When the Wind Blows: An Animated Tale of Nuclear Apocalypse With Music by Roger Waters & David Bowie (1986)

in Animation, History | August 28th, 2023

Human­i­ty has few fas­ci­na­tions as endur­ing as that with apoc­a­lypse. We’ve been telling our­selves sto­ries of civ­i­liza­tion’s destruc­tion as long as we’ve had civ­i­liza­tion to destroy. But those sto­ries haven’t all been the same: each era envi­sions the end of the world in a way that reflects its own imme­di­ate pre­oc­cu­pa­tions. In the mid nine­teen-eight­ies, noth­ing inspired pre­oc­cu­pa­tions quite so imme­di­ate as the prospect of sud­den nuclear holo­caust. The mount­ing pub­lic anx­i­ety brought large audi­ences to such major after­math-dra­ma­tiz­ing “tele­vi­sion events” as The Day After in the Unit­ed States and the even more har­row­ing Threads in the Unit­ed King­dom.

“As a young­ster grow­ing up in the nine­teen-eight­ies in a tiny vil­lage in the heart of the Cotswolds, I can attest to the fact that no part of the coun­try, how­ev­er remote and bucol­ic, was imper­vi­ous to the threat of the Cold War esca­lat­ing into a full-blown nuclear con­flict,” writes Neil Mitchell at the British Film Insti­tute.

“Pop­u­lar cul­ture was awash with nuclear war-themed films, com­ic strips, songs and nov­els.” This tor­rent includ­ed the artist-writer Ray­mond Brig­gs’ When the Wind Blows, a graph­ic nov­el about an elder­ly rur­al cou­ple who sur­vive a cat­a­stroph­ic strike on Eng­land. Jim and Hilda’s opti­mism and will­ing­ness to fol­low gov­ern­ment instruc­tions prove to be no match for nuclear win­ter, and how­ev­er inex­orable their fate, they man­age not to see it right up until the end comes.

In 1986, When the Wind Blows was adapt­ed into a fea­ture film, direct­ed by Amer­i­can ani­ma­tor Jim­my Muraka­mi. Among its dis­tinc­tive aes­thet­ic choic­es is the com­bi­na­tion of tra­di­tion­al cel ani­ma­tion for the char­ac­ters with pho­tographed minia­tures for the back­grounds, as well as the com­mis­sion­ing of sound­track music from the likes of Roger Waters, David Bowie, and Gen­e­sis — prop­er Eng­lish rock­ers for a prop­er Eng­lish pro­duc­tion. If the adap­ta­tion of When the Wind Blows is less wide­ly known today than oth­er nuclear-apoc­a­lypse movies, that may owe to its sheer cul­tur­al speci­fici­ty. It would be dif­fi­cult to pick the movie’s most Eng­lish scene, but a par­tic­u­lar­ly strong con­tender is the one in which Hil­da rem­i­nisces about how “it was nice in the war, real­ly: the shel­ters, the black­out, the cups of tea.”

“The cou­ple are fruit­less­ly nos­tal­gic for the Blitz spir­it of the Sec­ond World War, con­vinced the gov­ern­ment-issued Pro­tect and Sur­vive pam­phlets are worth the paper they’re print­ed on, and blind­ly under the assump­tion that there can be a win­ner in a nuclear war,” writes Mitchell. “These sweet, unas­sum­ing retirees rep­re­sent an ail­ing, rose-tint­ed world­view and way of life that’s woe­ful­ly unpre­pared for the mag­ni­tude of dev­as­ta­tion wrought by the bomb.” You can see fur­ther analy­sis of the film’s art and world­view in the video at the top of the post from ani­ma­tion-focused Youtube chan­nel Steve Reviews. In the event, human­i­ty sur­vived the long show­down of the Cold War, los­ing none of our pen­chant for apoc­a­lyp­tic fan­ta­sy as a result. How­ev­er com­pul­sive­ly we imag­ine the end of the world today, will any of our visions prove as mem­o­rable as When the Wind Blows?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pro­tect and Sur­vive: 1970s British Instruc­tion­al Films on How to Live Through a Nuclear Attack

The Atom­ic Café: The Cult Clas­sic Doc­u­men­tary Made Entire­ly Out of Nuclear Weapons Pro­pa­gan­da from the Cold War (1982)

The Night Ed Sul­li­van Scared a Nation with the Apoc­a­lyp­tic Ani­mat­ed Short, A Short Vision (1956)

Duck and Cov­er: The 1950s Film That Taught Mil­lions of School­child­ren How to Sur­vive a Nuclear Bomb

How a Clean, Tidy Home Can Help You Sur­vive the Atom­ic Bomb: A Cold War Film from 1954

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Brian Eno on the Loss of Humanity in Modern Music

in Music | August 24th, 2023

In music, as in film, we have reached a point where every ele­ment of every com­po­si­tion can be ful­ly pro­duced and auto­mat­ed by com­put­ers. This is a break­through that allows pro­duc­ers with lit­tle or no musi­cal train­ing the abil­i­ty to rapid­ly turn out hits. It also allows tal­ent­ed musi­cians with­out access to expen­sive equip­ment to record their music with lit­tle more than their lap­tops. But the ease of dig­i­tal record­ing tech­nol­o­gy has encour­aged pro­duc­ers, musi­cians, and engi­neers at all lev­els to smooth out every rough edge and cor­rect every mis­take, even in record­ings of real humans play­ing old-fash­ioned ana­logue instru­ments. After all, if you could make the drum­mer play in per­fect time every mea­sure, the singer hit every note on key, or the gui­tarist play every note per­fect­ly, why wouldn’t you?

One answer comes in a suc­cinct quo­ta­tion from Bri­an Eno’s Oblique Strate­gies, which Ted Mills ref­er­enced in a post here on Miles Davis: “Hon­or Your Mis­takes as a Hid­den Inten­tion.” (The advice is sim­i­lar to that Davis gave to Her­bie Han­cock, “There are no mis­takes, just chances to impro­vise.”) In the short clip at the top, Eno elab­o­rates in the con­text of dig­i­tal pro­duc­tion, say­ing “the temp­ta­tion of the tech­nol­o­gy is to smooth every­thing out.”

But the net effect of cor­rect­ing every per­ceived mis­take is to “homog­e­nize the whole song,” he says, “till every bar sounds the same… until there’s no evi­dence of human life at all in there.” There is a rea­son, after all, that even pure­ly dig­i­tal, “in the box” sequencers and drum machines have func­tions to “human­ize” their beats—to make them cor­re­spond more to the loose­ness and occa­sion­al hes­i­tan­cy of real human play­ers.

This does not mean that there is no such thing as singing or play­ing well or badly—it means there is no such thing as per­fec­tion. Or rather, that per­fec­tion is not a wor­thy goal in music. The real hooks, the moments that we most con­nect with and return to again and again, are often hap­py acci­dents. Mills points to a whole Red­dit thread devot­ed to mis­takes left in record­ings that became part of the song. And when it comes to play­ing per­fect­ly in time or in tune, I think of what an atroc­i­ty would have result­ed from run­ning all of The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street through a dig­i­tal audio work­sta­tion to sand down the sharp edges and “fix” the mis­takes. All of its sham­bling, mum­bling, drunk­en bar­room charm would be com­plete­ly lost. That goes also for the entire record­ed out­put of The Band, or most of Dylan’s albums (such as my per­son­al favorite, John Wes­ley Hard­ing).

To take a some­what more mod­ern exam­ple, lis­ten to “Sire­na” from Aus­tralian instru­men­tal trio Dirty Three, above. This is a band that sounds for­ev­er on the verge of col­lapse, and it’s absolute­ly beau­ti­ful to hear (or see, if you get the chance to expe­ri­ence them live). This record­ing, from their album Ocean Songs, was made in 1998, before most pro­duc­tion went ful­ly dig­i­tal, and there are very few records that sound like it any­more. Even dance music has the poten­tial to be much more raw and organ­ic, instead of hav­ing singers’ voic­es run through so much pitch cor­rec­tion soft­ware that they sound like machines.

There is a lot more to say about the way the albums rep­re­sent­ed above were record­ed, but the over­all point is that just as too much CGI has often ruined the excite­ment of cin­e­ma (we’re look­ing at you, George Lucas) —or as the dig­i­tal “loud­ness wars” sapped much record­ed music of its dynam­ic peaks and valleys—overzealous use of soft­ware to cor­rect imper­fec­tions can ruin the human appeal of music, and ren­der it ster­ile and dis­pos­able like so many cheap, plas­tic mass-pro­duced toys. As with all of our use of advanced tech­nol­o­gy, ques­tions about what we can do should always be fol­lowed by ques­tions about what we’re real­ly gain­ing, or los­ing, in the process.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2016.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bri­an Eno Cre­ates a List of 20 Books That Could Rebuild Civ­i­liza­tion

Bri­an Eno Shares His Crit­i­cal Take on Art & NFTs: “I Main­ly See Hus­tlers Look­ing for Suck­ers”

Bri­an Eno Lists the Ben­e­fits of Singing: A Long Life, Increased Intel­li­gence, and a Sound Civ­i­liza­tion

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

The Psychedelic Animated Video for Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (1979)

in Animation, Music | August 22nd, 2023

Ah, yes, “Auto­bahn.” From the moment the door slams and the igni­tion starts, prog rock­ers and pre-new wavers know a jour­ney is afoot. Though the mem­bers of Kraftwerk made three albums before this, the mem­bers still look­ing like well mean­ing book­ish hip­pies, 1974’s “Auto­bahn” is con­sid­ered Year Zero for the denizens of the elec­tric cafe, the four Ger­man robots who made human music with machines.

Cre­at­ed in 1979, but bop­ping around again in pop cul­ture orbit is this cel-drawn ani­ma­tion by Roger Main­wood, cre­at­ed to pro­mote “Auto­bahn” after most of the cul­ture had caught up. By that last year of the ’70s Omni mag­a­zine was a year old, music was sift­ing through the shock­waves left by Bowie’s Low and Heroes, ana­log was flirt­ing with dig­i­tal, and the world was ready to dri­ve on that long, elec­tric high­way.

Mainwood’s pro­tag­o­nist is part alien, part human, and he begins look­ing around in awe in his hip gog­gles, then set­ting off for a run straight out of a Muy­bridge loop, only to wind up float­ing, fly­ing, sail­ing and swim­ming through a land­scape indebt­ed to Peter Max, Push­Pin Stu­dios, under­ground comix, and 1930 mod­ernism.

Main­wood had just grad­u­at­ed from London’s Roy­al Col­lege of Art Film and Tele­vi­sion School, and was com­mis­sioned by John Halas, the Hun­gar­i­an immi­grant who became known as the Father of British Ani­ma­tion, for Kraftwerk’s record label. The label want­ed to put out one of the first music Laserdiscs. (Halas, by the way, direct­ed a very UPA-influ­enced short called “Auto­ma­nia” in 1963). Accord­ing to Main­wood, he still doesn’t know if the band liked the short or even if they watched it.

Main­wood avoid­ed any direct rep­re­sen­ta­tion of dri­ving or auto­mo­biles, much to his cred­it, which may be why the film holds its fas­ci­na­tion. The ani­ma­tor con­tin­ued in his field, wind­ing up a pro­duc­er of sev­er­al clas­sics of British ani­ma­tion, includ­ing The Snow­man and the chill­ing When the Wind Blows. As for the mean­ing of “Auto­bahn,” we’ll let Main­wood have the last word:

Think­ing back to my thought process­es at that time, I remem­ber want­i­ng to specif­i­cal­ly not have con­ven­tion­al cars in the film. I want­ed a sense of a repet­i­tive jour­ney, and alien­ation, which I took to be what the music was about…hence the soli­tary futur­is­tic fig­ure, pro­tect­ed by large gog­gles, mov­ing through and try­ing to con­nect with the jour­ney he is tak­ing. The auto­mo­bile “mon­sters” are delib­er­ate­ly threat­en­ing (I have nev­er been a big fan of cars or motor­ways!) and when our “hero” tries to make human con­tact (with dif­fer­ent coloured clones of him­self) he can nev­er do it. In the end he realis­es he is mak­ing the repet­i­tive and cir­cu­lar jour­ney alone but strides for­ward pur­pose­ful­ly at the end as he did in the begin­ning. All of which sounds rather pretentious…but I was a young thing in those days!

You can read more of an inter­view with Main­wood here.

Find more ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Kraftwerk’s First Con­cert: The Begin­ning of the End­less­ly Influ­en­tial Band (1970)

When Kraftwerk Issued Their Own Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor Syn­the­siz­er — to Play Their Song “Pock­et Cal­cu­la­tor” (1981)

Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” Per­formed by Ger­man 1st Graders in Cute Card­board Robot Cos­tumes

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

A New Course Teaches You How to Tap the Powers of ChatGPT and Put It to Work for You

in Technology | August 11th, 2023

Released in Novem­ber 2022, Chat­G­PT gave us all a glimpse into the future world of AI–a sense of what the world will look like when chat­bots can think and exe­cute tasks on our behalf. There’s a good chance that you’ve already exper­i­ment­ed loose­ly with Chat­G­PT, try­ing to test its strengths and weak­ness­es. But have you con­sid­ered using Chat­G­PT to unlock your cre­ativ­i­ty and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty in more sub­stan­tive ways? If so, Van­der­bilt Uni­ver­si­ty has a new course for you: Prompt Engi­neer­ing for Chat­G­PT.

Cre­at­ed by Dr. Jules White, Prompt Engi­neer­ing for Chat­G­PT will teach stu­dents how to write effec­tive “prompts” (or well-craft­ed ques­tions) so that they can lever­age Chat­G­PT and oth­er large lan­guage mod­els. Large lan­guage mod­els (LLMs) respond to “prompts” posed by users in nat­ur­al lan­guage state­ments. If users can write good prompts, they can get effec­tive answers from large lan­guage mod­els and dis­cov­er cre­ative uses for these tools. Divid­ed into six mod­ules, the Van­der­bilt course cov­ers the art of writ­ing effec­tive prompts, start­ing with basic prompts and build­ing toward more sophis­ti­cat­ed ones. By course’s end, stu­dents should feel com­fort­able using Chat­G­PT to com­plete mean­ing­ful tasks in their per­son­al and pro­fes­sion­al lives. For exam­ple, one stu­dent left this tes­ti­mo­ni­al after com­plet­ing the course:

As a med­ical researcher and med­ical writer with >30 years of expe­ri­ence, I was real­ly stunned to see what the capa­bil­i­ties of LLMs are. Dr. White made a great work of explain­ing and giv­ing exam­ples. About halfway through the course I was able to put Chat­G­PT to work on a real work-relat­ed issue. With its help, I was able in fact to com­plete in 7 hours a job that would have required at least 20. Now, after com­plet­ing the course, I believe that — by apply­ing some more com­plex for­mat­ting — I could have shaved anoth­er cou­ple of hours…”

Offered on the Cours­era plat­form, Prompt Engi­neer­ing for Chat­G­PT is designed for begin­ners. You only need a brows­er and a Chat­G­PT account. Designed to be com­plet­ed in 18 hours, stu­dents can take the course for a fee ($49) and earn a cre­den­tial at the end. Or they can also audit the course–and forego the credential–for no fee. Enroll here.

Nota Bene: Open Cul­ture has a part­ner­ship with Cours­era. We often fea­ture their cours­es because the cours­es offer val­ue to our read­ers. We typ­i­cal­ly receive fees when users sign up for a paid course, and some­times we receive a fee for fea­tur­ing an edu­ca­tion­al pro­gram itself. Those fees help sup­port our oper­a­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Google & Cours­era Launch New Career Cer­tifi­cates That Pre­pare Stu­dents for Jobs in 2–6 Months: Busi­ness Intel­li­gence & Advanced Data Ana­lyt­ics

Com­put­er Sci­en­tist Andrew Ng Presents a New Series of Machine Learn­ing Courses–an Updat­ed Ver­sion of the Pop­u­lar Course Tak­en by 5 Mil­lion Stu­dents

Watch Fritz Lang’s Metropolis with a Modern, New Electronic Soundtrack (1927)

in Film, Music | August 9th, 2023

From sound artist Tomer Baruch and drum­mer Alex Bra­jković comes a new elec­tron­ic sound­track for Fritz Lang’s cen­tu­ry-old clas­sic film, Metrop­o­lis. The new score comes with this pref­ace:

One of the most sig­nif­i­cant themes in the dystopi­an fea­ture is the blurred-to-nonex­is­tent line sep­a­rat­ing man and machine; Human-like machines, Mechan­i­cal-humans, real-life android deep­fakes, and above all the city of Metrop­o­lis, an enor­mous machine and with­in it men, slaved to main­tain its oper­a­tion. The theme that was dis­turb­ing in the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry is as rel­e­vant as ever with the lat­est devel­op­ments in AI, forc­ing us to rethink again what makes us human.

In anal­o­gy to that the sound­track is based on archive record­ings of ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry machin­ery, on top of which Tomer Baruch and Alex Bra­jkovic play ana­log syn­the­siz­ers and drums. They inter­face with the machines and embody a relent­less­ly repet­i­tive mechan­i­cal motion, one which is usu­al­ly sequenced or pro­grammed. By cre­at­ing music which is in itself blur­ring the line between man and machine, by sub­ject­ing them­selves to machine-like pat­terns, the musi­cians become a part of Metrop­o­lis, cre­at­ing a dis­il­lu­sioned, inten­si­fied and dark­er than ever sound­track for the film.

Baruch and Alex Bra­jković cre­at­ed the sound­track for the Sounds of Silence Film Fes­ti­val, Den Haag in 2019. Stream it above.

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 

If Fritz Lang’s Icon­ic Film Metrop­o­lis Had a Kraftwerk Sound­track

Read the Orig­i­nal 32-Page Pro­gram for Fritz Lang’s Metrop­o­lis (1927)

See Metrop­o­lis‘ Scan­dalous Dance Scene Col­orized, Enhanced, and New­ly Sound­tracked

Behold Beau­ti­ful Orig­i­nal Movie Posters for Metrop­o­lis from France, Swe­den, Ger­many, Japan & Beyond

Watch Metrop­o­lis’ Cin­e­mat­i­cal­ly Inno­v­a­tive Dance Scene, Restored as Fritz Lang Intend­ed It to Be Seen (1927)

Why Einstein Was a “Peerless” Genius, and Hawking Was an “Ordinary” Genius: A Scientist Explains

in Data, Science | August 1st, 2023

Genius sells. Pub­lish­ers of biogra­phies and stu­dios behind Oscar-win­ning dra­mas can tell you that. So can net­work sci­en­tist Albert-Lás­zló Barabási, who has actu­al­ly con­duct­ed research into the nature of genius. “What real­ly deter­mines the ‘genius’ label?” he asks in the Big Think video above. When he and his col­lab­o­ra­tors “com­pared all genius­es to their sci­en­tif­ic peers, we real­ized that there are real­ly two very dif­fer­ent class­es: ordi­nary genius and peer­less genius.” Con­sid­er­ing the lat­ter, Barabási points to the per­haps unsur­pris­ing exam­ple of Albert Ein­stein.

“When we looked at the sci­en­tists work­ing at the same time, rough­ly in the same areas of physics that he did,” Barabási explains, “there was no one who would have a com­pa­ra­ble pro­duc­tiv­i­ty or sci­en­tif­ic impact to him. He was tru­ly alone.” Illus­trat­ing the class of “ordi­nary genius” is a fig­ure almost as well-known as Ein­stein: Stephen Hawk­ing. “To our sur­prise, we real­ized, there were about six oth­er sci­en­tists who worked in rough­ly the same area, and had com­pa­ra­ble, often big­ger impacts than Stephen Hawk­ing had” — and yet only he was pub­licly labeled a “genius.”

“The ‘genius’ label is a con­struct that soci­ety assigns to excep­tion­al accom­plish­ment, but excep­tion­al accom­plish­ment is not suf­fi­cient to get the genius label.” Through­out his­to­ry, “remark­able indi­vid­u­als were always born in the vicin­i­ty of big cul­tur­al cen­ters, and every­thing that is out­side of the cul­tur­al cen­ters was typ­i­cal­ly a desert of excep­tion­al accom­plish­ments.” Today, as ven­ture cap­i­tal­ist and essay­ist Paul Gra­ham once wrote, “a thou­sand Leonar­dos and a thou­sand Michelan­ge­los walk among us. If DNA ruled, we should be greet­ed dai­ly by artis­tic mar­vels. We aren’t, and the rea­son is that to make Leonar­do you need more than his innate abil­i­ty. You also need Flo­rence in 1450.”

What would it take to dis­cov­er the “hid­den genius­es” who may have been born into unpro­pi­tious cir­cum­stances? This is one con­cern behind Barabási’s inquiry into the nature of sci­en­tif­ic promi­nence. The ques­tion of “how does the qual­i­ty of the idea that I picked, and the ulti­mate suc­cess, and my abil­i­ty as a sci­en­tist con­nect to each oth­er” led him to devel­op the “Q fac­tor,” the mea­sure of “our abil­i­ty to turn ideas into dis­cov­er­ies.” His analy­sis of the data shows that, through­out a sci­en­tist’s career, the Q fac­tor remains more or less sta­ble. Apply­ing it to big data “could help us to dis­cov­er those that real­ly had the accom­plish­ment and deserve the genius label and put them in the right place.” If he’s cor­rect, we can expect a bumper crop of books and movies on a whole new wave of genius­es in the years to come.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Char­ac­ter Traits Do Genius­es Share in Com­mon?: From Isaac New­ton to Richard Feyn­man

“The Most Intel­li­gent Pho­to Ever Tak­en”: The 1927 Solvay Coun­cil Con­fer­ence, Fea­tur­ing Ein­stein, Bohr, Curie, Heisen­berg, Schrödinger & More

This is What Richard Feynman’s PhD The­sis Looks Like: A Video Intro­duc­tion

Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Stag­ger­ing Genius of Isaac New­ton

Explore the Largest Online Archive Explor­ing the Genius of Leonard da Vin­ci

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Behold A Grammar of Japanese Ornament and Design: The 19th Century Book That Introduced Western Audiences to Japanese Art (1880)

in Architecture, Art, Design, History, Travel | July 31st, 2023

In 1880, archi­tect Thomas W. Cut­ler endeav­ored to intro­duce his fel­low Brits to Japan­ese art and design, a sub­ject that remained nov­el for many West­ern­ers of the time, giv­en how recent­ly the Toku­gawa shogu­nate had “kept them­selves aloof from all for­eign inter­course, and their coun­try jeal­ous­ly closed against strangers.”

Hav­ing writ­ten pos­i­tive­ly of China’s influ­ence on Japan­ese artists, Cut­ler hoped that access to West­ern art would not prove a cor­rupt­ing fac­tor:

The fear that a bas­tard art of a very debased kind may arise in Japan, is not with­out foundation…The Euro­pean artist, who will study the dec­o­ra­tive art of Japan care­ful­ly and rev­er­ent­ly, will not be in any haste to dis­turb, still less to uproot, the thought and feel­ing from which it has sprung; it is per­haps the ripest and rich­est fruit of a tree cul­ti­vat­ed for many ages with the utmost solic­i­tude and skill, under con­di­tions of soci­ety pecu­liar­ly favor­able to its growth.

Hav­ing nev­er vis­it­ed Japan him­self, Cut­ler relied on pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished works, as well as numer­ous friends who were able to fur­nish him with “reli­able infor­ma­tion upon many sub­jects,” giv­en their “long res­i­dence in the coun­try.”

Accord­ing­ly, expect a bit of bias in A Gram­mar of Japan­ese Orna­ment and Design (1880).

That said, Cut­ler emerges as a robust admir­er of Japan’s paint­ing, lac­quer­ware, ceram­ics, cal­lig­ra­phy, tex­tiles, met­al­work, enam­el­work and net­suke carv­ings, the lat­ter of which are “are often mar­velous in their humor, detail, and even dig­ni­ty.”

Only Japan’s wood­en archi­tec­ture, which he con­fi­dent­ly pooh poohed as lit­tle more than “artis­tic car­pen­try, dec­o­ra­tion, and gar­den­ing”, clev­er­ly designed to with­stand earth­quakes, get shown less respect.

Cutler’s ren­der­ings of Japan­ese design motifs, under­tak­en in his free time, are the last­ing lega­cy of his book, par­tic­u­lar­ly for those on the prowl for copy­right-free graph­ics.

Cut­ler observed that the “most char­ac­ter­is­tic” ele­ment of Japan­ese dec­o­ra­tion was its close ties to the nat­ur­al world, adding that unlike West­ern design­ers, a Japan­ese artist “would throw his design a lit­tle out of the cen­ter, and clev­er­ly bal­ance the com­po­si­tion by a but­ter­fly, a leaf, or even a spot of col­or.”

The below plant stud­ies are drawn from the work  of the great ukiyo‑e mas­ter Hoku­sai, a “man of the peo­ple” who ush­ered in a peri­od of “vital­i­ty and fresh­ness” in Japan­ese art.

A sam­pler of curved lines made with sin­gle brush strokes can be used to cre­ate clouds or the intri­cate scroll­work that inspired West­ern artists and design­ers of the Aes­thet­ic Move­ment.

While Cut­ler might not have thought much of Japan­ese archi­tec­ture, it’s worth not­ing that his book shows up in the foot­notes of Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan: The Role of Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Art and Archi­tec­ture in the Work of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Take a peek at some Japan­ese-inspired wall­pa­per of Cut­ler’s own design, then explore A Gram­mar of Japan­ese Orna­ment and Design by Thomas W. Cut­ler here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Explore the Beau­ti­ful Pages of the 1902 Japan­ese Design Mag­a­zine Shin-Bijut­sukai: Euro­pean Mod­ernism Meets Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Design

Down­load Clas­sic Japan­ese Wave and Rip­ple Designs: A Go-to Guide for Japan­ese Artists from 1903

Hun­dreds of Won­der­ful Japan­ese Fire­work Designs from the Ear­ly-1900s: Dig­i­tized and Free to Down­load

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How the Ancient Greeks Invented the First Computer: An Introduction to the Antikythera Mechanism (Circa 87 BC)

in History, Technology | July 26th, 2023

At the cen­ter of Indi­ana Jones and the Dial of Des­tiny is a device quite like the real ancient Greek arti­fact known as the Antikythera mech­a­nism, which has been called the world’s old­est com­put­er. “Every Indi­ana Jones adven­ture needs an exot­ic MacGuf­fin,” writes Smithsonian.com’s Meilan Sol­ly, and in this lat­est and pre­sum­ably last install­ment in its series, “the hero chas­es after the Archimedes Dial, a fic­tion­al­ized ver­sion of the Antikythera mech­a­nism that pre­dicts the loca­tion of nat­u­ral­ly occur­ring fis­sures in time.” After under­go­ing Indi­ana Jone­si­fi­ca­tion, in oth­er words, the Antikythera mech­a­nism becomes a time machine, a func­tion pre­sum­ably not includ­ed in even the least respon­si­ble archae­o­log­i­cal spec­u­la­tions about its still-unclear set of func­tions.

But accord­ing to Jo Marchant, author of Decod­ing the Heav­ens: Solv­ing the Mys­tery of the World’s First Com­put­er, the Antikythera mech­a­nism real­ly is “a time machine in a sense. When you turn the han­dle on the side, you are mov­ing back­ward in time, you’re con­trol­ling time. You’re see­ing the uni­verse either being fast-for­ward­ed or reversed, and you’re choos­ing the speed and can set it to any moment in his­to­ry that you want.”

She refers to the fact that a han­dle on the side of the mech­a­nism con­trols gears with­in it, which engage to com­pute and dis­play “the posi­tions of celes­tial bod­ies, the date, the tim­ing of ath­let­ic games. There’s a cal­en­dar, there’s an eclipse pre­dic­tion dial, and there are inscrip­tions giv­ing you infor­ma­tion about what the stars are doing.”

It seems that the Antikythera mech­a­nism could tell you “every­thing you need to know about the state and work­ings of the cos­mos,” at least if you’re an ancient Greek. But it also tells us some­thing impor­tant about the ancient Greeks them­selves: specif­i­cal­ly, that they’d devel­oped much more sophis­ti­cat­ed mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing than we’d known before the ear­ly twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when the device was dis­cov­ered in a ship­wreck. Accord­ing to the BBC video above on the details of the Antikythera mech­a­nis­m’s known capa­bil­i­ties, Arthur C. Clarke thought that “if the ancient Greeks had under­stood the capa­bil­i­ties of the tech­nol­o­gy, then they would have reached the moon with­in 300 years.” A grand old civ­i­liza­tion that turns out to have been on a course for out­er space: now there’s a viable premise for the next big archi­tec­tur­al adven­ture film fran­chise.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Watch an Accu­rate Recon­struc­tion of the World’s Old­est Com­put­er, the 2,200 Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, from Start to Fin­ish

How the World’s Old­est Com­put­er Worked: Recon­struct­ing the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism

Researchers Devel­op a Dig­i­tal Mod­el of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mech­a­nism, “the World’s First Com­put­er”

How the Ancient Greeks Shaped Mod­ern Math­e­mat­ics: A Short, Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Mod­ern Artists Show How the Ancient Greeks & Romans Made Coins, Vas­es & Arti­sanal Glass

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.

Explore the Largest Online Archive Exploring the Genius of Leonard da Vinci

in Art, Computer Science, Design, Science, Technology | July 10th, 2023

We dare not spec­u­late as to what Leonar­do DaVin­ci would make of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

We are, how­ev­er, fair­ly con­fi­dent that he would love the Inter­net.

The Renais­sance-era genius applied his sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of the human body and the nat­ur­al world to oth­er types of sys­tems, includ­ing plans for civ­il engi­neer­ing projects, mil­i­tary pro­jec­tiles, and fly­ing machines.

Google Arts & Culture’s new ini­tia­tive Inside a Genius Mind offers an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence of the codices in which Da Vin­ci made his sketch­es, dia­grams, and notes.

It’s also a cura­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tion between a human — Oxford art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Kemp  — and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Pro­fes­sor Kemp, author of Liv­ing with Leonar­do: Fifty Years of San­i­ty and Insan­i­ty in the Art World and Beyond, brings a life­time of rig­or­ous study and pas­sion for the sub­ject.

His non-human coun­ter­part used machine learn­ing to delve into the note­books’ con­tents, inves­ti­gat­ing some 1040 pages from 6 vol­umes and “draw­ing the­mat­ic con­nec­tions across time and sub­ject mat­ter to reflect Leonardo’s spir­it of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary imag­i­na­tion, inno­va­tion and the pro­found uni­ty at the heart of his appar­ent­ly diverse pur­suits.”

Upon launch­ing the exper­i­ment, you bush­whack your way through the indi­vid­ual codices by click­ing on the sketch­es float­ing toward you like ele­ments in a clas­sic space-themed video game, or choose to enjoy one of five curat­ed sto­ries.

We went with Earth as Body, which gath­ers sev­en pages from the UK’s Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust’s Codex Wind­sor, and one from the Codex Leices­ter, which inspired an ani­mat­ed mod­el that should sure­ly please its cur­rent own­er, Bill Gates.

Using a dis­creet and some­what fid­dly nav­i­ga­tion bar on the left side of the screen, we toured Leonardo’s ren­der­ings of the flayed mus­cles of the upper spine, the ves­sels and nerves of the neck and liv­er, the Arno val­ley with the route of a pro­posed canal that would run from Flo­rence to Pisa, a view of the Alps from Milan, the fall of light on a face, stud­ies of optics and men in action, and obser­va­tions of the moon and earth­shine.

How are these things relat­ed?

“Leonar­do believed that the human body rep­re­sent­ed the whole nat­ur­al world in minia­ture” and the selec­tions do offer food for thought that Leonardo’s pas­sion for the under­ly­ing laws of nature is the com­mon thread run­ning through his research and art.

Each image is accom­pa­nied a but­ton invit­ing you to “explore” the work fur­ther. Click it for infor­ma­tion about dimen­sions, prove­nance, and media, as well as some tan­ta­liz­ing bio­graph­i­cal tid­bits, such as this, adapt­ed from the cat­a­logue for the 2019 exhib­it Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Life in Draw­ing:

Leonar­do had first stud­ied anato­my in the late 1480s. By the end of his life he claimed to have per­formed 30 human dis­sec­tions, intend­ing to pub­lish an illus­trat­ed trea­tise on the sub­ject, but this was nev­er com­plet­ed, and Leonardo’s work thus had no dis­cernible impact on the dis­ci­pline. His only doc­u­ment­ed dis­sec­tion was car­ried out in the win­ter of 1507–8, when he per­formed an autop­sy on an old man whose death he had wit­nessed in a hos­pi­tal in Flo­rence. The stud­ies on this page from Leonardo’s note­book are based on that dis­sec­tion: on the ver­so Leonar­do depicts the ves­sels of the liv­er; and in notes else­where in the note­book he gives the first known clin­i­cal descrip­tion of cir­rho­sis of the liv­er.

Per­haps you’d like to cir­cum­vent the machine learn­ing and use your own genius mind to make  con­nec­tions a la Da Vin­ci?

Try mess­ing around with the AI tags. See what you can cob­ble togeth­er to forge a cohe­sive alliance between such ele­ments as wing, horse, map, musi­cal instru­ments, and spi­ral.

Or cleanse your palate by putting a mash-up of two codex sketch­es on a dig­i­tal sticky with the help of Google AI, mind­ful that the mas­ter, who lived to the ripe old age of 67, was prob­a­bly a bit more inten­tion­al with his time…

Begin your explo­rations of Google Arts & Culture’s Inside a Genius Mind here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490)

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

How Stanley Kubrick Adapted Stephen King’s The Shining into a Cinematic Masterpiece

in Books, Film | July 3rd, 2023

For most of us, the title The Shin­ing first calls to mind the Stan­ley Kubrick film, not the Stephen King nov­el from which it was adapt­ed. Though it would be an exag­ger­a­tion to say that the for­mer has entire­ly eclipsed the lat­ter, the enor­mous dif­fer­ence between the works’ rel­a­tive cul­tur­al impact speaks for itself — as does the resent­ment King occa­sion­al­ly airs about Kubrick­’s exten­sive rework­ing of his orig­i­nal sto­ry. At the cen­ter of both ver­sions of The Shin­ing is a win­ter care­tak­er at a moun­tain resort who goes insane and tries to mur­der his own fam­i­ly, but in most oth­er respects, the expe­ri­ence of the two works could hard­ly be more dif­fer­ent.

How King’s The Shin­ing became Kubrick­’s The Shin­ing is the sub­ject of the video essay above from Tyler Knud­sen, bet­ter known as Cin­e­maTyler, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture for his videos on such auteurs as Robert Wiene, Jean Renoir, and Andrei Tarkovsky (as well as a sev­en-part series on Kubrick­’s own 2001: A Space Odyssey). It begins with Kubrick­’s search for a new idea after com­plet­ing Bar­ry Lyn­don, which involved open­ing book after book at ran­dom and toss­ing against the wall any and all that proved unable to hold his atten­tion. When it became clear that The Shin­ing, the young King’s third nov­el, would­n’t go fly­ing, Kubrick enlist­ed the more expe­ri­enced nov­el­ist Diane John­son to col­lab­o­rate with him on an adap­ta­tion for the screen.

Almost all of Kubrick­’s films are based on books. As Knud­sen explains it, “Kubrick felt that there aren’t many orig­i­nal screen­writ­ers who are a high enough cal­iber as some of the great­est nov­el­ists,” and that start­ing with an already-writ­ten work “allowed him to see the sto­ry more objec­tive­ly.” In deter­min­ing the qual­i­ties that res­onat­ed with him, per­son­al­ly, “he could get at the core of what was good about the sto­ry, strip away the clut­ter, and enhance the most bril­liant aspects with a pro­found sense of hind­sight.” In no case do the trans­for­ma­tive effects of this process come through more clear­ly than The Shin­ing: Kubrick and John­son reduced King’s almost 450 dia­logue- and flash­back-filled pages to a res­o­nant­ly stark two and a half hours of film that has haunt­ed view­ers for four decades now.

“I don’t think the audi­ence is like­ly to miss the many and self-con­scious­ly ‘heavy’ pages King devotes to things like Jack­’s father’s drink­ing prob­lem or Wendy’s moth­er,” Kubrick once said. Still, any­one can hack a sto­ry down: the hard part is know­ing what to keep, and even more so what to inten­si­fy for max­i­mum effect. Knud­sen lists off a host of choic­es Kubrick and John­son con­sid­ered (includ­ing show­ing more Native Amer­i­can imagery, which should please fans of Bill Blake­more’s analy­sis in “The Fam­i­ly of Man”) but ulti­mate­ly reject­ed. The result is a film with an abun­dance of visu­al detail, but only enough nar­ra­tive and char­ac­ter detail to facil­i­tate Kubrick­’s aim of “using the audi­ence’s own imag­i­na­tion against them,” let­ting them fill in the gaps with fears of their own. While his ver­sion of The Shin­ing evades near­ly all clichés, it does demon­strate the truth of one: less is more.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Decod­ing the Screen­plays of The Shin­ing, Moon­rise King­dom & The Dark Knight: Watch Lessons from the Screen­play

How Stan­ley Kubrick Made 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Sev­en-Part Video Essay

Stan­ley Kubrick’s The Shin­ing Reimag­ined as Wes Ander­son and David Lynch Movies

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

A Kubrick Schol­ar Dis­cov­ers an Eerie Detail in The Shin­ing That’s Gone Unno­ticed for More Than 40 Years

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books 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.