Explore Meticulous 3D Models of Endangered Historical Sites in Google’s “Open Heritage” Project

in Architecture, Data, Travel | May 25th, 2018

One brisk thump­ing by a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter, total­i­tar­i­an regime, or ter­ror­ist group is more than enough to reduce an awe-inspir­ing her­itage site to rub­ble.

With that sad fact in mind, Google Arts & Cul­ture has paired with CyArk, a non prof­it whose mis­sion is using the lat­est tech­nolo­gies to dig­i­tal­ly doc­u­ment and pre­serve the world’s sig­nif­i­cant cul­tur­al her­itage in an eas­i­ly share­able for­mat.

The result­ing project, Open Her­itage, is a mas­sive brows­able col­lec­tion of 3D her­itage data, already the largest of its kind, and cer­tain to increase as its cre­ators race against the clock.

As of this writ­ing, vis­i­tors can explore 3D mod­els of 27 her­itage sites from 18 coun­tries.

Even those of us who’ve had the good for­tune to vis­it these sites in per­son have much to gain from the drone’s eye view of the Cara­col obser­va­to­ry that’s part of Mexico’s ancient Mayan metrop­o­lis Chichén Itzá or Berlin’s icon­ic Bran­den­burg Gate.

Each mod­el is accom­pa­nied by an expe­di­tion overview that details the site’s his­to­ry and sig­nif­i­cance, as well as its loca­tion on a map. Time lapse pho­tos help give a sense of the site’s human traf­fic dur­ing the time it was being doc­u­ment­ed, as well as the nature of the work CyArk does on loca­tion. Sig­nif­i­cant details are high­light­ed, and their sym­bol­ism dis­cussed.

CyArk will share project data with view­ers who request it, using a Cre­ative Com­mons Attri­bu­tion-Non­Com­mer­cial 4.0 Inter­na­tion­al License.

Equal­ly impor­tant is the role these com­pre­hen­sive 3D scans can play in cur­rent and future restora­tion efforts, by iden­ti­fy­ing areas of dam­age and doc­u­ment­ing exist­ing col­or and tex­ture with down-to-the-mil­lime­ter pre­ci­sion.

Begin your vir­tu­al explo­rations of such Open Her­itage sites as Greece’s Ancient Corinth, Lebanon’s Tem­ple of Echoun, and Ayut­thaya, Thailand’s Wat Si San­phet, here.

Learn more about aer­i­al pho­togram­me­try, 3D laser scan­ning, stereo­scop­ic 360 imagery, and oth­er tools of the dig­i­tal preser­va­tion trade here.

And stay abreast of CyArk’s work by sub­scrib­ing to their free month­ly newslet­ter here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Vis­it 890 UNESCO World Her­itage Sites with Free iPhone/iPad App

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Google Dig­i­tizes and Puts Online a Vast Archive of Lati­no Art­works and Arti­facts

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Her solo show Nurse!, in which one of Shakespeare’s best loved female char­ac­ters hits the lec­ture cir­cuit to set the record straight pre­mieres in June at The Tank in New York City. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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When Robert Rauschenberg Asked Willem De Kooning for One of His Paintings … So That He Could Erase It

in Art | May 24th, 2018

How to make a name for one­self in the art world? Every up-and-com­ing artist has to face that intim­i­dat­ing ques­tion in one way or anoth­er, but Robert Rauschen­berg, now remem­bered as a lead­ing light of the pop art move­ment, came up with a par­tic­u­lar­ly mem­o­rable answer. When in 1953 he got the coun­ter­in­tu­itive idea to make a draw­ing not by draw­ing, but by eras­ing, he at first tried eras­ing images he’d drawn him­self. This brought him to the real­iza­tion that not only should his eras­ing con­sti­tute more than half the process — “I want­ed it to be the whole,” he lat­er said — but that, to make a real artis­tic impact, he’d have to erase the work of some­one impor­tant.

The log­i­cal choice at the time: Willem de Koon­ing, then already con­sid­ered a mas­ter of abstract expres­sion­ism. “I bought a bot­tle of Jack Daniels and went up and knocked on his door, pray­ing the whole time that he would­n’t be home,” says Rauschen­berg in the inter­view clip above, “but he was home.” Even­tu­al­ly he sold the old­er and more emi­nent artist on the idea of tak­ing a draw­ing, eras­ing it, and turn­ing that into art of his own, a pitch no doubt assist­ed by Rauschen­berg and de Koon­ing’s already friend­ly rela­tion­ship. (The already vast dif­fer­ence between their artis­tic styles also took the notion of artis­tic pat­ri­cide out of the ques­tion.)

De Koon­ing at first resist­ed, but then dou­bled down: “I want it to be some­thing I’ll miss,” Rauschen­berg remem­bers him say­ing before pick­ing out the sac­ri­fice. Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing, the result of two months of eras­ing and count­less spent erasers, “essen­tial­ly remained an under­ground, art world phe­nom­e­non for more than ten years after it was com­plet­ed.” So writes SFMOMA cura­tor Sarah Roberts in an essay on the piece. “Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, it was exclud­ed from numer­ous impor­tant solo and group exhi­bi­tions in the late 1950s and ear­ly 1960s, cru­cial years when Rauschenberg’s rep­u­ta­tion was becom­ing estab­lished inter­na­tion­al­ly.”

But slow­ly, over the years, word spread through the art media and social scenes, and now the 27-year-old Rauschen­berg’s brazen artis­tic act has a place among the prog­en­i­tors of con­cep­tu­al art. “Yes, the era­sure was an act of destruc­tion,” writes Roberts, “but as a cre­ative ges­ture it was also an act of rev­er­ence or even devotion—to de Koon­ing, to draw­ing, to art his­to­ry, and to the idea of tak­ing a risk and being open to what­ev­er comes as a result.” Though prac­ti­cal­ly unknown for quite a long time, Erased de Koon­ing Draw­ing can now hard­ly be for­got­ten — which takes eras­ing a respect­ed fore­bear’s work off the table as a means of name-mak­ing for young artists today, each of whom will have to find their own way to set off a slow-burn shock.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Robert Rauschenberg’s 34 Illus­tra­tions of Dante’s Infer­no (1958–60)

New Robert Rauschen­berg Dig­i­tal Col­lec­tion Lets You Down­load Free High-Res Images of the Artist’s Work

The MoMA Teach­es You How to Paint Like Pol­lock, Rothko, de Koon­ing & Oth­er Abstract Painters

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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All of the Rulers of Europe Over the Past 2,400 Years Presented in a Timelapse Map (400 B.C. to 2017 A.D.)

in History | May 24th, 2018

The­o­ries of pow­er, from Machi­avel­li and Hobbes to Locke and Jef­fer­son, have drawn their lessons from the tow­er­ing fig­ure of the Sov­er­eign, the prin­ci­ple actor in dra­mas of old Euro­pean state­craft. One philoso­pher advis­es cun­ning, anoth­er fear and awe. When we come to ideas of civ­il soci­ety based in prop­er­ty rights, we see the­o­rists argu­ing with pro­po­nents of monar­chi­cal divine right, or strug­gling, con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly, mil­i­tar­i­ly, with a mad king.

Maybe this sur­vey seems banal, passé, bor­ing, blah.

It can be dif­fi­cult for post-post-mod­erns to ful­ly appre­ci­ate the Sovereign’s once-crush­ing weight. (See John Mil­ton’s many defens­es of regi­cide and rev­o­lu­tion, for exam­ple.) Maybe, schooled in the work of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Fou­cault, George Orwell, Han­nah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, etc., we have learned to think of power—whether from below or above—as dif­fuse, inter­re­lat­ed, net­worked, spread across class­es, imper­son­al bureau­cra­cies, insti­tu­tion­al prac­tices.

The word “despot,” for exam­ple, sounds so exot­ic, an ossi­fied term from antiq­ui­ty. Study­ing the video above could bring it to life again, if dis­cours­es around cur­rent events haven’t. Sprint­ing through two-thou­sand, four-hun­dred, and sev­en­teen years of his­to­ry, this dra­mat­ic pre­sen­ta­tion names the names of every ruler in Europe, from 400 B.C.E. to 2017.

Despite its Euro­cen­tric asso­ci­a­tion with the East (as in the stereo­type of the “Ori­en­tal Despot”), West­ern his­to­ry offers hun­dreds of exam­ples of despo­tism. Put sim­ply, “despo­tism,” says Fou­cault in his lec­ture series The Birth of Biopol­i­tics, “refers any injunc­tion made by the pub­lic author­i­ties back to the sovereign’s will, and to it alone.”

Despo­tism, he argues, stands in con­trast to the police state, or absolute rule by admin­is­tra­tors and enforcers, and to the Rule of Law, in which rulers and ruled are both osten­si­bly bound by exter­nal char­ters and legal codes.

Watch the pro­ces­sion of emper­ors, kings, usurpers, tyrants…. Do we know the names of any of their func­tionar­ies? Do we need to? If Claudius or Con­stan­tine decreed, what does it mat­ter who car­ried out the order? When and where do those terms change—when do the names become a kind of synec­doche, stand­ing in for admin­is­tra­tions, par­ties, jun­tas, etc. rather than the sin­gu­lar will of indi­vid­u­als, benev­o­lent, enlight­ened, or oth­er­wise?

How many of these rulers’ names are unfa­mil­iar to us? Why haven’t we heard them? At what peri­od in his­to­ry does Europe become pre­dom­i­nant­ly ruled by oth­er forms of gov­ern­ment? Does despo­tism ever dis­ap­pear? Does it reap­pear in the 20th cen­tu­ry (were Lenin, Fran­co, or Mar­shall Tito despots?), or must we use anoth­er rubric to describe dic­ta­tors and auto­crats? (Does it make any sense to call con­tem­po­rary fig­ure­heads like Eliz­a­beth II “rulers of Europe”?)

Pick your own mode of analy­sis, explore the out­er edges and obscure inte­ri­ors of empires, and you might find your­self get­ting very inter­est­ed in Euro­pean his­to­ry (learn more here), or curi­ous about how “despo­tism” divid­ed, meta­mor­phosed, and metas­ta­sized into what­ev­er var­i­ous forms of rule the names “Merkel,” “Macron,” “Putin,” “Poroshenko,” or “Erdo­gan,” for exam­ple, rep­re­sent today.

via Laugh­ing Squid

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Online His­to­ry Cours­es 

The His­to­ry of Europe: 5,000 Years Ani­mat­ed in a Time­lapse Map

Watch the His­to­ry of the World Unfold on an Ani­mat­ed Map: From 200,000 BCE to Today

Free: Euro­pean Cul­tur­al His­to­ry in 91 Lec­tures by Emi­nent His­to­ri­an George L. Mosse (1500–1920)

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

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An 82-Year-Old Japanese Audiophile Searches for the Best Sound by Installing His Own Electric Utility Pole in His Yard

in Music | May 24th, 2018

As a long­time record col­lec­tor (first because it was before CDs were invent­ed) and a bud­ding audio­phile (because vinyl does sound bet­ter than dig­i­tal, have at me in the com­ments if you must), I appre­ci­ate a good sto­ry about the search for per­fect sound. But Takeo Mori­ta takes it to a new lev­el.

In the Wall Street Jour­nal sto­ry above, we learn that the 82-year-old has installed a 42-foot util­i­ty pole next to his house. Why? To get that clean elec­tric­i­ty to his sys­tem, not that shared, filthy elec­tric­i­ty from a com­mon-as-muck util­i­ty pole. Elec­tric­i­ty is like blood, he explains, and the clean­er the blood, the bet­ter for the sys­tem.

Now this reminds me, while we’re here, to tell you about a show I once saw on Japan­ese TV and which I one day hope to see on YouTube. A news show pro­filed Japan’s num­ber one Bob Dylan col­lec­tor, who had every vinyl release of the musi­cian, even to redun­dan­cy. At one point he pulled out an album still in its shrink wrap that was no dif­fer­ent from the one next to it. “This has a green stick­er on it,” he said, point­ing to the right hand cor­ner. “But that’s just a stick­er,” said the host. Blank stare. Pause. “But this has a green stick­er on it.”

That’s the spir­it, I thought.

Also: Nev­er catch that spir­it, I thought.

This arti­cle at residentadvisor.net explores the world of Tokyo’s audio­phile under­ground, which is both a log­i­cal out­come for those into hear­ing the best music sys­tems and some­thing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese. I can’t imag­ine an audio­phile bar open­ing up in the States any­time soon. But the lis­ten­ing venue has a long his­to­ry in Japan:

It can be traced back to the rise of jazz kissa (jazz cafés) and meikyoku kissa (clas­si­cal music cafés) in the years fol­low­ing World War II, a time when import­ed records were pro­hib­i­tive­ly expen­sive. This meant that, for many peo­ple, the kissat­en were the only places to hear good music from abroad. The focus at these cafés was on deep, con­cen­trat­ed lis­ten­ing.

As the arti­cle men­tions, there are as many mini clubs in Tokyo as there are gen­res, from clas­si­cal to drone/glitch. And it comes down to the idea, start­ed by Amer­i­can soci­ol­o­gist Ray Old­en­burg, of “The Third Place,” the place that is nei­ther home, nor work:

As civ­i­liza­tion has advanced, going to work and back home has become our rou­tine as humans,” Ari­izu­mi says. “The third place is not quite home, and it’s not work, but a com­mu­ni­ty where every­one can be wel­comed and relax, with a nice atmos­phere. I heard about the term ‘third place’ for the first time just when we opened Bridge, and I remem­ber think­ing, ‘This is exact­ly what I want to cre­ate.’ That’s what I want to do, cre­ate a third space. Peo­ple can come here and talk about their jobs or their love life, or they can come here and dance. It’s a place between work and home. Peo­ple need that.

Ques­tion is, dear read­er: do you have a third space?

Relat­ed con­tent:

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

How Good Are Your Head­phones? This 150-Song Playlist, Fea­tur­ing Steely Dan, Pink Floyd & More, Will Test Them Out
The Dis­tor­tion of Sound: A Short Film on How We’ve Cre­at­ed “a McDonald’s Gen­er­a­tion of Music Con­sumers”

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

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Short Fascinating Film Shows How Japanese Soy Sauce Has Been Made for the Past 750 years

in Food & Drink, History | May 24th, 2018

A few years back, we vis­it­ed Hōshi, a hotel locat­ed in Komat­su, Japan, which holds the dis­tinc­tion of being the 2nd old­est hotel in the world, and “the old­est still run­ning fam­i­ly busi­ness in the world.” Built in 718 AD, Hōshi has been oper­at­ed by the same fam­i­ly for 46 con­sec­u­tive gen­er­a­tions.

It’s hard to imag­ine. But it’s true. Once estab­lished, Hōshi would have to wait anoth­er 500 years before soy sauce came to Japan and could be served to its guests. Accord­ing to the Nation­al Geo­graph­ic video above, a bud­dhist monk trav­eled from Chi­na to Yuasa, Japan in the 13th cen­tu­ry. And there he began pro­duc­ing soy sauce, fer­ment­ing soy beans, wheat, salt and water. That tra­di­tion con­tin­ues to this day. This fas­ci­nat­ing short film by Mile Nagao­ka gives you a good glimpse into this time­less process.

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:

Hōshi: A Short Film on the 1300-Year-Old Hotel Run by the Same Japan­ese Fam­i­ly for 46 Gen­er­a­tions

Ear­ly Japan­ese Ani­ma­tions: The Ori­gins of Ani­me (1917–1931)

Hand-Col­ored Pho­tographs of 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan

A Hyp­not­ic Look at How Japan­ese Samu­rai Swords Are Made

Female Samu­rai War­riors Immor­tal­ized in 19th Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Pho­tos

Hand-Col­ored 1860s Pho­tographs Reveal the Last Days of Samu­rai Japan

Leg­endary Japan­ese Author Yukio Mishi­ma Mus­es About the Samu­rai Code (Which Inspired His Hap­less 1970 Coup Attempt)

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Philip Roth (RIP) Creates a List of the 15 Books That Influenced Him Most

in Books, Literature | May 23rd, 2018

Image by Thier­ry Ehrmann, via Flickr Com­mons

We stand at a piv­otal time in his­to­ry, and not only when it comes to pres­i­den­tial pol­i­tics and oth­er tragedies. The boomer-era artists and writ­ers who loomed over the last sev­er­al decades—whose influ­ence, teach­ing, or patron­age deter­mined the careers of hun­dreds of successors—are pass­ing away. It seems that not a week goes by that we don’t mourn the loss of one or anoth­er tow­er­ing fig­ure in the arts and let­ters. And along with the eulo­gies and trib­utes come crit­i­cal reap­praisals of often straight white men whose sex­u­al and racial pol­i­tics can seem seri­ous­ly prob­lem­at­ic through a 21st cen­tu­ry lens.

Sure­ly such pieces are even now being writ­ten after the death of Philip Roth yes­ter­day, nov­el­ist of, among many oth­er themes, the unbri­dled straight male Id. From 1969’s sex-obsessed Alexan­der Port­noy—who mas­tur­bates with raw liv­er and screams at his ther­a­pist “LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!”—to 1995’s aging, sex-obsessed pup­peteer Mick­ey Sab­bath, who mas­tur­bates over his own wife’s grave, with sev­er­al obses­sive men like David Kepesh (who turns into a breast) in-between, Roth cre­at­ed mem­o­rably shock­ing, frus­trat­ed Jew­ish male char­ac­ters whose sex­u­al­i­ty might gen­er­ous­ly be described as self­ish.

In a New York Times inter­view at the begin­ning of this year, Roth, who retired from writ­ing in 2012, addressed the ques­tion of these “recur­rent themes” in the era of Trump and #MeToo. “I haven’t shunned the hard facts in these fic­tions of why and how and when tumes­cent men do what they do, even when these have not been in har­mo­ny with the por­tray­al that a mas­cu­line pub­lic-rela­tions cam­paign — if there were such a thing — might pre­fer.… Con­se­quent­ly, none of the more extreme con­duct I have been read­ing about in the news­pa­pers late­ly has aston­ished me.”

The psy­cho­log­i­cal truths Roth tells about fit­ful­ly neu­rot­ic male egos don’t flat­ter most men, as he points out, but maybe his depic­tions of obses­sive male desire offer a sober­ing per­spec­tive as we strug­gle to con­front its even ugli­er and more vio­lent, bound­ary-defy­ing irrup­tions in the real world. That said, many a writer after Roth han­dled the sub­ject with far less humor and com­ic aware­ness of its bathos. From where did Roth him­self draw his sense of the trag­i­cal­ly absurd, his lit­er­ary inter­est in extremes of human long­ing and its often-destruc­tive expres­sion?

He offered one col­lec­tion of influ­ences in 2016, when he pledged to donate his per­son­al library of over 3,500 vol­umes to the Newark Pub­lic Library (“my oth­er home”) upon his death. Along with that announce­ment, Roth issued a list of “fif­teen works of fic­tion,” writes Talya Zax at For­ward, “he con­sid­ers most sig­nif­i­cant to his life.” Next to each title, he lists the age at which he first read the book.

“It’s worth not­ing,” Zax points out, “that Roth, who fre­quent­ly fields accu­sa­tions of misog­y­ny, includ­ed only one female author on the list: Colette.” Make of that what you will. We might note oth­er blind spots as well, but so it is. Should we read Philip Roth? Of course we should read Philip Roth, for his keen insights into vari­eties of Amer­i­can mas­culin­i­ty, Jew­ish iden­ti­ty, aging, Amer­i­can hubris, lit­er­ary cre­ativ­i­ty, Wikipedia, and so much more besides, span­ning over fifty years. Start at the begin­ning with two of his fist pub­lished sto­ries from the late 50s, “Epstein” and “The Con­ver­sion of the Jews,” and work your way up to the 21st cen­tu­ry.

via The For­ward

Relat­ed Con­tent:  

What Was It Like to Have Philip Roth as an Eng­lish Prof?

Philip Roth Pre­dicts the Death of the Nov­el; Paul Auster Coun­ters

Philip Roth on Aging

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

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Watch The Hedy Lamarr Story, a New Documentary on the 1940s Film Star & Inventor of Wi-Fi Technology (Streaming Free for a Limited Time)

in Film | May 23rd, 2018

We told you last year about Hedy Lamarr, the 1940s film star who also helped invent the tech­nol­o­gy behind wi-fi and blue­tooth dur­ing World War II. Now, she’s the sub­ject of a new doc­u­men­tary from PBS’s Amer­i­can Mas­ters series. Direct­ed by Alexan­dra Dean, and stream­ing free online for a lim­it­ed time, Bomb­shell: The Hedy Lamarr Sto­ry, “explores how Lamarr’s true lega­cy is that of a tech­no­log­i­cal trail­blaz­er” and fea­tures, among oth­er things, “four nev­er-before-heard audio tapes of Lamarr speak­ing on the record about her incred­i­ble life, final­ly giv­ing her the chance to tell her own sto­ry.” The win­ner of sev­er­al film fes­ti­val awards, The Hedy Lamarr Sto­ry pre­miered across the US on May 18th. Stream it online above or also 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:

How 1940s Film Star Hedy Lamarr Helped Invent the Tech­nol­o­gy Behind Wi-Fi & Blue­tooth Dur­ing WWII

Watch The Strange Woman, the 1946 Noir Film Star­ring Hedy Lamarr

Gus­tav Machatý’s Erotikon (1929) & Ekstase (1933): Cinema’s Ear­li­est Explo­rations of Women’s Sen­su­al­i­ty

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The Art of Europe’s Forgotten Avant-Garde Artists Now Digitized and Put Online

in Archives, Art, History | May 23rd, 2018

Eco­nom­i­cal­ly deplet­ed but filled with the desire to pose ques­tions about the future in rad­i­cal­ly new ways, post­war Europe would prove fer­tile ground for the devel­op­ment of avant-garde art. Though that envi­ron­ment pro­duced a fair few stars over the sec­ond half of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, their work rep­re­sents only the tip of the ice­berg: bring­ing the rest out of the depths and onto the inter­net has con­sti­tut­ed the last few years’ work for For­got­ten Her­itage. A col­lab­o­ra­tion between insti­tu­tions in Poland, Bel­gium, Croa­t­ia, Esto­nia, and Ger­many sup­port­ed by Cre­ative Europe, the project offers a data­base of Euro­pean avant-garde art — includ­ing many works still dar­ing, sur­pris­ing, or just plain bizarre — nev­er prop­er­ly pre­served and made avail­able until now.

For­got­ten Her­itage’s About page describes the pro­jec­t’s goal as the cre­ation of “an inno­v­a­tive online repos­i­to­ry fea­tur­ing digi­tised archives of Pol­ish, Croa­t­ian, Eston­ian, Bel­gian and French artists of the avant-garde move­ment occur­ring in the sec­ond half of the 20th cen­tu­ry,” meant to even­tu­al­ly con­tain “approx­i­mate­ly 8 thou­sand of sort­ed and clas­si­fied archive entries, includ­ing descrip­tive data.”

Cur­rent­ly, writes Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Claire Voon, its site “offers vis­i­tors around 800 records to explore, from doc­u­men­ta­tion of art­works to texts.  The major­i­ty of works stem from to the ’60s and ’70s, as a time­line illus­trates, with the most recent piece dat­ing to 2005. This inter­ac­tive fea­ture, which has embed­ded links to indi­vid­ual artists’s biogra­phies and exam­ples of their art­works, is one way to explore the well-designed archive.”

For­got­ten Her­itage thus makes it easy to dis­cov­er artists pre­vi­ous­ly dif­fi­cult for even the avant-garde enthu­si­ast to encounter. Vis­i­tors can also browse the grow­ing archive by the medi­um of the work: paint­ing (like Jüri Arrak’s Artist, 1972, seen at the top of the post), instal­la­tion (Woj­ciech Bruszewski’s Visu­al­i­ty, 1980), film (Anna Kuter­a’s The Short­est Film in the World, 1975), “pho­to with inter­ven­tion” (Edi­ta Schu­bert’s Pho­ny Smile, 1997), Olav Moran’s “Konk­tal” and many more besides.

Voon cites Mari­ka Kuźmicz’s esti­mate that about 40 per­cent of it, most­ly from Bel­gian and Eston­ian artists, has nev­er before been avail­able online. Debates about whether an avant-garde still exists, in Europe or any­where else, will sure­ly con­tin­ue among observers of art, but as a vis­it to For­got­ten Her­itage’s dig­i­tal archives reveals, the avant-garde of decades past, when redis­cov­ered, retains no small amount of artis­tic vital­i­ty today.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Euro­peana Col­lec­tions, a Por­tal of 48 Mil­lion Free Art­works, Books, Videos, Arti­facts & Sounds from Across Europe

Every­thing You Need to Know About Mod­ern Russ­ian Art in 25 Min­utes: A Visu­al Intro­duc­tion to Futur­ism, Social­ist Real­ism & More

Enter Dig­i­tal Archives of the 1960s Fluxus Move­ment and Explore the Avant-Garde Art of John Cage, Yoko Ono, John Cale, Nam June Paik & More

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

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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