The Beatles Create an Abstract Collaborative Painting, Images of a Woman, During Three Days of Lockdown in Japan (1966)

in Art, Music | November 26th, 2020

One of the ear­li­est known non-human visu­al artists, Con­go the chim­panzee, learned to draw in 1956 at the age of two. Moody, fierce­ly pro­tec­tive of his work, and par­tic­u­lar about his process, he made around 400 draw­ings and paint­ings in a style described as “lyri­cal abstract impres­sion­ism.” He appeared sev­er­al times on British tele­vi­sion before his death in 1964. He count­ed Picas­so among his fans and, in a 2005 auc­tion, out­sold Warhol and Renoir.

One won­ders if who­ev­er gave the four-head­ed beast known as the Bea­t­les can­vas and paint (“pos­si­bly Bri­an Epstein or their Japan­ese pro­mot­er, Tats Nagashima”) remem­bered Con­go as the fab four bounced off the walls in their hotel rooms in Tokyo dur­ing their last, 1966 tour, when extra secu­ri­ty forced them to stay inside for three full days. Or per­haps their keep­ers were inspired by the humane prac­tice of art ther­a­py, com­ing into its own at the same time in men­tal health cir­cles with the found­ing of the British Asso­ci­a­tion of Art Ther­a­pists in 1964.

“Accord­ing to pho­tog­ra­ph­er Robert Whitak­er,” David Wol­man writes at The Atlantic, the Bea­t­les’ man­ag­er “brought the guys a bunch of art sup­plies to help pass the time. Then Epstein set a large can­vas on a table and placed a lamp in the mid­dle. Each mem­ber of the group set to work paint­ing a corner—comic strip­py for Ringo, psy­che­del­ic for John.” Paul’s cor­ner resem­bles an odd­ly erot­ic sea crea­ture, George’s the spir­i­tu­al abstrac­tions of Kandin­sky. Accord­ing to the Bea­t­les Bible, it was Nagashima “who sug­gest­ed that the com­plet­ed paint­ing be auc­tioned for char­i­ty.”

Whitak­er doc­u­ment­ed the exper­i­ment and lat­er pro­nounced it an imme­di­ate suc­cess: “I nev­er saw them calmer, more con­tent­ed than at this time… They’d stop, go and do a con­cert, and then it was ‘Let’s go back to the pic­ture!’” Once fin­ished, the lamp was lift­ed, all four signed their names in the cen­ter, and the paint­ing was titled Images of A Woman, which may be no indi­ca­tion of the artists’ inten­tions. Who knows what kind of scouser humor passed between them as they worked.

The paint­ing then passed to cin­e­ma exec­u­tive Tet­sus­aburo Shi­moya­ma, whose wid­ow auc­tioned it in 1989 to wealthy record store own­er Takao Nishi­no, who had seen them at Budokan in 1966 dur­ing the same his­toric tour that pro­duced the paint­ing. Then it end­ed up under a bed for twen­ty years before being auc­tioned again in 2012. It’s cer­tain­ly true the band, most espe­cial­ly Paul and John, had always tak­en to visu­al art, as artists them­selves or as col­lec­tors and appre­ci­a­tors. But this is some­thing spe­cial. It rep­re­sents their only col­lab­o­ra­tive art­work, aside from some doo­dles on a card sent to the Mon­ter­rey orga­niz­ers.

When look­ing at Whitaker’s pho­tographs of the band at work (see video mon­tage above), one doesn’t, of course, think of Con­go the chimp or the patients of a psy­chi­atric hos­pi­tal. Instead, they look like stu­dents in a ‘60s alter­na­tive school, set loose to cre­ate with­out inter­rup­tion (but for the occa­sion­al mega-con­cert) to their hearts’ con­tent. Maybe Epstein or Nagashima had just seen the 1966 Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da doc­u­men­tary Sum­mer­hill, about just such a school in Eng­land? What­ev­er inspired the zeitgeist‑y moment, we can see why it nev­er came again. That year, they played their final con­cert and retired to the stu­dio, where they could lock them­selves away with their pre­ferred means of cre­ative dis­trac­tion.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When the Bea­t­les Refused to Play Before Seg­re­gat­ed Audi­ences on Their First U.S. Tour (1964)

Meet Con­go the Chimp, London’s Sen­sa­tion­al 1950s Abstract Painter

How “Straw­ber­ry Fields For­ev­er” Con­tains “the Cra­zi­est Edit” in Bea­t­les His­to­ry

Audio: The Bea­t­les Play Their Final Con­cert at Can­dle­stick Park, 1966

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

Nikon Offers Free Online Photography Courses During the Holidays

in Online Courses, Photography | November 25th, 2020

A quick heads up. From Novem­ber 23rd through Decem­ber 31st, you can stream for free all class­es offered by Nikon School Online. Nor­mal­ly priced at $15-$50 per course, this 10-course offer­ing cov­ers Fun­da­men­tals of Pho­tog­ra­phy, Dynam­ic Land­scape Pho­tog­ra­phy, Macro Pho­tog­ra­phy, Pho­tograph­ing Chil­dren and Pets, and more.

Find­ing the cours­es on the Nikon site is not very intu­itive. To access the cours­es, click here and then scroll down the page until you see a yel­low but­ton that says “Watch Full Ver­sion.” From there you will get a prompt that allows you to sign up for the cours­es…

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!

via PetaPix­el

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Annie Lei­bovitz Teach­es Pho­tog­ra­phy in Her First Online Course

Take a Free Course on Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy from Stan­ford Prof Marc Lev­oy

Learn Dig­i­tal Pho­tog­ra­phy with Har­vard University’s Free Course

Stevie Ray Vaughan Gives a Blistering Demonstration of His Guitar Technique

in Music | November 25th, 2020

What made Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an such a great gui­tarist? If you ask Metallica’s Kirk Ham­mett, a devot­ed stu­dent of the blues, it’s “his tim­ing, his tone, his feel, his vibra­to, his phrasing–everything. Some peo­ple are just born to play gui­tar, and Ste­vie was def­i­nite­ly one of them.” This may come as dis­ap­point­ing news to gui­tar play­ers who want to sound like SRV but weren’t born with his genes. Ham­mett assures them it’s pos­si­ble to approx­i­mate his style, to some degree, with the right gear and mas­tery of his sig­na­ture tech­niques. Ham­mett lays out the SRV reper­toire thor­ough­ly, but there is no sub­sti­tute for the source.

SRV’s dual edu­ca­tion in both the British blues and the Amer­i­can blues of his heroes gave him “less reser­va­tions and less rea­sons to be so-called a ‘purist,’” he says in the video above. He then pro­ceeds to blow us away with imi­ta­tions of the greats and his own par­tic­u­lar spin on their tech­niques.

You could call it a gui­tar les­son, but as his stu­dent, you had bet­ter have advanced blues chops and a very good ear. As he runs through the styles of his idols, Vaugh­an doesn’t slow down or pause to explain what he’s doing. If you can keep up, you prob­a­bly don’t need the lessons after all.

Although com­pared, favor­ably or oth­er­wise, to his idol Jimi Hen­drix dur­ing his life and after his trag­ic death at 35, Vaugh­an also “incor­po­rat­ed the jazz stylings of Djan­go Rein­hardt, Ken­ny Bur­rell and Wes Mont­gomery,” Gui­tar mag­a­zine notes, and was “a keen stu­dent of Mud­dy Waters, Albert King, Fred­die King, Chuck Berry, Lon­nie Mack and Otis Rush.” Mud­dy Waters, in turn, was a great admir­er of Vaugh­an. “Ste­vie could per­haps be the great­est gui­tar play­er that ever lived,” the blues leg­end remarked in 1979. But like his hero Hen­drix, Vaughan’s tal­ent could be over­shad­owed by his addic­tions. “He won’t live to get 40 years old if he doesn’t leave that white pow­der alone,” Waters went on.

The drugs and alco­hol near­ly killed him, but they didn’t seem to cramp his play­ing. The video above comes from a Jan­u­ary 1986 sound­check, the same year Vaughan’s sub­stance abuse hit its peak and he entered rehab after near­ly dying of dehy­dra­tion in Ger­many. He would get sober and sur­vive, only to die in a heli­copter crash four years lat­er. While his ear­ly death may have some­thing to do with the way he has been dei­fied, what comes through in his albums and per­for­mances thir­ty years after he left us is the brute fact of his orig­i­nal­i­ty as a blues play­er.

Per­haps the the most con­cise state­ment of this comes from John Mayer’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induc­tion speech:

There is an inten­si­ty about Stevie’s gui­tar play­ing that only he could achieve, still to this day. It’s a rage with­out anger, it’s devo­tion­al, it’s reli­gious. He seam­less­ly meld­ed the super­nat­ur­al vibe of Jimi Hen­drix, the inten­si­ty of Albert King, the best of British, Texas and Chica­go Blues and the class and sharp shoot­er pre­ci­sion of his old­er broth­er Jim­mie. Ste­vie is the ulti­mate gui­tar hero.

If you’ve ever had rea­son to doubt, see it for your­self above.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How B.B. King & Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Dealt With Break­ing Strings Onstage Mid-Song: A Mas­ter­class in Han­dling Onstage Mishaps

Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an Plays the Acoustic Gui­tar in Rare Footage, Let­ting Us See His Gui­tar Vir­tu­os­i­ty in Its Purest Form

What Hap­pens When a Musi­cian Plays Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s “Pride and Joy” on a $25 Kids’ Gui­tar at Wal­mart

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

A Mysterious Monolith Appears in the Utah Desert, Channeling Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

in Art | November 25th, 2020

Peo­ple do weird things in the desert. A spokesman for the Utah Divi­sion of Wildlife Resources acknowl­edges that wide­ly under­stood truth in a recent New York Times arti­cle about a mys­te­ri­ous mono­lith dis­cov­ered in Red Rock Coun­try. “A team that was count­ing bighorn sheep by heli­copter spot­ted some­thing odd and land­ed to take a clos­er look,” writes Alan Yuhas. “It was a three-sided met­al mono­lith, about 10 to 12 feet tall, plant­ed firm­ly in the ground with no clear sign of where it came from or why it was there.” What­ev­er the dif­fer­ences in size, shape, and col­or, this still-unex­plained object brings to mind noth­ing so much as 2001: A Space Odyssey, with its most famous mono­lith of all.

Though Stan­ley Kubrick shot that par­tic­u­lar scene in Lon­don’s Shep­per­ton Stu­dios, plen­ty of oth­er pro­duc­tions have made use of the Utah Desert, includ­ing install­ments of the spec­ta­cle-dri­ven Indi­ana Jones and Mis­sion: Impos­si­ble series. But as far as any­one knows, the mono­lith isn’t a piece of set dress­ing.

Crowd­sourc­ing guess­es on social media, the Utah High­way Patrol received such respons­es as “a ‘res­o­nance deflec­tor,’ ‘an eye­sore,’ ‘some good met­al.’ Some the­o­rized, vague­ly, that it was a satel­lite bea­con. Oth­ers joked that it was a Wi-Fi router.” Who­ev­er assem­bled and installed it, they did so with “human-made riv­ets” and a skilled enough hand to cut a per­fect­ly shaped hole into the rock — the kind of com­bi­na­tion of appar­ent skill and inex­plic­a­bil­i­ty that once stirred up so much fas­ci­na­tion over crop cir­cles.

Image by Utah Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safe­ty

The Art News­pa­per’s Gabriel­la Angeleti describes the mono­lith as “resem­bling the free­stand­ing plank sculp­tures of the late Min­i­mal­ist artist John McCrack­en.” Though McCrack­en nev­er offi­cial­ly made an instal­la­tion in the Utah desert, he did spend the last years of his life not far away (at least by the stan­dards of the south­west­ern Unit­ed States) in north­ern New Mex­i­co, and any­one famil­iar with his work will sense a cer­tain affin­i­ty with it in this new­ly dis­cov­ered object. “While this is not a work by the late Amer­i­can artist John McCrack­en,” says a spokesman for the gallery that rep­re­sents him, “we sus­pect it is a work by a fel­low artist pay­ing homage.” Whether or not the mono­lith has an intend­ed mes­sage, the reac­tions now going viral around the world already have many of us won­der­ing how far we’ve real­ly evolved past the apes.

The mono­lith is appar­ent­ly view­able on Google Earth here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

When Michel Fou­cault Tripped on Acid in Death Val­ley and Called It “The Great­est Expe­ri­ence of My Life” (1975)

The CIA Puts Hun­dreds of Declas­si­fied Doc­u­ments About UFO Sight­ings Online, Plus 10 Tips for Inves­ti­gat­ing Fly­ing Saucers

Hear the Declas­si­fied, Eerie “Space Music” Heard Dur­ing the Apol­lo 10 Mis­sion (1969)

Watch a New­ly-Cre­at­ed “Epi­logue” For Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

The Uncanny Children’s Book Illustrations of Sigmund’s Freud’s Niece, Tom Seidmann-Freud

in Art, Education, K-12 | November 25th, 2020

In 1919, Sig­mund Freud pub­lished “The ‘Uncan­ny,’” his rare attempt as a psy­cho­an­a­lyst “to inves­ti­gate the sub­ject of aes­thet­ics.” The essay arrived in the midst of a mod­ernist rev­o­lu­tion Freud him­self unwit­ting­ly inspired in the work of Sur­re­al­ists like Sal­vador Dali, Andre Bre­ton, and many oth­ers. He also had an influ­ence on anoth­er artist of the peri­od: his niece Martha-Gertrud Freud, who start­ed going by the name “Tom” after the age of 15, and who became known as children’s book author and illus­tra­tor Tom Sei­d­mann-Freud after she mar­ried Jakob Sei­d­mann and the two estab­lished their own pub­lish­ing house in 1921.

Seidmann-Freud’s work can­not help but remind stu­dents of her uncle’s work of the unheim­lich—that which is both fright­en­ing and famil­iar at once. Uncan­ni­ness is a feel­ing of trau­mat­ic dis­lo­ca­tion: some­thing is where it does not belong and yet it seems to have always been there. Per­haps it’s no coin­ci­dence that the Seidmann-Freud’s named their pub­lish­ing com­pa­ny Pere­grin, which comes from “the Latin, Pere­gri­nos,” notes an exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue, “mean­ing ‘for­eign­er,’ or ‘from abroad’—a title used dur­ing the Roman Empire to iden­ti­fy indi­vid­u­als who were not Roman cit­i­zens.”

Uncan­ny dis­lo­ca­tion was a theme explored by many an artist—many of them Jewish—who would lat­er be labeled “deca­dent” by the Nazis and killed or forced into exile. Sei­d­mann-Freud her­self had migrat­ed often in her young life, from Vien­na to Lon­don, where she stud­ied art, then to Munich to fin­ish her stud­ies, and final­ly to Berlin with her hus­band. She became famil­iar with the Jew­ish philoso­pher and mys­tic Ger­shom Scholem, who inter­est­ed her in illus­trat­ing a Hebrew alpha­bet book. The project fell through, but she con­tin­ued to write and pub­lish her own children’s books in Hebrew.

In Berlin, the cou­ple estab­lished them­selves in the Char­lot­ten­burg neigh­bor­hood, the cen­ter of the Hebrew pub­lish­ing indus­try. Seidmann-Freud’s books were part of a larg­er effort to estab­lish a specif­i­cal­ly Jew­ish mod­ernism. Tom “was a typ­i­cal exam­ple of the busy dawn of the 1920s,” Chris­tine Brinck writes at Der Tagesspiegel. Scholem called the chain-smok­ing artist an “authen­tic Bohèmi­enne” and an “illus­tra­tor… bor­der­ing on genius.” Her work shows evi­dence of a “close famil­iar­i­ty with the world of dreams and the sub­con­scious,” writes Hadar Ben-Yehu­da, and a fas­ci­na­tion with the fear and won­der of child­hood.

In her 1923 The Fish’s Jour­ney, Sei­d­mann-Freud draws on a per­son­al trau­ma, “the first real tragedy to have struck her young life when her beloved broth­er Theodor died by drown­ing.” Oth­er works illus­trate texts—chosen by Jakob and the couple’s busi­ness part­ner, poet Hay­im Nah­man Bialik—by Hans Chris­t­ian Ander­sen and the Broth­ers Grimm, “with draw­ings adapt­ed to the land­scapes of a Mediter­ranean com­mu­ni­ty,” “a Jew­ish, social­ist notion… added to the texts,” “and the dif­fer­ence between boys and girls made inde­ci­pher­able,” the Sei­d­mann-Freud exhi­bi­tion cat­a­logue points out.

These books were part of a larg­er mis­sion to “intro­duce Hebrew-speak­ing chil­dren to world lit­er­a­ture, as part of estab­lish­ing a mod­ern Hebrew soci­ety in Pales­tine.” Trag­i­cal­ly, the pub­lish­ing ven­ture failed, and Jakob hung him­self, the event that pre­cip­i­tat­ed Tom’s own trag­ic end, as Ben-Yehu­da tells it:

The del­i­cate, sen­si­tive illus­tra­tor nev­er recov­ered from her husband’s death. She fell into depres­sion and stopped eat­ing. She was hos­pi­tal­ized, but no one from her fam­i­ly and friends, not even her uncle Sig­mund Freud who came to vis­it and to care for her was able to lift her spir­its. After a few months, she died of anorex­ia at the age of thir­ty-eight.

Sei­d­mann-Freud passed away in 1930, “the same year that the lib­er­al democ­ra­cy in Ger­many, the Weimar Repub­lic, start­ed it fren­zied down­ward descent,” a biog­ra­phy writ­ten by her fam­i­ly points out. Her work was burned by the Nazis, but copies of her books sur­vived in the hands of the couple’s only daugh­ter, Angela, who changed her name to Avi­va and “emi­grat­ed to Israel just before the out­break of World War II.”

The “whim­si­cal­ly apoc­a­lyp­tic” illus­tra­tions in books like Buch Der Hasen­geschicht­en, or The Book of Rab­bit Sto­ries from 1924, may seem more omi­nous in hind­sight. But we can also say that Tom, like her uncle and like so many con­tem­po­rary avant-garde artists, drew from a gen­er­al sense of uncan­ni­ness that per­me­at­ed the 1920s and often seemed to antic­i­pate more full-blown hor­ror. See more Sei­d­mann-Freud illus­tra­tions at 50 Watts, the Freud Muse­um Lon­don, Kul­tur­Port, and at her fam­i­ly-main­tained site, where you can also pur­chase prints of her many weird and won­der­ful scenes.

via 50 Watts

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sig­mund Freud Speaks: Hear the Only Known Record­ing of His Voice, 1938

Ralph Stead­man Cre­ates an Unortho­dox Illus­trat­ed Biog­ra­phy of Sig­mund Freud, the Father of Psy­cho­analy­sis (1979)

Enter an Archive of 6,000 His­tor­i­cal Children’s Books, All Dig­i­tized and Free to Read Online

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

Kevin Allison (The State, RISK!) Discusses Confessional Comedy on Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #70

in Comedy, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop | November 25th, 2020

Kevin was in the infa­mous, NYU-based sketch com­e­dy group The State which had a show for a sea­son on MTV and seemed like it was going to get picked up by CBS, but no. After sev­er­al years get­ting over this dis­ap­point­ment, Kevin dis­cov­ered a new out­let for his ener­gies: He deliv­ers, curates, and coach­es per­son­al sto­ries (bor­der­ing on too per­son­al, thus the “risk”) for his stage show and pod­cast RISK!

Kevin joins your hosts Mark Lin­sen­may­er, Eri­ca Spyres, and Bri­an Hirt to dis­cuss this idio­syn­crat­ic form: Do the sto­ries have to be fun­ny? Can you change things? What’s the rela­tion to auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal, humor­ous essays a la David Sedaris? What might be too per­son­al or actu­al­ly indi­cat­ing trau­ma to actu­al­ly share on RISK? This seems like some­thing any­one can do, so what’s the role of craft and sto­ry-telling his­to­ry?

Lis­ten to RISK at risk-show.com, and watch many sto­ries on the RISK! YouTube chan­nel. Also: kevinallison.net, thestorystudio.org, and @thekevinallison. Kev­in’s sto­ry about pros­ti­tut­ing him­self is about 14 min­utes into this episode. Hear Kevin on Marc Maron’s WTF! Lis­ten to that audio guide Kevin men­tions, “What Every RISK! Sto­ry­teller Should Know.” Read about the four lies of sto­ry­telling.

Hear more of this pod­cast at prettymuchpop.com. This episode includes bonus dis­cus­sion you can access by sup­port­ing the pod­cast at patreon.com/prettymuchpop. This time, the hosts tell (or at least out­line) their own RISK!-like sto­ries, and the result is pre­dictably too per­son­al for our pub­lic feed.

This pod­cast is part of the Par­tial­ly Exam­ined Life pod­cast net­work.

Pret­ty Much Pop: A Cul­ture Pod­cast is the first pod­cast curat­ed by Open Cul­ture. Browse all Pret­ty Much Pop posts.

The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside Buckminster Fuller-Inspired Geodesic Domes

in Creativity, Design, Environment, Life, Technology | November 24th, 2020

Buck­min­ster Fuller had a dif­fi­cult time as an inven­tor in his ear­ly years. “Hav­ing been expelled from Har­vard for irre­spon­si­ble con­duct,” notes The Guardian, “he strug­gled to find a job and pro­vide a liv­ing for his young fam­i­ly in his ear­ly 30s.” Despite lat­er suc­cess­es, and a lat­er rep­u­ta­tion as leg­endary as Niko­la Tesla’s, he was often, like Tes­la, seen by crit­ics as a utopi­an vision­ary, whose visions were too imprac­ti­cal to real­ly change the world.

But his body of work remains a tes­ta­ment to an imag­i­na­tion that ris­es above the trends of indus­tri­al design and engi­neer­ing. After a peri­od of decline, for exam­ple, Fuller’s geo­des­ic domes expe­ri­enced a revival in the ear­ly 2000’s when “aging baby-boomers across Amer­i­ca” began “build­ing dream homes in the shape of geo­des­ic domes.” Mean­while in Corn­wall, Eng­land, a few years ahead of the curve, Dutch-born busi­ness­man and archae­ol­o­gist-turned-suc­cess­ful-music-pro­duc­er Sir Tim­o­thy Smit broke ground on what would become a far more British use of Ful­lerist prin­ci­ples.

In the late 90s, Smit start­ed work on an enor­mous com­plex of geo­des­ic bio­mes called the Eden Project, a facil­i­ty “akin to a quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Vic­to­ri­an cre­ation: the Eng­lish green­house,” which reached its apex in the famed “Crys­tal Palace” built for the Great Exhi­bi­tion in Hyde Park in 1851. These were build­ings “born out of a play­ful, deca­dent imagination—yet in their archi­tec­ture and design they often opened new path­ways for the future.” So too do Fuller’s designs, in an appli­ca­tion meld­ing Vic­to­ri­an and Ful­lerist ideas about cura­tor­ship and sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Look­ing like “clus­ters of soap bub­bles” the Eden Project slow­ly rose above an exhaust­ed clay pit and opened in 2001 (see a short time-lapse film of the con­struc­tion above). Each of the two huge cen­tral domes recre­ates an ecosys­tem. The Rain­for­est Bio­me allows vis­i­tors to get lost in near­ly 4 acres of trop­i­cal for­est and includes banana, cof­fee, and rub­ber plants. The Mediter­ranean Bio­me hous­es an acre and a half of olives and grape vines. Small­er adjoin­ing domes house thou­sands of addi­tion­al plant species. There is a per­for­mance space and a year­ly music fes­ti­val; sculp­tures and art exhi­bi­tions in both the indoor and out­door gar­dens. The facil­i­ty has host­ed well over a mil­lion vis­i­tors each year.

Pho­to via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

In 2016, the Eden Project began plant­i­ng red­woods, intro­duc­ing a for­est of the North Amer­i­can trees to Europe for the first time. Next year, it will begin drilling for a geot­her­mal ener­gy project to turn heat from the gran­ite under­ground into pow­er, an under­tak­ing that, unlike frack­ing, will not release con­t­a­m­i­nants into the water sup­ply or addi­tion­al fos­sil fuels into the air and could pow­er and heat the facil­i­ty and 5000 addi­tion­al homes. In 2018, the project began con­struc­tion on Eden Project North, in More­cambe, Lan­cashire, with build­ings designed to look like giant mus­sels and a focus on marine envi­ron­ments.

Eden Project Inter­na­tion­al aims to build unique facil­i­ties all around the world, “to cre­ate new attrac­tions with a mes­sage of envi­ron­men­tal, social and eco­nom­ic regen­er­a­tion” and “to pro­tect and reju­ve­nate nat­ur­al land­scapes.” None of these ambi­tious expan­sions use the geo­des­ic domes of the orig­i­nal Eden Project, but that is not a reflec­tion on the domes’ struc­tur­al sound­ness. Many oth­er trans­par­ent uses of Fuller’s design have encoun­tered dif­fi­cul­ties with water tight­ness and heat flow. The Eden Project’s domes use inno­v­a­tive inflat­able, tri­an­gu­lar pan­els instead of glass to solve those prob­lems. Fuller sure­ly would have approved.

The project also rep­re­sents a poignant per­son­al vin­di­ca­tion for the Fuller fam­i­ly. Fuller “vowed to ded­i­cate his life to improv­ing stan­dards of liv­ing through good design,” The Guardian writes, after his daugh­ter Alexan­dra died in 1922. In 2009, his only sur­viv­ing child, Alle­gra Fuller Sny­der, then 82 and Chair­woman of the Buck­min­ster Fuller Insti­tute, vis­it­ed the Eden Project. “Of all the projects relat­ed to my father’s work,” she remarked after­ward, “I would say that this is the one I am most aware of as being a pow­er­ful, com­pre­hen­sive project…. My father would have been just thrilled. He would feel that it is a mar­vel­lous appli­ca­tion of his think­ing.”

Learn more about the Eden Project, which reopens Decem­ber 3, here. And learn how to “cre­ate Eden wher­ev­er you are” with the project’s free resources for gar­den­ers at home.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Buck­min­ster Fuller Rails Against the “Non­sense of Earn­ing a Liv­ing”: Why Work Use­less Jobs When Tech­nol­o­gy & Automa­tion Can Let Us Live More Mean­ing­ful Lives

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Map of the World: The Inno­va­tion that Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Map Design (1943)

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

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

The Geometry of Sound: Watch Artist Kenichi Kanazawa Make Amazing Geometric Designs Out of Sand, Using Sound Waves Alone

in Art, Physics | November 23rd, 2020

Before our eyes, Japan­ese artist Kenichi Kanaza­wa cre­ates crisp shapes and geo­met­ric pat­terns with no spe­cial tools but sand and sound, the kind of work that at first looks express­ly designed to go viral on social media. But he’s been at it much longer than that: “Orig­i­nal­ly a sculp­tor by trade,” accord­ing to Spoon & Tam­ago’s John­ny Wald­man, “Kanaza­wa began work­ing with steel and sound in 1987 after col­lab­o­rat­ing with the late sound artist Hiroshi Yoshimu­ra. Today, his work pri­mar­i­ly involves ele­ments like sound, vibra­tion and heat: mak­ing the invis­i­ble, vis­i­ble.” Or in oth­er words, using what crit­ic and music Ted Gioia calls, in a tweet of one of Kanaza­wa’s short table­top per­for­mances, “the pow­er of sound to cre­ate order out of chaos.”

Kanaza­wa does­n’t use just any old tables, but spe­cial ones made of steel, the bet­ter to res­onate when he taps and strokes them with his vari­ety of mal­lets. Nor does he use just any old sand, opt­ing instead for either a pure white — for max­i­mum visu­al stark­ness against the black steel — or a set of bright col­ors, as in the video at the top of the post.

What­ev­er its place on the spec­trum, the stuff seems to rearrange itself across the sur­face in response to the tones cre­at­ed by the artist. The strik­ing pre­ci­sion of the effects pro­duced by this inter­ac­tion of sand, steel, and sound gets view­ers won­der­ing what, sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, is going on here. The under­ly­ing set of phe­nom­e­na has a name: cymat­ics, coined in the 1960s by a Swiss doc­tor named Hans Jen­ny.

In his book Heal­ing Songs, Gioia calls Jen­ny’s study of cymat­ics “the most impres­sive and rig­or­ous inquiry yet made into the nature of vibra­tions and their impact on phys­i­cal objects of var­i­ous sorts.” In such a medi­um sen­si­tive to son­ic vibra­tions, Jen­ny him­self writes, “a pat­tern appears to take shape before the eye and, as long as the sound is spo­ken, to behave like some­thing alive.” This also fair­ly describes Kanaza­wa’s danc­ing sand, whether seen from up close or at a dis­tance. Phys­i­cal­ly speak­ing, sound is, of course, a form of vibra­tion, which is itself a form of motion. But for an observ­er like Jen­ny — an adher­ent of eso­teric philoso­pher Rudolf Stein­er’s anthro­pos­o­phy, a school of thought ori­ent­ed toward the obser­va­tion of the spir­i­tu­al world through sen­so­ry expe­ri­ence — Kanaza­wa’s work would sure­ly have, as it were, much deep­er res­o­nances.

via @Ted­Gioia

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Geom­e­try of Sound Waves Visu­al­ized

What Does Sound Look Like?: The Audi­ble Ren­dered Vis­i­ble Through Clever Tech­nol­o­gy

The Physics of Play­ing a Gui­tar Visu­al­ized: Metallica’s “Noth­ing Else Mat­ters” Viewed from Inside the Gui­tar

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, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

A Curious Herbal: 500 Beautiful Illustrations of Medicinal Plants Drawn by Elizabeth Blackwell in 1737 (to Save Her Family from Financial Ruin)

in Art, Books, History, Science | November 23rd, 2020

Some­times beau­ti­ful things come out of ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. This does not jus­ti­fy more ter­ri­ble cir­cum­stances. But as evi­dence of the resilience, resource­ful­ness, and cre­ativ­i­ty of human beings—and more specif­i­cal­ly of moth­ers in dire straits—we offer the fol­low­ing: A Curi­ous Herbal, Eliz­a­beth Blackwell’s fine­ly illus­trat­ed, engraved, and col­ored “herbal,” the term for a “book of plants, describ­ing their appear­ance, their prop­er­ties and how they may be used for prepar­ing oint­ments,” the British Library writes.

Born some­time around 1700 to a suc­cess­ful mer­chant fam­i­ly in Scot­land, Eliz­a­beth mar­ried Alexan­der Black­well, a “shady char­ac­ter” who pro­ceed­ed to drag her through a series of mis­ad­ven­tures involv­ing him pos­ing as a doc­tor and a print­er, despite the fact that he’d had no train­ing in either pro­fes­sion.

Black­well incurred sev­er­al hefty fines from the author­i­ties, which he could not pay, and he was final­ly remand­ed to debtor’s prison, an insti­tu­tion that often left women with young chil­dren to fend for them­selves.

“With Alexan­der in prison, Eliz­a­beth was forced to rely on her own resources to keep her­self and her child.” For­tu­nate­ly, she had been pre­pared with life skills dur­ing her pros­per­ous upbring­ing, hav­ing learned a thing or two about busi­ness and “received tuition in draw­ing and paint­ing, as many well-to-do young women then did.” Black­well real­ized a pub­lish­ing oppor­tu­ni­ty: find­ing no high-qual­i­ty herbals avail­able, she decid­ed to make her own in “a rare tri­umph of turn­ing des­per­a­tion into inspi­ra­tion,” Maria Popo­va writes.

After befriend­ing the head cura­tor Chelsea Physic Gar­den — a teach­ing facil­i­ty for appren­tice apothe­caries estab­lished sev­er­al decades ear­li­er — she real­ized that there was a need for a hand­book depict­ing and describ­ing the garden’s new col­lec­tion of mys­te­ri­ous plants from the New World. A keen observ­er, a gift­ed artist, and an entre­pre­neur by nature, she set about bridg­ing the world’s need and her own.

The gor­geous book, A Curi­ous Herbal (1737–39), was not all Blackwell’s work, though she com­plet­ed all of the illus­tra­tions from start to fin­ish. She also enlist­ed her husband’s help, vis­it­ing his cell to have him “sup­ply each plant’s name in Latin, Greek, Ital­ian, Span­ish, Dutch, and Ger­man.” Black­well pro­duced 500 illus­tra­tions in total. She adver­tised “by word of mouth,” notes the British Library, “and in sev­er­al jour­nals” and “showed her­self an adept busi­ness­woman, strik­ing mutu­al­ly advan­ta­geous deals with book­sellers that ensured the finan­cial suc­cess of the herbal.”

Black­well not only ben­e­fit­ed her fam­i­ly and her read­ers, but she also gave her book to posterity—though she couldn’t have known it at the time. Her herbal has been dig­i­tized in full by the Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library. The herbal will also give back to the nat­ur­al world she lov­ing­ly ren­dered (includ­ing plants that have since gone extinct). Popo­va has made a selec­tion of the illus­tra­tions avail­able as prints to ben­e­fit The Nature Con­ser­van­cy. See Blackwell’s dig­i­tized book in full here and order prints at Brain Pick­ings.

via Brain­Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Dis­cov­er Emi­ly Dickinson’s Herbar­i­um: A Beau­ti­ful Dig­i­tal Edi­tion of the Poet’s Col­lec­tion of Pressed Plants & Flow­ers Is Now Online

His­toric Man­u­script Filled with Beau­ti­ful Illus­tra­tions of Cuban Flow­ers & Plants Is Now Online (1826)

The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library Makes 150,000 High-Res Illus­tra­tions of the Nat­ur­al World Free to Down­load

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

Watch How to Be at Home, a Beautiful Short Animation on the Realities of Social Isolation in 2020

in Animation, Books, Film, Life, Poetry | November 23rd, 2020

I think, as social pri­mates, we want to feel a strong sense of belong­ing either in a rela­tion­ship or to a community—or both. But also intrin­sic to our human­i­ty is a feel­ing that we are tru­ly alone.

—Film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man, 2010

When they first became friends, poet Tanya Davis and film­mak­er Andrea Dorf­man talked a lot about the plea­sures and hard­ships of being alone. Davis had just gone through a break up, and Dorf­man was just embark­ing on a rela­tion­ship after four years of fly­ing solo.

These con­ver­sa­tions led to a col­lab­o­ra­tion, 2010’s How to Be At Alone (see below), a whim­si­cal videopo­em that com­bines live action and ani­ma­tion to con­sid­er some of soli­tude’s sweet­er aspects, like sit­ting on a bench as sig­nal to the uni­verse that one is avail­able for impromp­tu con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger.

That bench reap­pears in their 2020 fol­low up, How to Be At Home, above. Now it is cor­doned off with black and yel­low cau­tion tape, a famil­iar pub­lic health mea­sure in 2020.

As with the ear­li­er project, a large part of Davis’ pur­pose was to reflect and reas­sure, both her­self, and by exten­sion, oth­ers.

Although she has become a poster child for the joys of soli­tude, she also rel­ish­es human con­tact, and found her­self miss­ing it ter­ri­bly while shel­ter­ing alone in the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic. Writ­ing the new poem gave her “an anchor” and a place to put her anx­i­ety.

Dorf­man notes that the project, which was com­mis­sioned by the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da as part of a short film col­lec­tion about Cana­di­ans nav­i­gat­ing life dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, was “essen­tial­ly cat­alyzed by COVID.”

As she embarked on the project, she won­dered if the pan­dem­ic would be over by the time it was com­plete. As she told the CBC’s Tom Pow­er:

There was this feel­ing that this could go away in a month, so this bet­ter be fin­ished soon, so it’s still rel­e­vant. So as an artist, as a film­mak­er, I thought, “I have to crank this out” but there’s no fast and easy way to do ani­ma­tion. It just takes so long and as I got into it and real­ized that this was going to be a marathon, not a sprint, the images just kept com­ing to me and I real­ly just made it up as I went along. I’d go into my stu­dio every day not know­ing what lay ahead and I’d think, “Okay, so, what do we have up next? What’s the next line? And I’d spend maybe a week on a line of the poem, ani­mat­ing it. 

It appears to have been an effec­tive approach.

Dorfman’s paint­ed images rip­ple across the fast turn­ing pages of an old book. The titles change from time to time, and the choic­es seem delib­er­ate—The Lone Star Ranger, Le Secret du Manoir Han­té, a chap­ter in The Bro­ken Halo—“Rose­mary for Remem­brance.”

“It’s almost as though the way the poem is writ­ten there are many chap­ters in the book. (Davis) moves from one sub­ject to anoth­er so com­plete­ly,” Dorf­man told the Uni­ver­si­ty of King’s Col­lege stu­dent paper, The Sig­nal.

In the new work, the absence of oth­er peo­ple proves a much heav­ier bur­den than it does in How To Be Alone.

Davis flirts with many of the first poem’s set­tings, places where a lone indi­vid­ual might have gone to put them­selves in prox­im­i­ty to oth­er humans as recent­ly as Feb­ru­ary 2020:

Pub­lic trans­porta­tion

The gym

A dance club

A descrip­tion from 2010:

The lunch counter, where you will be sur­round­ed by chow-down­ers, employ­ees who only have an hour and their spous­es work across town, and they, like you, will be alone.

Resist the urge to hang out with your cell phone.

In 2020, she strug­gles to recre­ate that expe­ri­ence at home, her phone serv­ing as her most vital link to the out­side world, as she scrolls past images of a Black Lives Mat­ter protests and a masked essen­tial work­er:

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone.

See How to Be at Home and the 29 oth­er films that com­prise The Curve, the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da series about life in the era of COVID-19 here.

How to be at Home

By Tanya Davis

If you are, at first, real­ly fuck­ing anx­ious, just wait. It’ll get worse, and then you’ll get the hang of it. Maybe. 

Start with the rea­son­able feel­ings – dis­com­fort, lack of focus, the sad­ness of alone

you can try to do yoga

you can shut off the radio when it gets to you

you can mes­sage your fam­i­ly or your friends or your col­leagues, you’re not sup­posed to leave your home any­way, so it’s safe for you

There’s also the gym

you can’t go there but you could pre­tend to

you could bendy by your­self in your bed­room

And there’s pub­lic trans­porta­tion

prob­a­bly best to avoid it

but there’s prayer and med­i­ta­tion, yes always

employ it

if you have pains in your chest ‘cause your anx­i­ety won’t rest

take a moment, take a breath

Start sim­ple

things you can han­dle based on your inter­ests

your issues and your trig­gers

and your inner logis­tics 

I miss lunch coun­ters so much I’ve been eat­ing [pick­les and] toast­ed sand­wich­es while hang­ing unabashed­ly with my phone

When you are tired, again of still being alone

make your­self a din­ner

but don’t invite any­body over

put some­thing green in it, or maybe orange

chips are fine some­times but they won’t keep you charged 

feed your heart

if peo­ple are your nour­ish­ment, I get you

feel the feel­ings that undo you while you have to keep apart

Watch a movie, in the dark

and pre­tend some­one is with you 

watch all of the cred­its

because you have time, and not much else to do

or watch all of the cred­its to remem­ber 

how many peo­ple come togeth­er

just to tell a sto­ry

just to make a pic­ture move

And then, set your­self up danc­ing

like it’s a club where every­one knows you

and they’re all gonna hold you

all night long

they’re gonna dance around you and with you and on their own

it’s your favourite song 

with the hard­est bass and the cathar­tic drums

your heart pumps along/hard, you belong

you put your hands up to feel it

With the come down comes the weep­ing

those down­cast eyes and feel­ings

the truth is you can’t go danc­ing, not right now

not at any club or par­ty in any town

The heart­break of this astounds you

it joins old aches way down in you

you can vis­it them, but please don’t stay there

Go out­side if you’re able, breathe the air

there are trees for hug­ging

don’t be embar­rassed

it’s your friend, it’s your moth­er, it’s your new crush

lay your cheek against the bark, it’s a liv­ing thing to touch

Sad­ly, leave all bench­es emp­ty

appre­ci­ate the kind­ness in the dis­tance of strangers

as you pine for com­pa­ny and wave at your neigh­bours

savour the depths of your con­ver­sa­tions

the lay­ers uncov­ered

in this strange space and time

Soci­ety is afraid of change

and no one wants to die

not now, from a tiny virus

not lat­er from the world on fire

But death is a truth we all hate to know

we all get to live, and then we all have to go

In the mean­time, we’re sur­round­ed, we’re alone

each a thread woven in the fab­ric, unrav­el­ling in moments though

each a solo enti­ty spin­ning on its axis, for­get­ting that the galaxy includes us all

Here­in our fall

from grace from each oth­er from god what­ev­er, doesn’t mat­ter

the dis­as­ter is that we believe we’re sep­a­rate 

we’re not

As evi­denced by virus­es tak­ing down soci­eties

as proven by the lone­li­ness inher­ent in no gath­er­ings

as pal­pa­ble as the vacan­cy in the space of one per­son hug­ging

If this dis­rup­tion undoes you

if the absence of peo­ple unrav­els you

if touch was the teth­er that held you togeth­er

and now that it’s sev­ered you’re frag­ile too 

lean into lone­li­ness and know you’re not alone in it 

lean into lone­li­ness like it is hold­ing you

like it is a gen­er­ous rep­re­sen­ta­tive of a glar­ing truth

oh, we are con­nect­ed

we for­get this, yet we always knew.

How to Be at Home will be added to the Ani­ma­tion sec­tion of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch 66 Oscar-Nom­i­nat­ed-and-Award-Win­ning Ani­mat­ed Shorts Online, Cour­tesy of the Nation­al Film Board of Cana­da

Watch “Ryan,” Win­ner of an Oscar and 60 Oth­er Awards

2020: An Iso­la­tion Odyssey–A Short Film Reen­acts the Finale of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, with a COVID-19 Twist

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.