Ansel Adams, Photographer: 1958 Documentary Captures the Creative Process of the Iconic American Photographer

Amer­i­ca has spe­cial­ized in both the beau­ti­ful and the ter­ri­ble, inspir­ing awe of every pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive vari­ety. That goes for both the human achieve­ments that have hap­pened there as well of the nat­ur­al envi­ron­ments they’ve hap­pened in and around, both of which define Amer­i­ca equal­ly and have made it the kind of place the word sub­lime, mix­ing in as it does a tinge of fear with admi­ra­tion, was coined to describe. Ansel Adams, who ascend­ed to the top of the pho­to­graph­ic pan­theon with his career spent shoot­ing the 20th-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can West, seemed born to cap­ture that sub­lim­i­ty.

How did he do it? The 1958 doc­u­men­tary Ansel Adams, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er (also avail­able on Archive.org) offers a twen­ty-minute look into the life and work of the man whose name has become a byword for the majes­tic black-and-white Amer­i­can land­scape. We also hear a few of his philo­soph­i­cal posi­tions on his work. “Per­haps music is the most expres­sive of the arts,” says Adams him­self after a few min­utes at the piano. “How­ev­er, as a pho­tog­ra­ph­er, I believe that cre­ative pho­tog­ra­phy, when prac­ticed in terms of its inher­ent qual­i­ties, may also reveal end­less hori­zons of mean­ing.”

We then see and hear about all the (high­ly pre-dig­i­tal) cam­eras and asso­ci­at­ed tools with which Adams engaged in that prac­tice before head­ing out to the coast to watch him in action. “Like every good pho­tog­ra­ph­er,” says the nar­ra­tor, Adams “pre-visu­al­izes his final print right there,” a tech­nique we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly cov­ered here on Open Cul­ture. Then out comes the light meter, in order to “esti­mate what expo­sure he needs now and what devel­op­ment he needs lat­er.” Every choice Adams made — about “film, lens, fil­ter, lens exten­sion, lens aper­ture, shut­ter set­ting,” and more — he metic­u­lous­ly record­ed in his note­book.

After devel­op­ing and exam­in­ing the neg­a­tive in his lab, he tries out a “test expo­sure,” which pleas­ing­ly turns out as a “quite well-bal­anced” image, but one that nev­er­the­less sug­gests improv­ing tweaks for the next one. (Col­or film’s rel­a­tive lack of flex­i­bil­i­ty in this part of the process kept black-and-white Adams’ pho­to­graph­ic form of choice.) “Once Adams has achieved the print he wants,” the nar­ra­tor tells us, “he is able, sim­ply by con­trol­ling expo­sure and pro­cess­ing, to make from one neg­a­tive hun­dreds of fine prints in a day. By this tech­nique, he can pro­duce port­fo­lios of orig­i­nal prints which are in them­selves works of art.”

Much has changed about pho­tog­ra­phy since Adams did it, of course, though most­ly in the tech­ni­cal sense. As the process of sim­ply mak­ing a pho­to­graph becomes ever faster and eas­i­er, the dis­ci­pline, con­cen­tra­tion, and appetite for rig­or of a pho­tog­ra­ph­er like Adams, whose “stan­dards are as high as those of an archi­tect or an engi­neer,” become ever rar­er and more valu­able. Like all of the most impor­tant artists, his process in com­bi­na­tion with his very nature tran­scend­ed the lim­i­ta­tions of his time, result­ing in images of Amer­i­ca that, to this day, still look not just as if we could step right into them, but real­er, some­how, than real­i­ty itself.

Ansel Adams, Pho­tog­ra­ph­er has been added to our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Ansel Adams’ 226 Pho­tos of U.S. Nation­al Parks (and Anoth­er Side of the Leg­endary Pho­tog­ra­ph­er)

How to Take Pho­tographs Like Ansel Adams: The Mas­ter Explains The Art of “Visu­al­iza­tion”

200 Ansel Adams Pho­tographs Expose the Rig­ors of Life in Japan­ese Intern­ment Camps Dur­ing WW II

Alfred Stieglitz: The Elo­quent Eye, a Reveal­ing Look at “The Father of Mod­ern Pho­tog­ra­phy”

1972 Diane Arbus Doc­u­men­tary Inter­views Those Who Knew the Amer­i­can Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Best

Hen­ri Carti­er-Bres­son and the Deci­sive Moment

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.

Hear Controversial Versions of “The Star Spangled Banner” by Igor Stravinsky, Jimi Hendrix, José Feliciano & John Philip Sousa

Debates over whether or not we should destroy or alter U.S. icons seem to turn on a crit­i­cal ques­tion: are nation­al sym­bols qua­si-reli­gious totems of some tran­scen­dent sacred order? The kind of impe­r­i­al project like­ly to end up a col­lec­tion of crum­bling mon­u­ments with every oth­er empire of the past? Or are they liv­ing emblems of a sec­u­lar repub­lic whose pri­ma­ry embod­i­ment is its peo­ple? A coun­try, like its peo­ple, that must recon­sti­tute itself with each gen­er­a­tion in order to sur­vive?

Either way, the nation’s sym­bols have always with­stood cre­ative destruc­tion, détourne­ment, and recon­tex­tu­al­iza­tion. Sub­ject­ing nation­al iconog­ra­phy to the inter­ven­tions of artists and activists restores a sense of pro­por­tion, show­ing us that our gov­ern­ment and its sym­bols belong to the peo­ple, rather than the oth­er way around. The idea is a pow­er­ful one. So much so that its expres­sion nev­er fails to excite con­tro­ver­sy. And few expres­sions have pro­voked more ire than per­for­mances of (or respons­es to) the nation­al anthem that devi­ate from the staid tra­di­tion­al arrange­ment.

We could point to very obvi­ous anthem con­tro­ver­sies, like Roseanne Barr’s irrev­er­ent 1990 ren­di­tion. But cer­tain oth­er inter­pre­ta­tions have had much more seri­ous artis­tic intent, like that of nat­u­ral­ized cit­i­zen Igor Stravin­sky, whose 1944 ver­sion (top) came from his “desire to do my bit in these griev­ous times toward fos­ter­ing and pre­serv­ing the spir­it of patri­o­tism in this coun­try.” Stravinsky’s earnest ambi­tion was thwart­ed. He couldn’t help but add his sig­na­ture, in this case a dom­i­nant sev­enth chord, to the arrange­ment.

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 Boston police respond­ed by issu­ing him a warn­ing, claim­ing, we not­ed in a pre­vi­ous post, “there was a law against tam­per­ing with the nation­al anthem” (there wasn’t). Stravin­sky “grudg­ing­ly” pulled the anthem from his Boston Sym­pho­ny bill. Over twen­ty years lat­er, the blind Puer­to Rican folk singer José Feli­ciano played the anthem before the 1968 World Series in his own emo­tion­al­ly-charged style. And like Stravin­sky, he was moti­vat­ed by love of coun­try. “I had set out to sing an anthem of grat­i­tude to a coun­try that had giv­en me a chance,” he lat­er recalled, “that had allowed me, a blind kid from Puer­to Rico—a kid with a dream—to reach far above my own lim­i­ta­tions.”

Much of the coun­try did not respond in kind. Even dur­ing the per­for­mance, Feli­ciano could “feel the dis­con­tent with­in the waves of cheers and applause that spurred on the first pitch.” After­wards, he learned that “a great con­tro­ver­sy was explod­ing across the coun­try because I had cho­sen to alter my ren­di­tion.… Vet­er­ans, I was being told, had thrown their shoes at the tele­vi­sion as I sang; oth­ers ques­tioned my right to stay in the Unit­ed States.” Feli­ciano admits, “yes, it was dif­fer­ent but I promise you,” he says, “it was sin­cere.” So was the most rad­i­cal of “Star-Span­gled Ban­ner” inter­pre­ta­tions, Jimi Hendrix’s feed­back-laden ver­sion at Wood­stock the fol­low­ing year.

A vet­er­an him­self, Hen­drix wasn’t moti­vat­ed by wartime patri­o­tism or per­son­al grat­i­tude, but by a desire, per­haps, to tell the truth about what his coun­try was doing to thou­sands of peo­ple in South­east Asia—“Napalm bombs,” as he said at the time, “peo­ple get­ting burned up on TV.” It’s a sub­ject he occa­sion­al­ly touched on lyri­cal­ly; here he let the gui­tar tell it, “turn­ing the music to a lit­er­al inter­pre­ta­tion of the lyrics: bombs burst­ing in air, rock­ets light­ing up the night,” writes Andy Cush at Spin, “Hen­drix began to sly­ly use the music’s own mar­tial bom­bast to reflect the vio­lence car­ried out under his nation’s flag.” He was hard­ly the first to exploit the song’s inher­ent bom­bast.

Almost 100 years before Woodstock—before the nation­al anthem was even the nation­al anthem—one of the most icon­ic of Amer­i­can of com­posers re-arranged “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner.” John Philip Sousa (who would go on to write “Stars and Stripes For­ev­er”) con­ceived the song in the “man­ner of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Over­ture,” New York­er music crit­ic Alex Ross tells us. (You can stream the Wag­ner­ian adap­ta­tion of “The Star Span­gled Ban­ner” here.) He was “young and lit­tle known at that time,” Ross remarks, “and his sly­ly Wag­ner­ian take on the future nation­al anthem was eclipsed by the famous­ly mediocre and expen­sive Cen­ten­ni­al March that Wag­n­er him­self penned for the occa­sion.” There’s no indi­ca­tion Sousa’s arrange­ment pro­voked a nation­al upset. But it did set a prece­dent for what we might as well call an Amer­i­can tra­di­tion of musi­cians alter­ing the anthem, using it to speak not to Fran­cis Scott Key’s Amer­i­ca, but to their own.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Isaac Asi­mov: “I Am Crazy, Absolute­ly Nuts, About our Nation­al Anthem” (1991)

William Shat­ner Sings O Cana­da (and Hap­py Cana­da Day)

Slavoj Žižek Exam­ines the Per­verse Ide­ol­o­gy of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy

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

Woody: A Prize-Winning Short Animation About a Wooden Man’s Dream of Becoming a Concert Pianist

“Ever since he was a child, Woody has dreamt of play­ing piano. The prob­lem is that he only has wood­en pad­dles for hands. Stuck in a job he doesn’t want, Woody spends his days dream­ing of being a con­cert pianist. His dreams are big…but they’re about to get out of hand.”

That’s how ani­ma­tor Stu­art Bowen sets up the short ani­mat­ed film, sim­ply called “Woody.”

Bowen shot the film on a pret­ty tight bud­get, with mon­ey raised large­ly through crowd­fund­ing. The direc­tor notes: “We built the sets out of paper, foam-core, & card­board so we could achieve an ‘in-cam­era’ look while keep­ing costs down. We shot black and white because coloured ink was too expen­sive. We sourced hun­dreds of Bar­bie clothes through Face­book to dress the crowd and were extreme­ly for­tu­nate to have a large group of vol­un­teers keen to help make the film.”

Screened at count­less film fes­ti­vals in 2013 and 2014, “Woody” won the award for best ani­mat­ed short at the Seat­tle Film Fes­ti­val and received an AACTA award for best short ani­ma­tion (among oth­er acco­lades).

You can find many oth­er cre­ative ani­ma­tions in our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More.

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:

Why You Can Nev­er Tune a Piano

Hear Friedrich Nietzsche’s Clas­si­cal Piano Com­po­si­tions: They’re Apho­ris­tic Like His Phi­los­o­phy

The Mak­ing of a Stein­way Grand Piano, From Start to Fin­ish

 

Medieval Doodler Draws a “Rockstar Lady” in a Manuscript of Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy (Circa 1500)

Sloane 554 f 53

By the ear­ly 6th cen­tu­ry, the West­ern Roman Empire had effec­tive­ly come to an end after the depo­si­tion of the final emper­or and the instal­la­tion of Ger­man­ic kings. Under the sec­ond such ruler, Theodor­ic the Great, emerged one of the most influ­en­tial works of lit­er­a­ture of the Euro­pean Mid­dle Ages: The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy. Its author, sen­a­tor and philoso­pher Boethius, wrote the text while impris­oned and await­ing exe­cu­tion.

A con­ver­sa­tion the despon­dent author has with his muse, Lady Phi­los­o­phy, the book seeks the nature of hap­pi­ness and the nature of God, in the midst of great loss, dis­grace, and tyran­ny. The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy belongs to a long tra­di­tion of prison lit­er­a­ture that extends to Don Quixote, “Civ­il Dis­obe­di­ence,” and “Let­ter from a Birm­ing­ham Jail.” Almost a thou­sand years after Boethius’s 524 exe­cu­tion, one late Medieval read­er of his book—perhaps inspired by the text, or not—left the draw­ing you see above on the last page of a 15th cen­tu­ry Eng­lish illu­mi­nat­ed man­u­script.

medieval-rocker-2

Such doo­dling was com­mon prac­tice at the time, notes Medieval book his­to­ri­an Erik Kwakkel. Blank pages in man­u­scripts “often filled up with pen tri­als, notes, doo­dles, or draw­ings.” But this par­tic­u­lar doo­dle “is not what you’d expect: a full-on draw­ing of a maid­en play­ing the lute, which she holds just like a gui­tar.” Boethius may have dis­missed poet­ry in his search for hap­pi­ness in the midst of despair, but his lit­er­ary efforts might put us in mind of poet Berthold Brecht, who famous­ly wrote while in exile from Ger­many in the 1930s, “In the dark times/Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing/About the dark times.”

As if to remind us of the neces­si­ty not only of phi­los­o­phy, but also of song in dark times, our anony­mous read­er drew a “rock­star lady,” whose pose con­notes noth­ing but pure joy. We could jux­ta­pose her with the joy­ful gui­tar pos­es of any num­ber of mod­ern blues and rock stars, who have played through any num­ber of dark times. The draw­ing appears in a trans­la­tion by John Wal­ton dat­ing from between 1410 and 1500, a cen­tu­ry in Europe with no short­age of its own polit­i­cal crises and tyran­ni­cal rulers. “Even in the dark­est of times,” wrote Han­nah Arendt in her essay col­lec­tion pro­fil­ing artists and writ­ers like Boethius and Brecht, “we have the right to expect some illu­mi­na­tion,” whether from phi­los­o­phy or poet­ry. We also have the right—the medieval doo­dler in Boethius’ book seemed to sug­gest some 500-odd years ago—to rock out.

via Erik Kwakkel

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Wear­able Books: In Medieval Times, They Took Old Man­u­scripts & Turned Them into Clothes

Medieval Cats Behav­ing Bad­ly: Kit­ties That Left Paw Prints … and Peed … on 15th Cen­tu­ry Man­u­scripts

Won­der­ful­ly Weird & Inge­nious Medieval Books

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

Italian Pianist Ludovico Einaudi Plays a Grand Piano While Floating in the Middle of the Arctic Ocean

Above, watch Ital­ian pianist and com­pos­er Ludovi­co Ein­au­di per­form an orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion, “Ele­gy for the Arc­tic,” on a grand piano, float­ing right in the mid­dle of the Arc­tic Ocean. In one of his most chal­leng­ing per­for­mances, Ein­au­di played “Ele­gy for the Arc­tic” for the very first time–a piece ded­i­cat­ed to the preser­va­tion of the Arc­tic. The home of endan­gered wildlife, the region also helps reg­u­late our frag­ile cli­mate. And our future depends part­ly on whether we keep it intact.

To pull off this pro­duc­tion, a Green­peace ship trans­port­ed Ein­au­di and his grand piano to the seas north of Nor­way, and put them on a large plat­form. Says Green­peace:

The mas­sive ear­ly retreat of sea ice due to the effects of cli­mate change allowed the con­struc­tion of a 2.6 x 10 metre arti­fi­cial ice­berg, made from more than 300 tri­an­gles of wood attached togeth­er and weigh­ing a total of near­ly two tonnes. A grand piano was then placed on top of the plat­form.

You can see Ein­au­di per­form­ing right in front of a large glac­i­er, while ice sheets fall aways as he plays. It’s a sight to behold.

If you would like to help pro­tect the Arc­tic, you can donate to Green­peace 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:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

A Beau­ti­ful Drone’s Eye View of Antarc­ti­ca

The Arc­tic Light

The Mak­ing of a Stein­way Grand Piano, From Start to Fin­ish

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How To Understand a Picasso Painting: A Video Primer

night-fishing-picasso

Some­times it’s hard for the untrained eye to fig­ure out what exact­ly is going on in a Picas­so.

For­tu­nate­ly, the artist leaned toward infor­ma­tive, work­man­like titles.

Had he titled “Night Fish­ing at Antibes,” below, some­thing a bit more opaque—“Untitled No. 2,” say—the une­d­u­cat­ed eye might well per­ceive the nar­ra­tive as some­thing clos­er to “Drunk­en Night in a Con­vey­er Belt Sushi Joint.”

Even know­ing the cor­rect title, my gut still argues that the boomerang-head­ed lady with boobs like lips is singing karaoke…

But after watch­ing the above video by Evan Puschak, aka The Nerd­writer, I’m will­ing to con­cede that she’s stand­ing on a jet­ty, a like­ly amal­ga­ma­tion of two of Picas­so’s lovers.

(The less volup­tuous crea­ture stand­ing next to her is his wife, and my gut is eager to know why it looks like she’s top­less, a point on which Pushak is frus­trat­ing­ly mum.)

His process for under­stand­ing a Picas­so takes the gut response into account, but then flesh­es things out with four addi­tion­al steps. You can apply them to many oth­er artists’ work too.

  1. First reac­tion
  2. Con­tent
  3. Form
  4. His­tor­i­cal con­text
  5. Per­son­al con­text

It’s cer­tain­ly help­ful to know that the paint­ing was made in 1939.

You prob­a­bly don’t need the Inter­net to guess what world events were like­ly a source of pre­oc­cu­pa­tion for the artist, whose “Guer­ni­ca” was com­plet­ed just two years ear­li­er.

Con­tent-wise, Puschak truf­fles up some inter­est­ing geo­graph­i­cal ref­er­ences that elude most online analy­sis of the work. For instance, those pur­ple blocks in the upper left cor­ner now house the Musée Picas­so.

There may well be a sixth step. Ear­li­er, when a fan of the Nerdwriter’s week­ly video essay series asked Puschak how to under­stand art, he respond­ed:

All good art is try­ing to tell you some­thing about your life. Your life… specif­i­cal­ly. So under­stand­ing art is a process of under­stand­ing your­self, and vice ver­sa. In both cas­es, you only learn by engag­ing. Watch­ing isn’t enough, nei­ther is read­ing or lis­ten­ing or think­ing for that mat­ter. From my per­spec­tive, engage­ment means writ­ing. An idea that’s been snaking around in my videos for a long time is that we learn by say­ing, not think­ing. You know some­thing when you can artic­u­late it, and for that you need words and sen­tences and para­graphs. So intro­spect, write down what your mind is doing. And when you watch a movie or look at a paint­ing, write down how you feel about it. You’ll be amazed how one informs the oth­er, and before long you’ll see some beau­ti­ful sparks. 

Below are some of the resources Puschak cred­its with inform­ing this Nerd­writer episode:

Rudolf Arn­heim, “Picas­so’s Night Fish­ing at Antibes” The Jour­nal of Aes­thet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism — Vol. 22, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1963), pp. 165–167

Dou­glas N. Mor­gan, “Picas­so’s Peo­ple: A Les­son in Mak­ing Sense” The Jour­nal of Aes­thet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism Vol. 22, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1963), pp. 167–171

Nina Coraz­zo, “Picas­so’s ‘Night Fish­ing at Antibes’: A New Source” The Burling­ton Mag­a­zine Vol. 132, No. 1043 (Feb., 1990), pp. 99–101

Mark Rosen­thal, “Picas­so’s Night Fish­ing at Antibes: A Med­i­ta­tion on Death” The Art Bul­letin Vol. 65, No. 4 (Dec., 1983), pp. 649–658

Albert Boime, “Picas­so’s “Night Fish­ing at Antibes”: One More Try” The Jour­nal of Aes­thet­ics and Art Crit­i­cism Vol. 29, No. 2 (Win­ter, 1970), pp. 223–226

Tim­o­thy Anglin Bur­gard, “Picas­so’s Night Fish­ing at Antibes: Auto­bi­og­ra­phy, Apoc­a­lypse, and the Span­ish Civ­il War” The Art Bul­letin Vol. 68, No. 4 (Dec., 1986), pp. 657–672

Lawrence D. Steefel, Jr., “Body Imagery in Picas­so’s “Night Fish­ing at Antibes” Art Jour­nal Vol. 25, No. 4 (Sum­mer, 1966), pp. 356–363+376

You can view the Nerdwriter’s oth­er videos on his web­site or sub­scribe to his YouTube chan­nel where a new video is pub­lished every Wednes­day.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Picas­so Cre­ate Entire Paint­ings in Mag­nif­i­cent Time-Lapse Film (1956)

The Mys­tery of Picas­so: Land­mark Film of a Leg­endary Artist at Work, by Hen­ri-Georges Clouzot

How to Look at Art: A Short Visu­al Guide by Car­toon­ist Lyn­da Bar­ry

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her play Zam­boni Godot is open­ing in New York City in March 2017. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Discover Lincos, the Language a Dutch Mathematician Invented Just to Talk to Extraterrestrials (1960)

lincos

The recent hit film Arrival took on a ques­tion that has, in recent decades, deeply con­cerned those involved in the search for intel­li­gent life else­where in the uni­verse. Say we locate that intel­li­gent life. Say we decide what we want to say. On what basis, then, do we fig­ure out how to say it? Aliens, while they may well have evolved cer­tain qual­i­ties in com­mon with us humans, prob­a­bly haven’t hap­pened to come up with any of the same spo­ken or writ­ten lan­guages we have.

In 1960, the Dutch math­e­mati­cian Hans Freuden­thal came up with a solu­tion: why not cre­ate a lan­guage they could learn? The efforts came pub­lished in the book Lin­cos: Design of a Lan­guage for Cos­mic Inter­course. In it, writes The Atlantic’s Daniel Ober­haus, “Freuden­thal announced that his pri­ma­ry pur­pose ‘is to design a lan­guage that can be under­stood by a per­son not acquaint­ed with any of our nat­ur­al lan­guages, or even their syn­tac­tic struc­tures … The mes­sages com­mu­ni­cat­ed by means of this lan­guage [con­tain] not only math­e­mat­ics, but in prin­ci­ple the whole bulk of our knowl­edge.’ ”

Freuden­thal cre­at­ed Lin­cos as a kind of spo­ken lan­guage “made up of unmod­u­lat­ed radio waves of vary­ing length and dura­tion, encod­ed with a hodge­podge of sym­bols bor­rowed from math­e­mat­ics, sci­ence, sym­bol­ic log­ic, and Latin. In their var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions, these waves can be used to com­mu­ni­cate any­thing from basic math­e­mat­i­cal equa­tions to expla­na­tions for abstract con­cepts like death and love.” You can read Lin­cos: Design of a Lan­guage for Cos­mic Inter­course (PDF), over at Mono­skop, and even though it con­sti­tutes only the first of a planned series of books Freuden­thal nev­er fin­ished, you can still learn the basics of Lin­cos from it.

Be warned, how­ev­er, of the intel­lec­tu­al chal­lenge ahead: Freuden­thal just plows ahead with­out even defin­ing many of the con­cepts, which read­ers with­out a back­ground in math­e­mat­ics or log­ic will like­ly need explained, and Ober­haus quotes even one astro­physi­cist as call­ing Freuden­thal’s book “the most bor­ing I have ever read. Log­a­rithm tables are cool com­pared to it.” Still, 56 years on from its cre­ation, this inter­galac­tic Esperan­to has had a kind of influ­ence: Freuden­thal demon­strat­ed the idea of includ­ing an intu­itive­ly under­stand­able dic­tio­nary in the space­ward-sent mes­sage itself, an idea Carl Sagan went on to use in his nov­el Con­tact, in which extrater­res­tri­al intel­li­gence-seek­ing astronomers receive a sig­nal from else­where that con­sid­er­ate­ly does the same.

Con­tact became a major motion pic­ture, some­thing of the Arrival of its day, in 1997. Two years lat­er, a cou­ple of Cana­di­an Defense Research Estab­lish­ment astro­physi­cists used a radio tele­scope to beam out a Lin­cos-encod­ed mes­sage toward a few close stars. Like any enthu­si­as­tic mem­ber of their pro­fes­sion would, they sent out infor­ma­tion about math, physics, and astron­o­my. They have yet to hear back from any res­i­dents, fel­low astro­physi­cists or oth­er­wise, of those dis­tant neigh­bor­hoods. But if any extrater­res­tri­als did hear the mes­sage, and even if they have yet to ful­ly grasp Lin­cos, I have to believe they feel at least a lit­tle grate­ful that, unlike some humans attempt­ing to com­mu­ni­cate with oth­ers unlike them here on Earth, we did­n’t just start yam­mer­ing in Eng­lish and hope for the best.

via Mono­skop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free NASA eBook The­o­rizes How We Will Com­mu­ni­cate with Aliens

An Ani­mat­ed Carl Sagan Talks with Studs Terkel About Find­ing Extrater­res­tri­al Life (1985)

Ani­mat­ed Video Explores the Invent­ed Lan­guages of Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones & Star Trek

Klin­gon for Eng­lish Speak­ers: Sign Up for a Free Course Com­ing Soon

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.

Techie Working at Home Creates Bigger Archive of Historical Newspapers (37 Million Pages) Than the Library of Congress

“Real news, fake news, who cares, it’s all the same, am I right?”

… Not to make light of an exis­ten­tial cri­sis in jour­nal­ism and the pub­lic trust—a dis­turb­ing devel­op­ment. Cyn­i­cism threat­ens to erode the very foun­da­tions of… well, ring your own alarm bell. Per­haps it’s time we (re)drew some hard lines around what we mean by the word “news.”

How to do that? I leave it to the experts—professors of jour­nal­ism, reporters and archivists and his­to­ri­ans who do the hard work of con­struct­ing genealo­gies and tax­onomies of news, dis­cov­er­ing its muta­tions and dead ends.

Jour­nal­ism libraries around the coun­try ful­fill the needs of these schol­ars, as does the Library of Con­gress. But if you real­ly want to dig into a com­pre­hen­sive collection—one that bests even the august Fed­er­al gov­ern­ment library (sort of)—you’ll need to vis­it the web­site of one Tom Trynis­ki, pri­vate cit­i­zen, retired “com­put­er expert,” writes Jim Epstein at Rea­son, and ded­i­cat­ed ama­teur, “work­ing alone.”

This being Rea­son, the pre­serve of “free minds and free mar­kets,” you can expect a good bit of crow­ing about the entre­pre­neur­ial spir­it of Tryniski’s accom­plish­ment—an archive of 37,439,000 his­toric news­pa­per pages from the U.S. and Cana­da, “orders of mag­ni­tude big­ger and more pop­u­lar than one cre­at­ed by a fed­er­al bureau­cra­cy with mil­lions of dol­lars to spend.” The video above says it suc­cinct­ly in a tagline: “Ama­teur beats gov’t at dig­i­tiz­ing news­pa­pers.”

Should you take an inter­est in what Tryniski—the sole employ­ee of Old Ful­ton New York Post­cards—spends, Epstein pro­vides a full account­ing of the site’s impres­sive­ly mea­ger oper­at­ing bud­get. Should you won­der where the LoC’s mon­ey goes, and why it uses so many more resources than one retiree, you may wish to do your own com­par­i­son between Tryniski’s site and the Feds’ online news archive, Chron­i­cling Amer­i­ca. (And maybe pay their place a vis­it in the flesh.) There’s more to a library than num­bers of pages and views.

port-chester-journal

In some ways, it’s not a fair com­par­i­son. Trynis­ki may be a com­put­er expert, but he’s not a web design­er (or he’s an ornery, old-school purist). His site (last updat­ed in 2014), with its frames and heavy use of Flash and GIFs, reflects the web’s anar­chic 90s hey­day. And where the LoC’s site chron­i­cles all of Amer­i­ca, Tryniski’s most­ly sticks to New York, with local papers like The Port Chester Jour­nal (above) rep­re­sent­ed heav­i­ly.

That said, the site’s search func­tions are much cool­er than those of glossier com­peti­tors, with options for “fuzzy search­ing,” “phon­ic search­ing” (for those of us who can’t spell), “and “user-defined syn­onyms.” Trynis­ki also knows his way around micro­film and a micro­film scan­ner, despite (we’re express­ly told for some rea­son in the video and Epstein’s arti­cle) his being “a high school grad­u­ate.”

In this tri­umph of the every­man sto­ry, how­ev­er, Trynis­ki does not intro­duce his own col­lec­tion with ful­mi­na­tions of the “old man shakes fist at” vari­ety. Instead he describes his col­lec­tion as a means of time trav­el. “It’s the day-to-day life,” he says, “that you could not imag­ine today. Read­ing the actu­al news­pa­per seems to bring it back into cur­rent con­text. Peo­ple… sit there and it’s like, they move back into that time, and it’s like they’re liv­ing in the same time as their grand­par­ents and great-grand­par­ents.”

Nobody needs to fix jour­nal­ism, libraries, or fed­er­al spend­ing to have this expe­ri­ence, and it’s one every­one should have—whether by trav­el­ing through the pages of old news­pa­pers or a fam­i­ly trove of pho­tos and let­ters. His­to­ry can seem like lit­tle more than a sto­ry we tell our­selves about the past, but the pri­ma­ry doc­u­ments have tales to tell that we could nev­er imag­ine.

Learn more about Tryniski’s col­lec­tion at Rea­son, and vis­it the quirky, decep­tive­ly ful­some Old Ful­ton NY Post Cards (named as such because the site began as a scanned col­lec­tion of post­cards from Tryniski’s home­town of Ful­ton, NY). You’ll find in its charm­ing­ly clunky envi­rons a fas­ci­nat­ing repos­i­to­ry of vin­tage news and pho­tos. And remem­ber, “If you did not read about it on Old Ful­ton NY Post Cards, IT DID NOT HAPPEN!!!”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

From the Annals of Opti­mism: The News­pa­per Indus­try in 1981 Imag­ines its Dig­i­tal Future

“Titan­ic Sink­ing; No Lives Lost” and Oth­er Ter­ri­bly Innacu­rate News Reports from April 15, 1912

Archive of Hemingway’s News­pa­per Report­ing Reveals Nov­el­ist in the Mak­ing

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

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