Artists May Have Different Brains (More Grey Matter) Than the Rest of Us, According to a Recent Scientific Study

in Neuroscience, Science | June 2nd, 2017

Image Pho­to cour­tesy of the Lab­o­ra­to­ry of Neu­ro Imag­ing at UCLA.

Sometimes—as in the case of neuroscience—scientists and researchers seem to be say­ing sev­er­al con­tra­dic­to­ry things at once. Yes, oppos­ing claims can both be true, giv­en dif­fer­ent con­text and lev­els of descrip­tion. But which is it, Neu­ro­sci­en­tists? Do we have “neu­ro­plas­tic­i­ty”—the abil­i­ty to change our brains, and there­fore our behav­ior? Or are we “hard-wired” to be a cer­tain way by innate struc­tures.

The debate long pre­dates the field of neu­ro­science. It fig­ured promi­nent­ly in the work, for exam­ple, of John Locke and oth­er ear­ly mod­ern the­o­rists of cognition—which is why Locke is best known as the the­o­rist of tab­u­la rasa. In “Some Thoughts Con­cern­ing Edu­ca­tion,” Locke most­ly denies that we are able to change much at all in adult­hood.

Per­son­al­i­ty, he rea­soned, is deter­mined not by biol­o­gy, but in the “cra­dle” by “lit­tle, almost insen­si­ble impres­sions on our ten­der infan­cies.” Such imprints “have very impor­tant and last­ing con­se­quences.” Sor­ry, par­ents. Not only did your kid get wait-list­ed for that elite preschool, but their future will also be deter­mined by mil­lions of sights and sounds that hap­pened around them before they could walk.

It’s an extreme, and unsci­en­tif­ic, con­tention, fas­ci­nat­ing as it may be from a cul­tur­al stand­point. Now we have psy­che­del­ic-look­ing brain scans pop­ping up in our news feeds all the time, promis­ing to reveal the true ori­gins of con­scious­ness and per­son­al­i­ty. But the con­clu­sions drawn from such research are ten­ta­tive and often high­ly con­test­ed.

So what does sci­ence say about the eter­nal­ly mys­te­ri­ous act of artis­tic cre­ation? The abil­i­ties of artists have long seemed to us god­like, drawn from super­nat­ur­al sources, or chan­neled from oth­er dimen­sions. Many neu­ro­sci­en­tists, you may not be sur­prised to hear, believe that such abil­i­ties reside in the brain. More­over, some think that artists’ brains are supe­ri­or to those of mediocre abil­i­ty.

Or at least that artists’ brains have more gray and white mat­ter than “right-brained” thinkers in the areas of “visu­al per­cep­tion, spa­tial nav­i­ga­tion and fine motor skills.” So writes Kather­ine Brooks in a Huff­in­g­ton Post sum­ma­ry of “Draw­ing on the right side of the brain: A vox­el-based mor­phom­e­try analy­sis of obser­va­tion­al draw­ing.” The 2014 study, pub­lished at Neu­roIm­age, involved a very small sam­pling of grad­u­ate stu­dents, 21 of whom were artists, 23 of whom were not. All 44 stu­dents were asked to com­plete draw­ing tasks, which were then scored and com­pared to images of their brain tak­en by a method called “vox­el-based mor­phom­e­try.”

“The peo­ple who are bet­ter at draw­ing real­ly seem to have more devel­oped struc­tures in regions of the brain that con­trol for fine motor per­for­mance and what we call pro­ce­dur­al mem­o­ry,” the study’s lead author, Rebec­ca Cham­ber­lain of Belgium’s KU Leu­ven Uni­ver­si­ty, told the BBC. (Hear her seg­ment on BBC Radio 4’s Inside Sci­ence here.) Does this mean, as Art­net News claims in their quick take, that “artists’ brains are more ful­ly devel­oped?”

It’s a juicy head­line, but the find­ings of this lim­it­ed study, while “intrigu­ing,” are “far from con­clu­sive.” Nonethe­less, it marks an impor­tant first step. “No stud­ies” thus far, Cham­ber­lain says, “have assessed the struc­tur­al dif­fer­ences asso­ci­at­ed with rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al skills in visu­al arts.” Would a dozen such stud­ies resolve ques­tions about causality–nature or nur­ture? As usu­al, the truth prob­a­bly lies some­where in-between.

At Smith­son­ian, Randy Rieland quotes sev­er­al crit­ics of the neu­ro­science of art, which has pre­vi­ous­ly focused on what hap­pens in the brain when we look at a Van Gogh or read Jane Austen. The prob­lem with such stud­ies, writes Philip Ball at Nature, is that they can lead to “cre­at­ing cri­te­ria of right or wrong, either in the art itself or in indi­vid­ual reac­tions to it.” But such cri­te­ria may already be pre­de­ter­mined by cul­tur­al­ly-con­di­tioned respons­es to art.

The sci­ence is fas­ci­nat­ing and may lead to numer­ous dis­cov­er­ies. It does not, as the Cre­ators Project writes hyper­bol­i­cal­ly, sug­gest that “artists actu­al­ly are dif­fer­ent crea­tures from every­one else on the plan­et.” As Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia philoso­pher pro­fes­sor Alva Noe states suc­cinct­ly, one prob­lem with mak­ing sweep­ing gen­er­al­iza­tions about brains that view or cre­ate art is that “there can be noth­ing like a set­tled, once-and-for-all account of what art is.”

Emerg­ing fields of “neu­roaes­thet­ics” and “neu­ro­hu­man­i­ties” may mud­dy the waters between quan­ti­ta­tive and qual­i­ta­tive dis­tinc­tions, and may not real­ly answer ques­tions about where art comes from and what it does to us. But then again, giv­en enough time, they just might.

via The Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neu­ro­science of Read­ing Great Lit­er­a­ture

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

The Neu­ro­science & Psy­chol­o­gy of Pro­cras­ti­na­tion, and How to Over­come It

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

Manchester Benefit Concert Is Streaming Live Now

in Music | June 2nd, 2017

Just a quick fyi: The Man­ches­ter Ben­e­fit con­cert is hap­pen­ing now, and stream­ing live on YouTube. Cold­play, Phar­rell Williams, Justin Bieber, Katy Per­ry, Miley Cyrus, Niall Horan, Ush­er, and Ari­ana Grande will all per­form. Click play above to stream the live video feed.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. It’s a great way to see our new posts, all bun­dled in one email, each day.

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How Finland Created One of the Best Educational Systems in the World (by Doing the Opposite of U.S.)

in Education, Politics | May 26th, 2017

Every con­ver­sa­tion about edu­ca­tion in the U.S. takes place in a mine­field. Unless you’re a bil­lion­aire who bought the job of Sec­re­tary of Edu­ca­tion, you’d bet­ter be pre­pared to answer ques­tions about racial and eco­nom­ic equi­ty, dis­abil­i­ty issues, pro­tec­tions for LGBTQ stu­dents, teacher pay and unions, reli­gious char­ter schools, and many oth­er press­ing con­cerns. These issues are not mutu­al­ly exclu­sive, nor are they dis­tinct from ques­tions of cur­ricu­lum, test­ing, or achieve­ment. The ter­rain is lit­tered with pos­si­ble explo­sive con­flicts between edu­ca­tors, par­ents, admin­is­tra­tors, leg­is­la­tors, activists, and prof­i­teers.

The needs of the most deeply invest­ed stake­hold­ers, as they say, the stu­dents them­selves, seem to get far too lit­tle con­sid­er­a­tion. What if we in the U.S., all of us, actu­al­ly want­ed to improve the edu­ca­tion­al expe­ri­ences and aca­d­e­m­ic out­comes for our children—all of them? Where might we look for a mod­el? Many peo­ple have looked to Fin­land, at least since 2010, when the doc­u­men­tary Wait­ing for Super­man con­trast­ed strug­gling U.S. pub­lic schools with high­ly suc­cess­ful Finnish equiv­a­lents.

The film, a pos­i­tive spin on the char­ter school move­ment, received sig­nif­i­cant back­lash for its cher­ry-picked exam­ples and blam­ing of teach­ers’ unions for America’s fail­ing schools. By con­trast, Finland’s schools have been described by William Doyle, an Amer­i­can Ful­bright Schol­ar who stud­ies them, as “the ‘ulti­mate char­ter school net­work’ ” (a phrase, we’ll see, that means lit­tle in the Finnish con­text.) There, Doyle writes at The Hechinger Report, “teach­ers are not strait-jack­et­ed by bureau­crats, scripts or exces­sive reg­u­la­tions, but have the free­dom to inno­vate and exper­i­ment as teams of trust­ed pro­fes­sion­als.”

Last year, Michael Moore fea­tured many of Finland’s inno­v­a­tive edu­ca­tion­al exper­i­ments in his humor­ous, hope­ful trav­el­ogue Where to Invade Next. In the clip above, you can hear from the country’s Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion, Krista Kiu­ru, who explains to him why Finnish chil­dren do not have home­work; hear also from a group of high school stu­dents, high school prin­ci­pal Pasi Majas­sari, first grade teacher Anna Hart and many oth­ers. Short­er school hours—the “short­est school days and short­est school years in the entire West­ern world”—leave plen­ty of time for leisure and recre­ation. Kids bake, hike, build things, make art, con­duct exper­i­ments, sing, and gen­er­al­ly enjoy them­selves.

“There are no man­dat­ed stan­dard­ized tests,” writes Lyn­Nell Han­cock at Smith­son­ian, “apart from one exam at the end of stu­dents’ senior year in high school… there are no rank­ings, no com­par­isons or com­pe­ti­tion between stu­dents, schools or regions.” Yet Finnish stu­dents have, in the past sev­er­al years, con­sis­tent­ly ranked in the top ten among mil­lions of stu­dents world­wide in sci­ence, read­ing, and math. “If there was one thing I kept hear­ing over and over again from the Finns,” says Moore above, “it’s that Amer­i­ca should get rid of stan­dard­ized tests,” should stop teach­ing to those tests, stop design­ing entire cur­ric­u­la around mul­ti­ple-choice tests. Han­cock describes the results of the Finnish sys­tem, and its costs:

Nine­ty-three per­cent of Finns grad­u­ate from aca­d­e­m­ic or voca­tion­al high schools, 17.5 per­cent­age points high­er than the Unit­ed States, and 66 per­cent go on to high­er edu­ca­tion, the high­est rate in the Euro­pean Union. Yet Fin­land spends about 30 per­cent less per stu­dent than the Unit­ed States.

Moore’s cam­era reg­is­ters the shock on Finnish edu­ca­tors’ faces when they hear that many U.S. schools elim­i­nat­ed music, art, poet­ry and oth­er pur­suits in order to focus almost exclu­sive­ly on test­ing. Though light­heart­ed in tone, the seg­ment real­ly dri­ves home the depress­ing degree to which so many U.S. stu­dents receive an impov­er­ished education—one bare­ly wor­thy of the name—unless they luck into a vouch­er for a high-end char­ter school or have the inde­pen­dent means for an expen­sive pri­vate one. In Fin­land, says the Min­is­ter of Edu­ca­tion, “all the schools are equal. You nev­er ask where the best school is.”

It’s also ille­gal in Fin­land to prof­it from school­ing. Wealthy par­ents have to ensure that neigh­bor­hood schools can give their kids the best edu­ca­tion pos­si­ble, because they are the only option. Many peo­ple in the U.S. object to com­par­isons like Moore’s by not­ing that soci­eties like Fin­land are “homoge­nous” next to what may seem to them like mad­den­ing cul­tur­al diver­si­ty in the U.S. How­ev­er, Fin­land has incor­po­rat­ed (not with­out dif­fi­cul­ty) large immi­grant and refugee pop­u­la­tions—even as its schools con­tin­ue to improve. The gov­ern­ment has respond­ed in part to ris­ing immi­gra­tion with edu­ca­tion­al solu­tions such as this one, a “nation­al ini­tia­tive to rein­force Finnish high­er edu­ca­tion insti­tu­tions (HEIs) as sig­nif­i­cant stake­hold­ers in migrants’ inte­gra­tion.”

The sub­tan­tive dif­fer­ences between the two coun­tries’ edu­ca­tion­al sys­tems may have less to do with demog­ra­phy and more to do with eco­nom­ics and the train­ing and social sta­tus of teach­ers.

In Fin­land, writes Doyle, no teacher “is allowed to lead a pri­ma­ry school class with­out a master’s degree in edu­ca­tion, with spe­cial­iza­tion in research and class­room prac­tice.” Teach­ing “is the most admired job in Fin­land next to med­ical doc­tors.” And as Dana Gold­stein points out at The Nation—a fact Wait­ing for Super­man failed to mention—Finnish teach­ers are “gasp!—unionized and grant­ed tenure.” Per­haps an even more sig­nif­i­cant dif­fer­ence the doc­u­men­tary glossed over: in Fin­land, “fam­i­lies ben­e­fit from a cra­dle-to-grave social wel­fare sys­tem that includes uni­ver­sal day­care, preschool and health­care, all of which are proven to help chil­dren achieve bet­ter results at school.”

Hun­dreds of stud­ies in recent years sub­stan­ti­ate this claim. It would seem intu­itive that stress­es asso­ci­at­ed with hunger and pover­ty would have a per­ni­cious effect on learn­ing, espe­cial­ly when poor­er schools are so egre­gious­ly under-resourced. And the data says as much, to vary­ing degrees. And yet, we are now in the U.S. slash­ing break­fast and lunch pro­grams that feed hun­gry chil­dren and decid­ing whether to unin­sure mil­lions of fam­i­lies as mil­lions more still lack basic health cov­er­age. Most every Amer­i­can par­ent knows that qual­i­ty day­cares and preschools can cost as much per year as a decent uni­ver­si­ty edu­ca­tion in this coun­try.

It seems to many of us that the atro­cious state of the U.S. edu­ca­tion­al sys­tem can only be attrib­uted to an act of will on the part our polit­i­cal elite, who see schools as com­pe­ti­tion for fun­da­men­tal­ist belief sys­tems, oppor­tu­ni­ties to pun­ish their oppo­nents out of spite, or as rich fields for pri­vate prof­it. But it needn’t be so. It took 40 years for the Finns to cre­ate their cur­rent sys­tem. In the 1960s, their schools ranked on the very low end—along with those in the U.S. By most accounts, they’ve since shown there can be sys­tems that, while sure­ly imper­fect in their own way, work for all kids, embed­ded with­in larg­er sys­tems that prize their teach­ers and fam­i­lies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Study Shows That Teach­ing Young Kids Phi­los­o­phy Improves Their Aca­d­e­m­ic Per­for­mance, Mak­ing Them Bet­ter at Read­ing & Math

In Japan­ese Schools, Lunch Is As Much About Learn­ing As It’s About Eat­ing

Med­i­ta­tion is Replac­ing Deten­tion in Baltimore’s Pub­lic Schools, and the Stu­dents Are Thriv­ing

Mal­colm Glad­well Asks Hard Ques­tions about Mon­ey & Mer­i­toc­ra­cy in Amer­i­can High­er Edu­ca­tion: Stream 3 Episodes of His New Pod­cast

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

The Story of Habitat, the Very First Large-Scale Online Role-Playing Game (1986)

in Games, Technology | May 26th, 2017

Long before World of War­craft, before Everquest and Sec­ond Life, and even before Ulti­ma Online, com­put­er-gamers of the 1980s look­ing for an online world to explore with oth­ers of their kind could fire up their Com­modore 64s, switch on their dial-up modems, and log into Habi­tat. Brought out for the Com­modore online ser­vice Quan­tum Link by Lucas­film Games (lat­er known as the devel­op­er of such clas­sic point-and-click adven­ture games as Mani­ac Man­sion and The Secret of Mon­key Island, now known as Lucasarts), Habi­tat debuted as the very first large-scale graph­i­cal vir­tu­al com­mu­ni­ty, blaz­ing a trail for all the mas­sive­ly mul­ti­play­er online role-play­ing games (or MMORPGs) so many of us spend so much of our time play­ing today.

Designed, in the words of cre­ators Chip Morn­ingstar and F. Ran­dall Farmer, to “sup­port a pop­u­la­tion of thou­sands of users in a sin­gle shared cyber­space,” Habi­tat pre­sent­ed “a real-time ani­mat­ed view into an online sim­u­lat­ed world in which users can com­mu­ni­cate, play games, go on adven­tures, fall in love, get mar­ried, get divorced, start busi­ness­es, found reli­gions, wage wars, protest against them, and exper­i­ment with self-gov­ern­ment.” All that hap­pened and more with­in the ser­vice’s vir­tu­al real­i­ty dur­ing its pilot run from 1986 to 1988. The fea­tures both cau­tious­ly and reck­less­ly imple­ment­ed by Habi­tat’s devel­op­ers, and the feed­back they received from its users, laid down the tem­plate for all the more advanced graph­i­cal online worlds to come.

At the top of the post, you can watch Lucas­film’s orig­i­nal Habi­tat pro­mo­tion­al video promise a “strange new world where names can change as quick­ly as events, sur­pris­es lurk at every turn, and the keynotes of exis­tence are fan­ta­sy and fun,” one where “thou­sands of avatars, each con­trolled by a dif­fer­ent human, can con­verge to shape an imag­i­nary soci­ety.” (All per­formed, the nar­ra­tor notes, “with the coop­er­a­tion of a huge main­frame com­put­er in Vir­ginia.”) The form this soci­ety even­tu­al­ly took impressed Habi­tat’s cre­ators as much as any­one, as Farmer writes in his “Habi­tat Anec­dotes” from 1988, an exam­i­na­tion of the most mem­o­rable hap­pen­ings and phe­nom­e­na among its users.

Farmer found he could group those users into five now-famil­iar cat­e­gories: the Pas­sives (who “want to ‘be enter­tained’ with no effort, like watch­ing TV”), the Active (whose “biggest prob­lem is over­spend­ing”), the Moti­va­tors (the most valu­able users, for they “under­stand that Habi­tat is what they make of it”), the Care­tak­ers (employ­ees who “help the new users, con­trol per­son­al con­flicts, record bugs” and so on), and the Geek Gods (the vir­tu­al world’s all-pow­er­ful admin­is­tra­tors). Some­times every­one got along smooth­ly, and some­times — inevitably, giv­en that every­one had to define the prop­er­ties of this brand new medi­um even as they expe­ri­enced it — they did­n’t.

“At first, dur­ing ear­ly test­ing, we found out that peo­ple were tak­ing stuff out of oth­ers’ hands and shoot­ing peo­ple in their own homes,” Farmer writes. Lat­er, a Greek Ortho­dox Min­is­ter opened Habi­tat’s first church, but “I had to even­tu­al­ly put a lock on the Church’s front door because every time he dec­o­rat­ed (with flow­ers), some­one would steal and pawn them while he was not logged in!” This cit­i­zen-gov­erned vir­tu­al soci­ety even­tu­al­ly elect­ed a sher­iff from among its users, though the design­ers could nev­er quite decide what pow­ers to grant him. Oth­er sur­pris­ing­ly “real world” insti­tu­tions devel­oped, includ­ing a news­pa­per whose user-pub­lish­er “tire­less­ly spent 20–40 hours a week com­pos­ing a 20, 30, 40 or even 50 page tabloid con­tain­ing the lat­est news, events, rumors, and even fic­tion­al arti­cles.”

Though devel­op­ing this then-advanced soft­ware for “the ludi­crous Com­modore 64” posed a seri­ous tech­ni­cal chal­lenge, write Farmer and Morn­ingstar in their 1990 paper “The Lessons of Lucas­film’s Habi­tat,” the real work began when the users logged on. All the avatars need­ed hous­es, “orga­nized into towns and cities with asso­ci­at­ed traf­fic arter­ies and shop­ping and recre­ation­al areas” with “wilder­ness areas between the towns so that every­one would not be jammed togeth­er into the same place.” Most of all, they need­ed inter­est­ing places to vis­it, “and since they can’t all be in the same place at the same time, they need­ed a lot of inter­est­ing places to vis­it. [ … ] Each of those hous­es, towns, roads, shops, forests, the­aters, are­nas, and oth­er places is a dis­tinct enti­ty that some­one needs to design and cre­ate. Attempt­ing to play the role of omni­scient cen­tral plan­ners, we were swamped.”

All this, the cre­ators dis­cov­ered, required them to stop think­ing like the engi­neers and game design­ers they were, giv­ing up all hope of rig­or­ous cen­tral plan­ning and world-build­ing in favor of fig­ur­ing out the trick­er prob­lem of how, “like the cruise direc­tor on an ocean voy­age,” to make Habi­tat fun for every­one. Farmer faces that ques­tion again today, hav­ing launched the open-source Neo­Hab­i­tat project ear­li­er this year with the aim of reviv­ing the Habi­tat world for the 21st cen­tu­ry. As much progress as graph­i­cal mul­ti­play­er online games have made in the past thir­ty years, the con­clu­sion Farmer and Morn­ingstar reached after their expe­ri­ence cre­at­ing the first one holds as true as ever: “Cyber­space may indeed change human­i­ty, but only if it begins with human­i­ty as it real­ly is.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: Play 2,400 Vin­tage Com­put­er Games in Your Web Brows­er

Long Live Glitch! The Art & Code from the Game Now Released into the Pub­lic Domain

Tim­o­thy Leary Plans a Neu­ro­mancer Video Game, with Art by Kei­th Har­ing, Music by Devo & Cameos by David Byrne

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Huge Hands Rise Out of Venice’s Waters to Support the City Threatened by Climate Change: A Poignant New Sculpture

in Art, Science | May 17th, 2017

Upon arriv­ing in Venice in the late 1930s, colum­nist and Algo­nquin Round Table reg­u­lar Robert Bench­ley imme­di­ate­ly sent a telegram back home to Amer­i­ca: “Streets full of water. Please advise.” The line has tak­en its place in the canon of Amer­i­can humor, but in more recent times the image of water-filled streets — unin­ten­tion­al­ly water-filled streets, that is — has arisen most often in the con­ver­sa­tion about cli­mate change. Some of the poten­tial dis­as­ter sce­nar­ios envi­sion every major coastal city on Earth even­tu­al­ly turn­ing into a kind of Venice, albeit a much less pleas­ant ver­sion there­of.

And so what bet­ter place than the one that hosts per­haps the world’s best known art exhi­bi­tion, the Venice Bien­nale, to express cli­mate-change anx­i­ety in the form of pub­lic sculp­ture? “Venice is known for its gon­do­las, canals, and his­toric bridges,” writes Condé Nast Trav­el­er’s Sebas­t­ian Modak, “but vis­i­tors will now also be greet­ed by anoth­er, albeit tem­po­rary, reminder of the city’s inti­mate rela­tion­ship with water: a giant pair of hands reach­ing out of the Grand Canal and appear­ing to sup­port the walls of the his­toric Ca’ Sagre­do Hotel.” The piece is called Sup­port, and it’s cre­at­ed by Barcelona-based Ital­ian sculp­tor Loren­zo Quinn.

“I have three chil­dren, and I’m think­ing about their gen­er­a­tion and what world we’re going to pass on to them,” Quinn told Mash­able’s Maria Gal­luc­ci. “I’m wor­ried, I’m very wor­ried.” The hands of his 11-year-old son actu­al­ly pro­vid­ed the mod­el for the polyurethane-and-resin hands of Sup­port, weigh­ing 5,000 pounds each, that stand on 30-foot pil­lars at the bot­tom of the Grand Canal. Modak quotes one of Quin­n’s Insta­gram posts which describes the work as speak­ing to the peo­ple “in a clear, sim­ple and direct way through the inno­cent hands of a child and it evokes a pow­er­ful mes­sage, which is that unit­ed we can make a stand to curb the cli­mate change that affects us all.”

Those argu­ing in favor of more aggres­sive polit­i­cal mea­sures to coun­ter­act the effects of cli­mate change have gone to great lengths to point out what forms those effects have so far tak­en. But the fact that, apart from a stretch of hot sum­mers, few of those effects have yet man­i­fest­ed unde­ni­ably in most peo­ple’s lives has cer­tain­ly made their job hard­er. But nobody who vis­its Venice dur­ing the Bien­nale could fail to pause before Sup­port, a work whose visu­al dra­ma demands a reac­tion that tem­per­a­ture charts or data-filled stud­ies can’t hope to pro­voke by them­selves. And even apart from the issue at hand, as it were, Quin­n’s sculp­ture reminds us that art, even in as deeply his­tor­i­cal a set­ting as Venice, can also keep us think­ing about the future.

via Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

132 Years of Glob­al Warm­ing Visu­al­ized in 26 Dra­mat­i­cal­ly Ani­mat­ed Sec­onds

Music for a String Quar­tet Made from Glob­al Warm­ing Data: Hear “Plan­e­tary Bands, Warm­ing World”

A Song of Our Warm­ing Plan­et: Cel­list Turns 130 Years of Cli­mate Change Data into Music

How Cli­mate Change Is Threat­en­ing Your Dai­ly Cup of Cof­fee

Frank Capra’s Sci­ence Film The Unchained God­dess Warns of Cli­mate Change in 1958

Watch Episode 1 of Years of Liv­ing Dan­ger­ous­ly, The New Show­time Series on Cli­mate Change

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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

in Art, Technology | May 12th, 2017

In the 21st cen­tu­ry, most of us have tried our hand at mak­ing some kind of dig­i­tal art or anoth­er — even if only touch­ing up cell­phone pho­tos of our­selves — but imag­ine the task of pro­duc­ing it 50 years ago. To make dig­i­tal art before the world had bare­ly heard the term “dig­i­tal” required access to a main­frame com­put­er, those huge­ly expen­sive hulks that filled rooms and print­ed out reams and reams of paper data, and the con­sid­er­able tech­ni­cal know-how to oper­ate it.

But the achieve­ment also, to go by the very ear­ly exam­ple of Hiroshi Kawano, required a back­ground in phi­los­o­phy. A grad­u­ate of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Tokyo major­ing in aes­thet­ics and the phi­los­o­phy of sci­ence before becom­ing a research assis­tant at that school and then a lec­tur­er at the Tokyo Met­ro­pol­i­tan Col­lege of Air-Tech­nol­o­gy, Kawano mar­shaled his knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence to cre­ate these “dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans,” so described because of their com­put­er-gen­er­at­ed resem­blance to that Dutch painter’s most rig­or­ous­ly angu­lar, solid­ly col­ored work.

Kawano had drawn inspi­ra­tion, accord­ing to a Deutsche Welle arti­cle on his dona­tion of his archives to Ger­many’s Cen­ter for Media Art, from “the writ­ings of the Ger­man philoso­pher Max Bense, who pro­posed (among oth­er things) the idea of mea­sur­ing beau­ty using sci­en­tif­ic rules. At the same time, Kawano heard that sci­en­tists were using com­put­ers to cre­ate music. Putting the two togeth­er, he decid­ed to explore the pos­si­bil­i­ty of using a com­put­er to pro­gram beau­ty.”

Doing so required “writ­ing pro­grams in com­plex com­put­er lan­guages, then labo­ri­ous­ly punch­ing these pro­grams into hun­dreds of cards before feed­ing them into the machine.” And “while the design of his works pro­duced dur­ing the 1960s might look sim­ple — they’re not. They are the result of com­plex math­e­mat­i­cal algo­rithms pro­grammed so that, although Kawano sets the rules for how the pic­ture could look, he can’t deter­mine exact­ly what will appear on the print­er.”

Just before Kawano passed away in 2012, the ZKM (or Cen­ter for Art and Media Karl­sruhe), cel­e­brat­ed his pio­neer­ing dig­i­tal art with the exhi­bi­tion “The Philoso­pher at the Com­put­er,” some of which you can see in this Ger­man-lan­guage video clip. “The ret­ro­spec­tive empha­sizes Kawano’s spe­cial role in the cir­cle of pio­neers in ‘com­put­er art,’ ” says its intro­duc­tion. “He was nei­ther artist, who dis­cov­ered the com­put­er as a new pro­duc­tion medi­um and theme, nor engi­neer who came to art via the new machine, but a philoso­pher, who left his desk for the com­put­er cen­ter to exper­i­ment with the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els.”

Can com­put­ers cre­ate art? Can they even be used to cre­ate art? These ques­tions now have prac­ti­cal­ly obvi­ous answers in the affir­ma­tive, but back in 1964 when Kawano pro­duced the first of these pieces, work­ing through tri­al and error with the advice of the curi­ous staff of his uni­ver­si­ty’s com­put­er cen­ter, the ques­tions must have sound­ed impos­si­bly philo­soph­i­cal. Today, writes Over­head Com­part­men­t’s Clau­dio Rivera, Kawano’s dig­i­tal Mon­dri­ans “sug­gest them­selves as an odd­ly ephemer­al tran­si­tion in the nexus of tech­nol­o­gy and art. The famil­iar col­ors and forms are flash-frozen in crys­talline pix­e­la­tion, almost as if seized up in the final, over­heat­ed throes of a sud­den­ly-too-old com­put­er.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art Found on 30-Year-Old Flop­py Disks

Watch the Dutch Paint “the Largest Mon­dri­an Paint­ing in the World”

Arti­fi­cial Neur­al Net­work Reveals What It Would Look Like to Watch Bob Ross’ The Joy of Paint­ing on LSD

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

Holocaust Survivor Viktor Frankl Explains Why If We Have True Meaning in Our Lives, We Can Make It Through the Darkest of Times

in Philosophy, Psychology | May 3rd, 2017

In one school of pop­u­lar rea­son­ing, peo­ple judge his­tor­i­cal out­comes that they think are favor­able as wor­thy trade­offs for his­tor­i­cal atroc­i­ties. The argu­ment appears in some of the most inap­pro­pri­ate con­texts, such as dis­cus­sions of slav­ery or the Holo­caust. Or in indi­vid­ual thought exper­i­ments, such as that of a famous inven­tor whose birth was the result of a bru­tal assault. There are a great many peo­ple who con­sid­er this think­ing repul­sive, moral­ly cor­ro­sive, and astound­ing­ly pre­sump­tu­ous. Not only does it assume that every ter­ri­ble thing that hap­pens is part of a benev­o­lent design, but it pre­tends to know which cir­cum­stances count as unqual­i­fied goods, and which can be blithe­ly ignored. It deter­mines future actions from a tidy and con­ve­nient sto­ry of the past.

We might con­trast this atti­tude with a more Zen stance, for exam­ple, a rad­i­cal­ly agnos­tic “wait and see” approach to every­thing that hap­pens. Not-know­ing seems to give med­i­tat­ing monks a great deal of seren­i­ty in prac­tice. But the the­o­ry ter­ri­fies most of us. Effects must have caus­es, we think, caus­es must have effects, and in order to pre­dict what’s going to hap­pen next (and there­by save our skins), we must know why we’re doing what we’re doing. The deep impulse is what psy­chol­o­gist and psy­chother­a­pist Vik­tor Fran­kl iden­ti­fies, in his pre-gen­der-neu­tral­ly titled book, as Man’s Search for Mean­ing. Despite the mis­use of this fac­ul­ty to cre­ate neu­rot­ic or dehu­man­iz­ing myths, “man’s search for mean­ing,” writes Fran­kl, “is the pri­ma­ry moti­va­tion in his life and not a ‘sec­ondary ratio­nal­iza­tion’ of instinc­tu­al dri­ves.”

Fran­kl under­stood per­fect­ly well how the con­struc­tion of meaning—through nar­ra­tive, art, rela­tion­ships, social fic­tions, etc.—might be per­vert­ed for mur­der­ous ends. He was a sur­vivor of four con­cen­tra­tion camps, which took the lives of his par­ents, broth­er, and wife. The first part of his book, “Expe­ri­ences in a Con­cen­tra­tion Camp,” recounts the hor­ror in detail, spar­ing no one account­abil­i­ty for their actions. From these expe­ri­ences, Fran­kl draws a con­clu­sion, one he explains in the inter­view above in two parts from 1977. “The les­son one could learn from Auschwitz,” he says, “and in oth­er con­cen­tra­tion camps, in the final analy­sis was, those who were ori­ent­ed toward a meaning—toward a mean­ing to be ful­filled by them in the future—were most like­ly to sur­vive” beyond the expe­ri­ence. “The ques­tion,” Fran­kl says, “was sur­vival for what?” (See a short ani­mat­ed sum­ma­ry of Fran­kl’s book below.)

Fran­kl does not excuse the deaths of his fam­i­ly, friends, and mil­lions of oth­ers in his psy­cho­log­i­cal the­o­ry, which he calls logother­a­py. He cer­tain­ly does not triv­i­al­ize the most unimag­in­able of in-human expe­ri­ences. “We all said to each oth­er in camp,” he writes, “that there could be no earth­ly hap­pi­ness which could com­pen­sate for all we had suf­fered.” But it was not the hope of hap­pi­ness that “gave us courage,” he writes. It was the “will to mean­ing” that looked to the future, not to the past. In Frankl’s exis­ten­tial­ist view, we our­selves cre­ate that mean­ing, for our­selves, and not for oth­ers. Logother­a­py, Fran­kl writes, “defo­cus­es all the vicious-cir­cle for­ma­tions and feed­back mech­a­nisms which play such a great role in the devel­op­ment of neu­roses.” We must acknowl­edge the need to make sense of our lives and fill what Fran­kl called the “exis­ten­tial vac­u­um.” And we alone are respon­si­ble for writ­ing bet­ter sto­ries for our­selves.

To dig deep­er in Fran­kl’s phi­los­o­phy, you can read not only Man’s Search for Mean­ing but also The Will to Mean­ing: Foun­da­tions and Appli­ca­tions of Logother­a­py.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exis­ten­tial­ist Psy­chol­o­gist Vik­tor Fran­kl Explains How to Find Mean­ing in Life, No Mat­ter What Chal­lenges You Face

A Crash Course in Exis­ten­tial­ism: A Short Intro­duc­tion to Jean-Paul Sartre & Find­ing Mean­ing in a Mean­ing­less World

Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

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

New Film Project Features Citizens of Alabama Reading Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” a Poetic Embodiment of Democratic Ideals

in Poetry, Travel | April 25th, 2017

In times of nation­al anx­i­ety, many of us take com­fort in the fact that the U.S. has endured polit­i­cal crises even more severe than those at hand. His­to­ry can be a teacher and a guide, and so too can poet­ry, as Walt Whit­man reminds us again and again. Whit­man wit­nessed some of the great­est upheavals and rev­o­lu­tion­ary changes the coun­try has ever expe­ri­enced: the Civ­il War and its after­math, the assas­si­na­tion of Abra­ham Lin­coln, the fail­ure of Recon­struc­tion, the mas­sive indus­tri­al­iza­tion of the coun­try at the end of the 19th cen­tu­ry.…

Per­haps this is why we return to Whit­man when we make what crit­ics call a “poet­ic turn.” His expan­sive, mul­ti­va­lent verse speaks for us when beau­ty, shock, or sad­ness exceed the lim­its of every­day lan­guage. Whit­man con­tained the nation’s war­ring voic­es, and some­how rec­on­ciled them with­out dilut­ing their unique­ness. This was, indeed, his lit­er­ary mis­sion, to “cre­ate a uni­fied whole out of dis­parate parts,” argues Karen Swal­low Pri­or at The Atlantic. “For Whit­man, poet­ry wasn’t just a vehi­cle for express­ing polit­i­cal lament; it was also a polit­i­cal force in itself.” Poetry’s impor­tance as a bind­ing agent in the frac­tious, frag­ile coali­tion of states, meant that for Whit­man, the country’s “Pres­i­dents shall not be their com­mon ref­er­ee so much as their poets shall.”

Whit­man wrote as a gay man who, by the time he pub­lished the first edi­tion of Leaves of Grass in 1855, had gone from being an “ardent Free-Soil­er” to ful­ly sup­port­ing abo­li­tion. His poet­ry pro­claimed a “rad­i­cal­ly egal­i­tar­i­an vision,” writes Mar­tin Klam­mer, “of an ide­al, mul­tira­cial repub­lic.” A coun­try that was, itself, a poem. “The Unit­ed States them­selves are essen­tial­ly the great­est poem,” wrote Whit­man in his pref­ace. The nation’s con­tra­dic­tions inhab­it us just as we inhab­it them. The only way to resolve our dif­fer­ences, he insist­ed, is to embody them ful­ly, with open­ness toward oth­er peo­ple and the nat­ur­al world. Under­stand­ing Whitman’s mis­sion makes film­mak­er Jen­nifer Crandall’s project Whit­man, Alaba­ma all the more poignant.

For two years, Cran­dall “criss­crossed this deep South­ern state, invit­ing peo­ple to look into a cam­era and share part of them­selves through the words of Walt Whit­man.” To the ques­tion “Who is Amer­i­can?,” Crandall—just as Whit­man before her—answers with a mul­ti­tude of voic­es, weav­ing in and out of a col­lab­o­ra­tive read­ing of the epic “Song of Myself,” begin­ning with 97-year-old Vir­ginia Mae Schmitt of Birm­ing­ham, at the top, who reads Whitman’s lines, “I, now thir­ty-sev­en years old in per­fect health begin / Hop­ing to cease not till death.” No one watch­ing the video, Cran­dall remarks, should ask, “Why isn’t’ a thir­ty-sev­en year old man read­ing this?” To do so is to ignore Whitman’s design for the uni­ver­sal in the par­tic­u­lar.

When Whit­man penned the first lines of “Song of Myself,” the coun­try had not yet “Unlimber’d” the can­nons “to begin the red busi­ness,” as he would lat­er write, but the 1850 Fugi­tive Slave Act had clear­ly lain the foun­da­tion for civ­il war. The poet­’s many revi­sions, addi­tions, and sub­se­quent edi­tions of Leaves of Grass after his first small run in 1855 con­tin­ued until his death in 1892. He was obsessed with the huge­ness and dynamism of the coun­try and its peo­ple, in their dark­est, blood­i­est moments and at their most flour­ish­ing. His vision lets every­one in, with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion, con­stant­ly rewrit­ing itself to meet new faces in the ever-chang­ing nation.

As Mari­am Jal­loh, a 14-year old Mus­lim girl from Guinea, recites in her short por­tion of the read­ing fur­ther up, “every atom belong­ing to me as good belongs to you.” Jol­lah quite lit­er­al­ly makes Whitman’s lan­guage her own, trans­lat­ing into her native Fulani the line, “If they are not just as close as they are dis­tant, they are noth­ing.” Jal­loh “may seem like a sur­pris­ing con­duit for the writ­ing of Whit­man, a long-dead queer social­ist poet from Brook­lyn,” writes Chris­t­ian Kerr at Hyper­al­ler­gic, “but such incon­gruity is the active agent in Whit­man, Alaba­ma’s ther­a­peu­tic salve.” It is also, Whit­man sug­gest­ed, the matrix of Amer­i­can democ­ra­cy.

See more read­ings from the project above from Lau­ra and Bran­don Reed­er of Cull­man, the Sul­li­van fam­i­ly of Mobile, and by Demetrius Leslie and Fred­er­ick George, and Patri­cia Mar­shall and Tam­my Coop­er, inmates at mens’ and wom­ens’ pris­ons in Mont­gomery. Whitman’s voice winds through these bod­ies and voic­es, set­tling in, find­ing a home, then, rest­less, mov­ing on, invit­ing us all to join in the cho­rus, yet also—in its con­trar­i­an way—telling us to find our own paths. “You shall no longer take things at sec­ond or third hand.…,” wrote Whit­man, “nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spec­tres in books, / You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me, / You shall lis­ten to all sides and fil­ter them from your­self.”

Find many more read­ings at the Whit­man, Alaba­ma web­site. And stay tuned for new read­ings as they come online.

Also find works by Walt Whit­man on our lists of Free Audio Books and Free eBooks.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Iggy Pop Reads Walt Whit­man in Col­lab­o­ra­tions With Elec­tron­ic Artists Alva Noto and Tar­wa­ter

Walt Whit­man Gives Advice to Aspir­ing Young Writ­ers: “Don’t Write Poet­ry” & Oth­er Prac­ti­cal Tips (1888)

Walt Whitman’s Unearthed Health Man­u­al, “Man­ly Health & Train­ing,” Urges Read­ers to Stand (Don’t Sit!) and Eat Plen­ty of Meat (1858)

The Civ­il War & Recon­struc­tion: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

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

The Futurist Cookbook (1930) Tried to Turn Italian Cuisine into Modern Art

in Art, Food & Drink | April 24th, 2017

With the com­ing sav­age cuts in arts fund­ing, per­haps we’ll return to a sys­tem of noblesse oblige famil­iar to stu­dents of The Gild­ed Age, when artists need­ed inde­pen­dent wealth or patron­age, and wealthy indus­tri­al­ists often decid­ed what was art, and what wasn’t. Unlike fine art, how­ev­er, haute cui­sine has always relied on the patron­age of wealthy donors—or din­ers. It can be mar­ket­ed in pre­made pieces, sold in cook­books, and made to look easy on TV, but for rea­sons both cul­tur­al and prac­ti­cal, giv­en the nature of food, an exquis­ite­ly-pre­pared dish can only be made acces­si­ble to a select few.

Still, we would be mis­tak­en, sug­gest­ed Futur­ist poet and the­o­rist F.T. Marinet­ti (1876–1944), should we neglect to see cook­ing as an art form akin to all the oth­ers in its moral and intel­lec­tu­al influ­ence on us. While hard­ly the first or the last artist to pub­lish a cook­book, Marinetti’s Futur­ist Cook­book seems as first glance dead­ly, even aggres­sive­ly, seri­ous, lack­ing the whim­sy, imprac­ti­cal weird­ness, and sur­re­al­ist art of Sal­vador Dali’s Les Din­ers de Gala, for exam­ple, or the eclec­tic wist­ful­ness of the MoMA’s Artist’s Cook­book.

Just as he had sought with his ear­li­er Futur­ist Man­i­festo to rev­o­lu­tion­ize art, Marinet­ti intend­ed his cook­book to foment a “rev­o­lu­tion of cui­sine,” as Alex Rev­el­li Sori­ni and Susan­na Cuti­ni point out. You might even call it an act of war when it came to cer­tain sta­ples of Ital­ian eat­ing, like pas­ta, which he thought respon­si­ble for “slug­gish­ness, pes­simism, nos­tal­gic inac­tiv­i­ty, and neu­tral­ism” (antic­i­pat­ing scads of low and no-carb diets to come).

Believ­ing that peo­ple “think, dream and act accord­ing to what they eat and drink,” Marinet­ti for­mu­lat­ed strict rules not only for the prepa­ra­tion of food, but also the serv­ing and eat­ing of it, going so far as to call for abol­ish­ing the knife and fork. A short excerpt from his intro­duc­tion shows him apply­ing to food the tech­no-roman­ti­cism of his Futur­ist theory—an ethos tak­en up by Ben­i­to Mus­soli­ni, whom Marinet­ti sup­port­ed:

The Futur­ist culi­nary rev­o­lu­tion … has the lofty, noble and uni­ver­sal­ly expe­di­ent aim of chang­ing rad­i­cal­ly the eat­ing habits of our race, strength­en­ing it, dynamiz­ing it and spir­i­tu­al­iz­ing it with brand-new food com­bi­na­tions in which exper­i­ment, intel­li­gence and imag­i­na­tion will eco­nom­i­cal­ly take the place of quan­ti­ty, banal­i­ty, rep­e­ti­tion and expense.

In hind­sight, the fas­cist over­tones in Marinetti’s lan­guage seem glar­ing. In 1932, when  the Futur­ist Cook­book  was pub­lished, his Futur­ism seemed like a much-need “jolt to all the prac­ti­cal and intel­lec­tu­al activ­i­ties,” note Sori­ni and Cuti­ni.  “The sub­ject [of cook­ing] need­ed a good shake to reawak­en its spir­it.” And that’s just what it got. The Futur­ist Cook­book act­ed as “a pre­view of Ital­ian-style Nou­velle Cui­sine,” with such inno­va­tions as “addi­tives and preser­v­a­tives added to food, or using tech­no­log­i­cal tools in the kitchen to mince, pul­ver­ize, and emul­si­fy.”

Yet, for all the high seri­ous­ness with which Marinet­ti seems to treat his sub­ject, “what the media missed” at the time, writes Maria Popo­va, “was that the cook­book was arguably the great­est artis­tic prank of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry.” In an intro­duc­tion to the 1989 edi­tion, British jour­nal­ist and his­to­ri­an Les­ley Cham­ber­lain called the Futur­ist Cook­book “a seri­ous joke, rev­o­lu­tion­ary in the first instance because it over­turned with rib­ald laugh­ter every­thing ‘food’ and ‘cook­books’ held sacred.” Marinet­ti first swept away tra­di­tion in favor of cre­ative din­ing events the Futur­ists called “aer­oban­quets,” such as one in Bologna in 1931 with a table shaped like an air­plane and dish­es called “spicy air­port” (Olivi­er sal­ad) and “ris­ing thun­der” (orange risot­to). Lam­br­us­co wine was served in gas cans.

It’s per­for­mance art wor­thy of Dal­i’s bizarre cos­tumed din­ner par­ties, but fueled by a gen­uine desire to rev­o­lu­tion­ize food, if not the actu­al eat­ing of it, by “bring­ing togeth­er ele­ments sep­a­rat­ed by bias­es that have no true foun­da­tion.” So remarked French chef Jules Main­cave, a 1914 con­vert to Futur­ism and inspi­ra­tion for what Marinet­ti calls “flex­i­ble fla­vor­ful com­bi­na­tions.” See sev­er­al such recipes excerpt­ed from the Futur­ist Cook­book at Brain Pick­ings, read the full book in Ital­ian here, and, just below, see Marinetti’s rules for the per­fect meal, first pub­lished in 1930 as the “Man­i­festo of Futur­ist Cui­sine.”

Futur­ist cui­sine and rules for the per­fect lunch

1. An orig­i­nal har­mo­ny of the table (crys­tal ware, crock­ery and glass­ware, dec­o­ra­tion) with the fla­vors and col­ors of the dish­es.

2. Utter orig­i­nal­i­ty in the dish­es.

3. The inven­tion of flex­i­ble fla­vor­ful com­bi­na­tions (edi­ble plas­tic com­plex), whose orig­i­nal har­mo­ny of form and col­or feeds the eyes and awak­ens the imag­i­na­tion before tempt­ing the lips.

4. The abo­li­tion of knife and fork in favor of flex­i­ble com­bi­na­tions that can deliv­er prelabi­al tac­tile enjoy­ment.

5. The use of the art of per­fumery to enhance taste. Each dish must be pre­ced­ed by a per­fume that will be removed from the table using fans.

6. A lim­it­ed use of music in the inter­vals between one dish and the next, so as not to dis­tract the sen­si­tiv­i­ty of the tongue and the palate and serves to elim­i­nate the fla­vor enjoyed, restor­ing a clean slate for tast­ing.

7. Abo­li­tion of ora­to­ry and pol­i­tics at the table.

8. Mea­sured use of poet­ry and music as unex­pect­ed ingre­di­ents to awak­en the fla­vors of a giv­en dish with their sen­su­al inten­si­ty.

9. Rapid pre­sen­ta­tion between one dish and the next, before the nos­trils and the eyes of the din­ner guests, of the few dish­es that they will eat, and oth­ers that they will not, to facil­i­tate curios­i­ty, sur­prise, and imag­i­na­tion.

10. The cre­ation of simul­ta­ne­ous and chang­ing morsels that con­tain ten, twen­ty fla­vors to be tast­ed in a few moments. These morsels will also serve the ana­log func­tion […] of sum­ma­riz­ing an entire area of life, the course of a love affair, or an entire voy­age to the Far East.

11. A sup­ply of sci­en­tif­ic tools in the kitchen: ozone machines that will impart the scent of ozone to liq­uids and dish­es; lamps to emit ultra­vi­o­let rays; elec­trolyz­ers to decom­pose extract­ed juices etc. in order to use a known prod­uct to achieve a new prod­uct with new prop­er­ties; col­loidal mills that can be used to pul­ver­ize flours, dried fruit and nuts, spices, etc.; dis­till­ing devices using ordi­nary pres­sure or a vac­u­um, cen­trifuge auto­claves, dial­y­sis machines.

The use of this equip­ment must be sci­en­tif­ic, avoid­ing the error of allow­ing dish­es to cook in steam pres­sure cook­ers, which leads to the destruc­tion of active sub­stances (vit­a­mins, etc.) due to the high tem­per­a­tures. Chem­i­cal indi­ca­tors will check if the sauce is acidic or basic and will serve to cor­rect any errors that may occur: lack of salt, too much vine­gar, too much pep­per, too sweet.”

via Fine­Din­ingLovers and Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent

Sal­vador Dalí’s 1973 Cook­book Gets Reis­sued: Sur­re­al­ist Art Meets Haute Cui­sine

MoMA’s Artists’ Cook­book (1978) Reveals the Meals of Sal­vador Dalí, Willem de Koon­ing, Andy Warhol, Louise Bour­geois & More

The Artists’ and Writ­ers’ Cook­book Col­lects Recipes From T.C. Boyle, Mari­na Abramović, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Car­ol Oates & More

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

Alec Baldwin Has a Podcast: Hear His Intimate Interviews with Patti Smith, Thom Yorke, Jerry Seinfeld, Ira Glass, Amy Schumer & More

in Podcasts | April 21st, 2017

It some­how escaped me. Alec Bald­win has a pod­cast. With 133 episodes in its archive, Here’s The Thing with Alec Bald­win  (Web — iTunes — Feeds) fea­tures “inti­mate and hon­est con­ver­sa­tions” with “artists, pol­i­cy mak­ers and per­form­ers – to hear their sto­ries, what inspires their cre­ations, what deci­sions changed their careers, and what rela­tion­ships influ­enced their work.” Below, we’ve embed­ded his recent con­ver­sa­tion with Pat­ti Smith. It’s quite good. But there are so many oth­ers worth a men­tion. Let me rat­tle off a quick list: REM’s Michael Stipe, Vig­go Mortensen, Michael Pol­lan, Amy Schumer and Judd Apa­tow, William Fried­kin, Paul Simon, Ira Glass, Jer­ry Sein­feld, David Simon, Radio­head­’s Thom Yorke, Lena Dun­ham, Peter Framp­ton, David Let­ter­man, Car­ol Bur­nett, Kris­ten Wiig, SNL’s Lorne Michaels, and Chris Rock.

Click the links to stream each inter­view, and don’t miss Bald­win’s new mem­oir, Nev­er­the­less. He hap­pens to nar­rate the audio­book ver­sion, which you can down­load for free if you sign up for Audible.com’s 30-day free tri­al. We have info on that here.

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