The CIA’s Former Chief of Disguise Show How Spies Use Costumes in Undercover Operations

in Life, Politics, Theatre, Wikipedia | October 26th, 2018

Think on this as you ready your Hal­loween fin­ery. Some­times it’s not a case of win­ning a cos­tume con­test, or impress­ing your friends with your wit­ty take on cur­rent events or pop cul­ture.

Some­times, mas­quer­ade is a thin line between life and death.

The CIA’s for­mer Chief of Dis­guise, Jon­na Mendez, rose up through the ranks, hav­ing signed on as recep­tion­ist short­ly after her fiancé revealed—three days before the wedding—that he was actu­al­ly an under­cov­er agent.

As Chief of Dis­guise, her mis­sion was to pro­tect case offi­cers in dan­ger­ous sit­u­a­tions, as well as for­eign sources who rou­tine­ly put their lives at risk by meet­ing with Amer­i­can oper­a­tives.

Trans­form­ing their appear­ance was an addi­tive proposition—while it’s dif­fi­cult to make some­one short­er, slim­mer, or younger, it’s not dif­fi­cult to ren­der them taller, heav­ier, old­er…

In her expe­ri­ence, women are eas­i­ly dis­guised as men. (She shared with The New York Times’ Matthew Rosen­berg how she her­self passed unde­tect­ed in male mufti, thanks pri­mar­i­ly to a lit cig­ar.)

Men have a tougher time pass­ing as women. Fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race might take excep­tion to this posi­tion, were it not for the asser­tion that blend­ing in is key.

The goal is to be for­get­table, not fab­u­lous.

For Amer­i­cans abroad, this pos­es cer­tain cul­tur­al chal­lenges.

Mendez stress­es that dis­guise is much more than a sim­ple facial trans­for­ma­tion, involv­ing make­up, false hair, and pros­thet­ics.

It’s dress, car­riage, gait, jew­el­ry, scent…

The biggest Amer­i­can give­away is our shoes. An Ital­ian civil­ian can peg ‘em with one swift glance.

Pass­ing requires fur­ther behav­ioral mod­i­fi­ca­tions in the realms of table man­ners, gait, and even hang­ing out. (Euro­peans dis­trib­ute their weight even­ly, where­as Amer­i­cans lean.)

To fly beneath the radar, the dis­guised oper­a­tive must shoot to trans­form every aspect of their appear­ance. Imag­ine a sur­vey where­in the par­tic­i­pant recalls every phys­i­cal aspect of some­one they’ve just encoun­tered. The goal is to nudge that par­tic­i­pant into answer­ing every ques­tion incor­rect­ly.

What col­or are your eyes? Your hair? How much do you weigh? How tall are you? How old?  How would you describe your nose? Your voice? Your cloth­ing?

Change it.

Change it all.

You can do so by low tech meth­ods, using what­ev­er is on hand. Mendez once maneu­vered an agent out of a tight spot on the Sub-Con­ti­nent, by impro­vis­ing a quick change with Dr. Scholl’s pow­der and cos­met­ics col­lect­ed from local CIA wives.

She cred­its her own sec­ond hus­band, CIA “mas­ter of dis­guise” Tony Mendez (the inspi­ra­tion for Ben Affleck’s char­ac­ter in Argo) with many trade secrets she put into reg­u­lar prac­tice: den­tal facades, speech-alter­ing arti­fi­cial palettes, pros­thet­ics…

At the high end is the mask she wore to brief for­mer CIA Chief, Pres­i­dent George HW Bush, on devel­op­ments with­in the dis­guise pro­gram. The Pres­i­dent was none the wis­er.

Mean­while, a masked Amer­i­can agent chucked his mask under a Moscow rock when dan­ger com­pelled him to scup­per his mis­sion mid­way through. That mask now resides in the KGB muse­um where Mendez can­not vis­it it.

Check out the Mendezes’ book Spy­dust for more infor­ma­tion on their adven­tures in the field.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Read the CIA’s Sim­ple Sab­o­tage Field Man­u­al: A Time­less Guide to Sub­vert­ing Any Orga­ni­za­tion with “Pur­pose­ful Stu­pid­i­ty” (1944)

The CIA Assess­es the Pow­er of French Post-Mod­ern Philoso­phers: Read a New­ly Declas­si­fied CIA Report from 1985

Declas­si­fied CIA Doc­u­ment Reveals That Ben Franklin (and His Big Ego) Put U.S. Nation­al Secu­ri­ty at Risk

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Novem­ber 12 for anoth­er month­ly install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

David Lynch Is Creating a Virtual Reality Experience for Twin Peaks

in Video Games | October 25th, 2018

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Black Lodge/Red Room, the extra-dimen­sion­al space that is both an inte­gral part of Twin Peaks and icon­ic in its set design, is a place most of us would not want to vis­it. Detec­tive Dale Coop­er got trapped there for 25 years and it was not pleas­ant. But that hasn’t stopped fans from want­i­ng to cre­ate that space any chance they get, whether as a bar or place to sing karaoke. And when the final episode of the sec­ond sea­son showed the lodge was an end­less series of rooms con­nect­ed by hall­ways, it wasn’t long until the video game ver­sions start­ed appear­ing.

Well, now you can real­ly get lost in the Black Lodge with the slow unveil­ing of Twin Peaks VR, which AdWeek says will be avail­able “some­time in 2019” on Steam for HTC Vive and Ocu­lus Rift.

Fans who fol­low the Wel­come to Twin Peaks blog have been hear­ing about this game/not game since the begin­ning of the year, but it seems that the footage out there was only proof of con­cept graph­ics or some such attempt.

The first video dropped in Jan­u­ary of 2018, and it’s er, some­thing:

No doubt made by fans, this gives us a brief vis­it to the Red Room; a very strange and not par­tic­u­lar­ly flat­ter­ing por­tray­al of the Man from Anoth­er Place; a trip to the RR Din­er fea­tur­ing what I assume is Major Brig­gs; and a return to the fright­en­ing glass box some­where in New York City first seen in The Return. The man play­ing the VR seems appro­pri­ate­ly con­fused. “Is it future or past?” It’s your liv­ing room, man!

This sec­ond clip gives us a bit more of the Red Room and a dubi­ous look­ing Audrey Horne. The Con­ve­nience Store, how­ev­er, is well done.

But this is, we stress, nowhere near a fin­ished ver­sion. It’s not even clear if any of this will make it into the final ver­sion.

A beta ver­sion pre­miered two weeks ago at Lynch’s Fes­ti­val of Dis­rup­tion in Los Ange­les. AdWeek had the only real descrip­tion of the five minute demo, which starts near the ring of saplings in Glas­ton­bury Grove:

Imme­di­ate­ly after the pool turns to blood, view­ers are trans­port­ed to the Red Room, an extra-dimen­sion­al space that’s been a key fea­ture of Twin Peaks in both the orig­i­nal series from the 1990s and the mod­ern revival that aired last year. (It’s also a loca­tion fre­quent­ly vis­it­ed by the show’s main char­ac­ter, FBI Spe­cial Agent Dale Coop­er.) Inside the room, view­ers aren’t able to walk like they can in some VR expe­ri­ences, but they’re able to tele­port with­in the room as it rapid­ly changes in ways sim­i­lar to what hap­pens in the show itself. (One moment, a stat­ue falls over before run­ning around as a shad­ow on the oth­er side of a cur­tain. In anoth­er, users can pick up a cof­fee mug that won’t emp­ty until the sec­ond time it’s picked up.) The demo ends as a white horse appears in the room in the dis­tance, sur­round­ed in dark­ness but unreach­able.

The best news is that the com­pa­ny devel­op­ing the game, Col­lid­er Games, is giv­ing cre­ative con­trol to Lynch, so hope­ful­ly the game won’t be like those ter­ri­ble non-Lynch episodes in Sea­son Two. Says AdWeek:

“[T]he more we show, and the more we progress with this devel­op­ment, hope­ful­ly the more [Lynch] will want to be involved,” Ras­sool said. “And the more we can do with maybe even some new narrative—because I’m not going to write new nar­ra­tive for this. I’m only ever going to let David Lynch [write].”

Here’s to hop­ing Lynch doesn’t just give us a cheap VR ver­sion of what we’ve already seen. Instead, let’s hope he gives us some­thing that blows our minds (and a rea­son to final­ly buy a VR head­set).

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch an Epic, 4‑Hour Video Essay on the Mak­ing & Mythol­o­gy of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

Play the Twin Peaks Video Game: Retro Fun for David Lynch Fans

David Lynch’s Twin Peaks Title Sequence, Recre­at­ed in an Adorable Paper Ani­ma­tion

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

Yale Professor Jason Stanley Identifies 3 Essential Features of Fascism: Invoking a Mythic Past, Sowing Division & Attacking Truth

in Politics | October 25th, 2018

New books on fas­cism are pop­ping up every­where, from inde­pen­dent press­es, for­mer world lead­ers like Madeleine Albright, and aca­d­e­mics like Jason Stan­ley, Jacob Urowsky Pro­fes­sor of Phi­los­o­phy at Yale Uni­ver­si­ty. Stanley’s lat­est book, How Fas­cism Works: The Pol­i­tics of Us and Them, has been described as a “vital read for a nation under Trump.” And yet, as The Guardian’s Tom McCarthy writes, one of the ironies Stan­ley points out is that—despite the wide­spread cur­ren­cy of the term these days—fascism suc­ceeds by mak­ing “talk of fas­cism… seem out­landish.”

Is it?

The word has cer­tain­ly been dilut­ed by years of mis­use. Umber­to Eco wrote in his 1995 essay “Ur-Fas­cism” that “fas­cist” as an epi­thet was casu­al­ly thrown around “by Amer­i­can rad­i­cals… to refer to a cop who did not approve of their smok­ing habits.” When every author­i­ty fig­ure who seems to abuse pow­er gets labeled a fas­cist, the word los­es its explana­to­ry pow­er and its his­to­ry dis­ap­pears. But Eco, who grew up under Mus­soli­ni and under­stood fas­cist Europe, insist­ed that fas­cism has clear­ly rec­og­niz­able, and portable, if not par­tic­u­lar­ly coher­ent, fea­tures.

“The fas­cist game can be played in many forms,” Eco wrote, depend­ing on the nation­al mytholo­gies and cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the coun­try in which it takes root. Rather than a sin­gle polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, Eco argued, fas­cism is “a col­lage… a bee­hive of con­tra­dic­tions.” He enu­mer­at­ed four­teen fea­tures that delin­eate it from oth­er forms of pol­i­tics. Like Eco, Stan­ley also iden­ti­fies some core traits of fas­cism, such as “pub­li­ciz­ing false charges of cor­rup­tion,” as he writes in his book, “while engag­ing in cor­rupt prac­tice.”

In the short New York Times opin­ion video above, Stan­ley sum­ma­rizes his “for­mu­la for fascism”—a “sur­pris­ing­ly sim­ple” pat­tern now repeat­ing in Europe, South Amer­i­ca, India, Myan­mar, Turkey, the Philip­pines, and “right here in the Unit­ed States.” No mat­ter where they appear, “fas­cist politi­cians are cut from the same cloth,” he says. The ele­ments of his for­mu­la are:

1. Con­jur­ing a “myth­ic past” that has sup­pos­ed­ly been destroyed (“by lib­er­als, fem­i­nists, and immi­grants”). Mus­soli­ni had Rome, Turkey’s Erdoğan has the Ottoman Empire, and Hungary’s Vik­tor Orban rewrote the country’s con­sti­tu­tion with the aim of “mak­ing Hun­gary great again.” These myths rely on an “over­whelm­ing sense of nos­tal­gia for a past that is racial­ly pure, tra­di­tion­al, and patri­ar­chal.” Fas­cist lead­ers “posi­tion them­selves as father fig­ures and strong­men” who alone can restore lost great­ness. And yes, the fas­cist leader is “always a ‘he.’”

2. Fas­cist lead­ers sow divi­sion; they suc­ceed by “turn­ing groups against each oth­er,” inflam­ing his­tor­i­cal antag­o­nisms and ancient hatreds for their own advan­tage. Social divi­sions in themselves—between class­es, reli­gions, eth­nic groups and so on—are what we might call pre-exist­ing con­di­tions. Fas­cists may not invent the hate, but they cyn­i­cal­ly instru­men­tal­ize it: demo­niz­ing out­groups, nor­mal­iz­ing and nat­u­ral­iz­ing big­otry, stok­ing vio­lence to jus­ti­fy repres­sive “law and order” poli­cies, the cur­tail­ing of civ­il rights and due process, and the mass impris­on­ment and killing of man­u­fac­tured ene­mies.

3. Fas­cists “attack the truth” with pro­pa­gan­da, in par­tic­u­lar “a kind of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism” that “cre­ates a petri dish for con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries.” (Stanley’s fourth book, pub­lished by Prince­ton Uni­ver­si­ty Press, is titled How Pro­pa­gan­da Works.) We would have to be extra­or­di­nar­i­ly naïve to think that only fas­cist politi­cians lie, but we should focus here on the ques­tion of degree. For fas­cists, truth doesn’t mat­ter at all. (As Rudy Giu­liani says, “truth isn’t truth.”) Han­nah Arendt wrote that fas­cism relies on “a con­sis­tent and total sub­sti­tu­tion of lies for fac­tu­al truth.” She described the phe­nom­e­non as destroy­ing “the sense by which we take our bear­ings in the real world.… [T]he cat­e­go­ry of truth vers­es false­hood [being] among the men­tal means to this end.” In such an atmos­phere, any­thing is pos­si­ble, no mat­ter how pre­vi­ous­ly unthink­able.

Using this rubric, Stan­ley links the tac­tics and state­ments of fas­cist lead­ers around the world with those of the cur­rent U.S. pres­i­dent. It’s a per­sua­sive case that would prob­a­bly sway ear­li­er the­o­rists of fas­cism like Eco and Arendt. Whether he can con­vince Amer­i­cans who find talk of fas­cism “outlandish”—or who loose­ly use the word to describe any politi­cian or group they don’t like—is anoth­er ques­tion entire­ly.

FYI: You can down­load Stan­ley’s new book How Fas­cism Works, as a free audio­book if you want to try out Audible.com’s no-risk, 30-day free tri­al pro­gram. Find details here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Umber­to Eco Makes a List of the 14 Com­mon Fea­tures of Fas­cism

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

George Orwell Tries to Iden­ti­fy Who Is Real­ly a “Fas­cist” and Define the Mean­ing of This “Much-Abused Word” (1944)

20 Lessons from the 20th Cen­tu­ry About How to Defend Democ­ra­cy from Author­i­tar­i­an­ism, Accord­ing to Yale His­to­ri­an Tim­o­thy Sny­der

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

The Art Institute of Chicago Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Resolution

in Art, Education, How to Learn for Free, Museums, Technology | October 25th, 2018

After the fire that total­ly destroyed Brazil’s Museu Nacional in Rio, many peo­ple lament­ed that the muse­um had not dig­i­tal­ly backed up its col­lec­tion and point­ed to the event as a trag­ic exam­ple of why such dig­i­ti­za­tion is so nec­es­sary. Just a cou­ple decades ago, stor­ing and dis­play­ing this much infor­ma­tion was impos­si­ble, so it may seem like a strange demand to make. And in any case, two-dimen­sion­al images stored on servers—or even 3D print­ed copies—cannot replace or sub­sti­tute for orig­i­nal, price­less arti­facts or works of art.

But muse­ums around the world that have dig­i­tized most–or all–of their col­lec­tions don’t claim to have repli­cat­ed or replaced the expe­ri­ence of an in-per­son vis­it, or to have ren­dered phys­i­cal media obso­lete.

Dig­i­tal col­lec­tions pro­vide access to mil­lions of peo­ple who can­not, or will not, ever trav­el to the major cities in which fine art resides, and they give mil­lions of schol­ars, teach­ers, and stu­dents resources once avail­able only to a select few.

We can’t all take the day off like Fer­ris Bueller and stand in front of Georges Seurat’s Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te. But thanks to the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, we can all view and down­load the 1884 pointil­list paint­ing in high res­o­lu­tion, zoom in close­ly like the trou­bled Cameron to spe­cif­ic details, share the dig­i­tal image under a Cre­ative Com­mons Zero license, and sim­i­lar­ly inter­act with an oil sketch for the final paint­ing and sev­er­al con­té cray­on stud­ies.

And if that weren’t enough, the muse­um also includes a bib­li­og­ra­phy, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ry, notes on prove­nance, audio and video his­to­ries and descrip­tions, and edu­ca­tion­al resources like teacher man­u­als, les­son plans, and exams. This goes for many of the 44,312—with more to come—digital images online, includ­ing such famous works of art as Vin­cent van Gogh’s 1889 The Bed­room, Grant Wood’s 1930 Amer­i­can Goth­ic, Pablo Picasso’s 1903–4 blue peri­od paint­ing The Old Gui­tarist, Edward Hopper’s 1942 Nighthawks, Mary Cassatt’s 1893 The Child’s Bath, and so many more that it bog­gles the mind.

Browse Impres­sion­ism, Pop Art, works from the African Dias­po­ra, Cityscapes, Fash­ion, Mytho­log­i­cal Works, and oth­er gen­res and cat­e­gories. Search artists, dates, styles, media, depart­ments, places, and more.

A per­son­al vis­it to the Art Insti­tute is an awe-inspir­ing, and some­what over­whelm­ing expe­ri­ence, if you can get the day to go. You can vis­it the web­site, with full unre­strict­ed access, and gath­er infor­ma­tion, study, mar­vel, and casu­al­ly browse, at any time of day—every day if you like. No, it’s not the same, but as a learn­ing expe­ri­ence, in some ways, it’s even bet­ter. And if, by some awful chance, any­thing should hap­pen to this art, we won’t have to rely on user-sub­mit­ted pho­tos to recon­struct the cul­tur­al mem­o­ry.

The launch of this col­lec­tion comes as part of the museum’s web­site redesign, and it is an exten­sive, and expen­sive, endeav­or. The Art Insti­tute, which charges for entry, can afford to make its col­lec­tions free online. Some oth­er muse­ums charge image fees to sup­port their online work. Ide­al­ly, as art his­to­ri­an Ben­dor Grosvenor writes at Art His­to­ry News, muse­ums should offer free and open access to both phys­i­cal and online col­lec­tions, and some insti­tu­tions, like Sweden’s National­mu­se­um, have shown that this is pos­si­ble.

And, as Grosvenor shows, the suc­cess of open access online col­lec­tions has yield­ed anoth­er ben­e­fit, for both view­ers and muse­ums alike. The more peo­ple are exposed to art online, the more like­ly they are to vis­it muse­ums in per­son. Chica­go awaits you. Until then, vir­tu­al­ly immerse your­self in the Art Institute’s many thou­sands of trea­sures here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

25 Mil­lion Images From 14 Art Insti­tu­tions to Be Dig­i­tized & Put Online In One Huge Schol­ar­ly Archive

1.8 Mil­lion Free Works of Art from World-Class Muse­ums: A Meta List of Great Art Avail­able Online

Wikipedia Leads Effort to Cre­ate a Dig­i­tal Archive of 20 Mil­lion Arti­facts Lost in the Brazil­ian Muse­um Fire

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

The Golden Age of Ancient Greece Gets Faithfully Recreated in the New Video Game Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey

in History, Video Games | October 25th, 2018

If you haven’t played video games in a long time, you might feel a cer­tain trep­i­da­tion at the idea of pick­ing them up again. So rapid­ly have they evolved in the 21st cen­tu­ry that they now resem­ble less the elec­tron­ic enter­tain­ments we once knew than full-fledged alter­nate real­i­ties. The sud­den rise of the word immer­sive to describe the very kind of expe­ri­ences they con­sti­tute says it all. If you enter one of the elab­o­rate worlds built by mod­ern video game devel­op­ers, how do you extract your­self again — espe­cial­ly if the world is one as fas­ci­nat­ing as ancient Greece, recre­at­ed elab­o­rate­ly and to great acclaim in this year’s Assas­s­in’s Creed: Odyssey?

Even non-gamers will have heard of the Assas­s­in’s Creed series, which began in 2007 and has had a major release (in addi­tion to as many minor ones, as well as ven­tures into oth­er media) each and every year since. It has pre­vi­ous­ly tak­en as its set­tings such chap­ters of human his­to­ry as Vic­to­ri­an Eng­land, the Ital­ian Renais­sance, and Ptole­ma­ic Egypt, but its lat­est install­ment goes far­ther back in time than any oth­er. Play­ers will find them­selves dropped “into 431 BCE in Ancient Greece, at the start of the Pelo­pon­nesian War pre­dom­i­nant­ly fought between Athens and Spar­ta,” writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Zachary Small. “For a video game that includes bloody mer­ce­nar­ies, extrater­res­tri­al beings, and time trav­el, Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey is shock­ing­ly faith­ful to our con­tem­po­rary his­tor­i­cal under­stand­ing of what Ancient Greece looked like dur­ing its gold­en age.”

The very idea might star­tle those of us who remem­ber the set­tings of video games as per­func­to­ry at best, mere back­grounds to run past while we blast­ed ene­mies, jumped from plat­form to plat­form, and col­lect­ed pow­er-ups. Assas­s­in’s Creed takes its his­tor­i­cal world-build­ing so seri­ous­ly that the pre­vi­ous game in the series, Assas­s­in’s Creed: Ori­gins, even came with an “edu­ca­tion­al mode” that allowed play­ers to freely explore ancient Egypt — a far cry indeed from the dull, pur­pose-built edu­ca­tion­al games of yore. But Assas­s­in’s Creed: Odyssey takes it to anoth­er lev­el, incor­po­rat­ing seem­ing­ly every­thing known about ancient Greece at the time of its devel­op­ment. “The Ubisoft devel­op­ment team behind the game even hired a his­tor­i­cal advi­sor to help them recre­ate a metic­u­lous ver­sion of the Ancient World,” writes Small, “one that includes hun­dreds of poly­chro­mat­ic stat­ues, tem­ples, and tombs.”

Yes, that means the game’s vision of ancient Greece includes plen­ty of sculp­ture made, as we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, with not just with raw mar­ble but bright­ly col­ored paint as well. The sheer amount of his­to­ry and lore incor­po­rat­ed into the Assas­s­in’s Creed: Odyssey expe­ri­ence has even inspired a dis­cus­sion among experts on Twit­ter using the hash­tag #ACa­d­e­mi­cOdyssey.

Though nobody claims that the game recre­ates ancient Greece per­fect­ly in every detail — even apart from the gaps in human knowl­edge of the peri­od, the devel­op­ers seem to have had to cut a cor­ner here and there to meet the series’ famous­ly demand­ing release sched­ule — it suc­ceeds in ways that no one Hel­leni­cal­ly inclined, pro­fes­sion­al­ly or oth­er­wise, had dared hope before. “I have played about 5 min­utes of the game and I’m ready to cry from joy,” tweet­ed clas­si­cist Chris­tine Plas­tow, a sen­ti­ment one can hard­ly imag­ine any aca­d­e­m­ic express­ing about, say, Gold­en Axe.

via Ars Tech­ni­ca/Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Ancient Greek Stat­ues Real­ly Looked: Research Reveals their Bold, Bright Col­ors and Pat­terns

Watch Art on Ancient Greek Vas­es Come to Life with 21st Cen­tu­ry Ani­ma­tion

The Met Dig­i­tal­ly Restores the Col­ors of an Ancient Egypt­ian Tem­ple, Using Pro­jec­tion Map­ping Tech­nol­o­gy

Ancient Greek Pun­ish­ments: The Retro Video Game

Con­cepts of the Hero in Greek Civ­i­liza­tion (A Free Har­vard Course)

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.

Leonardo da Vinci Saw the World Differently… Thanks to an Eye Disorder, Says a New Scientific Study

in Art | October 24th, 2018

Leonar­do da Vin­ci was a man of many abil­i­ties, so many that he has defined the very image of the man of many abil­i­ties for more than 500 years now. His­to­ry remem­bers him for his impres­sive intel­lec­tu­al feats of sci­ence and engi­neer­ing (as well as the ambi­tion of his to-do lists), but even more so for his works of visu­al art. Most of us get our intro­duc­tion to Leonar­do through images like the Mona Lisa, The Last Sup­per, and Vit­ru­vian Man, not least because they’ve long since become too cul­tur­al­ly promi­nent to avoid. The ques­tion of how on earth he did it nat­u­ral­ly springs from con­tem­pla­tion of Leonar­do’s whole body of work, but also from con­tem­pla­tion of many of the indi­vid­ual pieces that con­sti­tute it. A part of the answer, recent research sug­gests, may well have to do with a dis­abil­i­ty.

“There is now evi­dence that da Vin­ci’s renowned capac­i­ty to repro­duce the three-dimen­sion­al world in paint­ings may have been aid­ed by an eye dis­or­der that allowed him to see in both 2‑D and 3‑D, accord­ing to a study pub­lished Thurs­day in JAMA Opthal­mol­o­gy, a peer-reviewed jour­nal,” writes The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Allyson Chiu.

“Da Vin­ci is believed to have had a con­di­tion called inter­mit­tent exotropia, a form of stra­bis­mus, com­mon­ly referred to as being ‘walleyed’,” a form of an eye mis­align­ment. If he did, it would have ham­pered his depth per­cep­tion enough for him to see a flat­ter world than the one most every­one else does, and thus a world more suit­ed to faith­ful repli­ca­tion on the page or the can­vas.

But the fact Leonar­do that could some­times con­trol his eyes enough to get them into prop­er align­ment, says the study’s author Christo­pher Tyler, would make him “very aware of the 3‑D and 2‑D depth cues and the dif­fer­ence between them.” He came to sus­pect that Leonar­do suf­fered from exotropia — if “suf­fered” is quite the right word here — after notic­ing the align­ment of the eyes in both images con­sid­ered por­traits of the man him­self as well as the por­traits Leonar­do made of oth­ers (on the the­o­ry that the work of an artist will, to an extent, reflect his own char­ac­ter­is­tics). The oph­thal­mo­log­i­cal­ly inclined can judge for them­selves by read­ing Tyler’s paper online. And if oth­er, sim­i­lar stud­ies done in the past also hold up, Leonar­do isn’t alone in art his­to­ry: such fig­ures as Rem­brandt, Picas­so, and Degas have also left behind evi­dence of their pos­si­bly stra­bis­mic vision. We some­times say that artists see the world dif­fer­ent­ly; the great­est artists may take that say­ing to a new lev­el of lit­er­al­ness.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Build Leonar­do da Vinci’s Inge­nious Self-Sup­port­ing Bridge: Renais­sance Inno­va­tions You Can Still Enjoy Today

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

The Anatom­i­cal Draw­ings of Renais­sance Man, Leonar­do da Vin­ci

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

What Leonar­do da Vin­ci Real­ly Looked Like

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.

The Lenny Bruce Archive: Brandeis Digitally Preserves the Legacy of the Pathbreaking Comedian

in Archives, Comedy | October 24th, 2018

Edgy, smart, aggres­sive, unapolo­get­i­cal­ly Jew­ish, Lenny Bruce mixed Yid­dishisms, hip­ster slang, col­or­ful terms for var­i­ous sex acts, and social, polit­i­cal, and reli­gious satire in a high-wire impro­visato­ry act he thought of as “ver­bal jazz.” Mar­ket­ed as a “sick come­di­an,” Bruce got his start play­ing strip clubs, and end­ed up—bitter, defeat­ed, black­list­ed, and addicted—ranting and read­ing court tran­scripts from his var­i­ous obscen­i­ty tri­als. It was a sad end to a bril­liant and too-short career.

When Bruce died of an over­dose at 40, “his wid­ow and their daugh­ter,” Kit­ty, “start­ed archiv­ing all that he had left behind,” notes NPR. Now that archive resides at Bran­deis Uni­ver­si­ty, acquired in 2014 by librar­i­an for archives and spe­cial col­lec­tions Sarah Schoe­mak­er. An episode of The Kitchen Sis­ters Present pod­cast called “The Keep­ers” tells the sto­ry of that col­lec­tion, kept for decades in Kitty’s attic, with back­up copies in Michi­gan and L.A. in case of fire. “10 lin­ear feet” of mate­r­i­al, as Kit­ty Bruce remem­bers it.

The sto­ry of that archive involves not only Bruce’s daugh­ter and Shoe­mak­er but also one of Bruce’s biggest cham­pi­ons, Hugh Hefn­er, his daugh­ter Christie, and his lawyer Mar­tin Gar­bus. It also fea­tures Steve Krief, who wrote the first Ph.D. the­sis on Bruce. When Krief vis­it­ed Kit­ty in Penn­syl­va­nia, she told him “you know what I don’t know what I’m going to do with my father’s things. They’re going to get destroyed.” Krief advised her to call Hefn­er, who even­tu­al­ly made a dona­tion to Bran­deis to fund the archive.

Some of the mate­r­i­al, the col­lec­tion notes, “has been pre­vi­ous­ly released in edit­ed form. Most of these record­ings are of Lenny Bruce’s stand-up com­e­dy per­for­mances…. Some of the record­ings are of a per­son­al nature, such as the ‘phone let­ters’ and pri­vate con­ver­sa­tions between Bruce and his friends and fam­i­ly.” At the collection’s site, you can hear frus­trat­ing­ly short, 10-sec­ond clips of sev­er­al rou­tines, but to hear the tapes in full, you need to con­tact the uni­ver­si­ty and set up an in-per­son appoint­ment. But the archive is ful­ly open to the pub­lic, and Bruce’s con­sid­er­able lega­cy is secure. Note: you can hear some longer record­ings on this page: Click here and then scroll down.

It’s a lega­cy that real­ly should be bet­ter known. Bruce con­sid­ered him­self “a sol­dier fight­ing for the Con­sti­tu­tion” and against gov­ern­ment cen­sor­ship. With­out him, it’s hard to imag­ine the careers of George Car­lin or Richard Pry­or ever hap­pen­ing, and he even left his imprint on Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture, as Gar­bus tells it. At his obscen­i­ty tri­al in New York, for which he was giv­en two years pro­ba­tion, a sen­tence only over­turned after his death, Philip Roth sat in the court­room. Roth lat­er said that with­out Bruce, he couldn’t have writ­ten Portnoy’s Com­plaint.

“Lenny broke down so many bar­ri­ers,” says Gar­bus, and though his humor may seem tame today—though his com­e­dy still holds up—in the ear­ly 1960s few peo­ple dared to say the things he did, the way he did. Bruce railed against the hyp­o­crit­i­cal puri­tanism of Amer­i­can cul­ture and paid a heavy price for telling truths we might take for grant­ed now—and many we still don’t want to hear. (See Dustin Hoff­man doing one of Bruce’s more seri­ous bits above in a clip from the 1974 Bob Fos­se biopic Lenny.) Browse the con­tents of the Lenny Bruce Audio Files here and learn more about Bruce’s life and influ­ence at his offi­cial web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Thank You, Mask Man: Lenny Bruce’s Lone Ranger Com­e­dy Rou­tine Becomes a NSFW Ani­mat­ed Film (1968)

George Car­lin Per­forms His “Sev­en Dirty Words” Rou­tine: His­toric and Com­plete­ly NSFW

Bill Hicks’ 12 Prin­ci­ples of Com­e­dy

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

Laurie Anderson Creates a Virtual Reality Installation That Takes Viewers on an Unconventional Tour of the Moon

in Art, Science, Technology | October 24th, 2018

Next year, NASA will cel­e­brate the 50th anniver­sary of the moon land­ing, and as part of the cel­e­bra­tion will restore the orig­i­nal beige and green con­trol pan­els from the late 60’s Mis­sion Con­trol. “We want to take you back to July 20, 1969,” says direc­tor of the non-prof­it Space Cen­ter Hous­ton, the offi­cial vis­i­tors cen­ter for the John­son Space Cen­ter. “You’re going to expe­ri­ence the final few moments before Neil Arm­strong and Buzz Aldrin land­ed on the moon for the first time.”

But the agency isn’t only look­ing back to half a cen­tu­ry ago. It’s also look­ing for­ward to launch­ing more moon expe­di­tions—in part­ner­ship with com­mer­cial and inter­na­tion­al agencies—next year. And while those of us who aren’t astro­nauts or bil­lion­aires are unlike­ly to ever see the moon up close, Lau­rie Ander­son, NASA’s first artist-in-res­i­dence, can trans­port view­ers there for the cost of a tick­et to Den­mark.

Start­ing last month and run­ning until Jan­u­ary 2019, the country’s Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art fea­tures Anderson’s new moon-themed vir­tu­al real­i­ty project as part of its exhi­bi­tion The Moon: From Inner Worlds to Out­er Space.

Cre­at­ed with mul­ti­me­dia artist Hsin-Chien Huang—with whom Ander­son col­lab­o­rat­ed on anoth­er beau­ti­ful VR expe­ri­ence last year—this project trans­ports vis­i­tors to a vir­tu­al moon, where they can view con­stel­la­tions invent­ed by Ander­son, sym­bols of things that have, or that seem poised to, dis­ap­pear: a dinosaur, a polar bear, democ­ra­cy. “All of those things that you think are so sta­ble are so frag­ile, and can be lost,” she says in the video intro­duc­tion to her project above.

So, okay, it’s not the moon Arm­strong and Aldrin plant­ed their country’s flag on in 1969. It’s also pop­u­lat­ed by dinosaurs, birds, and oth­er crea­tures cre­at­ed from a lat­tice­work of DNA mol­e­cules.

Not only did Ander­son and Huang depict a thrilling fan­ta­sy VR moon, but they also cre­at­ed a “’hideous’ ver­sion,” reports CNN, “in which peo­ple had dumped all the radioac­tive mate­r­i­al from Earth. “We did dif­fer­ent phas­es of the moon,” says Ander­son, “dif­fer­ent aspects, looked not just at the roman­ti­cism of the moon but dystopias.” This isn’t her first for­ay into moon-themed art. As artist-in-res­i­dence at NASA since 2003, she has had some time to reflect on the agency’s mis­sion.

After her first year with NASA, she debuted a 90-minute per­for­mance piece called “The End of the Moon,” the sec­ond in a tril­o­gy she described as an “epic poem” about con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can cul­ture. She is not the obvi­ous choice to work for a gov­ern­ment agency. Her work has been fierce­ly crit­i­cal of the country’s wars and its repres­sion on the domes­tic front. “Frankly, I find liv­ing in Amer­i­can cul­ture at the moment real­ly prob­lem­at­ic,” she said back in 2004. “But when I think of NASA, it’s the one thing that feels future-ori­ent­ed in a way that’s inspir­ing.”

Look­ing both back­ward and for­ward, next year’s anniver­sary of the moon land­ing will give us all rea­sons to think about humanity’s past and future in out­er space. Will it include “unbe­liev­able aspi­ra­tions,” as Ander­son mused, like “the green­ing of Mars,” or the dystopi­an dump­ing of radioac­tive waste on the Moon? Giv­en the trash and trea­sure of our cur­rent rela­tion­ship with the cosmos—not to men­tion our own planet—probably both. See more 2‑D excerpts from Ander­son and Huang’s piece in the scene test above, and, if you can score a tick­et, enter the full VR expe­ri­ence at the Louisiana Muse­um of Mod­ern Art.

via @dark_shark

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lau­rie Ander­son Intro­duces Her Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Instal­la­tion That Lets You Fly Mag­i­cal­ly Through Sto­ries

21 Artists Give “Advice to the Young:” Vital Lessons from Lau­rie Ander­son, David Byrne, Umber­to Eco, Pat­ti Smith & More

Lau­rie Anderson’s Top 10 Books to Take to a Desert Island

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

How an 18th-Century Monk Invented the First Electronic Instrument

in History, Music | October 23rd, 2018

We tend to think of elec­tron­ic music as a mod­ern phe­nom­e­non, dat­ing back only to the 20th cen­tu­ry, but the inven­tion of the first instru­ment made to use elec­tric­i­ty occurred a cou­ple cen­turies deep­er than that. The man pic­tured above, Czech the­olo­gian and sci­en­tist Václav Prokop Diviš, “is now regard­ed as the ear­li­est vision­ary of elec­tron­ic music,” writes Moth­er­board­’s Becky Fer­reira, owing to the fact that “his dual inter­ests in music and elec­tric­i­ty had merged into a sin­gle obses­sion with cre­at­ing an elec­tri­cal­ly enhanced musi­cal instru­ment.” Around the year 1748, that obses­sion pro­duced the “Denis d’or,” or “Gold­en Diony­sus,” a “key­board-based instru­ment out­fit­ted with 790 iron strings that were posi­tioned to be struck like a clavi­chord rather than plucked like a gui­tar.” Through the elec­tro­mag­net­ic exci­ta­tion of the piano strings, the monk could “imi­tate the sounds of a whole vari­ety of oth­er instru­ments.”

“Diviš was an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, hav­ing also invent­ed the light­ning rod at the same time as, but inde­pen­dent­ly of, Ben­jamin Franklin,” says the Cam­bridge Intro­duc­tion to Elec­tron­ic Music. He designed the Denis d’or with “an inge­nious and com­plex sys­tem of stops” that report­ed­ly allowed it to “imi­tate an aston­ish­ing array of instru­ments, includ­ing, it was claimed, aero­phones.” The same applied to “chor­do­phones such as harp­si­chords, harps and lutes, and even wind instru­ments.”

The term aero­phone (which denotes any musi­cal instru­ment that makes a body of air vibrate) might not sound famil­iar to many of us, but the func­tion­al­i­ty of Diviš’ inven­tion will. Don’t we all remem­ber the thrill of sit­ting down to our first syn­the­siz­er and dis­cov­er­ing how many dif­fer­ent instru­men­tal sounds it could make, vague though the son­ic approx­i­ma­tion might have been?

Whether the Denis d’or counts as the found­ing instru­ment of all elec­tron­ic music or a mere ear­ly curios­i­ty, you can learn more about it at 120 Years of Elec­tron­ic Music and Elec­tro­spec­tive Music. The pre-his­to­ry of elec­tron­ic music (since its his­to­ry prop­er begins around 1800) has remem­bered it as a prac­ti­cal-joke device as much as an instru­ment. “Diviš devised a nov­el method of tem­porar­i­ly charg­ing the strings with elec­tric­i­ty in order to ‘enhance’ the sound,” says the Cam­bridge Intro­duc­tion. “What effect this had is unclear (unfor­tu­nate­ly only one instru­ment was made and this did not sur­vive), but it appar­ent­ly allowed Diviš to deliv­er an elec­tric shock to the per­former when­ev­er he desired.” Nobody ever said a poly­math could­n’t also be a prankster.

via Moth­er­board

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music in 476 Tracks (1937–2001)

Meet the “Tel­har­mo­ni­um,” the First Syn­the­siz­er (and Pre­de­ces­sor to Muzak), Invent­ed in 1897

The His­to­ry of Elec­tron­ic Music Visu­al­ized on a Cir­cuit Dia­gram of a 1950s Theremin: 200 Inven­tors, Com­posers & Musi­cians

Moog This!: Hear a Playlist Fea­tur­ing 36 Hours of Music Made with the Leg­endary Ana­log Syn­the­siz­er

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.

Take a Free Animation Course from a Renowned French Animation School

in Animation | October 23rd, 2018

An FYI for any aspir­ing ani­ma­tors who hap­pen to speak some French…

A free course that cov­ers the basics of com­put­er ani­ma­tion has just got­ten under­way. Called Ani­ma Podi, the free course is offered by the Gob­elins, L’É­cole de L’Im­age, the famed Parisian school of visu­al arts.

Accord­ing to Car­toon Brew, the “MOOC [Mas­sive Open Online Course] is aimed at first-time or self-taught ani­ma­tors. The first week of the course will be ded­i­cat­ed to intro­duc­to­ry prepa­ra­tion, while each sub­se­quent week will focus on a new ani­ma­tion exer­cise.” “Ani­ma Podi will also ded­i­cate a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time to ani­ma­tion his­to­ry … and delve into styles and tra­di­tions from around the world ‘so that peo­ple under­stand what is ani­ma­tion beyond Dis­ney.’ ” Ani­ma­tion exer­cis­es will be com­plet­ed with a soft­ware called Rum­ba.

The free course (reg­is­ter here) is cur­rent­ly offered in French, but an Eng­lish ver­sion will appear down the road.

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 Car­toon Brew

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Take a Free Online Course on Mak­ing Ani­ma­tions from Pixar & Khan Acad­e­my

Pixar’s 22 Rules of Sto­ry­telling … Makes for an Addic­tive Par­lor Game

Down­load 15,000+ Free Gold­en Age Comics from the Dig­i­tal Com­ic Muse­um

1300 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties