Behold the Art-o-Mat: Vintage Cigarette Vending Machines Get Repurposed & Dispense Works of Art

in Art, Creativity, Design, Technology | July 6th, 2018

It’s a well known fact that any­one who’s quit­ting smok­ing will need to find some­thing to occu­py their hands.

Many experts sug­gest hold­ing a pen­cil or anoth­er vague­ly-cig­a­rette-shaped object.

Oth­ers pre­scribe busy work—cracking nuts and peel­ing oranges.

Hard­core cas­es are advised to keep those paws busy with a hob­by such as paint­ing or wood­work­ing.

But from where we sit, the most spir­i­tu­al­ly reward­ing, sym­bol­ic activ­i­ty for some­one in this ten­der sit­u­a­tion would be cre­at­ing a tiny art­work pro­to­type to sell in an Art-o-Mat®, one of over 100 vin­tage cig­a­rette vend­ing machines specif­i­cal­ly repur­posed to dis­pense art.

Locat­ed pri­mar­i­ly in the US, the machines are the brain­child of artist Clark Whit­ting­ton, who loaded the first one with black & white, block-mount­ed pho­tos for a 1997 solo show in a Win­ston-Salem cafe.

These days, there are a hun­dred or so Art-o-Mats, stocked with the work of artists both pro­fes­sion­al and ama­teur, who have suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gat­ed the sub­mis­sion process.

A vari­ety of medi­ums is represented—painting, sculp­ture, fine art prints, jew­el­ry, assem­blages, cut paper, and tiny bound books.

Wor­thing­ton encour­ages would-be par­tic­i­pants to avoid the ease of mass pro­duc­tion in favor of unique items that bear evi­dence of the human hand:

The vend­ing process is only the begin­ning of your Art-o-Mat® art. Once pur­chased and two steps away from the machine, your work is sole­ly a reflec­tion of you and your art. Many pieces have been car­ried around the globe. So, think of approach­es that do not con­vey “a Sun­day after­noon at the copy shop” and con­sid­er ways that your art will be appre­ci­at­ed for years to come.

The guide­lines are under­stand­ably strict with regard to dimen­sions. Wouldn’t want to kill the blind box thrill by jam­ming a vin­tage vend­ing machine’s inner work­ings.

Edi­bles, mag­nets, bal­loons, glit­ter, con­fet­ti, and any­thing processed along­side peanuts are ver­boten mate­ri­als.

A cer­tain pop­u­lar decoupage medi­um is anoth­er no-no, as it adheres to the man­dat­ed pro­tec­tive wrap.

And just as cig­a­rettes car­ry stern­ly word­ed warn­ings from the Sur­geon Gen­er­al, artists are advised to include a label if their sub­mis­sion could be con­sid­ered unsuit­able for under­age col­lec­tors.

If you need a hand to walk you through the process, have a look at crafter Shan­non Greene’s video, above.

Greene became enthralled with the Art-o-Mat expe­ri­ence on a heav­i­ly doc­u­ment­ed trip to Las Vegas, when she put $5 in the Cos­mopoli­tan Hotel’s machine, and received a box of string and paint­ed can­vas scrap book­marks cre­at­ed by Kelsey Huck­a­by.

(Wit­ness artist Huck­a­by treat­ing her­self to one of her own cre­ations from an Austin, Texas Art-o-Mat on her birth­day, below, to see a machine in action. Par­tic­u­lar­ly rec­om­mend­ed for those who came of age after these once-stan­dard fix­tures were banned from the lob­bies of bars and din­ers.)

Oth­er repur­posed machines in the Art-o-Mat sta­ble include the zip­py red num­ber in Ocala, Florida’s Apple­ton Muse­um of Art, a cool blue cus­tomer resid­ing in Stan­ford University’s Lan­tana House, and a 6‑knob mod­el that peri­od­i­cal­ly pops up in var­i­ous arts-friend­ly New York City venues.

As the jol­ly and self-dep­re­cat­ing crafter Greene observes, at $5 a “yank,” no one is get­ting rich off this project, though the artists get 50% of the pro­ceeds.

It’s also worth not­ing that these orig­i­nal art­works cost less than a pack of cig­a­rettes in all but six states.

We agree with Greene that the expe­ri­ence more than jus­ti­fies the price. What­ev­er art one winds up with is but added val­ue.

Greene does not regret the con­sid­er­able labor that went into the 100 tiny jour­nals cov­ered in retired bill­board vinyl she was required to crank out after her pro­to­types were green­lit.

To deter­mine whether or not you’re pre­pared to do the time, have a peek at Katharine Miele’s labor-inten­sive process, below. Even though the artist’s con­tact infor­ma­tion is includ­ed along with every Art-o-Mat sur­prise, there’s no guar­an­tee that she’ll hear back from any­one who wound up with one of the geo­met­ric chair linocuts she spent a week mak­ing.

Oth­er Art-o-Mat artists, like Susan Rossiter, have fig­ured out how to play by the rules while also real­iz­ing a bit of return beyond the Pip­pi Long­stock­ing-like sat­is­fac­tion of cre­at­ing a nifty expe­ri­ence for ran­dom strangers. The machines are stocked with orig­i­nals of her tiny mul­ti-media chick­en por­traits, and she sells prints on her web­site.

Or per­haps, you, like monony­mous physi­cist Colleen, find a med­i­ta­tive plea­sure in the act of cre­ation. To date, she’s paint­ed 1150 cig­a­rette-pack-sized blocks for inclu­sion in the machines.

Still game? Get start­ed with an Art-o-Mat pro­to­type kit for $19.99 here.

(As Greene joy­ful­ly points out, it comes with such good­ies as a lit­tle jour­nal, a pen­cil, and an offi­cial Art-o-Mat eras­er.)

Take inspi­ra­tion — or dream about what $5 might get you — in the collector’s show and tell, above.

Feel­ing flush and far from the near­est Art-o-Mat loca­tion?  Sup­port the project by drop­ping a Ben­jamin on an Art-o-Car­ton con­tain­ing 10 tiny art­works, cus­tom select­ed in response to a short, per­son­al­i­ty-based ques­tion­naire.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Vend­ing Machine Now Dis­trib­utes Free Short Sto­ries at Fran­cis Ford Coppola’s Café Zoetrope

Haru­ki Muraka­mi Nov­els Sold in Pol­ish Vend­ing Machines

Sup­port “Green Reads,” a Pro­gram That Finances Libraries by Dis­trib­ut­ing Used Books in Eco-Friend­ly Vend­ing Machines

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Take a 360° Virtual Tours of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Architectural Masterpieces, Taliesin & Taliesin West

in Architecture, Technology | July 2nd, 2018

In addi­tion to his build­ings, Frank Lloyd Wright left behind more than 23,000 draw­ings, 40 large-scale mod­els, 44,000 pho­tographs, 600 man­u­scripts and 300,000 pieces of cor­re­spon­dence. Any archives of that size, in this case a size com­men­su­rate with Wright’s pres­ence in archi­tec­tur­al his­to­ry, demand a daunt­ing (and expen­sive) amount of main­te­nance work. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foun­da­tion did the best it could with them after the archi­tec­t’s death in 1959, hous­ing most of their mate­ri­als at Wright’s two far-flung stu­dio-home-school com­plex­es: Tal­iesin in Spring Green, Wis­con­sin and Tal­iesin West in Scotts­dale, Ari­zona.

In 2012, the Foun­da­tion part­nered with the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art and the Avery Archi­tec­tur­al and Fine Arts Library to move the archives to New York and dig­i­tize them. Tal­iesin and Tal­iesin West, how­ev­er, still stand in the same places that they always have.

With a quar­ter of the 400 struc­tures Wright designed in his life­time now demol­ished or oth­er­wise lost, one has to won­der: could the build­ings them­selves be dig­i­tal­ly archived as well? Leica Geosys­tems has tak­en a step in that direc­tion by using “the world’s small­est and light­est imag­ing laser scan­ner, the BLK360″ to pro­duce “a dimen­sion­al­ly accu­rate laser cap­tured rep­re­sen­ta­tion” of Tal­iesin West.

The result­ing “point cloud” ver­sion of Tal­iesin West appears in the video above, which shows how the data cap­tured by the sys­tem rep­re­sents the exte­ri­or and the inte­ri­or of the build­ing. Like most impor­tant works of archi­tec­ture, its aes­thet­ics some­how both rep­re­sent the pro­jec­t’s time (in this case, con­struc­tion and addi­tions span­ning from 1911–1959) and tran­scend it. The scan also includes the sur­round­ing nat­ur­al land­scape, from which one can nev­er sep­a­rate Wright’s mas­ter­works, as well as the spe­cial­ly designed fur­ni­ture inside. This tech­nol­o­gy also makes pos­si­ble a vir­tu­al tour, which you can take here. You might fol­low it up with the vir­tu­al tour of the orig­i­nal Tal­iesin pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, there­by mak­ing an archi­tec­tur­al pil­grim­age of 1600 miles in an instant.

Wright, accord­ing to the New York Review of Books’ archi­tec­tur­al crit­ic Mar­tin Filler, believed in “the suprema­cy of the Gesamtkunst­werk, the com­plete work of art that was the dream of nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry vision­ar­ies who fore­saw the dis­in­te­gra­tion of cul­ture in the wake of the Indus­tri­al Rev­o­lu­tion.” It makes sense that the archi­tect, equal­ly a man of the nine­teenth and the twen­ti­eth cen­turies, would ded­i­cate him­self to the notion that “only by chang­ing the world — or, fail­ing that, cre­at­ing an alter­na­tive to it — could art be saved.” With his build­ings, Wright did indeed cre­ate an alter­na­tive to the world as it was. How they’ll hold up in the cen­turies to come nobody can say, but with more and more advanced meth­ods of inte­gra­tion between the phys­i­cal and dig­i­tal worlds, per­haps his art can be saved.

Take a vir­tu­al tour of Tal­iesin West here, and the orig­i­nal Tal­iesin here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a 360° Vir­tu­al Tour of Tal­iesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Per­son­al Home & Stu­dio

Frank Lloyd Wright Designs an Urban Utopia: See His Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Broad­acre City (1932)

The Mod­ernist Gas Sta­tions of Frank Lloyd Wright and Mies van der Rohe

Frank Lloyd Wright Reflects on Cre­ativ­i­ty, Nature and Reli­gion in Rare 1957 Audio

Frank Lloyd Wright’s Falling­wa­ter Ani­mat­ed

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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Optical Scanning Technology Lets Researchers Recover Lost Indigenous Languages from Old Wax Cylinder Recordings

in History, Science, Technology | June 12th, 2018

In an 1878 North Amer­i­can Review descrip­tion of his new inven­tion, the phono­graph, which tran­scribed sound on wax-cov­ered met­al cylin­ders, Thomas Edi­son sug­gest­ed a num­ber of pos­si­ble uses: “Let­ter writ­ing and all kinds of dic­ta­tion with­out the aid of a stenog­ra­ph­er,” “Phono­graph­ic books” for the blind, “the teach­ing of elo­cu­tion,” and, of course, “Repro­duc­tion of music.” He did not, vision­ary though he was, con­ceive of one extra­or­di­nary use to which wax cylin­ders might be put—the recov­ery or recon­struc­tion of extinct and endan­gered indige­nous lan­guages and cul­tures in Cal­i­for­nia.

And yet, 140 years after Edison’s inven­tion, this may be the most cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant use of the wax cylin­der to date. “Among the thou­sands of wax cylin­ders” at UC Berkeley’s Phoebe A. Hearst Muse­um of Anthro­pol­o­gy, writes Hyperallergic’s Alli­son Meier, “are songs and spo­ken-word record­ings in 78 indige­nous lan­guages of Cal­i­for­nia. Some of these lan­guages, record­ed between 1900 and 1938, no longer have liv­ing speak­ers.”

Such is the case with Yahi, a lan­guage spo­ken by a man called “Ishi,” who was sup­pos­ed­ly the last sur­viv­ing mem­ber of his cul­ture when anthro­pol­o­gist Alfred Kroe­ber met him in 1911. Kroe­ber record­ed near­ly 6 hours of Ishi’s speech on 148 wax cylin­ders, many of which are now bad­ly degrad­ed.

“The exist­ing ver­sions” of these arti­facts “sound ter­ri­ble,” says Berke­ley lin­guist Andrew Gar­rett in the Nation­al Sci­ence Foun­da­tion video at the top, but through dig­i­tal recon­struc­tion much of this rare audio can be restored. Gar­rett describes the project—supported joint­ly by the NSF and NEH—as a “dig­i­tal repa­tri­a­tion of cul­tur­al her­itage.” Using an opti­cal scan­ning tech­nique, sci­en­tists can recov­er data from these frag­ile mate­ri­als with­out fur­ther dam­ag­ing them. You can see audio preser­va­tion­ist Carl Haber describe the advanced meth­ods above.

The project rep­re­sents a sci­en­tif­ic break­through and also a stark reminder of the geno­cide and humil­i­a­tion of indige­nous peo­ple in the Amer­i­can west. When he was found, “starv­ing, dis­ori­ent­ed and sep­a­rat­ed from his tribe,” writes Jes­si­ca Jimenez at The Dai­ly Cal­i­forn­ian, Ishi was “believed to be the last Yahi man in exis­tence because of the Three Knolls Mas­sacre in 1866, in which the entire Yahi tribe was thought to have been slaugh­tered.” (Accord­ing to anoth­er Berke­ley schol­ar his sto­ry may be more com­pli­cat­ed.) He was “put on dis­play at the muse­um, where out­siders could watch him make arrows and describe aspects of Yahi cul­ture.” He nev­er revealed his name (“Ishi” means “man”) and died of tuber­cu­lo­sis in 1916.

The wax cylin­ders will allow schol­ars to recov­er oth­er lan­guages, sto­ries, and songs from peo­ples destroyed or dec­i­mat­ed by the 19th cen­tu­ry “Indi­an Wars.” Between 1900 and 1940, Kroe­ber and his col­leagues record­ed “Native Cal­i­for­ni­ans from many regions and cul­tures,” the Berke­ley project page explains, “speak­ing and singing; recit­ing his­to­ries, nar­ra­tives and prayers, list­ing names for places and objects among many oth­er things, all in a wide vari­ety of lan­guages. Many of the lan­guages record­ed on the cylin­ders have trans­formed, fall­en out of use, or are no longer spo­ken at all, mak­ing this col­lec­tion a unique and invalu­able resource for lin­guists and con­tem­po­rary com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers hop­ing to learn about or revi­tal­ize lan­guages, or retrieve impor­tant piece of cul­tur­al her­itage.”

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Down­load 10,000 of the First Record­ings of Music Ever Made, Cour­tesy of the UCSB Cylin­der Audio Archive

Inter­ac­tive Map Shows the Seizure of Over 1.5 Bil­lion Acres of Native Amer­i­can Land Between 1776 and 1887

1,000+ Haunt­ing & Beau­ti­ful Pho­tos of Native Amer­i­can Peo­ples, Shot by the Ethno­g­ra­ph­er Edward S. Cur­tis (Cir­ca 1905)

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

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Watch an Animated Visualization of the Bass Line for the Motown Classic, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”

in Music, Technology | June 1st, 2018

Jamer­son is the Schoen­berg of get­ting from the I chord to the IV chord. He’s algo­rith­mi­cal­ly gen­er­at­ing a new pat­tern every phrase…[He] belongs with Bach, Debussy and Mozart.

- Jack Strat­ton

Side­man James Jamer­son, Paul McCartney’s musi­cal hero and a co-author of the Motown sound, is a great illus­tra­tion of the bass’ impor­tance in pop and R&B his­to­ry.

He kept a funky beat for such artists as Ste­vie Won­der, Martha and the Van­del­las, Mar­vin Gaye, and the Supremes. His low notes helped the har­monies sing.

Jack Strat­ton, leader of the mod­ern Amer­i­can funk band, Vulf­peck, named Jamer­son to his Holy Trin­i­ty of Bass, along with Chic’s Bernard Edwards and Sly and the Fam­i­ly Stone’s Lar­ry Gra­ham.

(Joe Dart, Vulfpeck’s bassist, is a pret­ty hot tick­et too.)

Strat­ton’s rev­er­ence extend­ed to a side project in which he visu­al­ly plots some of Jamerson’s savoriest base­lines.

Check out the crag­gy peaks and val­leys on Mar­vin Gaye & Tam­mi Ter­rel­l’s famous ren­di­tion of Ash­ford & Simpson’s “Ain’t No Moun­tain High Enough,” above.

No won­der it’s the most lis­tened to iso­lat­ed bass track on No Tre­ble, the online mag­a­zine for bass play­ers.

All togeth­er now:

Stratton’s visu­al­iza­tions of the Jame­son lines for Ste­vie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her” and “For Once In My Life” are pret­ty mes­mer­iz­ing too.

Learn more about Jamerson’s high­ly influ­en­tial bass tech­nique in Dr. Lick’s Stand­ing in the Shad­ows of Motown: The Life and Music of Leg­endary Bassist James Jamer­son.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Made John Entwistle One of the Great Rock Bassists? Hear Iso­lat­ed Tracks from “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Baba O’Riley” & “Pin­ball Wiz­ard”

What Makes Flea Such an Amaz­ing Bass Play­er? A Video Essay Breaks Down His Style

The Sto­ry of the Bass: New Video Gives Us 500 Years of Music His­to­ry in 8 Min­utes

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Device Invented to Resuscitate Canaries in Coal Mines (Circa 1896)

in History, Technology | May 29th, 2018

Lewis Pol­lard, the cura­tor of the Muse­um of Sci­ence and Indus­try in Man­ches­ter, Eng­land, recent­ly high­light­ed his favorite object in his muse­um’s collections–this gad­get, cre­at­ed cir­ca 1896, used to resus­ci­tate canaries in coal mines.

For about a century–from the 1890s through the 1980s–British coal min­ers had a tra­di­tion of low­er­ing canaries into a coal mine to detect the pres­ence of nox­ious gas­es. As the BBC explains, the “canary is par­tic­u­lar­ly sen­si­tive to tox­ic gas­es such as car­bon monox­ide which is colour­less, odour­less and taste­less. This gas could eas­i­ly form under­ground dur­ing a mine fire or after an explo­sion. Fol­low­ing a mine fire or explo­sion, mine res­cuers would descend into the mine, car­ry­ing a canary in a small wood­en or met­al cage. Any sign of dis­tress from the canary was a clear sig­nal the con­di­tions under­ground were unsafe and min­ers should be evac­u­at­ed from the pit and the mine­shafts made safer.”

In decid­ing to send canaries into the mines, inven­tors came up with the some­what humane device shown above. Accord­ing to Pol­lard, the cir­cu­lar door of the cage “would be kept open and had a grill to pre­vent the canary [from] escap­ing. Once the canary showed signs of car­bon monox­ide poi­son­ing the door would be closed and a valve opened, allow­ing oxy­gen from the tank on top to be released and revive the canary. The min­ers would then be expect­ed to evac­u­ate the dan­ger area.” This prac­tice con­tin­ued for almost 100 years, until canaries offi­cial­ly start­ed to get replaced by tech­nol­o­gy in 1986.

Read more about Pol­lard’s favorite object here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Google Uses Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence to Map Thou­sands of Bird Sounds Into an Inter­ac­tive Visu­al­iza­tion

Cor­nell Launch­es Archive of 150,000 Bird Calls and Ani­mal Sounds, with Record­ings Going Back to 1929

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

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

in Art, Technology | May 25th, 2018

Most of us got hooked up to the inter­net in the 1990s or there­abouts, though the true ear­ly adopters did it when per­son­al com­put­ers first blew up in the 1980s. But cer­tain Cana­di­an house­holds got online even ear­li­er, in the late 1970s, although not quite on the inter­net as we know it: they had Telidon, a phone line-con­nect­ed video­tex/tele­tex sys­tem that used a reg­u­lar tele­vi­sion as a dis­play. “It is no exag­ger­a­tion to say that the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions mar­ket­place in Cana­da was gripped by Telidon fever from late 1979 to late 1982,” writes Don­ald Gilles in the Cana­di­an Jour­nal of Com­mu­ni­ca­tions. Fuel­ing that fever was “hope and belief in tech­nol­o­gy – sci­ence-based tech­nol­o­gy – as an agent of change, a bringer of nov­el­ty, and enhancer of life.”


When it first came avail­able, Telidon’s con­tent providers includ­ed “cor­po­ra­tions and inter­ests such as The Bay, Ency­clo­pe­dia Bri­tan­ni­ca and the Toron­to Star,” writes the CBC’s Chris Hamp­ton, but “a com­mu­ni­ty of arts-mind­ed elec­tron­ics wonks, tele­com prophets and oth­er curi­ous sorts coa­lesced around it, embrac­ing it as an art medi­um.”

You can see some of those Telidon cre­ators inter­viewed in the short Moth­er­board doc­u­men­tary at the top of the post. While busi­ness­es exper­i­ment­ed with pos­si­bil­i­ties of bank­ing and shop­ping through the sys­tem, artists pushed its bound­aries even fur­ther, using its now severe-seem­ing tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions as a cat­a­lyst for visu­al cre­ativ­i­ty. On some months, artist Bill Per­ry’s Telidon mag­a­zine Com­put­erese drew more view­ers than every oth­er provider com­bined.


Now, more than 30 years after its dis­con­tin­u­a­tion, Telidon has attract­ed atten­tion again. It turns out that its ear­ly-com­put­er-art aes­thet­ic has aged quite well, as seen in the exam­ples now being pulled from the archives and Insta­grammed by Toron­to new-media cen­ter Inter­Ac­cess. Orig­i­nal­ly found­ed to make Telidon devel­op­ment tools avail­able to the artist com­mu­ni­ty, Inter­Ac­cess launched this social media project as a way of cel­e­brat­ing its own 35th birth­day. Look­ing back on all the uses artists found for Telidon — every­thing from abstract qua­si-ani­ma­tions to a study of per­spec­tives on the Cold War — we can imag­ine how com­par­a­tive­ly bound­less the mod­ern inter­net would have seemed to them. But we might also won­der what that mod­ern inter­net would look like if it had a lit­tle more of their artis­ti­cal­ly and tech­no­log­i­cal­ly adven­tur­ous spir­it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

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

What the Entire Inter­net Looked Like in 1973: An Old Map Gets Found in a Pile of Research Papers

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

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

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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The First 100 Years of the Bicycle: A 1915 Documentary Shows How the Bike Went from Its Clunky Birth in 1818, to Its Enduring Design in 1890

in History, Technology | May 10th, 2018

Back in 1915, French film­mak­ers decid­ed to revis­it the evo­lu­tion of the bicy­cle dur­ing the 19th cen­tu­ry, mov­ing from the inven­tion of the bicy­cle in 1818, to the bikes that emerged dur­ing the 1890s. As the result­ing film above shows, the bike went from being clunky, cum­ber­some and seem­ing­ly per­ilous to ride, to tak­ing on the tried and true shape that we still rec­og­nize today.

This film was pre­served by the Nether­lands’ EYE Film Insti­tute. Hence the sub­ti­tles are in Dutch. But thanks to Aeon Mag­a­zine, you can read Eng­lish trans­la­tions below:

1. The drai­sine was invent­ed only a cen­tu­ry ago, in 1818 by Baron Drais de Sauer­brun.
2. [This sub­ti­tle nev­er appears in the film.
3. The vehi­cle that lies between the drai­sine and the 1850 bicy­cle has an improved steer­ing wheel and a fit­ted brake.
4. In 1863, Pierre Lalle­ment invent­ed ped­als that worked on the front wheel.
5. Around 1868, a third wheel was added. Although these tri­cy­cles were heav­ier than the two-wheel­ers, they were safer.
6. Between 1867 and 1870, var­i­ous improve­ments were made, includ­ing the increased use of rub­ber tyres.
7. In 1875, fol­low­ing an inven­tion by the engi­neer Tri­ef­fault, the frame was made of hol­low pipes.
8. Fol­low­ing the fash­ion of the day, the front wheel was made as large as pos­si­ble.
9. In 1878, Renard cre­at­ed a bicy­cle with a wheel cir­cum­fer­ence of more than 7 feet. Just sit­ting down on one of these was an ath­let­ic feat!
11. At the begin­ning of 1879, Rousseau replaced the large front wheel with a small­er one, and the chain was intro­duced on the front wheel for dri­ving pow­er.
12. The bicy­cle of today.

For anoth­er look at the Birth of the Bike, you can watch a 1937 news­reel that gives its own nar­ra­tive account. It comes the from British Pathé film archives.

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via Aeon

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Young Frank Zap­pa Plays the Bicy­cle on The Steven Allen Show (1963)

Watch Boy and Bicy­cle: Rid­ley Scott’s Very First Film (1965)

Watch The Bicy­cle Trip: An Ani­ma­tion of The World’s First LSD Trip Which Took Place on April 19, 1943

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How the Mysteries of the Vatican Secret Archives Are Being Revealed by Artificial Intelligence

in History, Technology | May 10th, 2018


Some­where with­in the Vat­i­can exists the Vat­i­can Secret Archives, whose 53 miles of shelv­ing con­tains more than 600 col­lec­tions of account books, offi­cial acts, papal cor­re­spon­dence, and oth­er his­tor­i­cal doc­u­ments. Though its hold­ings date back to the eighth cen­tu­ry, it has in the past few weeks come to world­wide atten­tion. This has brought about all man­ner of jokes about the plot of Dan Brown’s next nov­el, but also impor­tant news about the tech­nol­o­gy of man­u­script dig­i­ti­za­tion. It seems a project to get the con­tents of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives dig­i­tized and online has made great progress crack­ing a prob­lem that once seemed impos­si­bly dif­fi­cult: turn­ing hand­writ­ing into com­put­er-search­able text.

In Codice Ratio is “devel­op­ing a full-fledged sys­tem to auto­mat­i­cal­ly tran­scribe the con­tents of the man­u­scripts” that uses not the stan­dard method of opti­cal char­ac­ter recog­ni­tion (OCR), which looks for the spaces between words, but a new way that can han­dle con­nect­ed cur­sive and cal­li­graph­ic let­ters. Their method, in the lin­go of the field, “is to gov­ern impre­cise char­ac­ter seg­men­ta­tion by con­sid­er­ing that cor­rect seg­ments are those that give rise to a sequence of char­ac­ters that more like­ly com­pose a Latin word. We have designed a prin­ci­pled solu­tion that relies on con­vo­lu­tion­al neur­al net­works and sta­tis­ti­cal lan­guage mod­els.”

This is a job, in oth­er words, for arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, but in part­ner­ship with human intel­li­gence, a sel­dom-tapped source of which the sci­en­tists behind In Codice Ratio have har­nessed: that of high-school stu­dents. Their spe­cial OCR soft­ware, writes the Atlantic’s Sam Kean, works by “divid­ing each word into a series of ver­ti­cal and hor­i­zon­tal bands and look­ing for local minimums—the thin­ner por­tions, where there’s less ink (or real­ly, few­er pix­els). The soft­ware then carves the let­ters at these joints.” But the soft­ware “needs to know which groups of chunks rep­re­sent real let­ters and which are bogus,” and so “the team recruit­ed stu­dents at 24 schools in Italy to build the projects’ mem­o­ry banks,” man­u­al­ly sep­a­rat­ing the let­ters the sys­tem had prop­er­ly rec­og­nized from those over which it had stum­bled.

And so the stu­dents became the sys­tem’s “teach­ers,” improv­ing its abil­i­ty to extract the con­tent of hand­writ­ing, and not just hand­writ­ing but vast quan­ti­ties of archa­ic hand­writ­ing, with every click they made. The encour­ag­ing results thus far mean that it prob­a­bly won’t be long before large por­tions of the Vat­i­can Secret Archives (which, con­trary to its awk­ward­ly trans­lat­ed name, is such a non-secret it even has its own offi­cial web site) will final­ly become easy to browse, search, copy, paste, and ana­lyze. So they may, in the full­ness of time, prove a fruit­ful resource indeed to writ­ers of Catholi­cism-cen­tric thrillers like Brown — who, after all, has already gone pub­lic with his enthu­si­asm for man­u­script dig­i­ti­za­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Explore 5,300 Rare Man­u­scripts Dig­i­tized by the Vat­i­can: From The Ili­ad & Aeneid, to Japan­ese & Aztec Illus­tra­tions

Behold 3,000 Dig­i­tized Man­u­scripts from the Bib­lio­the­ca Palati­na: The Moth­er of All Medieval Libraries Is Get­ting Recon­struct­ed Online

3,500 Occult Man­u­scripts Will Be Dig­i­tized & Made Freely Avail­able Online, Thanks to Da Vin­ci Code Author Dan Brown

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities 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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