The First Masterpieces of Abstract Film: Hans Richter’s Rhythmus 21 (1921) & Viking Eggeling’s Symphonie Diagonale (1924)

in Film | March 21st, 2016

Paint­ing, as any Art His­to­ry 101 lec­tur­er will tell you, found the moti­va­tion to turn abstract when pho­tog­ra­phy trumped it in the game of life­like rep­re­sen­ta­tion. But what push­es pho­tog­ra­phy, and even motion pic­tures, to give abstrac­tion a try? The vast major­i­ty of films made today still rep­re­sent real­i­ty in some basi­cal­ly direct fash­ion, but almost since the first appear­ance of the medi­um, cer­tain artists have tried to push it in oth­er direc­tions. If you know the work of only one abstract film­mak­er, you prob­a­bly know the work of Stan Brakhage, crafts­man of such vivid and dis­tressed cin­e­mat­ic expe­ri­ences as Cat’s Cra­dle and Dog Star Man. But who pre­ced­ed him?

The title of the very first abstract film­mak­er has been dis­put­ed, but we at least know who made sev­er­al ear­ly abstract mas­ter­pieces. Today we present two of them, Hans Richter’s Rhyth­mus 21, made in 1921, and from three years lat­er, Viking Eggeling’s Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale. “Clock­ing in at just over three min­utes, it’s a sig­nif­i­cant depar­ture from the news­reels, romances, cliff-hang­ers, and pen­ny-dread­fuls that made up the bulk of film pro­duc­tion in the ear­ly 20s,” writes the Get­ty’s Jan­non Stein of Richter’s hyp­not­i­cal­ly geo­met­ric pic­ture, “the first decade in which the film indus­try began to play a major eco­nom­ic and cul­tur­al role around the world.”

But Richter, Stein con­tin­ues, “cred­it­ed his friend Viking Eggeling with the idea of explor­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ties for abstract ani­ma­tion. In fact, they’d worked togeth­er on a series of paint­ings on scrolls that pre­ced­ed both of Richter’s first films, as well as Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale,” which you can watch just above. This ver­sion opens with an endorse­ment from no less dar­ing a mind than archi­tect-artist-the­o­reti­cian Fred­er­ick John Kiesler, who describes it as “the best abstract film yet con­ceived” and “an exper­i­ment to dis­cov­er the basic prin­ci­ples of the orga­ni­za­tion of time inter­vals in the film medi­um.” I, per­son­al­ly, would call it some­thing like a pure shot of the art-deco aes­thet­ic which we now know, of course, not from the film it pro­duced in the 20s, but the archi­tec­ture.

That may excite you or it may not, but words have nev­er quite suit­ed the abstract. If Richter, Eggeling, Brakhage, or any who came between them or have come after them share a mis­sion, that mis­sion involves mak­ing movies that no words can real­ly describe. Eggeling would pass on the year after Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale, but Richter would go on to a long life and career that includ­ed oth­er projects meant to take film beyond its con­ven­tion­al uses, such as 1947’s “sto­ry of dreams mixed with real­i­ty,” Dreams that Mon­ey Can Buy. Even now, in the 21st cen­tu­ry, it seems that the medi­um has a long way to go before it makes use of all the cre­ative space avail­able to it — which should only encour­age the next Richters and Eggelings of the world.

Sym­phonie Diag­o­nale and Rhyth­mus 21 will be added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Dreams That Mon­ey Can Buy, a Sur­re­al­ist Film by Man Ray, Mar­cel Duchamp, Alexan­der Calder, Fer­nand Léger & Hans Richter

CBS Evening News with Wal­ter Cronkite Intro­duces Amer­i­ca to Under­ground Films and the Vel­vet Under­ground (1965)

Man Ray and the Ciné­ma Pur: Four Sur­re­al­ist Films From the 1920s

Un Chien Andalou: Revis­it­ing Buñuel and Dalí’s Sur­re­al­ist Film

The Hearts of Age: Orson Welles’ Sur­re­al­ist First Film (1934)

The Seashell and the Cler­gy­man: The World’s First Sur­re­al­ist Film

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

Hear a Complete 24-Hour Reading of Moby-Dick, Recorded at the Southbank Centre in London (2015)

in Audio Books, Literature | March 21st, 2016

Last week, Ted Mills told you how Ply­mouth Uni­ver­si­ty orches­trat­ed a won­der­ful project called Moby-Dick The Big Read, which result­ed in celebrities–like Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch, John Waters, Mary Oliv­er, Stephen Fry, and Til­da Swinton–reading the entire­ty of Her­man Melville’s Moby-Dick, and mak­ing the record­ing free to down­load.

This week­end, we hap­pi­ly dis­cov­ered anoth­er unabridged read­ing of Melville’s great Amer­i­can nov­el, this one com­ing out of the 2015 Lon­don Lit­er­a­ture Fes­ti­val, held at the South­bank Cen­tre in Lon­don. Over four days, Moby-Dick was read by writ­ers, actors, come­di­ans, mem­bers of the pub­lic and even Melville’s great-great-great-grand­daugh­ter. You can stream a record­ing of the epic read­ing on Sound­cloud right below. You might want to make a good strong pot of cof­fee because it runs 24 hours.

If you vis­it the Moby-Dick Unabridged web­site, you can get more back­ground on the project. In the mean­time, this lat­est record­ing will be added to our col­lec­tion, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Down­load Great Books for Free.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent

Hear Moby Dick Read in Its Entire­ty by Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch, John Waters, Stephen Fry, Til­da Swin­ton & More

An Illus­tra­tion of Every Page of Her­man Melville’s Moby Dick

How Ray Brad­bury Wrote the Script for John Huston’s Moby Dick (1956)

Orson Welles Reads From Moby-Dick: The Great Amer­i­can Direc­tor Takes on the Great Amer­i­can Nov­el

Peter Sellers Reads The Beatles’ “She Loves You” in 4 Different Accents: Dr. Strangelove, Cockney, Irish & Upper Crust

in Comedy, Music | March 19th, 2016

Back in the late 1950s, George Mar­tin (may he rest in peace) began his career as a pro­duc­er record­ing two albums with the come­di­an Peter Sell­ers–The Best Of Sell­ers and Songs for Swing­ing Sell­ers. When he joined forces with the Bea­t­les a few years lat­er, Mar­tin put the come­di­an in touch with the lads from Liv­er­pool, and they became fast friends. This rela­tion­ship paved the way for some good com­e­dy. As you might recall, Sell­ers made a cameo appear­ance on “The Music of Lennon and McCart­ney” in 1964, and read “A Hard Day’s Night” in a way that com­i­cal­ly recalls Lau­rence Olivier’s 1955 per­for­mance in Richard III. (Watch the spoof here.) And then, also dur­ing the mid 60s, Sell­ers record­ed a com­ic read­ing of “She Loves You” — once in the voice of Dr. Strangelove (above), again with cock­ney and upper-crusty accents (both right below), and final­ly with an Irish twist (the last item). The record­ings were all released posthu­mous­ly between 1981 and 1983 on albums no longer in cir­cu­la­tion. Sell­ers clear­ly had a thing for accents. Here you can also explore his Com­plete Guide to the Accents of the British Isles.

Cock­ney

Upper Crust

Irish

A ver­sion of this post first appeared on Open Cul­ture in Feb­ru­ary, 2012.

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!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Peter Sell­ers Per­forms The Bea­t­les “A Hard Day’s Night” in Shake­speare­an Voice

Here Comes The Sun: The Lost Gui­tar Solo by George Har­ri­son

Gui­tarist Randy Bach­man Demys­ti­fies the Open­ing Chord of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’

Hear the Unique, Orig­i­nal Com­po­si­tions of George Mar­tin, Beloved Bea­t­les Pro­duc­er (RIP)

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

Why Do People Talk Funny in Old Movies?, or The Origin of the Mid-Atlantic Accent

in English Language, Film, History | March 18th, 2016

“The first thing to notice about movies made in the clas­sic Hol­ly­wood stu­dio era,” writes New York­er film crit­ic Richard Brody, “from the twen­ties through the fifties, is the still­ness of the actors — not a sta­t­ic, micro­phone-bound stand-and-deliv­er the­atri­cal­i­ty but a lack of fid­geti­ness even while in motion, a self-mas­tery that pre­cludes uncon­trolled or inci­den­tal ges­tures,” an act­ing style reflec­tive of the fact, Brody sus­pects, that “Amer­i­can peo­ple of the era real­ly were more tight­ly con­trolled, more repressed by the gen­er­al expec­ta­tion of pub­lic deco­rum and expres­sive restraint.”

This has made it tough for film­mak­ers (in the case of Brody’s piece, Paul Thomas Ander­son mak­ing The Mas­ter, who pulled it off more con­vinc­ing­ly than any­one else in recent mem­o­ry) who want to do prop­er peri­od pieces set in those days: “even if styl­ists man­age to get the cloth­ing right, actors today — peo­ple today — have been raised by and large to let their emo­tions gov­ern their behav­ior,” and cur­rent actors “can hard­ly rep­re­sent the past with­out invest­ing it with the atti­tudes of our own day, which is why most new peri­od pieces seem either thin or unin­ten­tion­al­ly iron­ic.”

They’d have an espe­cial­ly for­mi­da­ble task set out for them in speak­ing, with­out any appar­ent irony, in the mid-atlantic accent, just as much a fix­ture of clas­sic Hol­ly­wood act­ing as that phys­i­cal self-mas­tery. Even if you haven’t heard its name, you’ve heard the accent, which gets exam­ined in the How­Stuff­Works video at the top of the post “Why Do Peo­ple in Old Movies Talk Weird?” The “old-timey voice” you hear in news­reels from movies like His Girl Fri­day (watch it online here) and fig­ures like Katharine Hep­burn, Franklin D. Roo­sevelt, George Plimp­ton, and William F. Buck­ley, his­tor­i­cal­ly “the hall­mark of aris­to­crat­ic Amer­i­ca,” acquired, usu­al­ly in New Eng­land board­ing schools, as “an inter­na­tion­al norm for com­mu­ni­ca­tion.”

The video points out its sig­nal qual­i­ties, from its “qua­si-British ele­ments” like a soft­en­ing of Rs to its “empha­sis on clipped, sharped Ts,” result­ing in a speech pat­tern that “isn’t com­plete­ly British, not com­plete­ly Amer­i­can” — one we can only place, in oth­er words, some­where in the mid-Atlantic ocean. The accent emerged as an opti­mal man­ner of speak­ing in “the ear­ly days of radio” when speak­ers could­n’t repro­duce bass vary well, and it van­ished not long after the Sec­ond World War, when teach­ers stopped pass­ing it along to their stu­dents. Has the time has come for the true iro­nists among us to bring it back?

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Speech Accent Archive: The Eng­lish Accents of Peo­ple Who Speak 341 Dif­fer­ent Lan­guages

The Lin­guis­tics Behind Kevin Spacey’s South­ern Accent in House of Cards: A Quick Primer

Watch Meryl Streep Have Fun with Accents: Bronx, Pol­ish, Irish, Aus­tralian, Yid­dish & More

A Brief Tour of British Accents: 14 Ways to Speak Eng­lish in 84 Sec­onds

Peter Sell­ers Presents The Com­plete Guide To Accents of The British Isles

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

Take Vladimir Nabokov’s Quiz to See If You’re a Good Reader–The Same One He Gave to His Students

in Literature | March 18th, 2016

Image by Giuseppe Pino, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

The writ­ers who most stay with me are those who tend to write about read­ing: its plea­sures, dif­fi­cul­ties, and at times impos­si­bil­i­ty. Wal­lace Stevens, Franz Kaf­ka, and Vladimir Nabokov belong in this cat­e­go­ry. Stevens’ essays in The Nec­es­sary Angel attempt to rec­on­cile Pla­to and the Poets; read­ing for him is akin to a mys­ti­cal union with ideas. For Kaf­ka, read­ing is an act of ascetic self-harm: we should read only books that “wound and stab us… wake us up with a blow on the head… affect us like a dis­as­ter… grieve us deeply.” And for Nabokov read­ing can be a form of dis­ci­plined edi­fi­ca­tion… and dis­sec­tion. He wields his crit­i­cal mind like a scalpel in his col­lect­ed Lec­tures on Lit­er­a­ture, in which we find a “lit­tle quiz” he devised for his stu­dents to test their think­ing about what makes a “good read­er.” One such qual­i­ty, he sug­gests is the pos­ses­sion of an “artis­tic sense.”

Good read­ers, Nabokov sug­gests, should already have acquired this sense before they even approach a book. This doubt­less leaves a great many peo­ple out, though he also implies in his cri­te­ria that learned qual­i­ties as well as innate ones play a role in the activ­i­ty of read­ing, and that “artis­tic sense” can be learned. But Nabokov did not sim­ply make a list—that would give it away too eas­i­ly and we wouldn’t learn any­thing (about, per­haps, the qual­i­ties of bad read­ers). The pro­fes­so­r­i­al nov­el­ist nev­er missed a chance to edu­cate, and occa­sion­al­ly con­de­scend to, his read­ers. In this case, he made a quiz with “ten def­i­n­i­tions of a read­er, and from these ten,” he had stu­dents choose the “four def­i­n­i­tions that would com­bine to make a good read­er.”

Take his good read­er quiz, below, and see if you can quick­ly iden­ti­fy the oth­er three qual­i­ties Nabokov requires. I doubt you’ll have much trou­ble. He pro­vides his answers fur­ther down.

Select four answers to the ques­tion what should a read­er be to be a good read­er:

1. The read­er should belong to a book club.
2. The read­er should iden­ti­fy him­self or her­self with the hero or hero­ine.
3. The read­er should con­cen­trate on the social-eco­nom­ic angle.
4. The read­er should pre­fer a sto­ry with action and dia­logue to one with none.
5. The read­er should have seen the book in a movie.
6. The read­er should be a bud­ding author.
7. The read­er should have imag­i­na­tion.
8. The read­er should have mem­o­ry.
9. The read­er should have a dic­tio­nary.
10. The read­er should have some artis­tic sense.

The stu­dents leaned heav­i­ly on emo­tion­al iden­ti­fi­ca­tion, action, and the social-eco­nom­ic or his­tor­i­cal angle. Of course, as you have guessed, the good read­er is one who has imag­i­na­tion, mem­o­ry, a dic­tio­nary, and some artis­tic sense–which sense I pro­pose to devel­op in myself and in oth­ers when­ev­er I have the chance.

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 Bib­liok­lept

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vladimir Nabokov Names the Great­est (and Most Over­rat­ed) Nov­els of the 20th Cen­tu­ry

Vladimir Nabokov’s Hand-Drawn Sketch­es of Mind-Bend­ing Chess Prob­lems

The Note­cards on Which Vladimir Nabokov Wrote Loli­ta: A Look Inside the Author’s Cre­ative Process

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

An Inside Look at How the Fantastic “Wintergatan Marble Machine” Makes Music with 2000 Marbles & 3000 Handmade Parts

in Creativity, Design, Music, Technology | March 18th, 2016

Swedish musi­cian Mar­tin Molin’s Mar­ble Machine, above, looks like the kind of top heavy, enchant­ed con­trap­tion one might find in a Miyaza­ki movie, gal­lop­ing through the coun­try­side on its skin­ny legs.

Those slen­der stems are but one of the design flaws that both­er its cre­ator, who notes that he hadn’t real­ly tak­en into account the destruc­tive pow­er of 2000 flow­ing mar­bles (or more accu­rate­ly, 11mm steel ball bear­ings).

It’s nat­ur­al for some­one so close to the project to fix­ate on its imper­fec­tions, but I think it’s safe to say that the rest of us will be bedaz­zled by all the giant musi­cal Rube Gold­berg device gets right. Hannes Knutsson’s “mak­ing of” videos below detail some of Molin’s labors, from recre­at­ing the sound of a snare drum with coast­ers, a con­tact mic and a box of bas­mati rice, to cut­ting wood­en gears from a cus­tomiz­able tem­plate that any­one can down­load off the Inter­net.

If it looks like a time con­sum­ing endeav­or, it was. Molin wound up devot­ing 14 months to what he had con­ceived of as a short term project, even­tu­al­ly design­ing and fab­ri­cat­ing 3,000 inter­nal parts.

The fin­ished prod­uct is a feat of dig­i­tal, musi­cal, and phys­i­cal skill. As Molin told Wired,

I grew up mak­ing music on Midi, and every­one makes music on a grid nowa­days, on com­put­ers. Even before dig­i­tal they made fan­tas­tic, pro­gram­ma­ble music instru­ments. In bell tow­ers and church tow­ers that play a melody they always have a pro­gram­ming wheel exact­ly like the one that is on the mar­ble machine.

The “mak­ing of” videos high­light the dif­fer­ence between the record­ed audio sig­nal and the sound in the room where the machine is being oper­at­ed. There’s some­thing immense­ly sat­is­fy­ing about the insect-like click of all those mar­bles work­ing in con­cert as they acti­vate the var­i­ous instru­ments and notes.

The machine also appears to give its inven­tor a rather brisk car­dio work­out.

You can read more about the con­struc­tion of the Mar­ble Machine on Molin’s Win­ter­gatan web­site. Its tune is avail­able for down­load here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

See the First “Drum Machine,” the Rhyth­mi­con from 1931, and the Mod­ern Drum Machines That Fol­lowed Decades Lat­er

New Order’s “Blue Mon­day” Played with Obso­lete 1930s Instru­ments

Two Gui­tar Effects That Rev­o­lu­tion­ized Rock: The Inven­tion of the Wah-Wah & Fuzz Ped­als

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 90,000 Works of Modern Art

in Art | March 17th, 2016

Ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ernism often seems to come out of nowhere, espe­cial­ly when our expo­sure to it comes in the form of a sur­vey of sin­gu­lar great works. Each sculp­ture, film, or paint­ing can seem sui gener­is, as though left by an alien civ­i­liza­tion for us to find and admire.

But when you spend a great deal more time with mod­ern art—looking over artists’ entire body of work and see­ing how var­i­ous schools and indi­vid­u­als devel­oped together—it becomes appar­ent that all art, even the most rad­i­cal or strange, evolves in dia­logue with art, and that no artist works ful­ly in iso­la­tion.

Take, for exam­ple, Monet’s Japan­ese Foot­bridge, above, from 1920. It’s a scene from his gar­den the ear­ly impres­sion­ist had paint­ed many times over the decades. In this, one of his final paint­ings of the bridge, we see a riot of reds, oranges, and yel­lows in ges­tur­al brush­strokes that almost obscure the scene entire­ly. Though we know Mon­et had fail­ing eye­sight due to cataracts, a con­di­tion that lead to the vivid col­ors he saw in this peri­od, it’s hard not to see some homage to Van Gogh, upon whose work Monet’s had a tremen­dous influ­ence.

Above, we have Geor­gia O’Keeffe’s Lake George, Coat and Red from 1919, which abstracts the vivid patch­es of col­or char­ac­ter­is­tic of Edouard Manet’s work and the fau­vism of Hen­ri Matisse, both of whom great­ly influ­enced Amer­i­can mod­ernists like O’Keeffe, Edward Hop­per, and Charles Demuth. These paint­ings reside at the Muse­um of Mod­ern Art in New York (MoMA), along with many thou­sands more that show us the devel­op­ment and inter­re­la­tion­ship of mod­ern art in Europe and Amer­i­ca. And you can see close to half of them, whether they’re on dis­play or not, at the MoMA’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion.

This online col­lec­tion hous­es 90,000 works of art in all, to be pre­cise. You can see, for exam­ple, Gior­gio de Chirico’s The Song of Love, above, a typ­i­cal paint­ing for the sur­re­al­ist that shows how much influ­ence he had on the lat­er Sal­vador Dali, who was only ten years old at the time of this work. At the top of the post, Fer­nand Leg­er’s Three Women, from 1921, shows the futur­ist and lat­er pop art French painter in con­ver­sa­tion with Picas­so and Hen­ri Rousseau.

In oth­er instances, we see works that seem anom­alous in an artist’s canon, such as Marc Chagall’s 1912 Cal­vary, above. Known for his depic­tions of folk­lore and urban Jew­ish life, this ear­ly work from the same year as The Fid­dler (the inspi­ra­tion for Fid­dler on the Roof) shows a much more pol­ished cubist style, and a sub­ject mat­ter that antic­i­pates his “dark­er” cru­ci­fix­ion series dur­ing and after World War II. To begin search­ing the MoMA’s col­lec­tion of 90,000 online works, you can begin here with a wide vari­ety of para­me­ters. To browse the col­lec­tion of ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry mod­ernists in which I found these amaz­ing works, start here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Down­load 35,000 Works of Art from the Nation­al Gallery, Includ­ing Mas­ter­pieces by Van Gogh, Gau­guin, Rem­brandt & More

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Down­load 100,000 Free Art Images in High-Res­o­lu­tion from The Get­ty

Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Launch­es Free Course on Look­ing at Pho­tographs as Art

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

Artists Put Online 3D, High Resolution Scans of 3,000-Year-Old Nefertiti Bust (and Controversy Ensues)

in Art | March 17th, 2016

Image by Jesús Gor­ri­ti, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Last Octo­ber, two artists, Nora al-Badri and Jan Niko­lai Nelles, paid a vis­it to the Neues Muse­um in Berlin and–so the sto­ry goes–scanned the 3,000-year-old bust of Nefer­ti­ti using a hid­den Kinect motion sen­sor. The result­ing 3D scans lat­er became avail­able to the world on a web­site called “Nefer­ti­ti Hack,” with the fol­low­ing pref­ace.

From today on every­body around the world can access, study, print or remix a 3D dataset of Nefer­ti­ti’s head in high res­o­lu­tion. This data is acces­si­ble under a pub­lic domain with­out any charge, this tor­rent pro­vides you a STL-file (100 MB)…

“Nefer­ti­ti Hack” goes on to say: “ ‘The Oth­er Nefer­ti­ti’ is an artis­tic inter­ven­tion by the two Ger­man artists Nora Al-Badri and Jan Niko­lai Nelles. Al-Badri and Nelles scanned the head of Nefer­ti­ti clan­des­tine­ly in the Neues Muse­um Berlin with­out per­mis­sion of the Muse­um and they here­by announce the release of the 3D data of Nefer­ti­ti’s head under a Cre­ative Com­mons Licence.… With regard to the notion of belong­ing and pos­ses­sion of objects of oth­er cul­tures, the artists’ inten­tion is to make cul­tur­al objects pub­licly acces­si­ble.”

As if not already con­tro­ver­sial, this act of artis­tic vig­i­lan­tism recent­ly became more con­tentious when 3D scan­ning experts start­ed ques­tion­ing whether Al-Badri and Nelles could have pro­duced such high qual­i­ty scans with a Kinect hid­den under a jack­et (shown on a video here). It seems implau­si­ble, they say. And it has left some won­der­ing, writes The New York Times, whether Al-Badri and Nelles “some­how acquired the museum’s own scan of the bust, scanned a high-qual­i­ty copy or pro­duced the scan by some oth­er means.” The answer is not yet clear.

In the mean­time, accord­ing to Hyper­al­ler­gic, the artists them­selves used their scans “to cre­ate a 3D-print­ed, one-to-one poly­mer resin mod­el” of the Nefer­ti­ti bust, which, they claim, “is the most pre­cise repli­ca of the bust ever made.” And that bust “will reside per­ma­nent­ly in the Amer­i­can Uni­ver­si­ty of Cairo lat­er this year as a stand-in for the orig­i­nal, 3,300-year-old work that was removed from its coun­try of ori­gin short­ly after its dis­cov­ery in 1912 by Ger­man archae­ol­o­gists in Amar­na.”

If there are updates to the sto­ry, I am sure Hyper­al­ler­gic will have them.

via New York Times/Hyper­al­ler­gic

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A Curated Collection of Vintage Japanese Magazine Covers (1913–46)

in Art, History, Magazines | March 17th, 2016

I just last week returned from a vis­it to Tokyo, where I did what I always do there: shop for mag­a­zines. Despite not pay­ing the mag­a­zine shelves a whole lot of atten­tion in Korea, where I live, and prac­ti­cal­ly none at all in Amer­i­ca, where I’m from, I can’t resist lin­ger­ing for hours over the ones in Japan, a coun­try whose print pub­lish­ing indus­try seems much stronger than that of any oth­er, and whose pub­li­ca­tions show­case the cul­ture’s for­mi­da­ble design sen­si­bil­i­ty that has only grown more com­pelling over the cen­turies.

Will Schofield, who runs the inter­na­tion­al and his­tor­i­cal book design blog 50 Watts, knows this, and he also knows that Japan­ese design has been mak­ing mag­a­zine cov­ers inter­est­ing since Japan first had mag­a­zines to cov­er. The images here come from two of his posts, Extra­or­di­nary ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry mag­a­zine cov­ers from Japan and 25 Vin­tage Mag­a­zine Cov­ers from Japan. The ear­li­er ones, which he describes as a mix­ture of “charm­ing chil­dren’s cov­ers with the creepy mod­ernist cov­ers,” come from Book­cov­er Design in Japan 1910s-40s. “Pub­lished in 2005 by PIE Books,” writes Schofield, “this incred­i­ble book is already out-of-print and becom­ing hard to find (it was actu­al­ly hard for me to find and I spend hours per day search­ing for rare books).”

As for the more recent post, he writes that it “began as a com­pi­la­tion of mag­a­zine cov­ers from the web­site of a Japan­ese anti­quar­i­an deal­er. I dug through all 1500 or so images and saved (like a good lit­tle dig­i­tal hoard­er) hun­dreds to fea­ture, though only 8 made the first cut.”

Both posts togeth­er present a curat­ed col­lec­tion of near­ly 50 most­ly pre­war Japan­ese mag­a­zine cov­ers, still vivid and of a decid­ed­ly high artis­tic stan­dards these 70 to 103 years lat­er. On my own shop­ping trip, I picked up an issue of Free & Easy, my favorite men’s style mag­a­zine pub­lished any­where — its final issue, inci­den­tal­ly, and one whose cov­er, despite depict­ing no less an Amer­i­can icon than Dick Tra­cy, admirably car­ries this tra­di­tion of Japan­ese mag­a­zine art one step fur­ther.

For more vin­tage Japan­ese mag­a­zine cov­ers, see: Extra­or­di­nary ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry mag­a­zine cov­ers from Japan and 25 Vin­tage Mag­a­zine Cov­ers from Japan.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Adver­tise­ments from Japan’s Gold­en Age of Art Deco

Glo­ri­ous Ear­ly 20th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Ads for Beer, Smokes & Sake (1902–1954)

Vin­tage 1930s Japan­ese Posters Artis­ti­cal­ly Mar­ket the Won­ders of Trav­el

A Won­der­ful­ly Illus­trat­ed 1925 Japan­ese Edi­tion of Aesop’s Fables by Leg­endary Children’s Book Illus­tra­tor Takeo Takei

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

Scientists Discover That James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake Has an Amazingly Mathematical “Multifractal” Structure

in Art, Literature, Math | March 16th, 2016

It has long been thought that the so-called “Gold­en Ratio” described in Euclid’s Ele­ments has “impli­ca­tions for numer­ous nat­ur­al phe­nom­e­na… from the leaf and seed arrange­ments of plants” and “from the arts to the stock mar­ket.” So writes astro­physi­cist Mario Liv­io, head of the sci­ence divi­sion for the insti­tute that over­sees the Hub­ble Tele­scope. And yet, though this math­e­mat­i­cal pro­por­tion has been found in paint­ings by Leonar­do da Vin­ci to Sal­vador Dali—two exam­ples that are only “the tip of the ice­berg in terms of the appear­ances of the Gold­en Ratio in the arts”—Livio con­cludes that it does not describe “some sort of uni­ver­sal stan­dard for ‘beau­ty.’” Most art of “last­ing val­ue,” he argues, departs “from any for­mal canon for aes­thet­ics.” We can con­sid­er Liv­io a Gold­en Ratio skep­tic.

Far on the oth­er end of a spec­trum of belief in math­e­mat­i­cal art lies Le Cor­busier, Swiss archi­tect and painter in whose mod­ernist design some see an almost total­i­tar­i­an mania for order. Using the Gold­en Ratio, Cor­busier designed a sys­tem of aes­thet­ic pro­por­tions called Mod­u­lor, its ambi­tion, writes William Wiles at Icon, “to rec­on­cile maths, the human form, archi­tec­ture and beau­ty into a sin­gle sys­tem.”

Praised by Ein­stein and adopt­ed by a few of Corbusier’s con­tem­po­raries, Mod­u­lor failed to catch on in part because “Cor­busier want­ed to patent the sys­tem and earn roy­al­ties from build­ings using it.” In place of Leonardo’s Vit­ru­vian Man, Cor­busier pro­posed “Mod­u­lor Man” (below) the “mas­cot of [his] sys­tem for reorder­ing the uni­verse.”

Per­haps now, we need an artist to ren­der a “Frac­tal Man”—or Frac­tal Gen­der Non-Spe­cif­ic Person—to rep­re­sent the lat­est enthu­si­as­tic find­ings of math in the arts. This time, sci­en­tists have quan­ti­fied beau­ty in lan­guage, a medi­um some­times char­ac­ter­ized as so impre­cise, opaque, and unsci­en­tif­ic that the Roy­al Soci­ety was found­ed with the mot­to “take no one’s word for it” and Lud­wig Wittgen­stein deflat­ed phi­los­o­phy with his con­clu­sion in the Trac­ta­tus, “Where­of one can­not speak, there­of one must be silent.” (Speak­ing, in this sense, meant using lan­guage in a high­ly math­e­mat­i­cal way.) Words—many sci­en­tists and philoso­phers have long believed—lie, and lead us away from the cold, hard truths of pure math­e­mat­ics.

And yet, reports The Guardian, sci­en­tists at the Insti­tute of Nuclear Physics in Poland have found that James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—a nov­el we might think of as per­haps the most self-con­scious­ly ref­er­en­tial exam­i­na­tion of lan­guage writ­ten in any tongue—is “almost indis­tin­guish­able in its struc­ture from a pure­ly math­e­mat­i­cal mul­ti­frac­tal.” Try­ing to explain this find­ing in as plain Eng­lish as pos­si­ble, Julia Johanne Tolo at Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture writes:

To deter­mine whether the books had frac­tal struc­tures, the aca­d­e­mics looked at the vari­a­tion of sen­tence lengths, find­ing that each sen­tence, or frag­ment, had a struc­ture that resem­bled the whole of the book.

And it isn’t only Joyce. Through a sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis of 113 works of lit­er­a­ture, the researchers found that many texts writ­ten by the likes of Dick­ens, Shake­speare, Thomas Mann, Umber­to Eco, and Samuel Beck­ett had mul­ti­frac­tal struc­tures. The most math­e­mat­i­cal­ly com­plex works were stream-of-con­scious­ness nar­ra­tives, hence the ulti­mate com­plex­i­ty of Finnegans Wake, which Pro­fes­sor Stanisław Drożdż, co-author of the paper pub­lished at Infor­ma­tion Sci­ences, describes as “the absolute record in terms of mul­ti­frac­tal­i­ty.” (The graph at the top shows the results of the nov­el­’s analy­sis, which pro­duced a shape iden­ti­cal to pure math­e­mat­i­cal mul­ti­frac­tals.)

This study pro­duced some incon­sis­ten­cies, how­ev­er. In the graph above, you can see how many of the titles sur­veyed ranked in terms of their “mul­ti­frac­tal­i­ty.” A close sec­ond to Joyce’s clas­sic work, sur­pris­ing­ly, is Dave Egger’s post-mod­ern mem­oir A Heart­break­ing Work of Stag­ger­ing Genius, and much, much fur­ther down the scale, Mar­cel Proust’s Remem­brance of Things Past. Proust’s mas­ter­work, writes Phys.org, shows “lit­tle cor­re­la­tion to mul­ti­frac­tal­i­ty” as do cer­tain oth­er books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. The mea­sure may tell us lit­tle about lit­er­ary qual­i­ty, though Pro­fes­sor Drożdż sug­gests that “it may some­day help in a more objec­tive assign­ment of books to one genre or anoth­er.” Irish nov­el­ist Eimear McBride finds this “upshot” dis­ap­point­ing. “Sure­ly there are more inter­est­ing ques­tions about the how and why of writ­ers’ brains arriv­ing at these com­plex, but seem­ing­ly instinc­tive, frac­tals?” she told The Guardian.

Of the find­ing that stream-of-con­scious­ness works seem to be the most frac­tal, McBride says, “By its nature, such writ­ing is con­cerned not only with the usu­al load-bear­ing aspects of language—content, mean­ing, aes­thet­ics, etc—but engages with lan­guage as the object in itself, using the re-form­ing of its rules to give the read­er a more pris­mat­ic under­stand­ing…. Giv­en the long-estab­lished con­nec­tion between beau­ty and sym­me­try, find­ing works of lit­er­a­ture frac­tal­ly quan­tifi­able seems per­fect­ly rea­son­able.” Maybe so, or per­haps the Pol­ish sci­en­tists have fall­en vic­tim to a more sophis­ti­cat­ed vari­ety of the psy­cho­log­i­cal sharpshooter’s fal­la­cy that affects “Bible Code” enthu­si­asts? I imag­ine we’ll see some frac­tal skep­tics emerge soon enough. But the idea that the worlds-with­in-worlds feel­ing one gets when read­ing cer­tain books—the sense that they con­tain uni­vers­es in miniature—may be math­e­mat­i­cal­ly ver­i­fi­able sends a lit­tle chill up my spine.

via The Guardian

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear All of Finnegans Wake Read Aloud: A 35 Hour Read­ing

See What Hap­pens When You Run Finnegans Wake Through a Spell Check­er

James Joyce Reads From Ulysses and Finnegans Wake In His Only Two Record­ings (1924/1929)

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