When Steve Jobs Taught Andy Warhol to Make Art on the Very First Macintosh (1984)

in Art, History, Technology | September 7th, 2018

When Andy Warhol first became famous, few knew what to make of his art. When Apple first released the Mac­in­tosh — dra­mat­i­cal­ly pro­mot­ed with that Rid­ley Scott Super Bowl com­mer­cial — few knew what to make of it either. The year was 1984, when almost nobody had seen a graph­i­cal user inter­face or even a mouse, let alone used them, and the Mac­in­tosh looked as strange and com­pelling when it entered the com­put­ing scene as Warhol did when he entered the art scene. Both seemed so casu­al­ly to repu­di­ate so many long-held assump­tions, an act that tends to star­tle and con­fuse old­er peo­ple but makes imme­di­ate sense to younger ones. What hap­pened, then, when Warhol and the Mac­in­tosh first crossed paths?

Jour­nal­ist David Sheff, who wrote an ear­ly pro­file of Steve Jobs and con­duct­ed the last in-depth inter­view with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, remem­bers it well. In Octo­ber 1984, he and Jobs attend­ed the ninth-birth­day par­ty thrown by Ono for Sean, her son with Lennon. As a present, Jobs brought along one of his com­pa­ny’s new Mac­in­tosh­es and set it up him­self in young Sean’s bed­room. “Sean took con­trol of the mouse, and rolled the small box along the floor,” Sheff writes. “Steve said, ‘Now hold the but­ton down while you move it and see what hap­pens.’ Sean did, and a thin, jagged, black line, appeared on the screen. Sean, entranced, said, ‘Cool!’ He clicked the mouse but­ton, pushed it around, and on the screen appeared shapes and lines, which he erased, and then he drew a sort of lion-camel and then a fig­ure that he said was Boy George.”

Though Boy George may not have been in atten­dance, the par­ty’s unsur­pris­ing­ly fab­u­lous guest list also includ­ed Andy Warhol (an “eccen­tric uncle” to Sean) and Kei­th Har­ing, both of whom Sheff remem­bers com­ing into the room as part of a crowd want­i­ng to catch a glimpse of Sean’s new toy. It was­n’t long before Warhol, pre­sum­ably com­pelled by the artis­tic impulse as well as by his fas­ci­na­tion for all things new, asked if he could give it a try:

Andy took Sean’s spot in front of the com­put­er and Steve showed him how to maneu­ver and click the mouse. Warhol didn’t get it; he lift­ed and waved the mouse, as if it were a conductor’s baton. Jobs gen­tly explained that the mouse worked when it was pushed along a sur­face. Warhol kept lift­ing it until Steve placed his hand on Warhol’s and guid­ed it along the floor. Final­ly Warhol began draw­ing, star­ing at the “pen­cil” as it drew on the screen.

Warhol was spell­bound – peo­ple who knew him know the way he tuned out every­thing extra­ne­ous when he was entranced by what­ev­er it was – glid­ing the mouse, eyes affixed to the mon­i­tor. Har­ing was bent over watch­ing. Andy, his eyes wide, looked up, stared at Har­ing, and said, “Look! Kei­th! I drew a cir­cle!”

In his diary, Warhol writes of enter­ing Sean’s room to find “a kid there set­ting up the Apple com­put­er that Sean had got­ten as a present, the Mac­in­tosh mod­el. I said that once some man had been call­ing me a lot want­i­ng to give me one, but that I’d nev­er called him back or some­thing, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ ” But Jobs, pos­sessed of as keen a pro­mo­tion­al instinct as Warhol’s own, assured him that the offer was still good, and that he would also give him a les­son in draw­ing on the Mac right then and there. “I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it,” writes Warhol, not­ing that “it only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in col­or.”

The Mac­in­tosh made an appear­ance in Warhol’s “Ads” series of paint­ings in 1984, the same year he also agreed, accord­ing to Art­sy’s Abi­gail Cain, “to be a spokesper­son for Apple’s rival in the per­son­al com­put­ing sphere — Com­modore. The artist was to pro­mote the company’s new com­put­er, the Ami­ga 1000, and its cut­ting-edge mul­ti­me­dia capa­bil­i­ties” that includ­ed a 4,096-color dis­play. At the machine’s launch, Warhol “used ProPaint to sketch Blondie lead singer Deb­bie Har­ry in front of a crowd of eager tech enthu­si­asts,” which you can see in the video above. Just a few years ago, the efforts of dig­i­tal artist Cory Arcan­gel and spe­cial­ists at Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­si­ty recov­ered 28 long-lost dig­i­tal paint­ings Warhol made on his Ami­ga. Whether the artist ever made any­thing with or even took deliv­ery of his promised Mac, we don’t know – or at least we don’t know yet.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

Andy Warhol Dig­i­tal­ly Paints Deb­bie Har­ry with the Ami­ga 1000 Com­put­er (1985)

Apple’s Guid­ed Tour to Using the First Mac­in­tosh (1984)

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

Japan­ese Com­put­er Artist Makes “Dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans” in 1964: When Giant Main­frame Com­put­ers Were First Used to Cre­ate Art

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Japanese Musicians Turn Obsolete Machines Into Musical Instruments: Cathode Ray Tube TVs, Overhead Projectors, Reel-to-Reel Tape Machines & More

in Music, Technology | August 29th, 2018

In the 1940s and 50s, exper­i­men­tal com­posers like Hal­im El-Dabh, Pierre Scha­ef­fer, and Pierre Hen­ry began mak­ing exper­i­men­tal com­po­si­tions that Scha­ef­fer would call musique con­crete. They used tape recorders, phono­graphs, micro­phones and oth­er ana­log elec­tro-acoustic devices to cre­ate music, as Hen­ry put it, from “non-musi­cal sounds.” These tech­niques became main­stays of more famil­iar audio art, such as the radio and tele­vi­sion sound designs of the BBC’s Radio­phon­ic Work­shop. With the advent of syn­the­siz­ers, elec­tron­ic music over­took these sound exper­i­ments, just as oth­er new tech­nolo­gies replaced the play­back and record­ing devices used to make them.

A Japan­ese group called Open Reel Ensem­ble recalls this lega­cy of musique con­crete, deploy­ing reel-to-reel tape machines, cath­ode ray tube TVs, over­head pro­jec­tors, and oth­er ana­log tech­nol­o­gy to make 21st cen­tu­ry music with “non-musi­cal sounds.” Head­ed by pro­gram­mer-turned-com­pos­er Ei Wada, the group embraces a very dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al phi­los­o­phy than the exper­i­men­tal elec­tro-acoustic com­posers of the past, who worked in reac­tion to Euro­pean clas­si­cal music, oppos­ing “con­crete” sounds to abstract musi­cal ideas. Wada, on the oth­er hand, was first inspired by hear­ing a game­lan ensem­ble at a per­for­mance in Indone­sia as a very small child.

Giv­en a col­lec­tion of 70s reel-to-reel recorders by a fam­i­ly friend, he attempt­ed to re-cre­ate the polypho­ny of those tra­di­tion­al Javanese gong ensem­bles. He has, writes Moth­er­board, “been on a quest to repro­duce oth­er­world­ly sounds with tech that nobody wants.” But he freely com­bines these out­dat­ed machines with con­tem­po­rary mix­ers, ampli­fiers, light shows, beats, and tem­pos. Formed with friends Haru­ka Yoshi­da and Masaru Yoshi­da, Wada’s Open Reel Ensem­ble might be com­pared to both the avant-garde exper­i­ments of com­posers like John Cage and the pop­u­lar exper­i­ments of hip hop turntab­lists, both of whom used ana­log tech­nol­o­gy in inno­v­a­tive, uncon­ven­tion­al ways.

Some of the group’s work is a kind of exper­i­men­tal dance music, as you can see in the live per­for­mance fur­ther up; some is more ambi­ent sound art, as in Wada’s solo ven­ti­la­tion fan per­for­mance above, with implic­it com­men­tary on Japan’s econ­o­my and the dis­pos­able nature of con­sumer tech­nol­o­gy. “All these tech objects are a sym­bol of Japan’s eco­nom­ic growth,” says Wada. “but they also get thrown away in great num­bers. It’s good to not just say bye to things that are thrown away but to instill old things with new mean­ing, and cel­e­brate their unique points.”

The detourn­ing of tech­nol­o­gy that would oth­er­wise end up as land­fill requires some inge­nu­ity, giv­en the increas­ing rar­i­ty of such instru­ments. In the per­for­mance above, we see Wada play with invent­ed devices his group calls in Eng­lish the “Exhaust Fan­cil­la­tor” and in Japan­ese a kankisen­thiz­er, a neol­o­gism formed from the word for ven­ti­la­tion fan. “We used laser cut­ters and 3D print­ers to design the ven­ti­la­tion fans,” he says. This will­ing­ness to impro­vise, invent, and repur­pose what­ev­er works makes for some fas­ci­nat­ing exper­i­ments that are as much per­for­mance art as sound com­po­si­tion.

In the Wada per­for­mance above from 2010, he uses old tube TVs as drums, hit­ting the screens to trig­ger both sound and light effects and bring­ing to mind not only the sound art of the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, but also the 1980s video instal­la­tions of Nam June Paik, ful­ly immer­sive expe­ri­ences that fore­ground their tech­no­log­i­cal arti­fice even as they pro­duce an inex­plic­a­ble kind of mag­ic.

via This is Colos­sal 

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to an Archive of Record­ings by Delia Der­byshire, the Elec­tron­ic Music Pio­neer & Com­pos­er of the Dr. Who Theme Song

Hear the One Night Sun Ra & John Cage Played Togeth­er in Con­cert (1986)

Pio­neer­ing Elec­tron­ic Com­pos­er Karl­heinz Stock­hausen Presents “Four Cri­te­ria of Elec­tron­ic Music” & Oth­er Lec­tures in Eng­lish (1972)

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Conserve the Sound, an Online Museum Preserves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Typewriters, Electric Shavers and Cassette Recorders, to Cameras & Classic Nintendo

in Archives, History, Libraries, Technology | August 28th, 2018

The unmis­tak­able zip and whirr of a rotary phone, the ungod­ly squeal of dial-up modems, the sat­is­fy­ing thunk of a car­tridge in a clas­sic Nin­ten­do con­sole, a VCR rewind­ing, the click-clack sound of a Walk­man’s but­tons…. I date myself in say­ing that these sounds imme­di­ate­ly send me back to var­i­ous moments in my child­hood with Prous­t­ian immer­sion. The sense of smell is most close­ly linked to mem­o­ry, but hear­ing can­not be far behind giv­en how sound embeds itself in time, and most espe­cial­ly the sounds of tech­nolo­gies, which are by nature fat­ed for obso­les­cence. A muse­um-qual­i­ty aura sur­rounds the Walk­man and the first iPods. These are tri­umphs of con­sumer design, but only one of them makes dis­tinc­tive mechan­i­cal nois­es.

As ana­log recedes, it can seem that noisy tech in gen­er­al becomes more and more dat­ed. It is hard to hear the rub­bing of thumbs and fin­gers across screens and touch­pads. Voice com­mands make but­tons and switch­es redun­dant. How much tech from now will one day fea­ture in Con­serve the Sound, the “online muse­um for van­ish­ing and endan­gered sounds”?

Its col­lec­tion gives the impres­sion of a bygone age, quaint in its dozens of exam­ples of mechan­i­cal inge­nu­ity. The visu­al jux­ta­po­si­tion of hand­held film cam­eras, type­writ­ers, car win­dow han­dles, elec­tric shavers, boom box­es, stop­watch­es, and so on has the effect of mak­ing these things seem all of a piece, assort­ed arti­facts in a great hall of won­ders called “the Sound the 20th Cen­tu­ry.”

At the top of the site’s “Sound” page, time­line nav­i­ga­tion allows users to vis­it every decade from the 1910s to the 2000s, a cat­e­go­ry that con­tains only two objects. Oth­er dis­plays are more plen­ti­ful, and col­or­ful. The 1960s, for exam­ple show­cas­es the incred­i­bly sexy red Schreib­mas­chine Olivet­ti Dora fur­ther up. It sounds as sleek and sophis­ti­cat­ed as it looks. The vir­tu­al dis­play case of the 30s holds the sounds of a twin-engine pro­peller plane and a hand­ful of beau­ti­ful mov­ing and still cam­eras, like the Fotokam­era Pur­ma Spe­cial above. It also fea­tures the hum­ble and endur­ing library stamp, a sound I pine for as I slide books under the self-check­out laser scan­ner at my local branch.

Giv­en just the few images here, you can already see that Con­serve the Sound is as much a feast for the eyes as for the ears, each object lov­ing­ly pho­tographed against an aus­tere white back­ground. In order for the full nos­tal­gic effect to work, how­ev­er, you need to vis­it these pages and hit “play.” It even mag­i­cal­ly works with objects from before our times, giv­en how promi­nent­ly their sounds fea­ture in film and audio record­ings that define the peri­ods. You’ve like­ly also noticed how many of these prod­ucts are of Euro­pean ori­gin, and many of them, like the robot­ic head of the Kas­set­ten­reko­rder Wel­tron Mod­el 2004, are per­haps unfa­mil­iar to many con­sumers from else­where in the world.

Con­serve the Sound is a Euro­pean project, fund­ed by the Film & Medi­en­s­tiftung NRW in Ger­many, thus its selec­tion skews toward Euro­pean-made prod­ucts. But the sound of a fan or an adding machine in Ger­many is the sound of a fan or adding machine in Chile, Chi­na, Kenya, or Nebras­ka. See a trail­er for the project at the top of the post, and below, one of the many inter­views in which Ger­man pub­lic fig­ures, schol­ars, librar­i­ans, tech­ni­cians, and stu­dents answer ques­tions about their mnemon­ic asso­ci­a­tions with tech­no­log­i­cal sound. In this inter­view, radio pre­sen­ter Bian­ca Hau­da describes one of her favorite old sounds from a favorite old machine, a 1970s portable cas­sette recorder.

via WFMU

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The British Library’s “Sounds” Archive Presents 80,000 Free Audio Record­ings: World & Clas­si­cal Music, Inter­views, Nature Sounds & More

Bri­an Eno Once Com­posed Music for Win­dows 95; Now He Lets You Cre­ate Music with an iPad App

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

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

The New York Public Library Puts Classic Stories on Instagram: Start with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Read Kafka’s The Metamorphosis Soon

in Books, K-12, Libraries, Literature, Technology | August 27th, 2018

I’d be hap­py if I could think that the role of the library was sus­tained and even enhanced in the age of the com­put­er. —Bill Gates

The New York Pub­lic Library excels at keep­ing a foot in both worlds, par­tic­u­lar­ly when it comes to engag­ing younger read­ers.

Vis­i­tors from all over the world make the pil­grim­age to see the real live Win­nie-the-Pooh and friends in the main branch’s hop­ping children’s cen­ter.

And now any­one with a smart­phone and an Insta­gram account can “check out” their dig­i­tal age take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land—no library card required. See Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

Work­ing with the design firm Moth­er, the library has found a way to make great page-turn­ing use of the Insta­gram Sto­ries plat­form—more com­mon­ly used to share blow-by-blow pho­to­graph­ic evi­dence of road trips, restau­rant out­ings, and hash-tagged wed­dings.

The Won­der­land expe­ri­ence remains pri­mar­i­ly text-based.

In oth­er words, sor­ry, har­ried care­givers! There’s no hand­ing your phone off to the pre-read­ing set this time around!

No trip­py Dis­ney teacups…

Sir John Ten­niel’s clas­sic illus­tra­tions won’t be spring­ing to ani­mat­ed life. Instead, you’ll find con­cep­tu­al artist Magoz’s bright min­i­mal­ist ding­bats of key­holes, teacups, and pock­et watch­es in the low­er right hand cor­ner. Tap your screen in rapid suc­ces­sion and they func­tion as a crowd-pleas­ing, all ages flip book.

Else­where, ani­ma­tion allows the text to take on clever shapes or reveal itself line by line—a pleas­ant­ly the­atri­cal, Cheshire Cat like approach to Carroll’s impu­dent poet­ry.

Remem­ber the famous scene where the Duchess and the Cook force Alice to mind a baby who turns into a pig? Grab some friends and hunch over the phone for a com­mu­nal read aloud! (It’s on page 75 of part 1)

Speak rough­ly to your lit­tle boy,

 And beat him when he sneezes:

 He only does it to annoy,

 Because he knows it teas­es

CHORUS

 (In which the cook and the baby joined)

 ‘Wow! wow! wow!’ 

Nav­i­gat­ing this new media can be a bit con­fus­ing for those whose social media flu­en­cy is not quite up to speed, but it’s not hard once you get the hang of the con­trols.

Tap­ping the right side of the screen turns the page.

Tap­ping left goes back a page.

And keep­ing a thumb (or any fin­ger, actu­al­ly) on the screen will keep the page as is until you’re ready to move on. You’ll def­i­nite­ly want to do this on ani­mat­ed pages like the one cit­ed above. Pre­tend you’re play­ing the flute and you’ll save a lot of frus­tra­tion.

The library plans to intro­duce your phone to Char­lotte Perkins Gilman’s short sto­ry “The Yel­low Wall­pa­per” and Franz Kafka’s The Meta­mor­pho­sis via Insta­gram Sto­ries over the next cou­ple of months. Like Alice, both works are in the pub­lic domain and share an appro­pri­ate com­mon theme: trans­for­ma­tion.

Use these links to go direct­ly to part 1 and part 2 of Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land on Insta­gram Sto­ries. Both parts are cur­rent­ly pinned to the top of the library’s Insta­gram account.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Lewis Carroll’s Orig­i­nal Hand­writ­ten & Illus­trat­ed Man­u­script for Alice’s Adven­tures in Won­der­land (1864)

Alice in Won­der­land: The Orig­i­nal 1903 Film Adap­ta­tion

The Psy­cho­log­i­cal & Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders Expe­ri­enced by Char­ac­ters in Alice in Won­der­land: A Neu­ro­science Read­ing of Lewis Carroll’s Clas­sic Tale

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Sep­tem­ber 24 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

This Is Your Kids’ Brains on Internet Algorithms: A Chilling Case Study Shows What’s Wrong with the Internet Today

in Software, Technology, TED Talks | August 22nd, 2018

Mul­ti­me­dia artist and writer James Bri­dle has a new book out, and it’s terrifying—appropriately so, I would say—in its analy­sis of “the dan­gers of trust­ing com­put­ers to explain (and, increas­ing­ly, run) the world,” as Adi Robert­son writes at The Verge. Sum­ming up one of his argu­ments in his New Dark Age: Tech­nol­o­gy and the End of the Future, Bri­dle writes, “We know more and more about the world, while being less and less able to do any­thing about it.” As Bri­dle tells Robert­son in a short inter­view, he doesn’t see the prob­lems as irre­me­di­a­ble, pro­vid­ed we gain “some kind of agency with­in these sys­tems.” But he insists that we must face head-on cer­tain facts about our dystopi­an, sci-fi-like real­i­ty.

In the brief TED talk above, you can see Bri­dle do just that, begin­ning with an analy­sis of the mil­lions of pro­lif­er­at­ing videos for chil­dren, with bil­lions of views, on YouTube, a case study that quick­ly goes to some dis­turb­ing places. Videos show­ing a pair of hands unwrap­ping choco­late eggs to reveal a toy with­in “are like crack for lit­tle kids,” says Bri­dle, who watch them over and over. Auto­play fer­ries them on to weird­er and weird­er iter­a­tions, which even­tu­al­ly end up with danc­ing Hitlers and their favorite car­toon char­ac­ters per­form­ing lewd and vio­lent acts. Some of the videos seem to be made by pro­fes­sion­al ani­ma­tors and “whole­some kid’s enter­tain­ers,” some seem assem­bled by soft­ware, some by “peo­ple who clear­ly shouldn’t be around chil­dren at all.”

The algo­rithms that dri­ve the bizarre uni­verse of these videos are used to “hack the brains of very small chil­dren in return for adver­tis­ing rev­enue,” says Bri­dle. “At least that what I hope they’re doing it for.” Bri­dle soon bridges the machin­ery of kids’ YouTube with the adult ver­sion. “It’s impos­si­ble to know,” he says, who’s post­ing these mil­lions of videos, “or what their motives might be…. Real­ly it’s exact­ly the same mech­a­nism that’s hap­pen­ing across most of our dig­i­tal ser­vices, where it’s impos­si­ble to know where this infor­ma­tion is com­ing from.” The children’s videos are “basi­cal­ly fake news for kids. We’re train­ing them from birth to click on the very first link that comes along, regard­less of what the source is.”

High school and col­lege teach­ers already deal with the prob­lem of stu­dents who can­not judge good infor­ma­tion from bad—and who can­not real­ly be blamed for it, since mil­lions of adults seem unable to do so as well. In sur­vey­ing YouTube children’s videos, Bri­dle finds him­self ask­ing the same ques­tions that arise in response to so much online con­tent: “Is this a bot? Is this a per­son? Is this a troll? What does it mean that we can’t tell the dif­fer­ence between these things any­more?” The lan­guage of online con­tent is a hash of pop­u­lar tags meant to be read by machine algo­rithms, not humans. But real peo­ple per­form­ing in an “algo­rith­mi­cal­ly opti­mized sys­tem” seem forced to “act out these increas­ing­ly bizarre com­bi­na­tions of words.”

With­in this cul­ture, he says, “even if you’re human, you have to end up behav­ing like a machine just to sur­vive.” What makes the sce­nario even dark­er is that machines repli­cate the worst aspects of human behav­ior, not because they’re evil but because that’s what they’re taught to do. To think that tech­nol­o­gy is neu­tral is a dan­ger­ous­ly naïve view, Bri­dle argues. Humans encode their his­tor­i­cal bias­es into the data, then entrust to A.I. such crit­i­cal func­tions as not only children’s enter­tain­ment, but also pre­dic­tive polic­ing and rec­om­mend­ing crim­i­nal sen­tences. As Bri­dle notes in the short video above, A.I. inher­its the racism of its cre­ators, rather than act­ing as a “lev­el­ing force.”

As we’ve seen the CEOs of tech com­pa­nies tak­en to task for the use of their plat­forms for pro­pa­gan­da, dis­in­for­ma­tion, hate speech, and wild con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries, we’ve also seen them respond to the prob­lem by promis­ing to solve it with more auto­mat­ed machine learn­ing algo­rithms. In oth­er words, to address the issues with the same tech­nol­o­gy that cre­at­ed them—technology that no one real­ly seems to under­stand. Let­ting “unac­count­able sys­tems” dri­ven almost sole­ly by ads con­trol glob­al net­works with ever-increas­ing influ­ence over world affairs seems wild­ly irre­spon­si­ble, and has already cre­at­ed a sit­u­a­tion, Bri­dle argues in his book, in which impe­ri­al­ism has “moved up to infra­struc­ture lev­el” and con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries are the most “pow­er­ful nar­ra­tives of our time,” as he says below.

Bridle’s claims might them­selves sound like alarmist con­spir­a­cies if they weren’t so alarm­ing­ly obvi­ous to most any­one pay­ing atten­tion. In an essay on Medi­um he writes a much more in-depth analy­sis of YouTube kids’ con­tent, devel­op­ing one of the argu­ments in his book. Bri­dle is one of many writ­ers and researchers cov­er­ing this ter­rain. Some oth­er good pop­u­lar books on the sub­ject come from schol­ars and tech­nol­o­gists like Tim Wu and Jaron Lanier. They are well worth read­ing and pay­ing atten­tion to, even if we might dis­agree with some of their argu­ments and pre­scrip­tions.

As Bri­dle him­self argues in his inter­view at The Verge, the best approach to deal­ing with what seems like a night­mar­ish sit­u­a­tion is to devel­op a “sys­temic lit­er­a­cy,” learn­ing “to think clear­ly about sub­jects that seem dif­fi­cult and com­plex,” but which nonethe­less, as we can clear­ly see, have tremen­dous impact on our every­day lives and the soci­ety our kids will inher­it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Infor­ma­tion Over­load Robs Us of Our Cre­ativ­i­ty: What the Sci­en­tif­ic Research Shows

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Prof. Cal New­port

The Diderot Effect: Enlight­en­ment Philoso­pher Denis Diderot Explains the Psy­chol­o­gy of Con­sumerism & Our Waste­ful Spend­ing

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Hundreds of Classical Sculptures from the Uffizi Gallery Now Digitized & Put Online: Explore a Collection of 3D Interactive Scans

in Art, Technology | August 17th, 2018

As the mighty House of Medici amassed works of art between the 15th and 18th cen­turies, could its mem­bers have imag­ined that we would still be enjoy­ing their col­lec­tion in the 21st? Per­haps they did, giv­en the ten­den­cy — some­times fatal — of busi­ness and polit­i­cal dynas­ties to imag­ine them­selves as eter­nal. But the Medicis could scarce­ly have imag­ined how peo­ple all around the world have just gained access to the sculp­ture they col­lect­ed, now dis­played at Flo­rence’s Uffizi Gallery and else­where, through the Uffizi Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project.

A col­lab­o­ra­tion between Indi­ana Uni­ver­si­ty’s Vir­tu­al World Her­itage Lab­o­ra­to­ry, the Politec­ni­co di Milano, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flo­rence, the five-year project, which began in 2016, has as its goal the com­plete dig­i­ti­za­tion of Greek and Roman sculp­ture in the Uffizi Gallery, Pit­ti Palace, and Boboli Gar­dens. Though not yet fin­ished, it has already man­aged to dig­i­tize more works of clas­si­cal sculp­ture than any oth­er effort by a sin­gle muse­um, and at its site you can take a look at every com­plete piece and frag­ment already dig­i­tized — and not just a look, as you’d get while pass­ing by on a walk through a muse­um, but a clos­er and more detailed look than you may ever have thought pos­si­ble.

“The gen­uine­ly easy-to-nav­i­gate web­site proves more inter­ac­tive than many com­put­er­ized muse­um archives,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Jas­mine Weber. “Users are giv­en the oppor­tu­ni­ty to trav­el inside tombs and inside every nook of the fig­ures’ con­struc­tion. The inter­face allows users to trav­el around and with­in the sculp­tures, get­ting clos­er than vis­i­tors often can in the muse­um space itself thanks to three-dimen­sion­al ren­der­ing from every imag­in­able angle.” The col­lec­tion, notes the Uffizzi Dig­i­ti­za­tion Pro­jec­t’s about page, con­tains “works of excep­tion­al inter­est to stu­dents of Greek and Roman art, notably the Medici Venus, the Medici Faun, the Nio­bids, and the Ari­adne.”

The Uffizi Dig­i­ti­za­tion Project has so far made more than 300 works avail­able to view as 3D mod­els, and you can find them by either search­ing the col­lec­tion or scrolling down to browse by cat­e­go­ry, a list that includes every­thing from altars and busts to stat­uettes and vas­es. And though no more tech­no­log­i­cal­ly impres­sive col­lec­tion of vir­tu­al clas­si­cal sculp­ture may exist on the inter­net, after expe­ri­enc­ing it you might nev­er­the­less feel the need to see these pieces in an envi­ron­ment oth­er than the black dig­i­tal void. If so, have a look at the vir­tu­al tour of the Uffizi Gallery we fea­tured ear­li­er this year here on Open Cul­ture. But be pre­pared: from there you may want to book a tick­et to Flo­rence and see the sculp­ture col­lect­ed by the House of Medici in the very city where it rose to such vast eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al pow­er.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Artists Put Online 3D, High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of 3,000-Year-Old Nefer­ti­ti Bust (and Con­tro­ver­sy Ensues)

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Hear Singers from the Metropolitan Opera Record Their Voices on Traditional Wax Cylinders

in History, Music, Opera, Technology | August 10th, 2018

Vinyl is back in a big way.

Music lovers who boot­ed their record col­lec­tions dur­ing the com­pact disc’s approx­i­mate­ly 15 year reign are scram­bling to replace their old favorites, even in the age of stream­ing. They can’t get enough of that warm ana­log sound.

Can a wax cylin­der revival be far behind?

A recent wax cylin­der exper­i­ment by Met­ro­pol­i­tan Opera sopra­no Susan­na Phillips and tenor Piotr Becza­la, above, sug­gests no. This ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy is no more due for a come­back than the zoetrope or the steam pow­ered vibra­tor.

Becza­la ini­ti­at­ed the project, curi­ous to know how his voice would sound when cap­tured by a Thomas Edi­son-era device. If it yield­ed a faith­ful repro­duc­tion, we can assume that the voice mod­ern lis­ten­ers accept as that of a great such as Enri­co Caru­so, whose out­put pre­dat­ed the advent of the elec­tri­cal record­ing process, is fair­ly iden­ti­cal to the one expe­ri­enced by his live audi­ences.

Work­ing togeth­er with the New York Pub­lic Library’s Rodgers and Ham­mer­stein Archives of Record­ed Sound and the Thomas Edi­son Nation­al His­tor­i­cal Park, the Met was able to set up a ses­sion to find out.

The result is not with­out a cer­tain ghost­ly appeal, but the fac­sim­i­le is far from rea­son­able.

As Becza­la told The New York Times, the tech­no­log­i­cal lim­i­ta­tions under­mined his into­na­tion, dic­tion, or per­for­mance of the qui­eter pas­sages of his selec­tion from Verdi’s Luisa Miller. In a field where craft and tech­nique are under con­stant scruti­ny, the exis­tence of such a record­ing could be a lia­bil­i­ty, were it not intend­ed as a curios­i­ty from the get go.

Phillips, ear turned to the horn for play­back, insist­ed that she would­n’t have rec­og­nized this record­ing of “Per Pieta” from Mozart’s Così fan tutte as her own.

Learn more about wax cylin­der record­ing tech­nol­o­gy and preser­va­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Tchaikovsky’s Voice Cap­tured on an Edi­son Cylin­der (1890)

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

Opti­cal Scan­ning Tech­nol­o­gy Lets Researchers Recov­er Lost Indige­nous Lan­guages from Old Wax Cylin­der Record­ings

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

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Filmmaker Wim Wenders Explains How Mobile Phones Have Killed Photography

in Film, Photography, Technology | August 7th, 2018

Smart­phones have made us all pho­tog­ra­phers — or maybe they’ve made it so that none of us is a pho­tog­ra­ph­er. A cen­tu­ry ago, mere­ly pos­sess­ing and know­ing how to use a cam­era count­ed as a fair­ly notable accom­plish­ment; today, near­ly all of us car­ry one at all times whether we want to or not, and its oper­a­tion demands no skill what­so­ev­er. “I do believe that every­body’s a pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” says cel­e­brat­ed film­mak­er Wim Wen­ders, direc­tor of movies like The Amer­i­can Friend, Paris, Texas and Wings of Desire, in the BBC clip above. “We’re all tak­ing bil­lions of pic­tures, so pho­tog­ra­phy is more alive than ever, and at the same time, it’s more dead than ever.”

Wen­ders made this claim at an exhi­bi­tion of his Polaroid pho­tographs, which we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. In a sense, the Polaroid cam­era — easy to use, near-instant results, and high­ly portable by the stan­dards of its era — was the smart­phone cam­era of the 20th cen­tu­ry, but Wen­ders does­n’t draw the same kind of inspi­ra­tion from phone shots as he did from Polaroids. “The trou­ble with iPhone pic­tures is that nobody sees them,” he says, and one glance at the speed with which Insta­gram users scroll will con­firm it. “Even the peo­ple who take them don’t look at them any­more, and they cer­tain­ly don’t make prints.”

Hav­ing worked in cin­e­ma for around half a cen­tu­ry now (and for a time with the late cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Rob­by Müller, one of the most respect­ed and idio­syn­crat­ic in the indus­try), Wen­ders has seen first­hand how our rela­tion­ship to the image has changed in that time. “I know from expe­ri­ence that the less you have, the more cre­ative you have to become,” he says, asked about the pre­pon­der­ance of pho­to­graph­ic fil­ters and apps. “Maybe it’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly a sign of cre­ativ­i­ty that you can turn every pic­ture into its oppo­site.” Still, he has no objec­tion to cam­era-phone cul­ture itself, and even admits to tak­ing self­ies him­self — with the caveat that “look­ing into the mir­ror is not an act of pho­tog­ra­phy.”

If self­ie-tak­ing and every­thing else we do with the cam­eras in our smart­phones (to say noth­ing of the image manip­u­la­tions we per­form) isn’t pho­tog­ra­phy, what is it? “I’m in search of a new word for this new activ­i­ty that looks so much like pho­tog­ra­phy, but isn’t pho­tog­ra­phy any­more,” Wen­ders says. “Please, let me know if you have a word for it.” Some com­menters have put forth “faux­tog­ra­phy,” an amus­ing enough sug­ges­tion but not one like­ly to sat­is­fy a cre­ator like Wen­ders who, in work as in life, sel­dom makes the obvi­ous choice.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wim Wen­ders Explains How Polaroid Pho­tos Ignite His Cre­ative Process and Help Him Cap­ture a Deep­er Kind of Truth

Wim Wen­ders Reveals His Rules of Cin­e­ma Per­fec­tion

See The First “Self­ie” In His­to­ry Tak­en by Robert Cor­nelius, a Philadel­phia Chemist, in 1839

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

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.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 27 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast