Hear the Christmas Carols Made by Alan Turing’s Computer: Cutting-Edge Versions of “Jingle Bells” and “Good King Wenceslas” (1951)

in History, Music, Radio, Technology | December 22nd, 2017

Alan Tur­ing (right) stands next to the Fer­ran­ti Mark I. Pho­to cour­tesy of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­ches­ter

This Christ­mas, as our com­put­ers fast learn to com­pose music by them­selves, we might gain some per­spec­tive by cast­ing our minds back to 66 Christ­mases ago, a time when a com­put­er’s ren­di­tion of any­thing resem­bling music at all had thou­sands and thou­sands lis­ten­ing in won­der. In Decem­ber of 1951, the BBC’s hol­i­day broad­cast, in most respects a nat­u­ral­ly tra­di­tion­al affair, includ­ed the sound of the future: a cou­ple of much-loved Christ­mas car­ols per­formed not by a choir, nor by human beings of any kind, but by an elec­tron­ic machine the likes of which almost nobody had even laid eyes upon.

“Among its Christ­mas fare the BBC broad­cast two melodies that, although instant­ly rec­og­niz­able, sound­ed like noth­ing else on earth,” write Jack Copeland and Jason Long at the British Library’s Sound and Vision Blog. “They were Jin­gle Bells and Good King Wences­las, played by the mam­moth Fer­ran­ti Mark I com­put­er that stood in Alan Tur­ing’s Com­put­ing Machine Lab­o­ra­to­ry” at the Vic­to­ria Uni­ver­si­ty of Man­ches­ter. Tur­ing, whom we now rec­og­nize for a vari­ety of achieve­ments in com­put­ing, cryp­tog­ra­phy, and relat­ed fields (includ­ing crack­ing the Ger­man “Enig­ma code” dur­ing the Sec­ond World War), had joined the uni­ver­si­ty in 1948.

That same year, with his for­mer under­grad­u­ate col­league D. G. Cham­per­nowne, Tur­ing began writ­ing a pure­ly the­o­ret­i­cal com­put­er chess pro­gram. No com­put­er exist­ed on which he could pos­si­bly try run­ning it for the next few years until the Fer­ran­ti Mark 1 came along, and even that mam­moth proved too slow. But it could, using a func­tion designed to give audi­to­ry feed­back to its oper­a­tors, play music — of a kind, any­way. The com­put­er com­pa­ny’s “mar­ket­ing supre­mo,” accord­ing to Copeland and Long, called its brief Christ­mas con­cert “the most expen­sive and most elab­o­rate method of play­ing a tune that has ever been devised.”

Since no record­ing of the broad­cast sur­vives, what you hear here is a painstak­ing recon­struc­tion made from tapes of the com­put­er’s even ear­li­er ren­di­tions of “God Save the King,” “Baa Baa Black Sheep,” and “In the Mood.” By man­u­al­ly chop­ping up the audio, write Copeland and Long, “we cre­at­ed a palette of notes of var­i­ous pitch­es and dura­tions. These could then be rearranged to form new melodies. It was musi­cal Lego.” But do “beware of occa­sion­al dud notes. Because the com­put­er chugged along at a sedate 4 kilo­hertz or so, hit­ting the right fre­quen­cy was not always pos­si­ble.” Even so, some­where in there I hear the his­tor­i­cal and tech­no­log­i­cal seeds of the much more elab­o­rate elec­tron­ic Christ­mas to come, from Mannheim Steam­roller to the Jin­gle Cats and well beyond.

via The British Library

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear the First Record­ing of Com­put­er Music: Researchers Restore Three Melodies Pro­grammed on Alan Turing’s Com­put­er (1951)

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music, 1800–2015: Free Web Project Cat­a­logues the Theremin, Fairlight & Oth­er Instru­ments That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Music

Hear Paul McCartney’s Exper­i­men­tal Christ­mas Mix­tape: A Rare & For­got­ten Record­ing from 1965

Stream 22 Hours of Funky, Rock­ing & Swing­ing Christ­mas Albums: From James Brown and John­ny Cash to Christo­pher Lee & The Ven­tures

The Enig­ma Machine: How Alan Tur­ing Helped Break the Unbreak­able Nazi Code

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

in Technology | December 20th, 2017


In 1923, Edwin Hub­ble dis­cov­ered the universe—or rather, he dis­cov­ered a star, and humans learned that the Milky Way wasn’t the whole of the cos­mos. Less than 100 years lat­er, thanks to the tele­scope named after him, NASA sci­en­tists esti­mate the uni­verse con­tains at least 100 bil­lion galax­ies, and who-knows-what beyond that. The expo­nen­tial growth of astro­nom­i­cal data col­lect­ed since Hubble’s time is absolute­ly stag­ger­ing, and it devel­oped in tan­dem with the rev­o­lu­tion­ary increase in com­put­ing pow­er over an even short­er span, which enabled the birth and mutant growth of the inter­net.

Mod­ern “maps” of the inter­net can indeed look like sprawl­ing clus­ters of star sys­tems, puls­ing with light and col­or. But the “weird com­bi­na­tion of phys­i­cal and con­cep­tu­al things,” Bet­sy Mason remarks at Wired, results in such an abstract enti­ty that it can be visu­al­ly illus­trat­ed with an almost unlim­it­ed num­ber of graph­ic tech­niques to rep­re­sent its hun­dreds of mil­lions of users. When the inter­net began as ARPANET in the late six­ties, it includ­ed a total of four loca­tions, all with­in a few hun­dred miles of each oth­er on the West Coast of the Unit­ed States. (See a sketch of the first four “nodes” from 1969 here.)

By 1973, the num­ber of nodes had grown from U.C.L.A, the Stan­ford Research Insti­tute, U.C. San­ta Bar­bara, and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Utah to include loca­tions all over the Mid­west and East Coast, from Har­vard to Case West­ern Reserve Uni­ver­si­ty to the Carnegie Mel­lon School of Com­put­er Sci­ence in Pitts­burgh, where David Newbury’s father worked (and still works). Among his father’s papers, New­bury found the map above from May of ’73, show­ing what seemed like tremen­dous growth in only a few short years.

The map is not geo­graph­i­cal but schemat­ic, with 36 square “nodes”—early routers—and 42 oval com­put­er hosts (one pop­u­lar main­frame, the mas­sive PDP-10, is sprin­kled through­out), and only nam­ing a few key loca­tions. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Hawaii appears as a node, linked to the main­land by satel­lite. Just above, you can see an update from just a few months lat­er, now rep­re­sent­ing 40 nodes and 45 com­put­ers. “The net­work,” writes Seli­na Chang, “became inter­na­tion­al: a satel­lite link con­nect­ed ARPANET to nodes in Nor­way and Lon­don, send­ing 2.9 mil­lion pack­ets of infor­ma­tion every day.”

These ear­ly net­works of glob­al inter­con­nec­tiv­i­ty, cre­at­ed by the Defense Depart­ment and used most­ly by sci­en­tists, pre­date Tim Bern­ers-Lee and CERN’s devel­op­ment of the World Wide Web in 1991, which opened up the enor­mous, expand­ing alter­nate uni­verse we know as the inter­net today (and was, coin­ci­den­tal­ly, invent­ed around the same time as the Hub­ble Tele­scope). Though maps aren’t ter­ri­to­ries (a 1977 ARPANET “log­i­cal map” dis­claims total accu­ra­cy in a note at the bot­tom), these ear­ly rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the inter­net resem­ble medieval maps of the cos­mos next to the beau­ti­ful com­plex­i­ty of glow­ing col­ors we see in 21st cen­tu­ry info­graph­ics like the author­i­ta­tive­ly-named “The Inter­net Map.”

via Vice

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of the Inter­net in 8 Min­utes

What Hap­pens on the Inter­net in 60 Sec­onds

The Inter­net Imag­ined in 1969

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

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The Van Gogh of Microsoft Excel: How a Japanese Retiree Makes Intricate Landscape Paintings with Spreadsheet Software

in Art, Software, Technology | December 6th, 2017

Just when you thought you’ve mas­tered Microsoft Excel–creating piv­ot tables, VLOOKUPs and the rest–you dis­cov­er the fea­ture you nev­er knew was there. The one that lets you cre­ate Japan­ese land­scape paint­ings. When Tat­suo Hori­uchi retired, he found that fea­ture and leaned on it, hard. Now 77 years old, he has enough land­scape paint­ings to stage an exhibition–all made with the point and click of a mouse.

So what’s the moral of this sto­ry? Maybe it’s you’re nev­er too old to make art. Or maybe it’s nev­er too late to mas­ter those hid­den fea­tures and push tech­nol­o­gy to the bleed­ing edge. In Tat­suo’s case, he’s doing both.

via Swiss Miss

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Hand-Drawn Japan­ese Ani­me: A Deep Study of How Kat­suhi­ro Otomo’s Aki­ra Uses Light

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

The Art of the Japan­ese Teapot: Watch a Mas­ter Crafts­man at Work, from the Begin­ning Until the Star­tling End

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

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George Orwell Predicted Cameras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Never Imagined We’d Gladly Buy and Install Them Ourselves

in Life, Technology | November 28th, 2017

Normalization—the main­stream­ing of peo­ple and ideas pre­vi­ous­ly ban­ished from pub­lic life for good reason—has become the oper­a­tive descrip­tion of a mas­sive soci­etal shift toward some­thing awful. Whether it’s puff pieces on neo-Nazis in major nation­al news­pa­pers or elect­ed lead­ers who are also doc­u­ment­ed sex­u­al preda­tors, a good deal of work goes into mak­ing the pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able seem mun­dane or appeal­ing.

I try not to imag­ine too often where these things might lead, but one pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able sce­nario, the open­ly pub­lic mass sur­veil­lance appa­ra­tus of George Orwell’s 1984 has pret­ty much arrived, and has been thor­ough­ly nor­mal­ized and become both mun­dane and appeal­ing. Net­worked cam­eras and micro­phones are installed through­out mil­lions of homes, and mil­lions of us car­ry them with us wher­ev­er we go. The twist is that we are the ones who installed them.

As com­ic Kei­th Low­ell Jensen remarked on Twit­ter a few years ago, “What Orwell failed to pre­dict is that we’d buy the cam­eras our­selves, and that our biggest fear would be that nobody was watch­ing.” By appeal­ing to our basic human need for con­nec­tion, to van­i­ty, the desire for recog­ni­tion, and the seem­ing­ly instinc­tu­al dri­ve for con­ve­nience, tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies have per­suad­ed mil­lions of peo­ple to active­ly sur­veille them­selves and each oth­er. They inces­sant­ly gath­er our data, as Tim Wu shows in The Atten­tion Mer­chants, and as a byprod­uct have pro­vid­ed access to our pri­vate spaces to gov­ern­ment agents and who-knows-who-else.

Com­put­ers, smart­phones, and “smart” devices can near­ly all be hacked or com­man­deered. For­mer direc­tor of nation­al intel­li­gence James Clap­per report­ed as much last year, telling the U.S. Sen­ate that intel­li­gence agen­cies might make extend­ed use of con­sumer devices for gov­ern­ment sur­veil­lance. Web­cams and “oth­er inter­net-con­nect­ed cam­eras,” writes Eric Limer at Pop­u­lar Mechan­ics, “such as secu­ri­ty cams and high-tech baby mon­i­tors, are… noto­ri­ous­ly inse­cure.” James Comey and Mark Zucker­berg both cov­er the cam­eras on their com­put­ers with tape.

The prob­lem is far from lim­it­ed to cam­eras. “Any device that can respond to voice com­mands is, by its very nature, lis­ten­ing to you all the time.” Although we are assured that those devices only hear cer­tain trig­ger words “the micro­phone is def­i­nite­ly on regard­less” and “the extent to which this sort of audio is saved or shared is unclear.” (Record­ings on an Ama­zon Echo are pend­ing use as evi­dence in a mur­der tri­al in Arkansas.) Devices like head­phones have even been turned into micro­phones, Limer notes, which means that speak­ers could be as well, and “Lipread­ing soft­ware is only get­ting more and more impres­sive.”

I type these words on a Siri-enabled Mac, an iPad lies near­by and an iPhone in my pock­et… I won’t deny the appeal—or, for  many, the neces­si­ty of con­nec­tiv­i­ty. The always-on vari­ety, with mul­ti­ple devices respon­si­ble for con­trol­ling greater aspects of our lives may not be jus­ti­fi­able. Nonethe­less, 2017 could “final­ly be the year of the smart home.” Sales of the iPhone X may not meet Apple’s expec­ta­tions. But that could have more to do with price or poor reviews than with the creepy new facial recog­ni­tion technology—a fea­ture like­ly to remain part of lat­er designs, and one that makes users much less like­ly to cov­er or oth­er­wise dis­able their cam­eras.

The thing is, we most­ly know this, at least abstract­ly. Bland bul­let­ed how-to guides make the prob­lem seem so ordi­nary that it begins not to seem like a seri­ous prob­lem at all. As an indi­ca­tion of how mun­dane inse­cure net­worked tech­nol­o­gy has become in the con­sumer mar­ket, major pub­li­ca­tions rou­tine­ly run arti­cles offer­ing help­ful tips on how “stop your smart gad­gets from ‘spy­ing’ on you” and “how to keep your smart TV from spy­ing on you.” Your TV may be watch­ing you. Your smart­phone may be watch­ing you. Your refrig­er­a­tor may be watch­ing you. Your ther­mo­stat is most def­i­nite­ly watch­ing you.

Yes, the sit­u­a­tion isn’t strict­ly Orwellian: Oceana’s con­stant­ly sur­veilled cit­i­zens did not com­par­i­son shop, pur­chase, and cus­tomize their own devices vol­un­tar­i­ly. (It’s not strict­ly Fou­cauldian either, but has its close resem­blances.) Yet in prop­er Orwellian dou­ble­s­peak, “spy­ing” might have a very flex­i­ble def­i­n­i­tion depend­ing on who is on the oth­er end. We might stop “spy­ing” by enabling or dis­abling cer­tain fea­tures, but we might not stop “spy­ing,” if you know what I mean.

So who is watch­ing? CIA doc­u­ments released by a cer­tain unsa­vory orga­ni­za­tion show that the Agency might be, as the BBC seg­ment at the top reports. As might any num­ber of oth­er inter­est­ed par­ties from data-hoard­ing cor­po­rate bots to tech-savvy voyeurs look­ing to get off on your can­did moments. We might assume that some­one could have access at any time, even if we use the pri­va­cy con­trols. That so many peo­ple have become depen­dent on their devices, and will increas­ing­ly become so in the future, makes the ques­tion of what to do about it a trick­i­er propo­si­tion.

via Red­dit

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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

The Exis­ten­tial­ism Files: How the FBI Tar­get­ed Camus, and Then Sartre After the JFK Assas­si­na­tion

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

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

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The Robots of Your Dystopian Future Are Already Here: Two Chilling Videos Drive It All Home

in Technology | November 28th, 2017

A year ago, Boston Dynam­ics released a video show­ing its humanoid robot “Atlas” doing, well, rather human things–opening doors, walk­ing through a snowy for­est, hoist­ing card­board box­es, and lift­ing itself off of the ground. Rarely has some­thing so banal seemed so pecu­liar.

What is “Atlas” doing these days? As shown in this new­ly-released video above, it’s jump­ing to new heights, twist­ing in the air, and doing back­flips with uncan­ny ease. Stand­ing six feet tall and weigh­ing 180 pounds, Atlas was designed to take care of mun­dane prob­lems–like assist­ing  emer­gency ser­vices in search and res­cue oper­a­tions and “oper­at­ing pow­ered equip­ment in envi­ron­ments where humans could not sur­vive.” But that’s not where the appli­ca­tions of Atlas end. See­ing that the Pen­ta­gon has helped finance and design Atlas, you can eas­i­ly see the humanoid fight­ing on the bat­tle­field. Stay tuned for that clip in 2018.

Which brings us to our next video. The new short film, “Slaugh­ter­bots,” comes from the Cam­paign to Stop Killer Robots and it fol­lows this plot:

A mil­i­tary firm unveils a tiny drone that hunts and kills with ruth­less effi­cien­cy. But when the tech­nol­o­gy falls into the wrong hands, no one is safe. Politi­cians are cut down in broad day­light. The machines descend on a lec­ture hall and spot activists, who are swift­ly dis­patched with an explo­sive to the head.

Accord­ing to UC Berke­ley AI expert Stu­art Rus­sell, “Slaugh­ter­bots” looks like sci­ence fic­tion. But it’s not. “It shows the results of inte­grat­ing and minia­tur­iz­ing tech­nolo­gies that we already have.” It is “sim­ply an inte­gra­tion of exist­ing capa­bil­i­ties… In fact, it is eas­i­er to achieve than self-dri­ving cars, which require far high­er stan­dards of per­for­mance.” Recent­ly shown at the Unit­ed Nations’ Con­ven­tion on Con­ven­tion­al Weapons, “Slaugh­ter­bots” comes on the heels of an open let­ter signed by 116 robot­ics and AI sci­en­tists (includ­ing Tesla’s Elon Musk), urg­ing the UN to ban the devel­op­ment and use of killer robots. It reads:

Lethal autonomous weapons threat­en to become the third rev­o­lu­tion in war­fare. Once devel­oped, they will per­mit armed con­flict to be fought at a scale greater than ever, and at timescales faster than humans can com­pre­hend. These can be weapons of ter­ror, weapons that despots and ter­ror­ists use against inno­cent pop­u­la­tions, and weapons hacked to behave in unde­sir­able ways. We do not have long to act. Once this Pandora’s box is opened, it will be hard to close.

If we already have mil­i­tary drones tak­ing out ene­mies across the world (in places like Yemen, Soma­lia, Iraq, Syr­ia, Libya and Afghanistan), the men­tal leap to deploy­ing Slaugh­ter­bots does­n’t seem too great. Do you trust our lead­ers to make fin­er dis­tinc­tions and keep a lid on Pan­do­ra’s Box? Or could you see them tear­ing Pan­do­ra’s Box open like a gift on Christ­mas day? Yeah, me too. The robots of your dystopi­an future are now here.

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.

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

Relat­ed Con­tent:

George Orwell Pre­dict­ed Cam­eras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Nev­er Imag­ined We’d Glad­ly Buy and Install Them Our­selves

Experts Pre­dict When Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence Will Take Our Jobs: From Writ­ing Essays, Books & Songs, to Per­form­ing Surgery and Dri­ving Trucks

Arti­fi­cial Intel­li­gence: A Free Online Course from MIT

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Net Neutrality Explained and Defended in a Doodle-Filled Video by Vi Hart: The Time to Save the Open Web is Now

in Current Affairs, Technology | November 22nd, 2017

By the end of Decem­ber, net neu­tral­i­ty may be a thing of the past. We’ll pay the price. You’ll pay the price. Com­cast, Ver­i­zon and AT&T will make out like ban­dits.

If you need a quick reminder of what net neu­tral­i­ty is, what ben­e­fits it brings and what you stand to lose, watch Vi Hart’s 11-minute explain­er above. It lays things out quite well. Then, once you have a han­dle on things, write or call Con­gress now and make a last stand for the open web.

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.

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

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The 1991 Tokyo Museum Exhibition That Was Only Accessible by Telephone, Fax & Modem: Features Works by Laurie Anderson, John Cage, William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard & Merce Cunningham

in Art, Technology | November 22nd, 2017

The deep­er we get into the 21st cen­tu­ry, the more ener­gy and resources muse­ums put into dig­i­tiz­ing their offer­ings and mak­ing them avail­able, free and world­wide, as vir­tu­al expe­ri­ences on the inter­net. But what form would a vir­tu­al muse­um have tak­en before the inter­net as we know it today? Japan­ese telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions giant NTT (best known today in the form of the cell­phone ser­vice provider NTT DoCo­Mo) devel­oped one answer to that ques­tion in 1991: The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work, an elab­o­rate art exhib­it acces­si­ble nowhere in the phys­i­cal world but every­where in Japan by tele­phone, fax, and even — in a high­ly lim­it­ed, pre-World-Wide-Web fash­ion — com­put­er modem.

“The works and mes­sages from almost 100 artists, writ­ers, and cul­tur­al fig­ures were avail­able through five chan­nels,” says Mono­skop, where you can down­load The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work’s cat­a­log (also avail­able in high res­o­lu­tion). “The works in ‘Voice & sound chan­nel’ such as talks and read­ings on the theme of com­mu­ni­ca­tion could be lis­tened to by tele­phone. The ‘Inter­ac­tive chan­nel’ offered par­tic­i­pants to cre­ate musi­cal tunes by push­ing but­tons on a tele­phone. Works of art, nov­els, comics and essays could be received at home through ‘Fax chan­nel.’ The ‘Live chan­nel’ offered artists’ live per­for­mances and tele­phone dia­logues between invit­ed intel­lec­tu­als to be heard by tele­phone. Addi­tion­al­ly, com­put­er graph­ics works could be accessed by modem and down­loaded to one’s per­son­al com­put­er screen for view­ing.”

“We need to rec­og­nize hon­est­ly that there were numer­ous prob­lems with The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work,” writes cura­tor and crit­ic Asa­da Aki­ra in the cat­a­log’s intro­duc­tion. “Nei­ther the prepa­ra­tion time nor the means for car­ry­ing it out was suf­fi­cient. Thus there were not a few cre­ative artists whose par­tic­i­pa­tion would have been a great asset to the project, but whom we were forced to do with­out.” Yet its list of con­trib­u­tors, which still reads like a Who’s-Who of the avant-garde and oth­er­wise adven­tur­ous cre­ators of the day, includes archi­tects like Isoza­ki Ara­ta and Ren­zo Piano, musi­cians like Lau­rie Ander­son and Sakamo­to Ryuichi, direc­tors like Kuro­sawa Kiyoshi and Derek Jar­man, writ­ers like William S. Bur­roughs and J.G. Bal­lard, com­posers like John Cage and Philip Glass, chore­o­g­ra­phers like William Forsythe, Mer­ce Cun­ning­ham, and visu­al artists like Yokoo Tadanori and Jeff Koons.

The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work launched as the first ven­ture of NTT’s Inter­Com­mu­ni­ca­tion Cen­ter (ICC), a “21st-cen­tu­ry muse­um that will pro­vide inter­face between sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy and art and cul­ture in the com­ing elec­tron­ic age,” as Asa­da described it in 1991. Hav­ing recent­ly cel­e­brat­ed its 20th year open in Toky­o’s Opera City Tow­er, the ICC con­tin­ues to put on a vari­ety of non-vir­tu­al exhi­bi­tions very much in the spir­it of the orig­i­nal, and involv­ing some of the very same artists as well (as of this writ­ing, they’re ready­ing a music instal­la­tion co-cre­at­ed by Sakamo­to). But offline or on, any union of art and tech­nol­o­gy is only as inter­est­ing as the spir­it moti­vat­ing it, and the cre­ators of such projects would do well to keep in mind the words of The Muse­um Inside the Tele­phone Net­work con­trib­u­tor Kon­dou Kou­ji: “I hope that peo­ple will think of this as the expe­ri­ence of acci­den­tal­ly drift­ing into a tele­phone net­work, where­in awaits a vast world of plea­sure and fun.”

via @monoskop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of the 1913 Exhi­bi­tion That Intro­duced Avant-Garde Art to Amer­i­ca

Take a Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Tour of the World’s Stolen Art

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

Good Morn­ing, Mr. Orwell: Nam June Paik’s Avant-Garde New Year’s Cel­e­bra­tion with Lau­rie Ander­son, John Cage, Peter Gabriel & More

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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New “Women of NASA” Lego Immortalizes the STEM Contributions of Sally Ride, Margaret Hamilton, Mae Jemison & Nancy Grace Roman

in Gender, Science, Technology | November 20th, 2017

Ear­li­er this year, the Lego com­pa­ny announced that it would pro­duce a Women of NASA Lego set, based on a pro­pos­al it received from sci­ence writer Maia Wein­stock. In that pro­pos­al, Wein­stock wrote: “Women have played crit­i­cal roles through­out the his­to­ry of the U.S. space pro­gram, a.k.a. NASA or the Nation­al Aero­nau­tics and Space Admin­is­tra­tion. Yet in many cas­es, their con­tri­bu­tions are unknown or under-appre­ci­at­ed — espe­cial­ly as women have his­tor­i­cal­ly strug­gled to gain accep­tance in the fields of sci­ence, tech­nol­o­gy, engi­neer­ing, and math­e­mat­ics (STEM).”

Now on the mar­ket, the new Lego set immor­tal­izes the con­tri­bu­tions of NASA astro­nauts Sal­ly Ride and Mae Jemi­son; astronomer Nan­cy Grace Roman; and com­put­er sci­en­tist Mar­garet Hamil­ton, who we fea­tured here this past sum­mer. The video above gives you a com­plete walk-through, show­ing you, for exam­ple, Hamil­ton stand­ing next to the large pile of source code that pow­ered the Apol­lo mis­sion (just as she did in this his­toric pho­to). Or you’ll see Nan­cy Grace Roman accom­pa­nied by a pos­able Hub­ble Space Tele­scope and a pro­ject­ed image of a plan­e­tary neb­u­la. The video clos­es with some com­men­tary on the social mer­its of this new Lego set, which you may or may not agree with.

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:

Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty to Cre­ate a Lego Pro­fes­sor­ship

The LEGO Tur­ing Machine Gives a Quick Primer on How Your Com­put­er Works

Two Scenes from Stan­ley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, Recre­at­ed in Lego

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