From 2010 to 2012, filmmaker Kirby Ferguson released “Everything is a Remix,” a four-part series (watch here) that explored art and creativity, and particularly how artists inevitably borrow from one another, drawing on past ideas and conventions, and then turn these materials into something beautiful and new. In the initial series, Ferguson focused on musicians, filmmakers, writers and even video game makers. Now, a little more than a decade later, Ferguson has resurfaced and released a fifth and final chapter in his series, with this episode focusing on a different kind of artist: artificial intelligence. Responding to the rise of AI-generated art, Ferguson delves into the ethics of art generated by machines, particularly when they’re trained with human-created art. Is AI-generated art a form of piracy? Or is it another kind of creative remix? And what does AI mean for the future of art and creativity? These are just some of the weighty questions Ferguson tackles in his final installment. Watch it above.
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Even if Florence didn’t represent the absolute pinnacle of human civilization at the end of the thirteenth century, it had to have been a strong contender for the position. What the city lacked, however, was a cathedral befitting its status. Hence the construction, which commenced in 1296, of just such a holy structure, in accordance with ambitious plans drawn up by architect Arnolfo di Cambio. But when di Cambio died in 1302, work came more or less to a stop for nearly half a century. Construction resumed in 1344 under Giotto, whose own death three years later left the project to his assistant Andrea Pisano, who was himself succeeded by Francesco Talenti, Giovanni di Lapo Ghini, Alberto Arnoldi, Giovanni d’Ambrogio, Neri di Fioravanti, and Andrea Orcagna.
None of these architects, however astute, managed to finish the cathedral: in 1418, it still had a gaping hole on top where its dome should have been, and in any case no viable design or engineering procedure to construct one. “So they had a competition, and everybody was invited to submit their projects,” says Youtuber Manuel Bravo, who tells the story in the video at the top of the post.
Enter the sculptor Filippo Brunelleschi, who declared, in effect, “I can do it. I can build you the dome. And what’s more, I can build you the dome without coins or earth.” That last was a reference to an earlier architect’s suggestion that the dome under construction be supported with a mound of dirt filled with money, so peasants would gladly volunteer to cart it away after completion.
Brunelleschi’s considerably more elegant idea was inspired by the ruins of antiquity, not least the Pantheon, which then boasted the largest dome ever built in Europe, discussed by Bravo in a previous video. In this one he breaks down the ingenious techniques Brunelleschi used to outdo the Pantheon, and without using a temporary supporting structure of any kind. Instead, he incorporated ring-like elements “tying the dome from outside, as if they were belts like the ones we wear,” as well as “a particular kind of brickwork, a pattern with a series of spiral ribs” which “allowed them to lock together the bricks that were placed horizontally.” The result, a structure “completely self-bracing in all its phases of construction,” has stood firmly since 1469 as, quite literally, a crowning glory: not just of the Duomo, but of Florence as well.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
“The word ‘connoisseur’ is not an attractive one,” writes Jancis Robinson in her memoir Tasting Pleasure: Confessions of a Wine Lover. “It smacks of exclusivity, preciousness and elitism.” Indeed, “connoisseurship is not a necessary state for wine appreciation. It is perfectly possible to enjoy wine enormously without really understanding it. But a connoisseur sees each individual wine in its historical, geographical and sociological context and is truly sensitive to its possibilities.” Those who drink wine too carelessly or too stringently, “those who will not meet a wine halfway, and who consistently ignore the story each wine has to tell, deprive themselves of a large part of the potential pleasure associated with each bottle.”
How best to experience that pleasure — or rather, how best to attain the state of connoisseurship that makes it accessible in the first place? One could do worse than starting with the works of Robinson herself, who’s not just one of the most respected wine writers alive today, but also onetime supervisor of the luxury wine selection on British Airways’ Concorde and advisor for the wine cellar of the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Since she began covering wine professionally nearly half a century ago, she has produced a great deal of work in print as well as for the screen. Among the latter, perhaps the most ambitious is Jancis Robinson’s Wine Course, whose ten episodes originally aired on BBC 2 in 1995 and are now available to watch on Robinson’s own Youtube channel.
With this $1.6 million production, Robinson was “set loose on the wine world, far too much of the time in full makeup, with freshly done hair and clothes subsidized by an official BBC budget.” Dedicating each episode to a different grape varietal “allowed us within a single program to visit more than one region — and therefore vary the scenery, architecture and climate. It also reflected my passionate interest in grape varieties and my conviction that coming to grips with the most important grapes provides the easiest route to learning about wine.” The yearlong shoot took her and her team around the globe, visiting winemakers wherever they could be found: France, Germany, Australia, Chile, and even northern California, where they managed an audience with auteur-vintner Francis Ford Coppola.
“The conflict between the New and Old Worlds of wine was coming nicely to a head at just the right time for our series, Robinson notes.” Those worlds have settled into a kind of relative peace in the decades since — as has the “Chardonnay boom” of the mid-nineteen-nineties, about which Robinson lets slip some frustration onscreen. Despite her vast knowledge and experience of wine, Robinson seldom shows any hesitancy to crack a joke, and surely her continued prominence as a wine educator owes something to that sense of humor, on display in the Talks at Google interview about her 2016 book The 24-Hour Wine Expert. More recently, she entered into another collaboration with the BBC, specifically the new BBC Maestro online education platform, to create the course “An Understanding of Wine.” In all pursuits, understanding is the basis of pleasure — but in wine, even more so.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
Everyone knows that Georges Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’Île de la GrandeJatte, or A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, resides at the Art Institute of Chicago. Or at least everyone who’s seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off knows it. The Art Institute appears as just one of the implausibly varied attractions of Chicago enjoyed by that film’s titular hooky-playing high-school senior and his friends — even the anxiety-ridden Cameron, drops from a moment out of his troubled life while transfixed by Seurat’s most famous painting. The closer he looks, the less discernible its genteel Parisian figures become, dissolving into fields of colored dots.
“George Seurat spent most of his adult life thinking about color,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne, “studying theories and working out systematically how one color, placed in a series of dots next to those of another, creates a whole different color when it hits the retina of the human eye.”
By the time of La Grande Jatte — which he meticulously planned, laboriously executed, and completed between 1884 and 1886 — “he made sure we saw color exactly how he wanted us to.” Payne tells the story of Seurat, his scientific, aesthetic, and philosophical interests, and the fruits of his intellectual and artistic labors, in the new video from his channel Great Art Explained at the top of the post.
Seurat first painted La Grande Jatte using not dots but dashes, “vertical for trees and horizontal for the water.” After further developing his color theory, he returned to the canvas and “added hundreds of thousands of small dots of complimentary colors on top of what he’d already done, which appear as solid and luminous forms when seen from a distance.” The final stage involved the addition of a colored border around the entire scene, and not long thereafter elaborate interpretations of the outwardly placid painting began to multiply. But “the lack of narrative means we really should look to the artist’s obsession with form, technique, and theory, which is practically all he wrote about, and not the meaning or subject manner.” We may enjoy talking about art’s content, but it is art’s form, after all, that truly captivates us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
“A brush makes watercolors appear on a white sheet of paper. An everyday object takes shape, drawn with precision by an artist’s hand. Then two, then three, then four… Superimposed, condensed, multiplied, thousands of documentary drawings in successive series come to life on the screen, composing a veritable visual symphony of everyday objects. The accumulation, both fascinating and dizzying, takes us on a trip through time.” That’s how the Vimeo channel of Girelle Productions prefaces the animation “Grands Canons” (aka “Big Guns”) by French filmmaker Alain Biet. It’s a wild ride, a painstaking feat in experimental filmmaking. Enjoy it above.
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Ancient Greece and Rome had plenty of literature, but practically none of it survives today. What exactly became of almost everything written down in Western antiquity is the subject of the video above by ancient-history Youtube channel Told in Stone, previously featured here on Open Culture for its investigations into everything from the Colosseum and the Pantheon to Roman nightlife and the explosion of Mount Vesuvius. But none of its past videos has quite as much relevance to this particular story as the one on the burning of the Library of Alexandria.
Described by narrator Garret Ryan as “the greatest of all ancient libraries,” the Library of Alexandria could have contained between 532,800 and 700,000 volumes in scroll form, all of them lost by the time Julius Caesar burned it down in 48 B.C..
Even so, “the loss of all but a tiny fraction of ancient literature was not brought about by the disappearance of a single library. It was, instead, the consequence of the basic fragility of texts before the advent of printing.” Papyrus, the pre-paper writing material first developed in ancient Egypt, certainly couldn’t stand the test of time: in relatively humid western Europe, “most papyri had to be recopied every century or so.”
Plus ça change: even, and perhaps especially, in our digital era, long-term data archival has turned out to necessitate regular movement from one storage medium to the next. But perhaps our civilization will prove luckier with the process than the Roman Empire, whose collapse meant that “the elites who had traditionally commissioned new copies all but vanished. Far fewer manuscripts were produced, and those that were tended to serve the particular purposes of religion, education, and the technical disciplines.” For these and other reasons, very few classics made it to the Middle Ages, and thus to the Renaissance. But even if you don’t have much to study, so the latter era gloriously demonstrated, you can more than compensate by studying it hard.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
With 26 lines and 472 stations, the New York City subway system is practically a living organism, and way too big a topic to tackle in a short video.
Architect Michael Wyetzner may not have time to touch on rats, crime track fires, flooding, night and weekend service disruptions, or the adults-in-a-Peanuts-special sound quality of the announcements in the above episode of Architectural Digest’s Blueprints web series, but he gives an excellent overview of its evolving design, from the stations themselves to sidewalk entrances to the platform signage.
First stop, the old City Hall station, whose chandeliers, skylights, and Guastavino tile arching in an alternating colors herringbone pattern made it the star attraction of the just-opened system in 1904.
(It’s been closed since 1945, but savvy transit buffs know that they can catch a glimpse by ignoring the conductor’s announcement to exit the downtown 6 train at its last stop, then looking out the window as it makes a U‑turn, passing through the abandoned station to begin its trip back uptown. The New York Transit Museum also hosts popular thrice yearly tours.)
Express tracks have been a feature of New York’s subway system since the beginning, when Interborough Rapid Transit Company enhanced its existing elevated line with an underground route capable of carrying passengers from City Hall to Harlem for a nickel fare.
Wyetzner efficiently sketches the open excavation design of the early IRT stations — “cut and cover” trenches less than 20’ deep, with room for four tracks, platforms, and no frills support columns that are nearly as ubiquitous white subway tiles.
For the most part, New Yorkers take the subway for granted, and are always prepared to beef about the fare to service ration, but this was not the case on New Year’s Day, 2017, when riders went out of their way to take the Q train.
(The massive drills used to create tunnels and stations at a far greater depth than the IRT line, were left where they wound up, in preparation for Phase 2, which is slated to push the line up to 125th St by 2029. (Don’t hold your breath…)
The designers of the subway placed a premium on aesthetics, as evidenced by the domed Art Nouveau IRT entrance kiosks and beautiful permanent platform signs.
Wyetzner also name checks graphic designer Massimo Vignelli who was brought aboard in 1966 to standardize the informational signage.
The white-on-black sans serif font directing us to our desired connections and exits now seems like part of the subway’s DNA.
Perhaps 21st-century innovations like countdown clocks and digital screens listing real-time service changes and alternative routes will too, one of these days.
If Wyetzner is open to filming the follow-up viewers are clamoring for in the comments, perhaps he’ll weigh in on the new A‑train cars that debuted last week, which boast security cameras, flip-up seating to accommodate riders with disabilities, and wider door openings to promote quicker boarding.
(Yes, they’re still the quickest way to get to Harlem…)
“I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,” Mary Delany, a 72-year-old widow wrote to her niece in 1772 from the grand home where she was a frequent guest, having just captured her hostess’ geranium’s likeness, by collaging cut paper in a nearly identical shade.
Novelty rekindled the creative fire her husband’s death had dampened.
Former pursuits such as needlework, silhouette cut outs, and shell decorating went by the wayside as she dedicated herself fully to her botanical-themed “paper mosaicks.”
Over the next decade Mrs. Delany produced 985 astonishingly floral representations from meticulously cut, hand colored tissue, which she glued to hand painted black backings, and labeled with the specimens’ taxonomic and common names, as well as a collection of numbers, date and provenance.
In the beginning, she took inspiration from a giant collection of botanical specimens amassed by the celebrated botanist Sir Joseph Banks, with whom she became acquainted while spending summers at Bulstrode, the Buckinghamshire estate of her friend Margaret Bentinck, duchess of Portland and a fellow enthusiast of the natural world.
Bulstrode also provided her with abundant source material. The estate boasted botanic, flower, kitchen, ancient and American gardens, as well a staff botanist, the Swedish naturalist Daniel Solander charged with cataloguing their contents according to the Linnaean system.
Sir Joseph Banks commended Mrs. Delany’s powers of observation, declaring her assemblages “the only imitations of nature” from which he “could venture to describe botanically any plant without the least fear of committing an error.”
The main flower head … is so intensely public that it’s as if you’ve come upon a nude stody. She splays out approximately 230 shockingly vulvular purplish pink petals in the bloom, and inside the leaves she places the slenderest of ivory veins also cut separately from paper, with vine tendrils finer that a girl’s hair. It is so fresh that it looks wet and full of desire, yet the Passiflora is dull and matte
Mrs. Delany’s exquisitely rendered paper flowers became high society sensations, fetching her no small amount of invitations from titled hosts and hostesses, clamoring for specimens from their gardens to be immortalized in her growing Flora Delanica.
She also received donations of exotic plants at Balstrode, where greenhouses kept non-native plants alive, as she gleefully informed her niece in a 1777 letter, shortly after completing her work:
I am so plentifully supplied with the hothouse here, and from the Queen’s garden at Kew, that natural plants have been a good deal laid aside this year for foreigners, but not less in favour. O! How I long to show you the progress I have made.
Her work was in such demand, that she streamlined her creation process from necessity, coloring paper in batches, and working on several pieces simultaneously.
Her failing eyesight forced her to stop just shy of her goal of one thousand flowers.
She dedicated the ten volumes of Flora Delanica to her friend, the duchess of Portland, mistress of Balstrode “(whose) approbation was such a sanction to my undertaking, as made it appear of consequence and gave me courage to go on with confidence.”
She also reflected on the great undertaking of her seventh decade in a poem:
Jokes about “reality television” being a contradiction in terms go as far back in pop-culture history as the format itself. But the fact remains that, deliberately or otherwise, its programs do reflect certain characteristics of the societies that produce them. Before turning into one of the most globally successful franchises of this century’s reality-TV boom, the once-controversial strangers-in-a-house show Big Brother premiered in the Netherlands. It will be left as an exercise to the reader what that says about the Dutch, who have been tuning in to a very different kind of reality programming in the past month: De Nieuwe Vermeer, or The New Vermeer.
“The results are judged by Vermeer experts from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, and from the Mauritshuis, a collection of old masters in The Hague.” The professionals face such tasks as faithfully reconstructing Vermeer’s lost works, whether they vanished centuries ago or in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum theft of 1990. The amateurs work in their own media, including “stained glass, printmaking and even Lego.”
All this has made The New Vermeer “an instant sensation in the Netherlands, with 1.3 million viewers (in a country of 17 million) tuning in for the first episode.” Like any successful reality TV show these days, it has also inspired a wealth of supplementary content, including a podcast and an online gallery showing all the artwork created by the contestants. “You can’t currently watch the series in the U.S., writes Artnet’s Sarah Cascone, “but the network is streaming a weekly YouTube ‘Masterclass’ ” offering “step-by-step instructions on how to create your own Vermeer canvas.” At the moment, those videos are available only in Dutch, presumably on the assumption that The New Vermeer won’t travel well outside the Netherlands. But if, by some slim chance, it turned into a Big Brother-scale phenomenon, imagine the golden age of reality TV that would lie ahead.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
That we spend much, if not most, of our lives working is, in itself, not necessarily a bad thing — unless, that is, we’re bored doing it. In the Big Think video above, London Business School Professor of Organizational Behavior Dan Cable cites Gallup polls showing that “about 70 percent of people are not engaged in what they do all day long, and about eighteen percent of people are repulsed.” This may sound normal enough, but Cable calls these perceptions of work as “a thing that we have to get through on the way to the weekend” a “humanistic sickness”: a bad condition for people, of course, but also for the “organizations who get lackluster performance.”
Cable traces the civilizational roots of this at-work boredom back to the decades after the Industrial Revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century, a shoe-shopper would go to the local cobbler. “Each of the people in the store would watch the customer walk in, and then they’d make a shoe for that customer.” But toward the end of the century, “we got this different idea, as a species, where we should not sell two pairs of shoes each day, but two million.”
This vast increase of productivity entailed “breaking the work into extremely small tasks, where most of the people don’t meet the customer. Most of the people don’t invent the shoe. Most of the people don’t actually see the shoe made from beginning to end.”
It entailed, in other words, “removing the meaning from work” in the name of ever-greater scale and efficiency. The nature of the tasks that result don’t sit well with a part of our brain called the ventral striatum. Always “urging us to explore the boundaries of what we know, urging us to be curious,” it sends our minds right out of jobs that no longer offer us the chance to learn anything new. One solution is to work for smaller organizations, whose members tend to play multiple roles in closer proximity to the customer; another is to engage in big-picture thinking by staying aware of what Cable calls “the why of the work,” its larger impact on the world, as well as how it fits in with your own purpose. But then, boredom at work isn’t all bad: a bout of it may well, after all, have led you to read this post in the first place.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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.
In 2018, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. The award itself came as less of a surprise than did the fact that Shoplifters was the first of Kore-eda’s films to win it, given how long he’d been the most widely acclaimed Japanese filmmaker alive. And though it had been more than twenty years since the Palme last went to a Japanese movie — Shomei Imamura’s The Eel, in 1997 — Japan had long since established itself at Cannes as the Asian country to beat. Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama had won the Palme in 1983, Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha in 1980, and Teinosuke Kinugasa’s Gate of Hell in 1954, when Western cinephiles were only just starting to appreciate Japanese cinema.
Why has that appreciation proven so enduring? This is one question investigated by “The Essential Japanese Cinema,” a video essay from The Cinema Cartography. Narrator Luiza Liz Bond emphasized the “heightened aesthetic sensibility” of Japanese filmmakers, on display in “the tender observation of Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the poetic rhapsody of Kurosawa’s Dreams, the harrowing feminine gaze of Videophobia.” But one can find examples just as rich and even more various in lesser-known films from Japan such as Shūji Terayama’s engagé experimental drama Throw Away Your Books, Rally in the Streets, Kaizō Hayashi’s oneiric silent-film pastiche To Sleep as to Dream, and Gakuryū Ishii’s subtly psychedelic and science-fictional coming-of-age tale August in the Water.
The video organizes these films and many others under a rubric of philosophical concepts drawn from Japanese culture. These include bushidō, the code of the samurai Westerners came to know through the pictures of Akira Kurosawa and Masaki Kobayashi; wabi-sabi, an ideal of beauty centered on imperfect things; mono no aware, a sensitivity to the transient and the ephemeral; and guro, which pushes the unsettling to its outer limits. Their heightened aesthetic sensibility “grants Japanese filmmakers the ability to be fine-tuned to the grotesque and the gruesome,” Bond notes. They understand that we all enjoy beauty, but an appreciation of ugliness is necessary to magnify this process. The beauty and the ugly are not opposites, but different aspects of the same thing.”
Of course, one need not be familiar with these ideas in order to enjoy Japanese cinema. The texture-intensive eroticism of Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman in the Dunes, the junkyard body horror of Shinya Tsukamoto’s Tetsuo: The Iron Man, the relentlessly bizarre inventiveness of Nobuhiko Obayashi’s House: these could only be delivered by filmmakers who understand first that they work in a medium of visceral power. Even the work of Yasujirō Ozu, famed for its imperturbable restraint, resonates more deeply than ever with us six decades after his death. “It is impossible to speak of the sublime without speaking of his portrayal of human fragility,” says Bond. “Ozu is never too sentimental, never too ornamental.” Would that more modern-day filmmakers, from Japan or anywhere else, looked to his example.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, 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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