The Word “Robot” Originated in a Czech Play in 1921: Discover Karel Čapek’s Sci-Fi Play R.U.R. (a.k.a. Rossum’s Universal Robots)

in History, Literature, Science, Technology | February 4th, 2020

When I hear the word robot, I like to imag­ine Isaac Asimov’s delight­ful­ly Yid­dish-inflect­ed Brook­ly­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tion of the word: “ro-butt,” with heavy stress on the first syl­la­ble. (A quirk shared by Futu­ra­ma’s crus­tacean Doc­tor Zoid­berg.) Asi­mov warned us that robots could be dan­ger­ous and impos­si­ble to con­trol. But he also showed young readers—in his Nor­by series of kids’ books writ­ten with his wife Janet—that robots could be hero­ic com­pan­ions, sav­ing the solar sys­tem from cos­mic supervil­lains.

The word robot con­jures all of these asso­ci­a­tions in sci­ence fic­tion: from Blade Run­ner’s repli­cants to Star Trek’s Data. We might refer to these par­tic­u­lar exam­ples as androids rather than robots, but this con­fu­sion is pre­cise­ly to the point. Our lan­guage has for­got­ten that robots start­ed in sci-fi as more human than human, before they became Asi­mov-like machines. Like the sci-fi writer’s pro­nun­ci­a­tion of robot, the word orig­i­nat­ed in East­ern Europe in 1921, the year after Asimov’s birth, in a play by Czech intel­lec­tu­al Karel Čapek called R.U.R., or “Rossum’s Uni­ver­sal Robots.”

The title refers to the cre­ations of Mr. Rossum, a Franken­stein-like inven­tor and pos­si­ble inspi­ra­tion for Metrop­o­lis’s Rot­wang (who was him­self an inspi­ra­tion for Dr. Strangelove). Čapek told the Lon­don Sat­ur­day Review after the play pre­miered that Rossum was a “typ­i­cal rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the sci­en­tif­ic mate­ri­al­ism of the last [nine­teenth] cen­tu­ry,” with a “desire to cre­ate an arti­fi­cial man—in the chem­i­cal and bio­log­i­cal, not mechan­i­cal sense.”

Rossum did not wish to play God so much as “to prove God to be unnec­es­sary and absurd.” This was but one stop on “the road to indus­tri­al pro­duc­tion.” As tech­nol­o­gy ana­lyst and Penn State pro­fes­sor John M. Jor­dan writes at the MIT Press Read­er, Čapek’s robots were not appli­ances become sen­tient, nor trusty, super­pow­ered side­kicks. They were, in fact, invent­ed to be slaves.

The robot… was a cri­tique of mech­a­niza­tion and the ways it can dehu­man­ize peo­ple. The word itself derives from the Czech word “rob­o­ta,” or forced labor, as done by serfs. Its Slav­ic lin­guis­tic root, “rab,” means “slave.” The orig­i­nal word for robots more accu­rate­ly defines androids, then, in that they were nei­ther metal­lic nor mechan­i­cal.

Jor­dan describes this his­to­ry in an excerpt from his book Robots, part of the MIT Press Essen­tial Knowl­edge Series, and a time­li­er than ever inter­ven­tion in the cul­tur­al and tech­no­log­i­cal his­to­ry of robots, who walk (and moon­walk) among us in all sorts of machine forms, if not quite yet in the sense Čapek imag­ined. But a Blade Run­ner-like sce­nario seemed inevitable to him in a soci­ety ruled by “utopi­an notions of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy.”

In the time he imag­ines, he says, “the prod­uct of the human brain has escaped the con­trol of human hands.” Čapek has one char­ac­ter, the robot Radius, make the point plain­ly:

The pow­er of man has fall­en. By gain­ing pos­ses­sion of the fac­to­ry we have become mas­ters of every­thing. The peri­od of mankind has passed away. A new world has arisen. … Mankind is no more. Mankind gave us too lit­tle life. We want­ed more life.

Sound famil­iar? While R.U.R. owes a “sub­stan­tial” debt to Mary Shelley’s Franken­stein, it’s also clear that Čapek con­tributed some­thing orig­i­nal to the cri­tique, a vision of a world in which “humans become more like their machines,” writes Jor­dan. “Humans and robots… are essen­tial­ly one and the same.” Beyond the sur­face fears of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy, the play that intro­duced the word robot to the cul­tur­al lex­i­con also intro­duced the dark­er social cri­tique in most sto­ries about them: We have rea­son to fear robots because in cre­at­ing them, we’ve recre­at­ed our­selves; then we’ve treat­ed them the way we treat each oth­er.

You can find the text of Čapek’s play in book for­mat on Ama­zon.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov Explains His Three Laws of Robots

Twerk­ing, Moon­walk­ing AI Robots–They’re Now Here

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

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

How Walter Murch Revolutionized the Sound of Modern Cinema: A New Video Essay Explores His Innovations in American Graffiti, The Godfather & More

in Film | February 3rd, 2020

Wal­ter Murch, per­haps the most famed film edi­tor alive, is acclaimed for the work he’s done for direc­tors like Fran­cis Ford Cop­po­la, George Lucas, and Antho­ny Minghel­la. As inno­v­a­tive and influ­en­tial as his ways for putting images togeth­er have been, Murch has done just as much for cin­e­ma as a sound design­er. In the video above Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, exam­ines Murch’s sound­craft through what Murch calls “worldiz­ing,” which Filmsound.org describes as “manip­u­lat­ing sound until it seemed to be some­thing that exist­ed in real space.” This involves “play­ing back exist­ing record­ings through a speak­er or speak­ers in real-world acoustic sit­u­a­tions,” record­ing it, and using that record­ing on the film’s sound­track.

In oth­er words, Murch pio­neered the tech­nique of not just insert­ing music into a movie in the edit­ing room, but re-record­ing that music in the actu­al spaces in which the char­ac­ters hear it. Mix­ing the orig­i­nal, “clean” record­ing of a song with that song as re-record­ed in the movie’s space — a dance hall, an out­door wed­ding, a dystopi­an under­ground war­ren — has giv­en Murch a greater degree of con­trol over the view­er’s lis­ten­ing expe­ri­ence. In some shots he could let the view­er hear more of the song itself by pri­or­i­tiz­ing the orig­i­nal song; in oth­ers he could pri­or­i­tize the re-record­ed song and let the view­er hear the song as the char­ac­ters do, with all the son­ic char­ac­ter­is­tics con­tributed by the space — or, if you like, the world — around them.

Puschak uses exam­ples of Murch’s worldiz­ing from Amer­i­can Graf­fi­ti and The God­fa­ther, and notes that he first used it in Lucas’ debut fea­ture THX 1138. But he also dis­cov­ered an ear­li­er attempt by Orson Welles to accom­plish the same effect in Touch of Evil, a film Murch re-edit­ed in 1998. What Welles had not done, says Murch in an inter­view with Film Quar­ter­ly, “was com­bine the orig­i­nal record­ing and the atmos­pher­ic record­ing. He sim­ply posi­tioned a micro­phone, sta­t­ic in an alley­way out­side Uni­ver­sal Sound Stu­dios, re-record­ing from a speak­er to the micro­phone through the alley­way. He did­n’t have con­trol over the bal­ance of dry sound ver­sus reflect­ed sound, and he did­n’t have the sense of motion that we got from mov­ing the speak­er and mov­ing the micro­phone rel­a­tive to one anoth­er.”

Doing this, Murch says, “cre­ates the son­ic equiv­a­lent of depth of field in pho­tog­ra­phy. We can still have the music in the back­ground, but because it’s so dif­fuse, you can’t find edges to focus on and, there­fore, focus on the dia­logue which is in the fore­ground.” In all ear­li­er films besides Welles’, “music was just fil­tered and played low, but it still had its edges,” mak­ing it hard to sep­a­rate from the dia­logue. These days, as Puschak points out, any­one with the right sound-edit­ing soft­ware can per­form these manip­u­la­tions with the click of a mouse. No such ease in the 1970s, when Murch had to not only exe­cute these thor­ough­ly ana­log, labor-inten­sive process­es, but also invent them in the first place. As any­one who’s looked and lis­tened close­ly to his work knows, that audio­vi­su­al strug­gle made Murch expe­ri­ence and work with cin­e­ma in a rich­ly phys­i­cal way — one that, as gen­er­a­tions of edi­tors and sound design­ers come up in whol­ly dig­i­tal envi­ron­ments, may not exist much longer.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Sounds of Blade Run­ner: How Music & Sound Effects Became Part of the DNA of Rid­ley Scott’s Futur­is­tic World

How the Sounds You Hear in Movies Are Real­ly Made: Dis­cov­er the Mag­ic of “Foley Artists”

Hear Dzi­ga Vertov’s Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Exper­i­ments in Sound: From His Radio Broad­casts to His First Sound Film

Why Mar­vel and Oth­er Hol­ly­wood Films Have Such Bland Music: Every Frame a Paint­ing Explains the Per­ils of the “Temp Score”

The Alche­my of Film Edit­ing, Explored in a New Video Essay That Breaks Down Han­nah and Her Sis­ters, The Empire Strikes Back & Oth­er Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

How the Psychedelic Mellotron Works: An In-Depth Demonstration

in Music | January 29th, 2020

Record­ed music his­to­ry is filled with instru­ments that appeared for a brief time, then were nev­er heard from again—relegated to the dust­bin of too-quirky, heavy, awk­ward, tonal­ly-unpleas­ant, or impos­si­ble-to-tune-and-main­tain. Then there are instruments—once they assumed their basic shape and form—that have per­sist­ed large­ly unchanged for cen­turies. The Mel­lotron falls into nei­ther of these cat­e­gories. But it may in time tran­scend them both in a strange way.

“Of all of the strange instru­ments that’ve worked the edges of pop­u­lar music,” writes Gareth Bran­wyn at Boing Boing, “the Mel­lotron is prob­a­bly the odd­est. Basi­cal­ly an upright organ cab­i­net filled the tape heads and record­ed tape strips that you trig­ger through the key­board, the Mel­lotron is like some crazy one-off con­trap­tion that caught on and actu­al­ly got man­u­fac­tured.”

First made in Eng­land in 1963, it appeared in var­i­ous mod­els through­out the sev­en­ties and eight­ies. It has reap­peared in the nineties and 2000s in improved and upgrad­ed ver­sions, all lead­ing up to what Sound on Sound called “the most tech­no­log­i­cal­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed Mel­lotron ever,” the 2007 M4000. In the video above Alli­son Stout from Bell Tone Synth Works, a music shop in Philadel­phia, PA, demon­strates a much ear­li­er, far less advanced M400 from 1976.

Not only did the Mel­lotron beat the odds of remain­ing an unwork­able pro­to­type; the pro­to-sam­pler became a psy­che­del­ic sig­na­ture: from “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” to the Moody Blues and David Bowie’s “Space Odd­i­ty.” It pop­u­lat­ed ear­ly prog rock, thanks to Yes’s Rick Wake­man, who played on Bowie’s space rock clas­sic in 1969, and to Ian McDon­ald, who fell for the instru­ment that same year as a found­ing mem­ber of King Crim­son. (See enthu­si­as­tic YouTu­ber “Doc­tor Mix” play Mel­lotron parts from well-known songs above.)

The instrument’s slight­ly cheesy, Lawrence-Welk-orches­tra-like sounds some­how fit per­fect­ly with the loose, spa­cious instru­men­ta­tion of prog and psych rock; its sound will live as long as the music of The Bea­t­les, Bowie, and every­one else who put a micro­phone in front of a Mel­lotron. Yet in most of its iter­a­tions, the Mel­lotron has lacked the char­ac­ter­is­tics of a melod­ic instru­ment that sur­vives the test of time. It is finicky and prone to fre­quent break­downs. It is lim­it­ed in its tonal range to a series of tape record­ings of a lim­it­ed num­ber of instru­ments.

In the case of the Mel­lotron M400 at the top, those instru­ments are vio­lin, flute, and cel­lo. Do the sounds com­ing from the Mel­lotron in any way improve upon or even approx­i­mate the qual­i­ties of their orig­i­nals? Of course not. Why would musi­cians choose to record with a Mel­lotron at a time when ana­logue syn­the­siz­ers were becom­ing afford­able, portable, and capa­ble of an expres­sive range of tones? The answer is sim­ple. Noth­ing else makes the weird, warm, war­bly, whirring, and entire­ly oth­er­world­ly sound of a Mel­lotron, and noth­ing ever will.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Intro­duc­ing the Mel­lotron: A Groovy 1965 Demon­stra­tion of the “Musi­cal Com­put­er” Used by The Bea­t­les, Moody Blues & Oth­er Psy­che­del­ic Pop Artists

Rick Wake­man Tells the Sto­ry of the Mel­lotron, the Odd­ball Pro­to-Syn­the­siz­er Pio­neered by the Bea­t­les

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

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

Jim Lehrer’s 16 Rules for Practicing Journalism with Integrity

in Current Affairs, Media, Television | January 27th, 2020

In 1988, stal­wart PBS news anchor, writer, and long­time pres­i­den­tial debate mod­er­a­tor Jim Lehrer was accused of being too soft on the can­di­dates. He snapped back, “If some­body wants to be enter­tained, they ought to go to the cir­cus.” The folksy quote sums up the Tex­an jour­nal­ist’s phi­los­o­phy suc­cinct­ly. The news was a seri­ous busi­ness. But Lehrer, who passed away last Thurs­day, wit­nessed the dis­tinc­tion between polit­i­cal jour­nal­ism and the cir­cus col­lapse, with the spread of cable info­tain­ment, and cor­po­rate dom­i­na­tion of the Inter­net and radio.

Kot­tke remarks that Lehrer seemed “like one of the last of a breed of jour­nal­ist who took seri­ous­ly the integri­ty of inform­ing the Amer­i­can pub­lic about impor­tant events.” He con­tin­u­al­ly refused offers from the major net­works, host­ing PBS’s Mac­Neil-Lehrer New­shour with cohost Robert Mac­Neil until 1995, then his own in-depth news hour until his retire­ment in 2011. “I have an old-fash­ioned view that news is not a com­mod­i­ty,” he said. “News is infor­ma­tion that’s required in a demo­c­ra­t­ic soci­ety… That sounds corny, but I don’t care whether it sounds corny or not. It’s the truth.”

To meet such high stan­dards required a rig­or­ous set of jour­nal­is­tic… well, standards—such as Lehrer was hap­py to list, below, in a 1997 report from the Aspen Insti­tute.

1. Do noth­ing I can­not defend.*
2. Do not dis­tort, lie, slant, or hype.
3. Do not fal­si­fy facts or make up quotes.
4. Cov­er, write, and present every sto­ry with the care I would want if the sto­ry were about me.*
5. Assume there is at least one oth­er side or ver­sion to every sto­ry.*
6. Assume the view­er is as smart and car­ing and good a per­son as I am.*
7. Assume the same about all peo­ple on whom I report.*
8. Assume every­one is inno­cent until proven guilty.
9. Assume per­son­al lives are a pri­vate mat­ter until a legit­i­mate turn in the sto­ry man­dates oth­er­wise.*
10. Care­ful­ly sep­a­rate opin­ion and analy­sis from straight news sto­ries and clear­ly label them as such.*
11. Do not use anony­mous sources or blind quotes except on rare and mon­u­men­tal occa­sions. No one should ever be allowed to attack anoth­er anony­mous­ly.*
12. Do not broad­cast pro­fan­i­ty or the end result of vio­lence unless it is an inte­gral and nec­es­sary part of the sto­ry and/or cru­cial to under­stand­ing the sto­ry.
13. Acknowl­edge that objec­tiv­i­ty may be impos­si­ble but fair­ness nev­er is.
14. Jour­nal­ists who are reck­less with facts and rep­u­ta­tions should be dis­ci­plined by their employ­ers.
15. My view­ers have a right to know what prin­ci­ples guide my work and the process I use in their prac­tice.
16. I am not in the enter­tain­ment busi­ness.*

In a 2006 Har­vard com­mence­ment address (at the top), Lehrer reduced the list to only the nine rules marked by aster­isks above by Kot­tke, who goes on to explain in short why these guide­lines are so rou­tine­ly cast aside—“this shit takes time! And time is mon­ey.” It’s eas­i­er to patch togeth­er sto­ries in rapid-fire order when you don’t cite or check sources or do inves­tiga­tive report­ing, and face no seri­ous con­se­quences for it.

Lehrer’s adher­ence to pro­fes­sion­al ethics may have been unique in any era, but his atten­tion to detail and obses­sion with access­ing mul­ti­ple points of view came from an old­er media. He “saw him­self as ‘a print/word per­son at heart’ and his pro­gram as a kind of news­pa­per for tele­vi­sion,” writes Robert McFad­den in his New York Times obit­u­ary. He was also “an oasis of civil­i­ty in a news media that thrived on excit­ed head­lines, gotcha ques­tions and noisy con­fronta­tions.”

Lehrer under­stood that civil­i­ty is mean­ing­less in the absence of truth, or of kind­ness and humil­i­ty. His long­time cohost’s list of jour­nal­is­tic guide­lines also appears in the Aspen Insti­tute report. “The val­ues which Jim Lehrer and I observed,” Mac­Neil writes, “he con­tin­ues to observe.” Jour­nal­ism is a seri­ous business—“behave with civility”—but “remem­ber that jour­nal­ists are no more impor­tant to soci­ety than peo­ple in oth­er pro­fes­sions. Avoid macho pos­tur­ing and arro­gant dis­play.”

Read more about Lehrer’s list of guide­lines at Kot­tke.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Jour­nal­ism Under Siege: A Free Course from Stan­ford Explores the Imper­iled Free­dom of the Press

Jour­nal­is­tic Ethics: A Free Online Course from UCLA 

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

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

How Humans Domesticated Cats (Twice)

in Biology, History, Nature, Travel | January 27th, 2020

Depend­ing on how you feel about cats, the feline sit­u­a­tion on the island of Cyprus is either the stuff of a delight­ful children’s sto­ry or a hor­ror film to be avoid­ed at all cost.

Despite being sur­round­ed on all sides by water, the cat pop­u­la­tion—an esti­mat­ed 1.5 mil­lion—cur­rent­ly out­num­bers human res­i­dents. The over­whelm­ing major­i­ty are fer­al, though as we learn in the above episode of PBS’ EONS, they, too, can be con­sid­ered domes­ti­cat­ed. Like the oth­er 600,000,000-some liv­ing mem­bers of Felis Catus on plan­et Earth—which is to say the type of beast we asso­ciate with lit­ter­box­es, laser point­ers, and Ten­der Vittles—they are descend­ed from a sin­gle sub­species of African wild­cat, Felis Sil­vestris Lybi­ca.

While there’s no sin­gle nar­ra­tive explain­ing how cats came to dom­i­nate Cyprus, the sto­ry of their glob­al domes­ti­ca­tion is not an uncom­mon one:

An ancient effi­cien­cy expert real­ized that herd­ing cats was a much bet­ter use of time than hunt­ing them, and the idea quick­ly spread to neigh­bor­ing com­mu­ni­ties.

Kid­ding. There’s no such thing as herd­ing cats (though there is a Chica­go-based cat cir­cus, whose founder moti­vates her skate­board-rid­ing, bar­rel-rolling, high-wire-walk­ing stars with pos­i­tive rein­force­ment…)

Instead, cats took a com­men­sal path to domes­ti­ca­tion, lured by their bel­lies and cel­e­brat­ed curios­i­ty.

Ol’ Felis (Felix!) Sil­vestris (Suf­ferin’ Suc­co­tash!) Lybi­ca couldn’t help notic­ing how human set­tle­ments boast­ed gen­er­ous sup­plies of food, includ­ing large num­bers of tasty mice and oth­er rodents attract­ed by the grain stores.

Her inad­ver­tent human hosts grew to val­ue her pest con­trol capa­bil­i­ties, and cul­ti­vat­ed the rela­tion­ship… or at the very least, refrained from devour­ing every cat that wan­dered into camp.

Even­tu­al­ly, things got to the point where one 5600-year-old spec­i­men from north­west­ern Chi­na was revealed to have died with more mil­let than mouse meat in its system—a pet in both name and pop­u­lar sen­ti­ment.

Chow chow chow.

Inter­est­ing­ly, while today’s house cats’ gene pool leads back to that one sub-species of wild mack­er­el-tab­by, it’s impos­si­ble to iso­late domes­ti­ca­tion to a sin­gle time and place.

Both arche­o­log­i­cal evi­dence and genome analy­sis sup­port the idea that cats were domes­ti­cat­ed both 10,000 years ago in South­west Asia… and then again in Egypt 6500 years lat­er.

At some point, a human and cat trav­eled togeth­er to Cyprus and the rest is his­to­ry, an Inter­net sen­sa­tion and an if you can’t beat em, join em tourist attrac­tion.

Such high end island hotels as Pissouri’s Colum­bia Beach Resort and TUI Sen­satori Resort Atlanti­ca Aphrodite Hills in Paphos have start­ed cater­ing to the ever-swelling num­bers of unin­vit­ed, four-legged locals with a robust reg­i­men of health­care, shel­ter, and food, served in feline-spe­cif­ic tav­er­nas.

An island char­i­ty known as Cat P.A.W.S. (Pro­tect­ing Ani­mals With­out Shel­ter) appeals to vis­i­tors for dona­tions to defray the cost of neu­ter­ing the mas­sive fer­al pop­u­la­tion.

Some­times they even man­age to send a fur­ry Cyprus native off to a new home with a for­eign hol­i­day­mak­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Cats: How Over 10,000 Years the Cat Went from Wild Preda­tor to Sofa Side­kick

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

A New Pho­to Book Doc­u­ments the Won­der­ful Home­made Cat Lad­ders of Switzer­land

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 3 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates New York, The Nation’s Metrop­o­lis (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

When Salvador Dali Met Sigmund Freud, and Changed Freud’s Mind About Surrealism (1938)

in Art, Psychology | January 22nd, 2020

The close asso­ci­a­tions between Sur­re­al­ism and Freudi­an psy­cho­analy­sis were lib­er­al­ly encour­aged by the most famous pro­po­nent of the move­ment, Sal­vador Dalí, who con­sid­ered him­self a devot­ed fol­low­er of Freud. We don’t have to won­der what the founder of psy­cho­analy­sis would have thought of his self-appoint­ed pro­tégé.

We have them record­ing, in their own words, their impres­sions of their one and only meeting—which took place in July of 1938, at Freud’s home in Lon­don. Freud was 81, Dali 34. We also have sketch­es Dali made of Freud while the two sat togeth­er. Their mem­o­ries of events, shall we say, dif­fer con­sid­er­ably, or at least they seemed total­ly bewil­dered by each oth­er. (Freud pro­nounced Dali a “fanat­ic.”)

In any case, There’s absolute­ly no way the encounter could have lived up to Dali’s expec­ta­tions, as the Freud Muse­um Lon­don notes:

[Dalí] had already trav­elled to Vien­na sev­er­al times but failed to make an intro­duc­tion. Instead, he wrote in his auto­bi­og­ra­phy, he spent his time hav­ing “long and exhaus­tive imag­i­nary con­ver­sa­tions” with his hero, at one point fan­ta­siz­ing that he “came home with me and stayed all night cling­ing to the cur­tains of my room in the Hotel Sach­er.”

Freud was cer­tain­ly not going to indulge Dalí’s pecu­liar fan­tasies, but what the artist real­ly want­ed was val­i­da­tion of his work—and maybe his very being. “Dali had spent his teens and ear­ly twen­ties read­ing Freud’s works on the uncon­scious,” writes Paul Gal­lagher at Dan­ger­ous Minds, “on sex­u­al­i­ty and The Inter­pre­ta­tion of Dreams.” He was obsessed. Final­ly meet­ing Freud in ’38, he must have felt “like a believ­er might feel when com­ing face-to-face with God.”

He brought with him his lat­est paint­ing The Meta­mor­pho­sis of Nar­cis­sus, and an arti­cle he had pub­lished on para­noia. This, espe­cial­ly, Dali hoped would gain the respect of the elder­ly Freud.

Try­ing to inter­est him, I explained that it was not a sur­re­al­ist diver­sion, but was real­ly an ambi­tious­ly sci­en­tif­ic arti­cle, and I repeat­ed the title, point­ing to it at the same time with my fin­ger. Before his imper­turbable indif­fer­ence, my voice became invol­un­tar­i­ly sharp­er and more insis­tent.

On being shown the paint­ing, Freud sup­pos­ed­ly said, “in clas­sic paint­ings I look for the uncon­scious, but in your paint­ings I look for the con­scious.” The com­ment stung, though Dali wasn’t entire­ly sure what it meant. But he took it as fur­ther evi­dence that the meet­ing was a bust. Sketch­ing Freud in the draw­ing below, he wrote, “Freud’s cra­ni­um is a snail! His brain is in the form of a spiral—to be extract­ed with a nee­dle!”

One might see why Freud was sus­pi­cious of Sur­re­al­ists, “who have appar­ent­ly cho­sen me as their patron saint,” he wrote to Ste­fan Zweig, the mutu­al friend who intro­duced him to Dali. In 1921, poet and Sur­re­al­ist man­i­festo writer André Bre­ton “had shown up unin­vit­ed on [Freud’s] doorstep.” Unhap­py with his recep­tion, Bre­ton pub­lished a “bit­ter attack,” call­ing Freud an “old man with­out ele­gance” and lat­er accused Freud of pla­gia­riz­ing him.

Despite the mem­o­ry of this nas­ti­ness, and Freud’s gen­er­al dis­taste for mod­ern art, he could­n’t help but be impressed with Dali. “Until then,” he wrote to Zweig, “I was inclined to look upon the sur­re­al­ists… as absolute (let us say 95 per­cent, like alco­hol), cranks. That young Spaniard, how­ev­er, with his can­did and fanat­i­cal eyes, and his unde­ni­able tech­ni­cal mas­tery, has made me recon­sid­er my opin­ion.”

via Dan­ger­ous Minds

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

George Orwell Reviews Sal­vador Dali’s Auto­bi­og­ra­phy: “Dali is a Good Draughts­man and a Dis­gust­ing Human Being” (1944)

The Famous Break Up of Sig­mund Freud & Carl Jung Explained in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

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

The First Real Museum of Philosophy Prepares to Launch: See the Museo della Filosofia in Milan

in Museums, Philosophy | January 22nd, 2020

You’ve almost cer­tain­ly been to more art muse­ums than you can remem­ber, and more than like­ly to a few muse­ums of nat­ur­al his­to­ry, sci­ence, and tech­nol­o­gy as well. But think hard: have you ever set foot inside a muse­um of phi­los­o­phy? Not just an exhi­bi­tion deal­ing with philoso­phers or philo­soph­i­cal con­cepts, but a sin­gle insti­tu­tion ded­i­cat­ed whol­ly to putting the prac­tice of phi­los­o­phy itself on dis­play. Your answer can approach a yes only if you spent time in Milan last Novem­ber, and more specif­i­cal­ly at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Milan, in whose halls the Museo del­la Filosofia set up shop and proved its sur­pris­ing­ly untest­ed — and sur­pris­ing­ly suc­cess­ful — con­cept.

“What we had in mind was not an his­tor­i­cal­ly-mind­ed muse­um col­lect­ing relics about the lives and works of impor­tant philoso­phers, but some­thing more dynam­ic and inter­ac­tive,” writes Uni­ver­si­ty of Milan post­doc­tor­al research fel­low Anna Ichi­no at Dai­ly Nous, “where philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems and the­o­ries become intu­itive­ly acces­si­ble through a vari­ety of games, activ­i­ties, exper­i­ments, aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences, and oth­er such things.”

In the first hall, “we used images like Mary Midgely’s ‘con­cep­tu­al plumb­ing’ or Wittgenstein’s ‘fly bot­tle’ to con­vey the idea accord­ing to which philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems are in impor­tant respects con­cep­tu­al prob­lems, which amount to ana­lyz­ing con­cepts that we com­mon­ly use in unre­flec­tive ways.”

In the sec­ond hall, vis­i­tors to the Museo del­la Filosofia “could lit­er­al­ly play with para­dox­es and thought exper­i­ments in order to appre­ci­ate their heuris­tic role in philo­soph­i­cal inquiry.” The expe­ri­ences avail­able there ranged from using an over­sized deck of cards to “solve” para­dox­es, the per­haps inevitable demon­stra­tion of the well-known “trol­ley prob­lem” using a mod­el rail­road set, and — most har­row­ing of all — the chance to “eat choco­lates shaped as cat excre­ment” straight from the lit­ter box. Then came the “School of Athens” game, “in which vis­i­tors had to decide whether to back Pla­to or Aris­to­tle; then they could also take a sou­venir pic­ture por­tray­ing them­selves in the shoes (and face!) of one or the oth­er.”

In the third, “pro­gram­mat­ic” hall, the muse­um’s orga­niz­ers “pre­sent­ed the plan for what still needs to be done,” a to-do list that includes find­ing a per­ma­nent home. Before it does so, you can have a look at the pro­jec­t’s web site as well as its pages on Face­book and Insta­gram. At the top of the post appears a short video intro­duc­ing the Museo del­la Filosofia which, like the rest of the mate­ri­als, is for the moment in Ital­ian only, but it nev­er­the­less gets across even to non-Ital­ian-speak­ers a cer­tain idea of the expe­ri­ence a philo­soph­i­cal muse­um can deliv­er. Philo­soph­i­cal think­ing, after all, occurs pri­or to lan­guage. Or maybe it’s inex­tri­ca­bly tied up with lan­guage; dif­fer­ent philoso­phers have approached the prob­lem dif­fer­ent­ly. And when the Museo del­la Filosofia opens for good, you’ll be able to vis­it and approach a few philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems your­self. Read more about the muse­um at Dai­ly Nous.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philo­graph­ics Presents a Visu­al Dic­tio­nary of Phi­los­o­phy: 95 Philo­soph­i­cal Con­cepts as Graph­ic Designs

The His­to­ry of Phi­los­o­phy Visu­al­ized

A Data Visu­al­iza­tion of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, 1950–2018

Phi­los­o­phy Explained With Donuts

Watch a 2‑Year-Old Solve Philosophy’s Famous Eth­i­cal “Trol­ley Prob­lem” (It Doesn’t End Well)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

Can You Spot Liars Through Their Body Language? A Former FBI Agent Breaks Down the Clues in Non-Verbal Communication

in Psychology | January 21st, 2020

Can you spot a liar? We all know peo­ple who think they can, and very often they claim to be able to do so by read­ing “body lan­guage.” Clear­ing one’s throat, touch­ing one’s mouth, cross­ing one’s arms, look­ing away: these and oth­er such ges­tures, they say, indi­cate on the part of the speak­er a cer­tain dis­tance from the truth. In the WIRED “Trade­craft” video above, how­ev­er for­mer FBI spe­cial agent Joe Navar­ro more than once pro­nounces ideas about such phys­i­cal lie indi­ca­tors “non­sense.” And hav­ing spent 25 years work­ing to iden­ti­fy peo­ple pre­sent­ing them­selves false­ly to the world — “my job was to catch spies,” he says — he should know, at the very least, what isn’t a tell.

Not that all the throat-clear­ing and arm-cross­ing does­n’t indi­cate some­thing. Navar­ro calls such behav­iors “self-soothers,” phys­i­cal actions we use to paci­fy our­selves in stress­ful moments. Of course, even if self-soothers pro­vide no use­ful infor­ma­tion about whether a per­son is telling the truth, that does­n’t mean they pro­vide no use­ful infor­ma­tion at all.

But Navar­ro’s career has taught him that actions deci­sive­ly indi­cat­ing decep­tion are much more spe­cif­ic, and with­out rel­e­vant knowl­edge com­plete­ly illeg­i­ble: take the sus­pect­ed spy he had under sur­veil­lance who gave the game away just by leav­ing a flower shop hold­ing a bou­quet fac­ing not upward but down­ward, “how they car­ry flow­ers in east­ern Europe.”

For the most part, detect­ing a liar requires a great deal of what Navar­ro calls “face time,” a neces­si­ty when it comes to observ­ing the full range of and pat­terns in an indi­vid­u­al’s forms of non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. In the video he ana­lyzes footage of a pok­er game, the kind of set­ting that height­ens our aware­ness of such non-ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. At the table we all know to put on a “pok­er face” and shut our mouths, but even when we say noth­ing, Navar­ro empha­sizes, we’re con­stant­ly trans­mit­ting a high quan­ti­ty of infor­ma­tion about our­selves. What­ev­er the set­ting, it comes through in how we dress, how we walk, how we car­ry our­selves — espe­cial­ly if we think it does­n’t. In the eyes of those who know how to inter­pret this infor­ma­tion, all the world becomes a pok­er game.

Navar­ro is the author of two books on this sub­ject: The Dic­tio­nary of Body Lan­guage: A Field Guide to Human Behav­ior and What Every Body Is Say­ing: An Ex-FBI Agen­t’s Guide to Speed-Read­ing Peo­ple. For a con­trar­i­an point of view that chal­lenges the idea that we can ever read peo­ple accu­rate­ly, see Mal­colm Glad­well’s new book, Talk­ing to Strangers: What We Should Know about the Peo­ple We Don’t Know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Han­nah Arendt Explains How Pro­pa­gan­da Uses Lies to Erode All Truth & Moral­i­ty: Insights from The Ori­gins of Total­i­tar­i­an­ism

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

FBI’s “Vault” Web Site Reveals Declas­si­fied Files on Hem­ing­way, Ein­stein, Mar­i­lyn & Oth­er Icons

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.

Fellini’s Fantastic TV Commercials for Barilla, Campari & More: The Italian Filmmaker Was Born 100 Years Ago Today

in Film, Television | January 20th, 2020

To help cel­e­brate the 100th anniver­sary of the birth of the great Ital­ian film­mak­er Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, we present a series of lyri­cal tele­vi­sion adver­tise­ments made dur­ing the final decade of his life.

In 1984, when he was 64 years old, Felli­ni agreed to make a minia­ture film fea­tur­ing Cam­pari, the famous Ital­ian apéri­tif. The result, Oh, che bel pae­sag­gio! (“Oh, what a beau­ti­ful land­scape!”), shown above, fea­tures a man and a woman seat­ed across from one anoth­er on a long-dis­tance train.

The man (played by Vic­tor Polet­ti) smiles, but the woman (Sil­via Dion­i­sio) averts her eyes, star­ing sul­len­ly out the win­dow and pick­ing up a remote con­trol to switch the scenery. She grows increas­ing­ly exas­per­at­ed as a sequence of desert and medieval land­scapes pass by. Still smil­ing, the man takes the remote con­trol, clicks it, and the beau­ti­ful Cam­po di Mira­coli (“Field of Mir­a­cles”) of Pisa appears in the win­dow, embell­ished by a tow­er­ing bot­tle of Cam­pari.

“In just one minute,” writes Tul­lio Kezich in Fed­eri­co Felli­ni: His Life and Work, “Felli­ni gives us a chap­ter of the sto­ry of the bat­tle between men and women, and makes ref­er­ence to the neu­ro­sis of TV, insin­u­ates that we’re dis­parag­ing the mirac­u­lous gifts of nature and his­to­ry, and offers the hope that there might be a screen that will bring the joy back. The lit­tle tale is as quick as a train and has a remark­ably light touch.”

Also in 1984, Felli­ni made a com­mer­cial titled Alta Soci­eta (“High Soci­ety”) for Bar­il­la riga­toni pas­ta (above). As with the Cam­pari com­mer­cial, Felli­ni wrote the script him­self and col­lab­o­rat­ed with cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ennio Guarnieri and musi­cal direc­tor Nico­la Pio­vani. The cou­ple in the restau­rant were played by Gre­ta Vaian and Mau­r­izio Mau­ri. The Bar­il­la spot is per­haps the least inspired of Fellini’s com­mer­cials. Bet­ter things were yet to come.

In 1991 Felli­ni made a series of three com­mer­cials for the Bank of Rome called Che Brutte Not­ti or “The Bad Nights.” “These com­mer­cials, aired the fol­low­ing year,” writes Peter Bon­danel­la in The Films of Fed­eri­co Felli­ni, “are par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing, since they find their inspi­ra­tion in var­i­ous dreams Felli­ni had sketched out in his dream note­books dur­ing his career.”

In the episode above, titled “The Pic­nic Lunch Dream,” the clas­sic damsel-in-dis­tress sce­nario is turned upside down when a man (played by Pao­lo Vil­lag­gio) finds him­self trapped on the rail­road tracks with a train bear­ing down on him while the beau­ti­ful woman he was din­ing with (Anna Falchi) climbs out of reach and taunts him. But it’s all a dream, which the man tells to his psy­cho­an­a­lyst (Fer­nan­do Rey). The ana­lyst inter­prets the dream and assures the man that his nights will be rest­ful if he puts his mon­ey in the Ban­co di Roma.

The oth­er com­mer­cials (watch here) are called “The Tun­nel Dream” and “The Dream of the Lion in the Cel­lar.” (You can watch Rober­to Di Vito’s short, untrans­lat­ed film of Felli­ni and his crew work­ing on the project here.)

The bank com­mer­cials were the last films Felli­ni ever made. He died a year after they aired, at age 73. In Kezich’s view, the deeply per­son­al and imag­i­na­tive ads amount to Fellini’s last tes­ta­ment, a brief but won­drous return to form. “In Fed­eri­co’s life,” he writes, “these three com­mer­cial spots are a kind of Indi­an sum­mer, the gold­en autumn of a patri­arch of cin­e­ma who, for a moment, holds again the reins of cre­ation.”

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!

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2012.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Fellini’s Three Bank of Rome Com­mer­cials, the Last Thing He Did Behind a Cam­era (1992)

Watch All of the Com­mer­cials That David Lynch Has Direct­ed: A Big 30-Minute Com­pi­la­tion

Wim Wen­ders Cre­ates Ads to Sell Beer (Stel­la Artois), Pas­ta (Bar­il­la), and More Beer (Car­ling)

Ing­mar Bergman’s 1950s Soap Com­mer­cials Wash Away the Exis­ten­tial Despair

All of Wes Anderson’s Cin­e­mat­ic Com­mer­cials: Watch His Spots for Pra­da, Amer­i­can Express, H&M & More

Discover the Apprehension Engine: Brian Eno Called It “the Most Terrifying Musical Instrument of All Time”

in Music | January 13th, 2020

Apart from the occa­sion­al Blair Witch Project, scary movies need scary scores. But much like mak­ing a gen­uine­ly scary movie, com­pos­ing gen­uine­ly scary music becomes more of a chal­lenge all the time. By now, even the most timid movie­go­ers among us have sure­ly grown inured to the throb­bing bass, the tense strings, and all the oth­er stan­dard, increas­ing­ly clichéd instru­men­tal tech­niques used to gen­er­ate a sense of omi­nous­ness. Giv­en the ever-grow­ing pres­sure to come up with more effec­tive­ly dread-induc­ing music, the inven­tion of the Appre­hen­sion Engine was sure­ly inevitable. A part of the stu­dio of film com­pos­er Mark Kor­ven, it looks unlike any oth­er musi­cal instru­ment in exis­tence, and sounds even more so.

With a nor­mal instru­ment, says Kor­ven in the Great Big Sto­ry Video above, “you’re expect­ing it to have a sound that is pleas­ing.” But with the Appre­hen­sion Engine, “the goal is to just pro­duce sounds that, in this case, are dis­turb­ing.” What we hear is less music than a son­ic approx­i­ma­tion of the abyss itself, which some­how emerges from his manip­u­la­tion of a vari­ety of strings, bars, wheels, and bows attached to a wood­en box — as ana­log a device as one would ever encounter in the 21st cen­tu­ry. “I orig­i­nal­ly com­mis­sioned the Appre­hen­sion Engine because I was tired of the same dig­i­tal sam­ples, which result­ed in a lot of same­ness,” says Kor­ven. “I was look­ing for some­thing more exper­i­men­tal, more acoustic, that would give me a lit­tle more of an orig­i­nal sound.”

Luthi­er Tony Dug­gan-Smith rose to the chal­lenge of craft­ing the Appre­hen­sion Engine. “You’re deal­ing with things that stir pri­mal emo­tions and feel­ings,” says Dug­gan-Smith of the sound of the instru­ment. Kor­ven thinks of it as “not music in the tra­di­tion­al sense at all,” but “it def­i­nite­ly evokes emo­tion, so I would call it music.” In a com­po­si­tion career more than three decades long,  Kor­ven has learned a thing or two about how to evoke emo­tion with sound. His best-known work so far is the score of Robert Eggers’ The Witch, which no less a hor­ror and sus­pense con­nois­seur than Stephen King has named as one of his favorite movies of all time. “The Witch scared the hell out of me,” King tweet­ed. “And it’s a real movie, tense and thought-pro­vok­ing as well as vis­cer­al.” And as the gui­tar-play­ing, music-lov­ing King under­stands, we react to noth­ing more vis­cer­al­ly than that which we hear.

Though the first Appre­hen­sion Engine was built by its very nature as a unique instru­ment, it has­n’t remained a one-off. The first Appre­hen­sion Engine begat an improved sec­ond ver­sion, or “V2,” and now, accord­ing to the instru­men­t’s offi­cial site, “there is an offi­cial V2+ mod­el which we are ready to pro­duce in small num­bers.” Upgrades include cus­tom mag­net­ic pick­ups, a “Hur­dy Gur­dy mech­a­nism,” and your choice of two dif­fer­ent mount­ing loca­tions for the reverb tank. A hand­made Appre­hen­sion Engine of your own won’t come cheap, and all pro­duc­tion runs will no doubt sell out as quick­ly as the first one did, but if you need to strike true hor­ror into the hearts of your lis­ten­ers, can you afford not to con­sid­er what Bri­an Eno, no stranger to the out­er lim­its of son­ic pos­si­bil­i­ty, has called “the most ter­ri­fy­ing musi­cal instru­ment of all time”?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Creepy 13th-Cen­tu­ry Melody That Shows Up in Movies Again & Again: An Intro­duc­tion to “Dies Irae”

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Nick Cave Nar­rates an Ani­mat­ed Film about the Cat Piano, the Twist­ed 18th Cen­tu­ry Musi­cal Instru­ment Designed to Treat Men­tal Ill­ness

The Strange, Sci-Fi Sounds of Skat­ing on Thin Black Ice

A Big Archive of Occult Record­ings: His­toric Audio Lets You Hear Trances, Para­nor­mal Music, Glos­so­lalia & Oth­er Strange Sounds (1905–2007)

Meet the World’s Worst Orches­tra, the Portsmouth Sin­fo­nia, Fea­tur­ing Bri­an Eno

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, 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.