, another Hoosier state fave, at least in 1974…)
As writer Jason Kottke notes, the shadows the mountains cast on the margins of Reinhard’s maps are a particularly effective optical trick.
You can see more of Reinhard’s digitally enhanced maps from the late 19th and early 20th-century, and order prints in his online shop.
Maybe it’s too soon to divide pop music history into “Before David Bowie” and “After David Bowie,” but two years after Bowie’s death, it’s impossible to imagine pop music history without him. Yet, if there ever did come a time when future generations did not know who David Bowie is, they could do far worse than hear Gary Oldman tell the story. Luckily for them, and us, Oldman narrates the new David Bowie augmented reality app, which launches today on what would have been the legend’s 72nd birthday.
Bowie and Oldman were both born and raised in South London. They became friends in the 80s, starred together in Julian Schnabel’s 1996 film Basquiat, and collaborated on the 2013 video for “The Next Day,” in which Oldman plays a sleazy, ducktailed priest. As much the consummate changeling in his medium as Bowie, Oldman brings a fellow craftsman’s appreciation to his role as docent, without any sense of star-struckness. “I see him less as ‘David Bowie,’” he once remarked, “and more as Dave from Brixton and I’m Gary from New Cross.”
The app is based on the sensational 2013 Victoria & Albert museum exhibition David Bowie Is, which traveled the world for five years before ending at the Brooklyn Museum this past summer. Focused on “the colourful, theatrical side of Bowie,” Tim Jonze writes at The Guardian, the show drew “a staggering 2m visitors” with its stunning breadth of costumes, props, sketches, lyrics sheets, film, and photography. The digital version intends, however, not only to “recreate the experience of going to the exhibition,” but “to better it.”
Learn how “Dave from Brixton” (or Davy Jones, before a Monkee of the same name came along) made “sketches proposing outfits for his teenage band the Delta Lemons (brown waistcoats with jeans).” See how that young aspiring crooner learned to love “hikinuki—the Japanese method of quick costume change that he experimented with during his Aladdin Sane shows at Radio City Music Hall.” The exhibition brilliantly fulfilled his own wishes for his legacy. “As Bowie himself puts it,” Jonze writes, “he didn’t want to be a radio, but a colour television.”
Bowie probably would have been pleased to have his friend Gary hosting his variety show. But does the AR app match, or better, the real thing? It’s “no match for seeing the costumes in real life,” or seeing Bowie himself in the flesh. But for the millions of people who never got the chance—a category that will soon include everyone—it may currently be the best way to experience the musician/actor/writer/one-man-zeitgeist’s career in three dimensions. See a preview of the app from Rolling Stone, above, and download the AR David Bowie Is for iPhone and Android via these links. The cost is $7.99.
“And this too,” muses Marlow as he floats down the Thames in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, “has been one of the dark places on earth.” Whole theses have been written on the meaning of this statement. We can simply take it to mean that before London was London, it was just another obscure, humble town of ordinary farmers and artisans. That is, before the Romans came. So too Paris.
One of the world’s most famous cities got its start as a cluster of humble huts, walled compounds, and low, wooden buildings with thatched roofs and fenced-in pastures—the settlement of a Celtic tribe known as the Parisii, who began inhabiting the region sometime in the 3rd century, BCE. In the first century, the Romans conquered and settled what would become the Left Bank, and began to build an impressive, prosperous city with a forum, temples, bathhouses, and theaters.
The Roman town was first called Lutetia (or Luticia Parisiorum) and the central forum, in French, the Forum de Lutèce. Christianity came in the 3rd century, supposedly by way of Saint Denis, whom the Romans beheaded on the hill later known as Mons Martyrum (“Hill of the Martyrs”)—later still, Montmartre. Then came the Franks in the 5th century, establishing the Merovingian dynasty under Clovis in 508 and bringing with them Frankish speech, and later the Francien dialect of Île-de-France.
The rest—in broad outline or fine detail—you may know, but if not, like all city’s histories, it is worth getting acquainted. As you do, watch the video above from Dassault Systemes’ Paris 3D, an “interactive journey through time” that strips away hundreds of years of history to reveal virtual models of the city during the periods above and through the Middle Ages, French Revolution, and the 1889 World’s Fair, presided over by the just-built Eiffel Tower.
The project “required the work of over 40 people, including numerous experts about Paris’s history, for more than two years.” By 2013, it covered the city’s “18,000 listed monuments” with a website, free iPad app, and augmented reality book. Unfortunately, the features of its web application seem to have been disabled and its app seems unavailable, at least in the U.S. Still—like the virtual 3d videos of Rome we’ve featured recently—the promo video above offers some impressive, beautifully-rendered reconstructions of the city one-thousand, fifteen hundred, and over two thousand years ago.
Each day in the 2010s, it seems, brings another startling development in the field of artificial intelligence — a field widely written off not all that long ago as a dead end. But now AI looks just as alive as the people you see in these photographs, despite the fact that none of them have ever lived, and it’s questionable whether we can even call the images that depict them “photographs” at all. All of them come, in fact, as products of a state-of-the-art generative adversarial network, a type of artificial intelligence algorithm that pits multiple neural networks against each other in a kind of machine-learning match.
These neural networks have, it seems, competed their way to generating images of fabricated human faces that genuine humans have trouble distinguishing from images of the real deal. Their architecture, described in a paper by the Nvidia researchers who developed it, “leads to an automatically learned, unsupervised separation of high-level attributes (e.g., pose and identity when trained on human faces) and stochastic variation in the generated images (e.g., freckles, hair), and it enables intuitive, scale-specific control of the synthesis.” What they’ve come up with, in other words, has made it not just more possible than ever to create fake faces, but made those faces more customizable than ever as well.
“Of course, the ability to create realistic AI faces raises troubling questions. (Not least of all, how long until stock photo models go out of work?)” writes James Vincent at The Verge. “Experts have been raising the alarm for the past couple of years about how AI fakery might impact society. These tools could be used for misinformation and propaganda and might erode public trust in pictorial evidence, a trend that could damage the justice system as well as politics.”
But still, “you can’t doctor any image in any way you like with the same fidelity. There are also serious constraints when it comes to expertise and time. It took Nvidia’s researchers a week training their model on eight Tesla GPUs to create these faces.”
Though “a running battle between AI fakery and image authentication for decades to come” seems inevitable, the current ability of computers to create plausible faces certainly fascinates, especially when compared to their ability just four years ago, the hazy black-and-white fruits of which appear just above. Put that against the grid of faces at the top of the post, which shows how Nvidia’s system can combine the features of the faces on one axis with the features on the other, and you’ll get a sense of the technological acceleration involved. Such a process could well be used, for example, to give you a sense of what your future children might look like. But how long until it puts convincing visions of moving, speaking, even thinking human beings before our eyes?
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.
As we know from conversations in subway tunnels or singing in the shower, different kinds of spaces and building materials alter the quality of a sound. It’s a subject near and dear to architects, musicians, and composers. The relationship between space and sound also centrally occupies the field of “Acoustic Archeology.” But here, an unusual problem presents itself. How can we know how music, voice, and environmental sound behaves in spaces that no longer exist?
More specifically, writes EurekAltert!, the question that faced researchers at the University of Seville was “how did words or the rain sound inside the Mosque of Cordoba in the time of Abd al-Rahman I?” The founder of an Iberian Muslim dynasty began construction on the Mosque of Cordoba in the 780s. In the hundreds of years since, it underwent several expansions and, later, major renovations after it became the Cathedral of Cordoba in the 13th century.
The architecture of the 8th century building is lost to history, and so, it would seem, is its careful sound design. “Unlike fragments of tools or shards of pottery,” Atlas Obscura’s Jessica Leigh Hester notes, “sounds don’t lodge themselves in the soil.” Archeo-acousticians do not have recourse to the material artifacts archeologists rely on in their reconstructions of the past. But, given the technological developments in reverb simulation and audio software, these scientists can nonetheless approximate the sounds of ancient spaces.
In this case, University of Seville’s Rafael Suárez and his collaborators in the research group “Architecture, Heritage and Sustainability” collected impulse responses—recordings of reverberation—from the current cathedral. “From there, they used software to reconstruct the internal architecture of the mosque during four different phases of construction and renovation.… Next, they produced auralizations, or sound files replicating what worshippers would have heard.”
To hear what late-8th century Spanish Muslims would have, “researchers used software to model how the architecture would change the same snippet of a recorded salat, or daily prayer. In the first configuration, the prayer sounds full-bodied and sonorous; in the model that reflects the mosque’s last renovation, the same prayer echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave.” All of those renovations, in other words, destroyed the sonic engineering of the mosque.
As the authors write in a paper recently published in Applied Acoustics, “the enlargement interventions failed to take the functional aspect of the mosque and gave the highest priority to mainly the aesthetic aspect.” In the simulation of the mosque as it sounded in the 780s, sound was intelligible all over the building. Later construction added what the researchers call “acoustic shadow zones” where little can be heard but echo.
Unlike Hagia Sofia, the Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque, which retained its basic design over the course of almost 1500 years, and thus its basic sound design, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba was so altered architecturally that a “significant deterioration of the acoustic conditions” resulted, the authors claim. The mosque’s many remaining visual elements would be familiar to 8th century attendees, writes Hester, including “gilt calligraphy and intricate tiles… and hundreds of columns—made from jasper, onyx, marble, and other stones salvaged from Roman ruins.” But the “acoustic landscape” of the space would be unrecognizable.
The specific sounds of a space are essential to making “a place feel like itself.” Something to consider the next time you’re planning a major home renovation.
The amount of money one is willing to spend—should one have amounts of money—for a vintage recording console will vary greatly depending on who one is. The average person will see an enormous, heavy, wonky, wood and metal space hog with no apparent purpose. The musician, engineer, producer, or studio owner, on the other hand, will see a finely-tuned instrument, whose preamps, EQs, compressors, meters, and circuitry promise worlds of sonic warmth and depth.
In the case of one particular recording console, the so-called “Heliocentric Helios Console,” everyone will see a piece of music history, one that rightly belongs in a museum on public view. Such a fate is unlikely for this artifact, which goes on sale today at auction house Bonhams in London. It will end up in some well-heeled private hands, fetching a hefty sum for reasons far beyond its classic engineering.
“Songs and albums recorded on this bespoke console and its original parts rank among some of the most recognizable and best-loved pieces of music in existence, and have resulted in Grammys, Brit Awards and multiple number one spots,” says Bonham’s Claire Tole-Mole. “This console is a piece of Britain’s modern cultural history.” Actually an amalgam of two different historic consoles, combined in 1996, the Island Record section of the mixing desk was used by Led Zeppelin to record IV, the album featuring their most famous song, “Stairway to Heaven.”
This tantalizing bit is only a taste of the HeliosCentric console’s extensive provenance. Bob Marley recorded Catch a Fire and Burnin’ on the machine, Jimmy Cliff recorded “Many Rivers to Cross”; Eric Clapton’s “After Midnight” emerged from the console, as did songs and albums made by George Harrison, Steve Winwood, Mick Fleetwood, Steven Stills, Jimi Hendrix, Ronnie Wood, David Bowie, Free, The Rolling Stones, Sly Stone, Harry Nilsson, Cat Stevens, Jeff Beck, Mott the Hoople, Humble Pie, Paul Weller, Supergrass, Sia, KT Tunstall, Squeeze, the Pet Shop Boys, Keane, and Dido… among many more.
The number of top-notch artists who have used one or both parts of the console is astonishing, and its combining also provides devotees of rock history with a great story: the founder of Helios Electronics himself, Dick Swettenham, who formerly worked at Abbey Road, personally consulted on the construction of the new console, which was put together by Elvis Costello and Squeeze’s Chris Difford. You can read the machine’s full history at Bonhams, as great a story as you’re ever likely to hear about a piece of specialized studio equipment the size of a small car. The HelioCentric Console is expected to fetch six figures, but as Rolling Stone points out, the auction house recently sold the console used to record Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon for $1.8 million. What’s another few dozen classic albums and singles worth?
Isaac Asimov’s readers have long found something prophetic in his work, but where did Asimov himself look when he wanted to catch a glimpse of the future? In 1964 he found one at the New York World’s Fair, the vast exhibition dedicated to “Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe” that history now remembers as the most elaborate expression of the industrial and technological optimism of Space Age America. Despite the fanciful nature of some of the products on display, visitors first saw things there — computers, for instance — that would become essential in a matter of decades.
“What is to come, through the fair’s eyes at least, is wonderful,” Asimov writes in a piece on his experience at the fair for the New York Times. But it all makes him wonder: “What will life be like, say, in 2014 A.D., 50 years from now? What will the World’s Fair of 2014 be like?” His speculations begin with the notion that “men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better,” which they certainly have, though not so much through the use of “electroluminescent panels” that will make “ceilings and walls will glow softly, and in a variety of colors that will change at the touch of a push button.” Still, all the other screens near-constantly in use seem to provide all the glow we need for the moment.
“Gadgetry will continue to relieve mankind of tedious jobs,” Asimov predicts, and so it has, though our kitchens have yet to evolve to the point of preparing “ ‘automeals,’ heating water and converting it to coffee; toasting bread; frying, poaching or scrambling eggs, grilling bacon, and so on.” He hits closer to the mark when declaring that “robots will neither be common nor very good in 2014, but they will be in existence.” He notes that IBM’s exhibit at the World’s Fair had nothing about robots to show, but plenty about computers, “which are shown in all their amazing complexity, notably in the task of translating Russian into English. If machines are that smart today, what may not be in the works 50 years hence? It will be such computers, much miniaturized, that will serve as the ‘brains’ of robots.”
“The appliances of 2014 will have no electric cords,” Asimov writes, and in the case of our all-important mobile phones, that has turned out to be at least half-true. But we still lack the “long-lived batteries running on radioisotopes” produced by “fission-power plants which, by 2014, will be supplying well over half the power needs of humanity.” The real decade of the 2010s turned out to be more attached to the old ways, not least by cords and cables, than Asimov imagined. Even the United States of America hasn’t quite mastered the art of designing highways so that “long buses move on special central lanes” along them, let alone forms of ground travel that “take to the air a foot or two off the ground.”
But one advance in transportation Asimov describes will sound familiar to those of us living in the 2010s: “Much effort will be put into the designing of vehicles with ‘Robot-brains,’ vehicles that can be set for particular destinations and that will then proceed there without interference by the slow reflexes of a human driver.” Indeed, we hear about few reportedly imminent technologies these days as much as we hear about self-driving cars and their potential to get us where we’re going while we do other things, such as engage in communications that “will become sight-sound and you will see as well as hear the person you telephone,” on a screen used “not only to see the people you call but also for studying documents and photographs and reading passages from books.”
Conversations with the moon colonies, Asimov needlessly warns us, “will be a trifle uncomfortable” because of the 2.5‑second delay. But immediately thereafter comes the much more realistic prediction that “as for television, wall screens will have replaced the ordinary set.” Still, “all is not rosy” in the world of 2014, whose population will have swelled to 6,500,000,000 — or 7,298,453,033, as it happened. This has many implications for development, housing, and even agriculture, though the “mock-turkey” and “pseudosteak” eaten today has more to do with lifestyle than necessity. (“It won’t be bad at all,” Asimov adds, “if you can dig up those premium prices.”)
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, “the world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.” Asimov foresees the need for a change in education to accommodate that, one hinted at even in General Electric’s exhibit in 1964, which “consists of a school of the future in which such present realities as closed-circuit TV and programmed tapes aid the teaching process.” His envisioned high-school curriculum would have students master “the fundamentals of computer technology” and get them “trained to perfection in the use of the computer language.”
But even with all these developments, “mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom, a disease spreading more widely each year and growing in intensity.” The “serious mental, emotional and sociological consequences” of that will make psychiatry an important medical specialty, and “the lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.” Though Asimov may have been surprised by what we’ve come up with in the quarter-century since his death, as well as what we haven’t come up with, he would surely have understood the sorts of anxieties that now beset us in the future-turned-present in which we live. But even given all the ways in which his predictions in 1964 have proven more or less correct, he did miss one big thing: there was no World’s Fair in 2014.
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.
No museum could ever put on a complete Vermeer exhibition. The problem isn’t quantity: thus far, only 36 works have been definitively attributed to the 17th-century Dutch painter of domestic scenes and portraits, most famously Girl with a Pearl Earring. But they all hang in collections scattered around the world, not just in places like Amsterdam and The Hague but London, New York, Paris, and elsewhere besides. Some have become too fragile to travel, and one, The Concert, was stolen in 1990 and hasn’t been seen since. But all of this makes a complete Vermeer exhibition the perfect concept to execute in virtual reality, or rather augmented reality — a concept just recently executed by the Mauritshuis museum and Google Arts & Culture.
“In total, 18 museums and private collections from seven countries contributed high-resolution images of the Vermeers in their possession, which were then compiled into a virtual museum by Google,” writes Gizmodo’s Victoria Song.
“To view the Meet Vermeer virtual museum, you can download the free Google Arts and Culture app for iOS and Android. So long as you have a smartphone with a working camera, all you have to do is point your phone at a flat surface, wave it in a circle, and voila — you, too, can have a virtual museum floating above your bed and nightstand. After that, you can pinch and zoom on each of the seven rooms to ‘enter’ the AR museum to view the paintings.” If you enter the virtual museum on a computer, you can navigate a completely virtual version of those themed rooms, of which you can catch glimpses in the GIF below.
Google’s augmented-reality technology, in other words, allows not just the creation of an entire virtual museum in which to view Vermeer’s body of work together, but the creation of such a museum in any location where you might possibly open the app. Those of us who tend toward fantasies of a high-powered art collection will, of course, want to give it a try in our homes and get a taste of what it would look like if we had the cash on hand to round up all the Vermeers in the world ourselves. Whether the impecunious Vermeer himself — impecunious in part, no doubt, due to his lack of prolificacy — entertained such dreams of wealth, history hasn’t recorded, though given the unabashed domesticity of his subjects, he might well agree that, for an exhibition of everything he ever painted, there’s no place like home.
Again, to view the Meet Vermeer virtual museum, you can download the free Google Arts and Culture app for iOS and Android.
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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