History of Modern Philosophy: A Free Online Course

in | April 5th, 2017

This 23-lec­ture course, His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy, was taught by Pro­fes­sor John DePoe at Mary­wood Uni­ver­si­ty in the Spring of 2014. The course cov­ers Descartes, Leib­niz, Locke, Berke­ley, Hume, and Kant.  And it “con­cen­trates on the devel­op­ment of mod­ern thought, exam­in­ing the con­cepts of mind, body, and cau­sa­tion among oth­ers.”

His­to­ry of Mod­ern Phi­los­o­phy will be added to our list of Free Online Phi­los­o­phy cours­es, a sub­set of our meta col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

Take a 360 Degree Tour of Miniature Models of Famous Landmarks: From the Taj Mahal to The Great Wall of China

in Random | April 5th, 2017

Pret­ty cool item. A new exhi­bi­tion in New York, called “Gul­liv­er’s Gate,” shrinks the world’s most famous sites–everything from the Taj Mahal to The Great Wall of China–into minia­ture ver­sions of them­selves, rough­ly 87 times small­er than the orig­i­nal. In the video above, you can take a 360 degree tour of parts of the exhi­bi­tion. Click on the clip, swirl around, and check out the tiny cre­ations. It’s par­tic­u­lar­ly neat if you try it on your phone.

Below, find an intro­duc­tion to the project and don’t miss their behind-the-scenes footage.

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!

Graphic Designer Redesigns a Movie Poster Every Day, for One Year: Scarface, Mulholland Dr., The Graduate, Vertigo, The Life Aquatic and 360 More

in Art, Film | April 5th, 2017

No scene in a movie counts for as much as its open­ing, but even before its first frame pass­es through the pro­jec­tor, its poster has already made the real first impres­sion. This remains basi­cal­ly as true in the era of dig­i­tal cin­e­ma as it was when film actu­al­ly passed through pro­jec­tors. But while film­mak­ers only occa­sion­al­ly go back and retool their past works — not that the expe­ri­ence of, say, George Lucas and the orig­i­nal Star Wars tril­o­gy vouch­es for the prac­tice — film posters can eas­i­ly under­go any num­ber of revi­sions through the decades. What cinephile graph­ic design­er would­n’t want to take a shot at cre­at­ing a new face for a favorite movie?

Last year, the Syd­ney-based design­er Peter Majarich took shots at 365 of them, cre­at­ing one new poster for an exist­ing movie each and every day. “The feat is a huge under­tak­ing,” writes the Cre­ators Pro­jec­t’s Diana Shi, “but Majarich’s final prod­ucts nev­er give the impres­sion of last-minute cre­ations; instead, they show off an acute atten­tion to detail and a bold, dig­i­tal-influ­enced style. The inven­tive­ness of each poster reveals how much of a cinephile Majarich real­ly is.” His selec­tions include “a pool of zeit­geist direc­tors, Oscar win­ners, and art-house films with cult fol­low­ings.

A ren­der­ing of De Palma’s Scar­face is a sub­tle assem­bly of white pow­der to stark­ly draw out Al Pacino’s pro­file. While what looks like a body of com­plex cod­ing lan­guage forms the blank-star­ing face of Ali­cia Vikander’s lead in Ex Machi­na.” You can browse all these at A Movie Poster a Day, see them dis­played in sequence in the video above, and buy them on his design com­pa­ny’s site.

Their simul­ta­ne­ous aes­thet­ic and cin­e­mat­ic ref­er­ences will please design- and film-lovers alike (groups hard­ly sep­a­rate on the Venn dia­gram any­way), and while many con­sti­tute good visu­al gags, the best pro­vide new per­spec­tives on even much-watched favorite movies.

For Wes Ander­son­’s The Life Aquat­ic with Steve Zis­sou, Majarich depicts the emo­tion­al sub­mer­sion of its sea­far­ing pro­tag­o­nist; for Alfred Hitch­cock­’s Ver­ti­go he works only with the title itself imbu­ing the type with the com­bi­na­tion of shock and dread on dis­play in the film; for David Lynch’s Mul­hol­land Dri­ve he uses a pink-skied land­scape of the tit­u­lar Los Ange­les road lead­ing off, as Lynch’s work often does, to who knows where. After you’ve seen the first 286, you’ll come upon a selec­tion that will hard­ly sur­prise you: Gary Hus­twit’s Hel­veti­ca.

via Cre­ators Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Design­er Reimag­ines Icon­ic Movie Posters With Min­i­mal­ist Designs: Reser­voir Dogs, The Matrix & More

40,000 Film Posters in a Won­der­ful­ly Eclec­tic Archive: Ital­ian Tarkovsky Posters, Japan­ese Orson Welles, Czech Woody Allen & Much More

Down­load Vin­tage Film Posters in High-Res: From The Philadel­phia Sto­ry to Attack of the Crab Mon­sters

A Look Inside Mar­tin Scorsese’s Vin­tage Movie Poster Col­lec­tion

The Strange and Won­der­ful Movie Posters from Ghana: The Matrix, Alien & More

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.

Harvard Students Launch a Free Course on How to Resist: Now You Can Watch the Lectures

in Current Affairs, Politics | April 5th, 2017

NOTE: As of July 22, we updat­ed this post to include the videos from the class ses­sions. Watch the playlist of lec­tures above.

I have my doubts about whether we should call reg­u­lar acts of civic duty “resis­tance,” rather than Con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-pro­tect­ed demo­c­ra­t­ic free­doms.  Yes­ter­day we remem­bered Mar­tin Luther King, Jr. on the 49th anniver­sary of his assas­si­na­tion (and the 50th anniver­sary of his speech oppos­ing the Viet­nam War). As King and count­less oth­er civ­il rights and anti-war cam­paign­ers have demonstrated—some at the cost of their lives—civil dis­obe­di­ence is very often required and moral­ly jus­ti­fied when legal appeals for jus­tice fail. But for bet­ter or worse, “The Resis­tance” has become a catch-all media term for a loose and very often frac­tious col­lec­tion of main­stream Democ­rats, pro­gres­sives, and rad­i­cals of all stripes, whose tac­tics range from polite phone lob­by­ing to brawl­ing with white suprema­cists in the streets.

Mil­lions of peo­ple who for­mer­ly had lit­tle to no involve­ment in pol­i­tics have thrown them­selves into activism, and vet­er­an orga­niz­ers have been over­whelmed with new recruits. Just as quick­ly, those orga­niz­ers have met the chal­lenge by dis­sem­i­nat­ing guides for lob­by­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives, run­ning for office, and par­tic­i­pat­ing in more direct forms of action.

Every move­ment has its res­i­dent schol­ars and edu­ca­tors, whether they be eru­dite laypeo­ple, pro­fes­sion­al aca­d­e­mics, or enter­pris­ing col­lege stu­dents. A group from the lat­ter cat­e­go­ry, “pro­gres­sive stu­dents,” writes CNN, from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Gov­ern­ment, begin today what they’re call­ing “Resis­tance School,” a “4‑week course in anti-Trump activism… open to peo­ple across the coun­try and the world.” (You can watch the video from the course above.)

At their site, the stu­dents bill “Resis­tance School” as a series of “prac­ti­cal skills for tak­ing back Amer­i­ca” and open their online syl­labus with a quote spu­ri­ous­ly attrib­uted to Thomas Jef­fer­son: “When injus­tice becomes law, resis­tance becomes duty.” It’s pos­si­ble that who­ev­er said it had blood­i­er things in mind. Resis­tance School sticks to peace­ful means, with four ses­sions that teach, in order, “How to Com­mu­ni­cate our Val­ues in Polit­i­cal Advo­ca­cy,” “How to Mobi­lize and Orga­nize our Com­mu­ni­ties,” “How to Struc­ture and Build Capac­i­ty for Action,” and “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” Instruc­tors are drawn from the ranks of acad­e­mia, labor orga­niz­ing, and the Oba­ma admin­is­tra­tion, and you can stream the ses­sions on the school’s site or on Face­book, or attend in per­son.

The Resis­tance School is sure to attract crit­i­cism, not only from the expect­ed sources but from more anti-estab­lish­ment fac­tions on the left. But that may be unlike­ly to deter the more than 10,000 peo­ple who have reg­is­tered for the first class. Orga­niz­ers have encour­aged peo­ple to attend in groups, and cur­rent­ly have about 3,000 groups enrolled. “Some are com­ing with groups of 700 peo­ple,” says co-founder Shanoor Seer­vai, “some are small­er groups, potlucks, gath­er­ing in people’s kitchens.”

Ser­vaai and fel­low Kennedy School stu­dents have been tak­en aback and are now, writes CNN, “grap­pling with ques­tions of scale.” How, they won­der, will such large num­bers of peo­ple coor­di­nate; how to mea­sure the impact of the pro­gram?.… ques­tions, per­haps, they will resolve by the fourth ses­sion, “How to Sus­tain the Resis­tance Long-Term.” But they’re cer­tain­ly not alone in try­ing to steer a mas­sive surge of new inter­est in activism and elec­toral pol­i­tics. As the mil­lions now plan­ning and par­tic­i­pat­ing in civ­il actions across the coun­try attest, peo­ple have begun to take to heart sen­ti­ments recent­ly expressed by orga­niz­er Alice Mar­shall: “If we wait for some great leader to save us we are lost. We have to save our­selves.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Matt Damon Reads Howard Zinn’s “The Prob­lem is Civ­il Obe­di­ence,” a Call for Amer­i­cans to Take Action

Hen­ry David Thore­au on When Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence and Resis­tance Are Jus­ti­fied (1849)

Read Mar­tin Luther King and The Mont­gomery Sto­ry: The Influ­en­tial 1957 Civ­il Rights Com­ic Book

Watch The March, the Mas­ter­ful, Dig­i­tal­ly Restored Doc­u­men­tary on The Great March on Wash­ing­ton

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

Crystallography: A Free Online Course

in | April 4th, 2017

This is a com­plete course in Crys­tal­log­ra­phy, taught by H. K. D. H. Bhadeshia, a British met­al­lur­gist and TATA Steel Pro­fes­sor of Met­al­lur­gy at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge. The lec­tures were record­ed in 2016.

This course has been added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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!

Cosmologies of Capitalism: A Free Online Course

in | April 4th, 2017

This course by Alan Mac­far­lane was orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed to sec­ond-year stu­dents in the Depart­ment of Social Anthro­pol­o­gy at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty as a foun­da­tion course in the devel­op­ment of social the­o­ries. The course cov­ers all of the social sci­ences, arts and human­i­ties over the last five hun­dred years and the main par­a­digm shifts: cir­cu­lar­i­ty, progress, Enlight­en­ment.

The lec­ture titles are list­ed below. You can find the videos online here.

1. The­o­ret­i­cal Sys­tems in the Social Sci­ences: Nature and Ori­gins
2. The­o­ret­i­cal Sys­tems in Social Sci­ence: Anthro­po­log­i­cal Approach­es
3. Three Major The­o­ret­i­cal Sys­tems: An Overview
4. Three Major The­o­ret­i­cal Sys­tems: Struc­tural­ism and Cau­sa­tion
5. From Cir­cu­lar to Lin­ear Time: The Renais­sance 1400–1700
6. From Cir­cu­lar to Ser­i­al Time: Some Caus­es of the Change
7. The Enlight­en­ment — 1: Nature and Caus­es
8. The Enlight­en­ment — 2: France and the Rever­sal
9. Evo­lu­tion: The Back­ground
10. Evo­lu­tion: Some Fea­tures
11. Evo­lu­tion­ism: Social Sci­ences
12. Struc­tural­ism: A Por­trait
13. Struc­tural­ism: Social Sci­ences
14. New Evo­lu­tion­ism 1930–1980
15. Reflec­tions on the Lec­tures: Decem­ber 2012

Cos­molo­gies of Cap­i­tal­ism will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

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!

An Animated Introduction to Roland Barthes’s Mythologies and How He Used Semiotics to Decode Popular Culture

in Current Affairs, Philosophy, Politics | April 4th, 2017

In 1979, French the­o­rist Jean-François Lyotard declared the end of all “grand narratives”—every “the­o­ry or intel­lec­tu­al sys­tem,” as Blackwell’s dic­tio­nary defines the term, “which attempts to pro­vide a com­pre­hen­sive expla­na­tion of human expe­ri­ence and knowl­edge.” The announce­ment arrived with all the rhetor­i­cal bom­bast of Nietzsche’s “God is Dead,” sweep­ing not only the­ol­o­gy into the dust­bin but also over­ar­ch­ing sci­en­tif­ic the­o­ries, Freudi­an psy­chol­o­gy, Marx­ism, and every oth­er “total­iz­ing” expla­na­tion. But as Lyotard him­self explained in his book The Post­mod­ern Con­di­tion, the loss of uni­ver­sal coherence—or the illu­sion of coherence—had tak­en decades, a “tran­si­tion,” he wrote, “under way since at least the end of the 1950s.”

We might date the onset of Post­mod­ernism and the end of “mas­ter nar­ra­tives” even earlier—to the dev­as­ta­tion at the end of World War II and the appear­ance of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialec­tic of Enlight­en­ment and of Roland Barthes’ slim vol­ume Mytholo­gies, a col­lec­tion of essays writ­ten between 1954 and 56 in which the French lit­er­ary the­o­rist and cul­tur­al crit­ic put to work his under­stand­ing of Fer­di­nand de Saussure’s semi­otics.

As a result of read­ing the Swiss lin­guist, Barthes wrote in a pref­ace to the 1970 edi­tion of his book, he had “acquired the con­vic­tion that by treat­ing ‘col­lec­tive rep­re­sen­ta­tions’ as a sign-sys­tems, one might hope to go fur­ther than the pious show of unmask­ing them and account in detail for the mys­ti­fi­ca­tion which trans­forms petit-bour­geois cul­ture into a uni­ver­sal nature.”

While gen­er­al­ly lumped into the cat­e­go­ry of “struc­tural­ist” thinkers, as opposed to “post-struc­tural­ists” like Lyotard, Barthes nonethe­less paved the way for a par­tic­u­lar­ly French mis­trust of “petit-bour­geois cul­ture” and its pop­ulist spec­ta­cles and all-know­ing talk­ing heads. He was an oppo­nent of total­iz­ing nar­ra­tives just as he was “an unre­lent­ing oppo­nent of French impe­ri­al­ism,” writes Richard Brody at The New York­er. Like Adorno and many oth­er post-war Euro­pean intel­lec­tu­als, Barthes riffed on Marx’s notion of “false consciousness”—the men­tal fog pro­duced by dog­mat­ic edu­ca­tion, mass media, and pop­u­lar culture—and applied the idea relent­less­ly to his analy­sis of the post-indus­tri­al West.

“Barthes’s work on myths,” writes Andrew Robin­son at Cease­fire Mag­a­zine, “pre­fig­ures dis­course-analy­sis in media stud­ies.” He direct­ed his focus to “cer­tain insid­i­ous myths… par­tic­u­lar­ly typ­i­cal of right-wing pop­ulism and of the tabloid press.” Barthes though of pop­ulist mythol­o­gy as a “meta­lan­guage” that “removes his­to­ry from lan­guage,” mak­ing “par­tic­u­lar signs appear nat­ur­al, eter­nal, absolute, or frozen” and trans­form­ing “his­to­ry into nature.” Through its nor­mal­iza­tion, we lose sight of the arti­fice of cable news, for exam­ple, and take for grant­ed its for­mat­ting as a uni­ver­sal stan­dard for high seri­ous­ness and cred­i­bil­i­ty (as in the por­ten­tous sig­ni­fi­ca­tion of “Break­ing News”), even when we know we’re being lied to.

The Al Jazeera video at the top of the post asks us to con­sid­er the “rhetor­i­cal motifs” of such media, which con­struct “the biggest myth of all: that what we are watch­ing is unmedi­at­ed real­i­ty.” The obser­va­tion may seem ele­men­tary, but Barthes sought to go fur­ther than “the pious show of unmask­ing,” as he wrote. He “would have seen,” the video’s nar­ra­tor says, “the TV screen as a cul­tur­al text, and he would have unveiled its myths,” as he did the myths prof­fered by wrestling, adver­tis­ing, pop­u­lar film and nov­els, tourism, pho­tog­ra­phy, din­ing, and oth­er seem­ing­ly mun­dane pop­u­lar phe­nom­e­na.

The video above from edu­ca­tion­al com­pa­ny Macat offers a more for­mal sum­ma­ry of Barthes’ Mytholo­gies. The French crit­ic and semi­oti­cian made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to lit­er­ary and crit­i­cal the­o­ry, demonstrating—with the wide-rang­ing wit and eru­di­tion of his human­ist coun­try­man Michel de Mon­taigne—how “dom­i­nant ide­olo­gies suc­cess­ful­ly present them­selves as sim­ply the way the world should be.” Look­ing back on his book over twen­ty years lat­er, after the events in Paris of May 1968, Barthes remarked that the need for “ide­o­log­i­cal crit­i­cism” had been “again made bru­tal­ly evi­dent.” Indeed, we have ample rea­son to think that, over six­ty years since Barthes pub­lished his clas­sic analy­sis, the need for a rig­or­ous­ly crit­i­cal view of mass media, adver­tis­ing, and polit­i­cal spec­ta­cle has become more press­ing than ever.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Roland Barthes Present His 40-Hour Course, La Pré­pa­ra­tion du roman, in French (1978–80)

Hear the Writ­ing of French The­o­rists Jacques Der­ri­da, Jean Bau­drillard & Roland Barthes Sung by Poet Ken­neth Gold­smith

Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tions to Edward Said’s Ground­break­ing Book Ori­en­tal­ism

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

Behold the Ingenious “Ambiguous Cylinder Illusion” (and Then Find Out How It Works)

in Math | April 4th, 2017

Cre­at­ed by Kokichi Sug­i­hara, a math pro­fes­sor at Mei­ji Uni­ver­si­ty in Tokyo, the “Ambigu­ous Cylin­der Illu­sion” wowed audi­ences at “the Best Illu­sion of the Year Con­test” in 2016. Here’s the gen­er­al gist of the illu­sion:

The direct views of the objects and their mir­ror images gen­er­ate quite dif­fer­ent inter­pre­ta­tions of the 3D shapes. They look like ver­ti­cal cylin­ders, but their sec­tions appear to be dif­fer­ent; in one view they appear to be rec­tan­gles, while in the oth­er view they appear to be cir­cles. We can­not cor­rect our inter­pre­ta­tions although we log­i­cal­ly know that they come from the same objects. Even if the object is rotat­ed in front of a view­er, it is dif­fi­cult to under­stand the true shape of the object, and thus the illu­sion does not dis­ap­pear.

So how do those rec­tan­gles look like cir­cles, and vice-ver­sa? The video below–if you care to spoil the illusion–will show you. Find more videos from the Illu­sion Con­test here.

via The Kids Should See This

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!

Creating Saturday Night Live: Behind-the Scenes Videos Reveal How the Iconic Comedy Show Gets Made

in Comedy, Television | April 4th, 2017

I’ve yet to meet any­one who doesn’t have some gripe about the state of SNL, very often root­ed in nos­tal­gia for a sim­pler, fun­nier Gold­en Age. It’s hard not to asso­ciate icon­ic TV shows with lost youth, even shows that have moved on when some of the rest of us haven’t.

The live sketch com­e­dy show, now two years into its fourth decade, has done its best to keep pace with chang­ing times and tastes. While my own fan­dom has waxed and waned, one thing has remained a con­stant: my con­sid­er­able appre­ci­a­tion for the tal­ent and sheer mox­ie required to stage orig­i­nal live com­e­dy on nation­al tele­vi­sion, week after week for forty years.

Comics and celebri­ty guests risk the dis­as­ter of dead air when jokes fall flat. Crewmem­bers rig up con­vinc­ing sets only to strike them min­utes lat­er for com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent envi­rons. Make-up artists trans­form Kate McK­in­non from the car­toon­ish Jeff Ses­sions to the bald, jow­ly “Shud the Mer­maid” in-between sketch­es, a process that seems to unfold in sec­onds in the sped-up behind-the-scenes video above.

Sure, every­thing on the show is script­ed and chore­o­graphed, and the actors read from cue cards. But as the pop­u­lar phe­nom­e­non of “corps­ing”—break­ing char­ac­ter by break­ing into laughter—shows us, any­thing can go wrong live with the best-laid plans of writ­ers and direc­tors. The quick-change tran­si­tion between the cold open and the open­ing mono­logue, which both hap­pen on the “home base stage” of stu­dio 8H, as you can see at the top; the rock-sol­id segues from the live band, below…. The SNL machine depends on every one of its many mov­ing parts to func­tion.

And if—or inevitably when—one of those parts mal­func­tions, well the show goes on… and on and on and on…. How many sea­sons does SNL have left in it? Anoth­er forty? A pos­si­bly infi­nite num­ber? Giv­en how well its teams of cre­atives and crew have mas­tered the art of live tele­vised sketch comedy—not all of it to everyone’s taste, to be sure—it’s pos­si­ble that Sat­ur­day Night Live will out­live even the phe­nom­e­non of tele­vi­sion, trans­plant­i­ng itself some­where in our brains in the far future, where we’ll lean back, close our eyes, and hear the sax­o­phones and that famil­iar, rous­ing announce­ment, “Live, from New York….”

See the show’s make­up depart­ment head and hair design­er walk us through their process below, and watch four more behind-the-scenes shorts at the “Cre­at­ing Sat­ur­day Night Live” playlist on Youtube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dave Chappelle’s Sat­ur­day Night Live Mono­logue: “We’ve Elect­ed an Inter­net Troll as Our Pres­i­dent”

Sat­ur­day Night Live: Putin Mocks Trump’s Poor­ly Attend­ed Inau­gu­ra­tion 

When William S. Bur­roughs Appeared on Sat­ur­day Night Live: His First TV Appear­ance (1981)

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

Stream 72 Hours of Ambient Sounds from Blade Runner: Relax, Go to Sleep in a Dystopian Future

in Film, Games, Sci Fi | April 4th, 2017

As reflex­ive­ly as we may now describe the 2019 Los Ange­les of Blade Run­ner as “dystopi­an” — and indeed, as vivid a mod­ern dystopia as cin­e­ma has yet pro­duced — who among us would­n’t want to spend at least a few hours there? Much of the sur­face appeal is, of course, visu­al: the rainy neon-lined streets, the indus­tri­al fear­some­ness, those tow­er-side video geisha. But no film tru­ly suc­ceeds, at cre­at­ing a world or any­thing else, with­out the right sound. We may not con­scious­ly real­ize it when we watch the movie, no mat­ter how many times we’ve seen it before, but the son­ic ele­ments, all care­ful­ly craft­ed, do more than their fair share to make Blade Run­ner feel like Blade Run­ner.

And so the best way to put your­self into Blade Run­ner’s world may be to sur­round your­self with its sounds, a task made much eas­i­er by “ambi­ent geek” Crysknife007, whose Youtube chan­nel offers a playlist of ambi­ent noise from Blade Run­ner places. These include Deckard’s apart­ment, the Tyrell Build­ing, the Brad­bury Hotel, and oth­ers, each of which loops for a con­tin­u­ous twelve hours. (The com­plete playlist above runs for 72 hours.) Some of the loca­tions even die-hard fans of the movie might not rec­og­nize, because they come from anoth­er exten­sion of Blade Run­ner’s real­i­ty: the 1997 PC adven­ture game that has a new cast of char­ac­ters play out a dif­fer­ent sto­ry in the pro­to-cyber­punk urban set­ting with the same neces­si­ty for just the right sound to cre­ate just the right atmos­phere

Crysknife007, who as an ambi­ent musi­cian goes under the name “Cheesy Ner­vosa,” seems to have a side line in this sort of thing: last month we fea­tured oth­er sci-fi-inspired selec­tions from the same Youtube chan­nel like the sounds of the ship’s engine from Star Trek: the Next Gen­er­a­tion and the TARDIS from Doc­tor Who. But it’s Blade Run­ner, as Thom Ander­sen says in his doc­u­men­tary Los Ange­les Plays Itself, that “con­tin­ues to fas­ci­nate. Per­haps it express­es a nos­tal­gia for a dystopi­an vision of the future that has become out­dat­ed. This vision offered some con­so­la­tion because it was at least sub­lime. Now the future looks brighter, hot­ter, and bland­er.” But even as the real 2019 draws near, what­ev­er the future actu­al­ly ends up look­ing like, we at least know we can keep it sound­ing inter­est­ing.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art of Mak­ing Blade Run­ner: See the Orig­i­nal Sketch­book, Sto­ry­boards, On-Set Polaroids & More

10 Hours of Ambi­ent Arc­tic Sounds Will Help You Relax, Med­i­tate, Study & Sleep

Moby Lets You Down­load 4 Hours of Ambi­ent Music to Help You Sleep, Med­i­tate, Do Yoga & Not Pan­ic

Music That Helps You Sleep: Min­i­mal­ist Com­pos­er Max Richter, Pop Phe­nom Ed Sheer­an & Your Favorites

42 Hours of Ambi­ent Sounds from Blade Run­ner, Alien, Star Trek and Doc­tor Who Will Help You Relax & Sleep

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.