Can You Solve These Animated Brain Teasers from TED-Ed?

Zom­bies, alien over­lords, sharks, a mad dictator…math is a dan­ger­ous propo­si­tion in the hands of TED Ed script writer Alex Gendler.

The recre­ation­al math­e­mat­ics puz­zles he retro­fits for TED’s edu­ca­tion­al ini­tia­tive have been around for hun­dreds, even thou­sands of years. In the past, sto­ry­lines tend­ed to rely on bias­es 21st-cen­tu­ry puz­zle solvers would find objec­tion­able. As math­e­mati­cian David Singmas­ter told Sci­ence News:

One must be a lit­tle care­ful with some of these prob­lems, as past cul­tures were often bla­tant­ly sex­ist or racist. But such prob­lems also show what the cul­ture was like.… The riv­er cross­ing prob­lem of the jeal­ous hus­bands is quite sex­ist and trans­forms into mas­ters and ser­vants, which is clas­sist, then into mis­sion­ar­ies and can­ni­bals, which is racist. With such prob­lems, you can offend every­body!

Gendler’s updates, ani­mat­ed by Artrake stu­dio, derive their nar­ra­tive urgency from the sort of crowd pleas­ing sci fi predica­ments that fuel sum­mer block­busters.

And for­tu­nate­ly for those of us whose brains are per­ma­nent­ly stuck in beach mode, he nev­er fails to explain how the char­ac­ters pre­vail, out­wit­ting or out­run­ning the afore­men­tioned zom­bies, aliens, sharks, and mad dic­ta­tor.

(No wor­ries if you’re deter­mined to find the solu­tion on your own. Gendler gives plen­ty of fair warn­ing before each reveal.)

Put your brain in gear, pull the skull-embossed lever, and remem­ber, team­work — and induc­tive log­ic — car­ry the day!

The pris­on­er hat rid­dle, above, hinges on a hier­ar­chy of beliefs and the alien overlord’s will­ing­ness to give its nine cap­tives a few min­utes to come up with a game plan.

Go deep­er into this age old puz­zle by view­ing the full les­son.

Gendler’s spin on the green-eyed log­ic puz­zle, above, con­tains two brain teasers, one for the hive mind, and one for an indi­vid­ual act­ing alone, with a strat­e­gy culled from philoso­pher David Lewis’ Com­mon Knowl­edge play­book. Here’s the full les­son.

Rar­ing for more? You’ll find a playlist of TED-Ed puz­zles by Gendler and oth­ers here. The full les­son for the bridge prob­lem at the top of the post is here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online Math Cours­es 

200 Free Text­books: A Meta Col­lec­tion 

Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge: 4 Bril­liant Math­e­mati­cians & Their Drift to Insan­i­ty

Ayun Hal­l­i­day, author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine, will be lead­ing a free col­lab­o­ra­tive zine work­shop  at the Glue­stick Fest in Indi­anapo­lis Sat­ur­day, July 9. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

Animated: Frank Zappa on Why the Culturally-Bereft United States Is So Susceptible to Fads (1971)

Frank Zap­pa was always frank. You got­ta give him that.

Speak­ing with Vil­lage Voice jour­nal­ist Howard Smith in 1971, Zap­pa talked can­did­ly about the tastes, opin­ions, and beliefs of most Amer­i­cans, whether they apply to music or pol­i­tics or any­thing else. “You have a nation of peo­ple who are wait­ing for the next big thing to hap­pen.” “I see a lot of changes. But I think they’re all tem­po­rary things and any change for the good is always sub­ject to can­cel­la­tion upon the arrival of the next fad. And the same thing with any change for the worst.”

Maybe it’s like this every­where. But it’s par­tic­u­lar­ly so in Amer­i­ca says Zap­pa:

I think that’s a rea­son­able way to look at it because [the U.S.] doesn’t have any real sort of val­ues, you know? And a fad pro­vides you with a tem­po­rary occu­pa­tion for your imag­i­na­tion. Real­ly, [Amer­i­ca] doesn’t have any real cul­ture. It doesn’t have any real art. It doesn’t have any real any­thing. It’s just got fads and a gross nation­al prod­uct and a lot of infla­tion.

It’s not a flat­ter­ing por­trait of the States. But know this. Zap­pa did­n’t see him­self being above it all: “I’m an Amer­i­can. I was born here. I auto­mat­i­cal­ly got entered in a mem­ber­ship in the club.” Yeah, Frank could be frank.

The video above was ani­mat­ed by Blank on Blank. You can read a tran­script of the con­ver­sa­tion here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Stream 82 Hours of Frank Zap­pa Music: Free Playlists of Songs He Com­posed & Per­formed

Frank Zap­pa Debates Cen­sor­ship on CNN’s Cross­fire (1986)

A Young Frank Zap­pa Turns the Bicy­cle into a Musi­cal Instru­ment on The Steve Allen Show (1963)

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An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary Time

OC bachelor coobook illustration

By the time I got to high school, home eco­nom­ics class­es had fall­en out of favor: the boys, of course, con­sid­ered them too “girly,” and the girls con­sid­ered them enforcers of tra­di­tion­al gen­der roles whol­ly out of place in mod­ern soci­ety. At that time, Amer­i­ca’s wide­spread obses­sion with food still had a few years before its full bloom, and now I imag­ine that learn­ing to cook has regained a cer­tain cachet even among teenagers. But what of “home eco­nom­ics” itself, that curi­ous ban­ner that com­bines a def­i­n­i­tion of eco­nom­ics nobody now quite rec­og­nizes with the less-than-fash­ion­able con­cepts of domes­tic­i­ty, prac­ti­cal­i­ty, and neces­si­ty?

You can get a sense of the field­’s his­to­ry with a vis­it to the Cook­book and Home Eco­nom­ics Col­lec­tion at the Inter­net Archive. Its items, drawn from the Young Research Library Depart­ment of Spe­cial Col­lec­tions at UCLA, the Ban­croft Library at The Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, and the Prelinger Library, “take us back to an Amer­i­ca in the ear­ly decades of the 20th cen­tu­ry cov­er­ing top­ics on cook­ery, tex­tiles, fam­i­ly and home, bud­get­ing, domes­tic sci­ences, and many oth­er delight­ful top­ics.” Some will find them more inher­ent­ly delight­ful than will oth­ers, but the his­tor­i­cal val­ue remains unde­ni­able: each and every book in the col­lec­tion takes us back to a dif­fer­ent time and place with its own inter­ests and pri­or­i­ties, in the kitchen as well as else­where in the home.

At the Inter­net Archive blog, Jeff Kaplan high­lights such works as the Pil­grim Cook Bookpub­lished by Chicago’s Pil­grim Evan­gel­i­cal Luther­an Church Ladies’ Aid Soci­ety in 1921 and includ­ing recipes for Sausage in Pota­to Box­es, Blitz Torte, Cough Syrup, and Sauer­kraut Can­dy; 1912’s more sub­dued Food for the invalid and the con­va­les­cent, with its Beef Juice, Meat Jel­ly, Crack­er Gru­el, and advice that, “among oth­er things, beer and pick­les are bad for chil­dren”; and even old­er, 1906’s A bach­e­lors cup­board; con­tain­ing crumbs culled from the cup­boards of the great unwed­ded which, warn­ing that “the day of of the ‘dude’ has passed and the weak­ling is rel­e­gat­ed to his right­ful sphere in short order,” offers meth­ods for the mak­ing of dish­es with names like Bed-Spread For Two, Indi­an Dev­il Mix­ture, Hot Birds, and Finnan Had­die.

If we dis­missed what­ev­er they taught in high school Home Ec as old-fash­ioned, then boy, the wis­dom pre­served in this cor­ner of the Inter­net Archive exists on a whole oth­er plane. But it also con­tains more than laughs: the seri­ous stu­dent of cui­sine and its his­to­ry will also find the likes of 1907’s A Guide to Mod­ern Cook­ery, the work of French “king of chefs and chef of kings” Auguste Escoffi­er, as well as — stick­ing, sen­si­bly, to that most Epi­cure­an of all nations — Le grand dic­tio­n­naire de cui­sine, a 1200-page ency­clo­pe­dia-cook­book pub­lished just after the death of its author, The Three Mus­ke­teers author Alexan­dre Dumas. As rel­e­vance goes, both of them of them sure­ly hold up far bet­ter than, say, The whole duty of a woman, or, An infal­li­ble guide to the fair sex: con­tain­ing rules, direc­tions, and obser­va­tions, for their con­duct and behav­ior through all ages and cir­cum­stances of life, as vir­gins, wives, or wid­ows.

Enter the archive of 3,000+ cook­books and home ec texts here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New York Times Makes 17,000 Tasty Recipes Avail­able Online: Japan­ese, Ital­ian, Thai & Much More

Cook­pad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launch­es New Site in Eng­lish

53 New York Times Videos Teach Essen­tial Cook­ing Tech­niques: From Poach­ing Eggs to Shuck­ing Oys­ters

1967 Cook­book Fea­tures Recipes by the Rolling Stones, Simon & Gar­funkel, Bar­bra Streisand & More

Archive of Hand­writ­ten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and 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.

Watch “The Corridor,” a Tribute to the Music Video Stanley Kubrick Planned to Make Near the End of His Life

When Stan­ley Kubrick died, he left behind numer­ous film ideas that would nev­er see the light of day. There was his epic Napoleon film; an adap­ta­tion of a Jim Thomp­son nov­el; his long-talked about Holo­caust film Aryan Papers; and so much more.

But this was a new one to hear about: in 1996 Kubrick agreed to direct a music video for UNKLE’s upcom­ing Psyence Fic­tion album. You may recall, back when MTV played music videos, see­ing Jonathan Glazer’s “Rab­bit in Your Head­lights” video, or Jake Scott’s “Be There,” both from UNKLE’s album. Alas, Kubrick­’s video nev­er got made. He had start­ed film­ing Eyes Wide Shut and then passed away upon its release.

Now “The Cor­ri­dor,” a glimpse of which you can see above, is an attempt to bring Kubrick and UNKLE back togeth­er. It’s not what actu­al­ly might have been filmed by the direc­tor, but some­thing that cap­tures the project in spir­it. It’s also a lov­ing trib­ute to Kubrick’s career and his love of sin­gle-point per­spec­tive, which has been video essayed else­where.

Direc­tor Toby Dye, who has direct­ed videos like “Par­adise Cir­cus” for Mas­sive Attack and “Anoth­er Night Out” for UNKLE, took on the job of bring­ing “The Cor­ri­dor” to the screen, co-designed by Rid­ley Scott Asso­ciates, work­ing with Dye’s Black Dog Films.

“The Cor­ri­dor” uses the one song off Psyence Fic­tion that nev­er got a video, the Richard Ashcroft-sung “Lone­ly Souls,” as its back­drop. Dye has cre­at­ed four nar­ra­tives that play on Kubrick’s icon­ic films–The Shin­ing, A Clock­work Orange, Bar­ry Lyn­don,and 2001–but then inter­weaves time and char­ac­ter along a long cor­ri­dor track­ing shot, star­ring Joan­na Lum­ley and Aiden Gillen.

In addi­tion, “The Cor­ri­dor” is a video cen­ter­piece to what sounds like a very cool exhi­bi­tion. Curat­ed by Mo’Wax and UNKLE founder James Lavelle, “Day­dream­ing with Stan­ley Kubrick” opened yes­ter­day at Som­er­set House in Lon­don and runs through August 24, 2016. Along with the video, the exhi­bi­tion fea­tures art­works cel­e­brat­ing Kubrick’s influ­ence on gen­er­a­tions of artists. (The stack of heaters on top of the Over­look car­pet is great.)

Said Dye:

‘For me, the unblink­ing red eye of 2001 A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 per­fect­ly encap­su­lates the cin­e­ma of Stan­ley Kubrick. For all his films share that same cool­ly ana­lyt­i­cal gaze, study­ing from afar mankind and all its many foibles. Kubrick’s cam­era nev­er appeared to fol­low the action, it was as if it moved of its own accord and the tableau of life sim­ply unfurled before it. It was his seem­ing­ly nev­er-end­ing cam­era zooms from Bar­ry Lyn­don that first sparked the seed of the idea behind “The Cor­ri­dor,” before that idea grew, and grew into some­thing that was, at times, infu­ri­at­ing­ly ambi­tious, but I hope in the best tra­di­tion of the man who inspired it.’

Those who can’t attend will have to wait and see if and when the full video for “The Cor­ri­dor” appears online. In the mean­time, Som­er­set House awaits.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Napoleon: The Great­est Movie Stan­ley Kubrick Nev­er Made

A Tour of Stan­ley Kubrick’s Prized Lens Col­lec­tion

The Shin­ing and Oth­er Com­plex Stan­ley Kubrick Films Recut as Sim­ple Hol­ly­wood Movies

Lost Kubrick: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on Stan­ley Kubrick’s Unfin­ished Films

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

32 Animated Videos by Wireless Philosophy Teach You the Essentials of Critical Thinking

Do you know some­one whose argu­ments con­sist of bald­ly spe­cious rea­son­ing, hope­less­ly con­fused cat­e­gories, arch­i­pel­a­gos of log­i­cal fal­lac­i­es but­tressed by sea­walls of cog­ni­tive bias­es? Sure­ly you do. Per­haps such a per­son would wel­come some instruc­tion on the prop­er­ties of crit­i­cal think­ing and argu­men­ta­tion? Not like­ly? Well, just in case, you may wish to send them over to this series of Wire­less Phi­los­o­phy (or “WiPhi”) videos by phi­los­o­phy instruc­tor Geoff Pynn of North­ern Illi­nois Uni­ver­si­ty and doc­tor­al stu­dents Kel­ley Schiff­man of Yale, Paul Henne of Duke, and sev­er­al oth­er phi­los­o­phy and psy­chol­o­gy grad­u­ates.

What is crit­i­cal think­ing? “Crit­i­cal think­ing,” says Pynn, “is about mak­ing sure that you have good rea­sons for your beliefs.” Now, there’s quite a bit more to it than that, as the var­i­ous instruc­tors explain over the course of 32 short lessons (watch them all at the bot­tom of the post), but Pynn’s intro­duc­to­ry video above lays out the foun­da­tion. Good rea­sons log­i­cal­ly sup­port the beliefs or con­clu­sions one adopts—from degrees of prob­a­bil­i­ty to absolute cer­tain­ty (a rare con­di­tion indeed). The sense of “good” here, Pynn spec­i­fies, does not relate to moral good­ness, but to log­i­cal coher­ence and truth val­ue. Though many ethi­cists and philoso­phers would dis­agree, he notes that it isn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly “moral­ly wrong or evil or wicked” to believe some­thing on the basis of bad rea­sons. But in order to think ratio­nal­ly, we need to dis­tin­guish “good” rea­sons from “bad” ones.

“A good rea­son for a belief,” Pynn says, “is one that makes it prob­a­ble. That is, it’s one that makes the belief like­ly to be true. The very best rea­sons for a belief make it cer­tain. They guar­an­tee it.” In his next two videos, above and below, he dis­cuss­es these two class­es of argument—one relat­ing to cer­tain­ty, the oth­er prob­a­bil­i­ty. The first class, deduc­tive argu­ments, occur in the clas­sic, Aris­totelian form of the syl­lo­gism, and they should guar­an­tee their con­clu­sions, mean­ing that “it’s impos­si­ble for the premis­es to be true while the con­clu­sion is false” (pro­vid­ed the form of the argu­ment itself is cor­rect). In such an instance, we say the argu­ment is “valid,” a tech­ni­cal philo­soph­i­cal term that rough­ly cor­re­sponds to what we mean by a “good, cogent, or rea­son­able” argu­ment. Some prop­er­ties of deduc­tive rea­son­ing—valid­i­ty, truth, and sound­ness—receive their own explana­to­ry videos lat­er in the series.

In abduc­tive argu­ments (or what are also called “induc­tive argu­ments”), above, we rea­son infor­mal­ly to the best, most prob­a­ble expla­na­tion. In these kinds of argu­ments, the premis­es do not guar­an­tee the con­clu­sion, and the argu­ments are not bound in rigid for­mal syl­lo­gisms. Rather, we must make a leap—or an inference—to what seems like the most like­ly con­clu­sion giv­en the rea­son­ing and evi­dence. Find­ing addi­tion­al evi­dence, or find­ing that some of our evi­dence or rea­son­ing is incor­rect or must be rethought, should force us to reassess the like­li­hood of our con­clu­sion and make new infer­ences. Most sci­en­tif­ic expla­na­tions rely on abduc­tive rea­son­ing, which is why they are sub­ject to retrac­tion or revi­sion. New evidence—or new under­stand­ings of the evidence—often requires new con­clu­sions.

As for under­stand­ing probability—the like­li­hood that rea­sons pro­vide suf­fi­cient jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for infer­ring par­tic­u­lar conclusions—well… this is where we often get into trou­ble, falling vic­tim to all sorts of fal­lac­i­es. And when it comes to inter­pret­ing evi­dence, we’re prey to a num­ber of psy­cho­log­i­cal bias­es that pre­vent us from mak­ing fair assess­ments. WiPhi brings pre­vi­ous video series to bear on these prob­lems of argu­men­ta­tion, one on For­mal and Infor­mal Fal­lac­i­es and anoth­er on Cog­ni­tive Bias­es.

Courera - Earn your Degree Online

When it comes to a gen­er­al the­o­ry of prob­a­bil­i­ty itself, we would all ben­e­fit from some under­stand­ing of what’s called Bayes’ The­o­rem, named for the 18th cen­tu­ry sta­tis­ti­cian and philoso­pher Thomas Bayes. Bayes’ The­o­rem can seem for­bid­ding, but its wide appli­ca­tion across a range of dis­ci­plines speaks to its impor­tance. “Some philoso­phers,” says CUNY grad­u­ate stu­dent Ian Olasov in his video les­son above, “even think it’s the key to under­stand­ing what it means to think ratio­nal­ly.”

Bayesian rea­son­ing, infor­mal log­ic, sound, valid, and true argu­ments… all of these modes of crit­i­cal think­ing help us make sense of the tan­gles of infor­ma­tion we find our­selves caught up in dai­ly. Though some of our less ratio­nal­ly-inclined acquain­tances may not be recep­tive to good intro­duc­to­ry lessons like these, it’s worth the effort to pass them along. And while we’re at it, we can sharp­en our own rea­son­ing skills and learn quite a bit about where we go right and where we go wrong as crit­i­cal thinkers in Wire­less Philosophy’s thor­ough, high qual­i­ty series of video lessons.

Find more help­ful resources in the Relat­eds below.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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:

Down­load 130 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es: Tools for Think­ing About Life, Death & Every­thing Between

Carl Sagan Presents His “Baloney Detec­tion Kit”: 8 Tools for Skep­ti­cal Think­ing

How to Spot Bull­shit: A Primer by Prince­ton Philoso­pher Har­ry Frank­furt

Michael Shermer’s Baloney Detec­tion Kit: What to Ask Before Believ­ing

Daniel Den­nett Presents Sev­en Tools For Crit­i­cal Think­ing

“Call­ing Bull­shit”: See the Syl­labus for a Col­lege Course Designed to Iden­ti­fy & Com­bat Bull­shit

Oxford’s Free Course Crit­i­cal Rea­son­ing For Begin­ners Will Teach You to Think Like a Philoso­pher

1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

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

 

What’s the Essence of Music & Sound?: Meditations from Radiolab’s Jad Abumrad Presented in a Short, Creative Film

If you’ve ever lis­tened to Radi­o­lab, one of the most pop­u­lar and endur­ing pod­casts out there, you know how much music (and sound more gen­er­al­ly) plays a spe­cial role in the show’s pro­duc­tion. And that’s all large­ly the cre­ation of Radi­o­lab’s co-host, Jad Abum­rad. You know those “jaggedy sounds, lit­tle plurps and things, strange stac­ca­to, per­cus­sive things” that make the show so dis­tinc­tive? That’s all Abum­rad, who majored in exper­i­men­tal music com­po­si­tion and pro­duc­tion at Ober­lin Col­lege.

To get inside Abum­rad’s think­ing about music (what is sound? what is music? why do we orga­nize sound into music?) watch the video above. Mac Pre­mo inter­viewed Jad, then turned the con­ver­sa­tion into a short cre­ative film. Note: If you don’t react well to see­ing fast-mov­ing images, you might want to skip this one.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

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!

The Prince Online Museum Archives 16 of Prince’s Official Web Sites, Spanning 20 Years

PrinceOnline Lotusflow3r

In March of 2015, The Guardian pub­lished a piece on Prince’s vault, begun by his for­mer sound engi­neer Susan Rogers before his Pur­ple Rain super­star­dom: “It’s an actu­al bank vault, with a thick door,” she said, “in the base­ment of Pais­ley Park. When I left in 87, it was near­ly full.” That was 30 years ago. Com­pos­er and Prince orches­tra­tor Brent Fis­ch­er spec­u­lat­ed that “over 70% of the music we’ve worked on for Prince is yet to come out.” Already able to release “in a decade what most musi­cians couldn’t put out in a life­time,” Prince stored in his vaults enough to reveal him as thrice the pro­lif­ic genius we knew in life.

PrinceOnline TheDawn

Now that Prince has depart­ed, the vault has been final­ly been opened. What’s in it? Spec­u­la­tion, rumor, and hoax­es abound; we could see a posthu­mous album a year for the next cen­tu­ry. As they trick­le out we’ll like­ly see more con­ven­tion­al, less Prince-like releas­ing strate­gies, now that he is no longer per­son­al­ly in con­trol of his out­put. This will sure­ly make it eas­i­er on his fans, but will also strip the music of much of its curi­ous mys­tique. “A stream­ing skep­tic before it was fash­ion­able,” writes August Brown at the L.A. Times, and “a born futur­ist,” Prince excelled at “cre­at­ing new dis­tri­b­u­tion sys­tems under his purview.” As an ear­ly adopter of web tech­nol­o­gy, he began giv­ing away and sell­ing his music and mer­chan­dise online as ear­ly as 1996, when he cre­at­ed his first offi­cial web­site, “The Dawn” (above).

PrinceOnline NPG2003

Prince’s web debut hap­pened in the midst of his pitched bat­tle with Warn­er Broth­ers, and three years after he changed his name to the “Love Sym­bol.” Brows­ing through the his­to­ry of his inter­net strate­gies allows us to see how his per­son­al­ized dis­tri­b­u­tion approach­es and online iden­ti­ties evolved over the next two decades as he regained full cre­ative inde­pen­dence. We can eas­i­ly sur­vey that his­to­ry all in one place now, thanks to the Prince Online Muse­um, an archive of 16 of Prince’s var­i­ous web­sites, each one with its own pro­file writ­ten in Prince’s dis­tinc­tive idiom, with “tes­ti­mo­ni­als from the peo­ple who were involved in cre­at­ing and run­ning them for Prince,” writes The New York Times, and “links as well as screen shots and videos” of each site, none of them cur­rent­ly active.

There’s even a pre­cur­sor to Prince’s online world, Prince Inter­ac­tive, a 1994 CD-Rom “cou­pled with Prince’s under­ground film, The Beau­ti­ful Expe­ri­ence.” This ear­ly attempt makes clear that “Prince was fas­ci­nat­ed and excit­ed by the pos­si­bil­i­ties of con­nect­ing direct­ly 2 his audi­ence through their com­put­ers. It would be sev­er­al years until that became a real­i­ty 4 him, but the idea start­ed here.” (See a slow video walk-through of the CD-Rom above). After 1996’s “The Dawn” came the first offi­cial online retail store, “1–800-NewFunk,” and an online lyric book, “Crys­tal Ball Online.” Suc­ces­sive sites each had a dis­tinc­tive focus: on Prince’s char­i­ta­ble foun­da­tion with “Love 4 One Anoth­er”; on var­i­ous iter­a­tions of his “NPG Music Club,” an “online dis­tri­b­u­tion hub”—including the “vir­tu­al estate” of the 2003 iter­a­tion (see pic­ture fur­ther up); and on rebrand­ing efforts like “3121.com.”

PrinceOnline 3rdEyeGirl

One of the most strik­ing of all of the var­i­ous sites, “Lotusflow3r” (top) con­tained “vibrant 3D imagery and ani­ma­tion con­nect­ed 2 the music” and design of the 3‑CD album set of the same name from 2009. The last entry in the archive, the “3rdEyeGirl” site from 2013, was cre­at­ed for Prince’s new band and “was anoth­er exam­ple of choos­ing 2 bypass tra­di­tion­al chan­nels and go his own way.” Each of these site pro­files act as “snap­shots in time to expe­ri­ence the Web sites just like when they were active,” writes Prince Online Muse­um direc­tor Sam Jen­nings. They also show­case “his fierce inde­pen­dence” and desire “to con­nect direct­ly with his audi­ence with­out any mid­dle­man.”

You can explore the Prince Online Muse­um here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Life of Prince in a 24-Page Com­ic Book: A New Release

See Prince (RIP) Play Mind-Blow­ing Gui­tar Solos On “While My Gui­tar Gen­tly Weeps” and “Amer­i­can Woman”

Prince Plays Unplugged and Wraps the Crowd Around His Lit­tle Fin­ger (2004)

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

Four Video Essays Explain the Mastery of Filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami (RIP)

With each film he made, the inter­na­tion­al­ly acclaimed Iran­ian film­mak­er Abbas Kiarosta­mi left crit­ics grasp­ing for superla­tives, and his death this past Mon­day has chal­lenged them to find ways to ful­ly describe the dis­tinc­tive nature of his cin­e­mat­ic mas­tery. In his New York­er obit­u­ary for Kiarosta­mi, Richard Brody calls him “sim­ply one of the most orig­i­nal and influ­en­tial direc­tors in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma,” as well as “the first Iran­ian film­mak­er who expand­ed the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma not mere­ly in a soci­o­log­i­cal sense but in an artis­tic one,” whose “tena­cious, bold, rest­less orig­i­nal­i­ty” brought the world to Iran­ian cin­e­ma and Iran­ian cin­e­ma to the world.

Brody nar­rat­ed video essays on two films of Kiarostami’s. He calls 1999’s The Wind Will Car­ry Us (above) “the great­est of Kiarostami’s Iran­ian films,” a show­case for his com­bi­na­tion of “patient and lov­ing atten­tion to char­ac­ters drawn from dai­ly life and to their land­scapes with a pre­cise, can­ny, and fierce dis­til­la­tion of con­crete phe­nom­e­na into bril­liant, ver­tig­i­nous, and lib­er­at­ing abstrac­tions.” In 2012’s Tokyo-set Like Some­one in Love, Kiarostami’s final film, he “found him­self freer than usu­al to depict such ordi­nary events as a woman, her hair uncov­ered, in a bed­room with a man. But, fac­ing the seem­ing­ly lim­it­less free­dom of depic­tion, Kiarosta­mi inge­nious­ly revers­es the equa­tion; start­ing with the title and con­tin­u­ing with the very first shot, he ques­tions the dif­fer­ence between sim­u­la­tion and real­i­ty, between imi­ta­tion and being.”

Audi­ences every­where thrilled to Kiarostami’s treat­ment of those con­cepts, poten­tial­ly abstruse in the hands of oth­er film­mak­ers but nev­er in his, when he put them at the cen­ter of 2010’s Juli­ette Binoche-star­ing Cer­ti­fied Copy, the first film he made out­side Iran. In his video essay “The Dou­ble Life of James and Juli­ette: Mys­ter­ies and Per­cep­tions in Kiarostami’s Cer­ti­fied Copy,” cin­e­ma schol­ar Peter Labuza breaks down this many-lay­ered, mul­ti­fac­eted, mul­ti­lin­gual work, in one sense a no-frills rela­tion­ship dra­ma about a man and a woman who may or may not be or have been mar­ried, and in anoth­er a “com­plete and total enig­ma” deeply con­cerned with “the nature and role of per­cep­tion.”

Gra­ham Bol­lard’s “The Min­i­mal­ist Cin­e­ma of Abbas Kiarosta­mi” focus­es on the direc­tor’s aes­thet­ic choic­es, such as often shoot­ing inside cars, whose space “helps define the main char­ac­ter’s point of view” and repeat­ing a shot in such a way that “we, the audi­ence, are forced to view it in dif­fer­ent ways that take on dif­fer­ent mean­ings,” draw­ing visu­al evi­dence from Kiarostami’s Iran­ian films like Taste of Cher­ryTen, and Close-Up, from which Hamid Dabashi’s book Close Up: Iran­ian Cin­e­ma, Past, Present, and Future takes its name. The essay ends with a quote from it, describ­ing Kiarostami’s work as “there to fil­ter the world and thus strip it of all its cul­tures, nar­ra­tiv­i­ties, author­i­ties, and ide­olo­gies” — no small accom­plish­ment for one life­time in cin­e­ma.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Inside the Renais­sance of Iran­ian Cin­e­ma

Watch a Video Essay on the Poet­ic Har­mo­ny of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Film­mak­ing, Then View His Major Films Free Online

The Geo­met­ric Beau­ty of Aki­ra Kuro­sawa and Wes Anderson’s Films

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.

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