Demystifying the Activist Graffiti Art of Keith Haring: A Video Essay

in Art, History | July 11th, 2023

The art of Kei­th Har­ing emerged in the high­ly spe­cif­ic place and time of ear­ly-eight­ies New York City. Four decades lat­er, it’s vis­i­ble all around the world, yet has­n’t lost its asso­ci­a­tions with its ori­gins. Just the oth­er day, I was walk­ing down a street in my neigh­bor­hood in Seoul and noticed that a bou­tique had put a T‑shirt embla­zoned with one of Har­ing’s artis­tic dec­la­ra­tions that “CRACK IS WACK!!” Drug abuse use was just one of the issues to which he attached his work: oth­ers includ­ed apartheid, nuclear dis­ar­ma­ment, and above all AIDS aware­ness. How, in con­trast to so much activist art, has the Har­ing oeu­vre achieved its endur­ing pop­u­lar­i­ty?

Gal­lerist and Youtu­ber James Payne address­es this ques­tion in his new Great Art Explained video on Har­ing’s life and work. As soon as pos­si­ble after a tele­vi­sion-sat­u­rat­ed sub­ur­ban baby-boomer upbring­ing that did its part to teach him to “sell dif­fi­cult pol­i­tics in the same way Madi­son Avenue sold vac­u­um clean­ers,” Har­ing moved to New York.

With­in its cul­tur­al free-for-all he devel­oped a sig­na­ture style by mak­ing chalk draw­ings on unused ad spaces: “he called the New York sub­way his ‘lab­o­ra­to­ry,’ exper­i­ment­ing with ideas and form,” and only occa­sion­al­ly get­ting into trou­ble for it. New York­ers “looked for­ward to see­ing what he drew next and where, and before long main­stream media noticed him too and almost overnight he became a star.”

As Har­ing’s fame grew, it became clear that “he tru­ly believed in the pow­er of art to change the world. This belief, com­bined with the imme­di­a­cy of his car­toon style, came togeth­er spec­tac­u­lar­ly in the nine­teen-eight­ies.” Indeed, as Kurt Ander­sen writes in the New York­er, Har­ing at his “man­ic, mon­eyed, fun, par­ty-dri­ven, celebri­ty-obsessed, shame­less” prime was a per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of that decade. But even after his AIDS-relat­ed death in 1990, the sim­ple exu­ber­ance of his art style lived on, not least in the form of posters and oth­er prod­ucts. “It’s def­i­nite­ly art for the age of mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion,” Har­ing once said of his own work, and its sheer com­mon­ness — as well as its out­ward cheer­ful­ness — make it easy to over­look the sources of its pow­er. As has been said of Walt Dis­ney, for whom he had dreamed of work­ing since child­hood, Har­ing did­n’t just give peo­ple what they want­ed; he want­ed what they want­ed.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Short Biog­ra­phy of Kei­th Har­ing Told with Com­ic Book Illus­tra­tions & Music

Kei­th Haring’s Eclec­tic Jour­nal Entries Go Online

An Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Dogs, Inspired by Kei­th Har­ing

Behold the World’s First Mod­ern Art Amuse­ment Park, Fea­tur­ing Attrac­tions by Sal­vador Dalí, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kei­th Har­ing, Roy Licht­en­stein & More (1987)

What Makes Basquiat’s Unti­tled Great Art: One Paint­ing Says Every­thing Basquiat Want­ed to Say About Amer­i­ca, Art & Being Black in Both Worlds

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Explore the Largest Online Archive Exploring the Genius of Leonard da Vinci

in Art, Computer Science, Design, Science, Technology | July 10th, 2023

We dare not spec­u­late as to what Leonar­do DaVin­ci would make of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

We are, how­ev­er, fair­ly con­fi­dent that he would love the Inter­net.

The Renais­sance-era genius applied his sophis­ti­cat­ed under­stand­ing of the human body and the nat­ur­al world to oth­er types of sys­tems, includ­ing plans for civ­il engi­neer­ing projects, mil­i­tary pro­jec­tiles, and fly­ing machines.

Google Arts & Culture’s new ini­tia­tive Inside a Genius Mind offers an inter­ac­tive expe­ri­ence of the codices in which Da Vin­ci made his sketch­es, dia­grams, and notes.

It’s also a cura­to­r­i­al col­lab­o­ra­tion between a human — Oxford art his­to­ry pro­fes­sor Mar­tin Kemp  — and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence.

Pro­fes­sor Kemp, author of Liv­ing with Leonar­do: Fifty Years of San­i­ty and Insan­i­ty in the Art World and Beyond, brings a life­time of rig­or­ous study and pas­sion for the sub­ject.

His non-human coun­ter­part used machine learn­ing to delve into the note­books’ con­tents, inves­ti­gat­ing some 1040 pages from 6 vol­umes and “draw­ing the­mat­ic con­nec­tions across time and sub­ject mat­ter to reflect Leonardo’s spir­it of inter­dis­ci­pli­nary imag­i­na­tion, inno­va­tion and the pro­found uni­ty at the heart of his appar­ent­ly diverse pur­suits.”

Upon launch­ing the exper­i­ment, you bush­whack your way through the indi­vid­ual codices by click­ing on the sketch­es float­ing toward you like ele­ments in a clas­sic space-themed video game, or choose to enjoy one of five curat­ed sto­ries.


We went with Earth as Body, which gath­ers sev­en pages from the UK’s Roy­al Col­lec­tion Trust’s Codex Wind­sor, and one from the Codex Leices­ter, which inspired an ani­mat­ed mod­el that should sure­ly please its cur­rent own­er, Bill Gates.

 

Using a dis­creet and some­what fid­dly nav­i­ga­tion bar on the left side of the screen, we toured Leonardo’s ren­der­ings of the flayed mus­cles of the upper spine, the ves­sels and nerves of the neck and liv­er, the Arno val­ley with the route of a pro­posed canal that would run from Flo­rence to Pisa, a view of the Alps from Milan, the fall of light on a face, stud­ies of optics and men in action, and obser­va­tions of the moon and earth­shine.

How are these things relat­ed?

“Leonar­do believed that the human body rep­re­sent­ed the whole nat­ur­al world in minia­ture” and the selec­tions do offer food for thought that Leonardo’s pas­sion for the under­ly­ing laws of nature is the com­mon thread run­ning through his research and art.

Each image is accom­pa­nied a but­ton invit­ing you to “explore” the work fur­ther. Click it for infor­ma­tion about dimen­sions, prove­nance, and media, as well as some tan­ta­liz­ing bio­graph­i­cal tid­bits, such as this, adapt­ed from the cat­a­logue for the 2019 exhib­it Leonar­do da Vin­ci: A Life in Draw­ing:

Leonar­do had first stud­ied anato­my in the late 1480s. By the end of his life he claimed to have per­formed 30 human dis­sec­tions, intend­ing to pub­lish an illus­trat­ed trea­tise on the sub­ject, but this was nev­er com­plet­ed, and Leonardo’s work thus had no dis­cernible impact on the dis­ci­pline. His only doc­u­ment­ed dis­sec­tion was car­ried out in the win­ter of 1507–8, when he per­formed an autop­sy on an old man whose death he had wit­nessed in a hos­pi­tal in Flo­rence. The stud­ies on this page from Leonardo’s note­book are based on that dis­sec­tion: on the ver­so Leonar­do depicts the ves­sels of the liv­er; and in notes else­where in the note­book he gives the first known clin­i­cal descrip­tion of cir­rho­sis of the liv­er.

Per­haps you’d like to cir­cum­vent the machine learn­ing and use your own genius mind to make  con­nec­tions a la Da Vin­ci?

Try mess­ing around with the AI tags. See what you can cob­ble togeth­er to forge a cohe­sive alliance between such ele­ments as wing, horse, map, musi­cal instru­ments, and spi­ral.

Or cleanse your palate by putting a mash-up of two codex sketch­es on a dig­i­tal sticky with the help of Google AI, mind­ful that the mas­ter, who lived to the ripe old age of 67, was prob­a­bly a bit more inten­tion­al with his time…

Begin your explo­rations of Google Arts & Culture’s Inside a Genius Mind here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

The Inge­nious Inven­tions of Leonar­do da Vin­ci Recre­at­ed with 3D Ani­ma­tion

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490)

A Com­plete Dig­i­ti­za­tion of Leonar­do Da Vinci’s Codex Atlanti­cus, the Largest Exist­ing Col­lec­tion of His Draw­ings & Writ­ings

How Leonar­do da Vin­ci Made His Mag­nif­i­cent Draw­ings Using Only a Met­al Sty­lus, Pen & Ink, and Chalk

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Can Modern-Day Italians Understand Latin? A Youtuber Puts It to the Test on the Streets of Rome

in Language | July 10th, 2023

Of all the Romance lan­guages, none is more Roman­tic than Ital­ian, at least in the sense that it has changed the least in its long descent from Latin to its cur­rent form. Whether the Ital­ian spo­ken in recent cen­turies has a par­tic­u­lar­ly close resem­blance to Latin is anoth­er ques­tion, and one Amer­i­can Youtu­ber Luke Ranieri inves­ti­gates on the streets of Rome itself in the video above. In order to find out whether mod­ern-day Ital­ians can under­stand ancient Latin, he approach­es unsus­pect­ing Romans and asks them for direc­tions in that lan­guage, speak­ing it flu­ent­ly and just as their ances­tors would have back in the first cen­tu­ry.

So, can Romans under­stand Latin? “Yes,” Ranieri con­cludes, “but they don’t always enjoy it.” Most of the indi­vid­u­als he address­es claim that they can’t under­stand him at first. But as the con­ver­sa­tion con­tin­ues — in Latin on one side, Ital­ian on the oth­er — it becomes clear that they can indeed fig­ure out what he wants to know.

“Ital­ians are almost uni­ver­sal­ly exposed only to the tra­di­tion­al Ital­ian pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Latin (called the pro­nun­cia sco­las­ti­ca), oth­er­wise known as the Eccle­si­as­ti­cal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion,” Ranieri notes in a com­ment. But “in this video, I am using the Restored Clas­si­cal Pro­nun­ci­a­tion of Latin as it was pro­nounced in Rome two thou­sand years ago.”

He may have had bet­ter luck at the Vat­i­can and the Colos­se­um, but the Ital­ians he meets in Rome do rise to this chal­lenge, more or less, though few do it with­out hem­ming, haw­ing, and of course, attempt­ing to use Eng­lish. For the lan­guage of Eng­land has, one could argue, risen to play the same role in wide swaths of our world that Latin once played across the Roman Empire. This sit­u­a­tion has its advan­tages, but in the heart of many a lan­guage-lover it also inspires some regrets. Though full of Lati­nate vocab­u­lary, Eng­lish arguably falls short of the beau­ty of the gen­uine Romance lan­guages. And even the most obsti­nate Anglo­phone has to admit that, com­pared to Latin, Eng­lish lacks some­thing: a cer­tain grav­i­tas, let us say.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

Why Learn Latin?: 5 Videos Make a Com­pelling Case That the “Dead Lan­guage” Is an “Eter­nal Lan­guage”

Why French Sounds So Unlike Span­ish, Ital­ian & Oth­er Romance Lan­guages, Even Though They All Evolved from Latin

The Sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum: How Scram­bled Text by Cicero Became the Stan­dard For Type­set­ters Every­where

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Hear the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ Sung in the Indigenous Mi’kmaq Language

in Language, Music | July 6th, 2023

To raise aware­ness of her native lan­guage, 16-year-old Emma Stevens sang a ver­sion of The Bea­t­les’ 1968 clas­sic “Black­bird” in the Mi’k­maq lan­guage, an East­ern Algo­nquian lan­guage spo­ken by near­ly 11,000 in Cana­da and the Unit­ed States. A mem­ber of the Eska­soni First Nation, the Nova Sco­tia stu­dent sang lyrics that were painstak­ing­ly trans­lat­ed by Katani Julian, a teacher who works in lan­guage revi­tal­iza­tion. Julian told WBUR. “My lan­guage is very dif­fer­ent from oth­er ones.” “There’s a lot of syl­la­bles in ours. And there’s a lot of long words that trans­late into some­thing real­ly easy in Eng­lish.”

You can find the lyrics below and the song above.

Pu’tliskiej wap­in­in­toq
Kina’masi telayja’timk
tel pitawsin
eskimatimu’sipnek nike’ mnja’sin

Pu’tliskiej wap­in­in­toq
Ewlapin nike’ nmiteke
tel pkitawsin
eskimatimu’sipnek nike’ seya’sin

Pu’tliskiej…layja’si
ta’n wasatek poqnitpa’qiktuk

Pu’tliskiej…layja’si
ta’n wasatek poqnitpa’qiktuk

Pu’tliskiej wap­in­in­toq
Kina’masi telayja’timk
tel pitawsin

eskimatimu’sipnek nike’ mnja’sin
eskimatimu’sipnek nike’ mnja’sin
eskimatimu’sipnek nike’ mnja’sin

——————————————————–

Boo-dull-ees-kee-edge wob­bin-in-toq
Kee-na-ma-see dell-I-jaw-dimk
dell-bit-ow-sin
ess-gum-mud-dum-oo-sup-neg nike’ mn-jaw-sin

Boo-dull-ees-kee-edge wob­bin-in-toq
ew-la-bin nike’ num-mid-deh-geh
dell-bit-ow-sin
ess-gum-mud-dum-oo-sup-neg say-ya-sin

Boo-dull-ees-kee-edge, lie-jaw-see
don was­sa-deg poq-nit-ba’q‑ik-tuk

Boo-dull-ees-kee-edge, lie-jaw-see
don was­sa-deg poq-nit-ba’q‑ik-tuk

Boo-dull-ees-kee-edge wob­bin-in-toq
Kee-na-ma-see dell-I-jaw-dimk
dell-bit-ow-sin

ess-gum-mud-dum-oo-sup-neg nike’ mn-jaw-sin
ess-gum-mud-dum-oo-sup-neg nike’ mn-jaw-sin
ess-gum-mud-dum-oo-sup-neg nike’ mn-jaw-sin

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 

Watch Pre­cious­ly Rare Footage of Paul McCart­ney Record­ing “Black­bird” at Abbey Road Stu­dios (1968)

Paul McCart­ney Explains How Bach Influ­enced “Black­bird”

How The Bea­t­les Reviewed Songs Top­ping the Charts Dur­ing the 1960s: Hear Their Takes on the Beach Boys, Ray Charles, the Byrds, Joan Baez & More

Hear the Brazil­ian Met­al Band Singing in–and Try­ing to Save–Their Native Lan­guage of Tupi-Guarani

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Wes Anderson Visits a Paris Video Store and Highlights the Films He Loves: Kurosawa, Truffaut, Buñuel & More

in Film | July 6th, 2023

Wes Ander­son lives at least part-time in Paris, a sit­u­a­tion whose advan­tages include the abil­i­ty to fre­quent JM Vidéo, one of the very few cinephile-ori­ent­ed video-rental shops still in busi­ness. His apart­ment is on rue Daguerre, which would make it a bit of a trek — across the Seine and then some — to get there. Still, he made it out to JM to shoot the video above, the lat­est install­ment of a series from French Youtube chan­nel Kon­bi­ni in which famous auteurs (here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured episodes star­ing David Cro­nen­berg and Ter­ry Gilliam) pick their favorites off the shelves. Any­one who’s seen Ander­son­’s work will have a sense of his love of movies, but sel­dom have we had the chance to see him speak so enthu­si­as­ti­cal­ly about them.

Ander­son­’s JM jour­ney begins and ends in Japan. He calls Shōhei Ima­mu­ra’s Vengeance Is Mine “a great, very long, sort of ser­i­al killer movie” and names Aki­ra Kuro­sawa’s Drunk­en Angel as one source of music for his own ani­mat­ed film Isle of Dogs. There fol­low works from Luis Buñuel, Rouben Mamou­lian (who seems to have been a par­tic­u­lar­ly pow­er­ful fount of inspi­ra­tion), musi­cals like The Paja­ma Game and Meet Me in St. Louis, and John Sturges’ West­ern Bad Day at Black Rock (whose title sequence he lift­ed for his lat­est pic­ture, Aster­oid City).

He also pulls out a series of French films: The Fire With­in by Louis Malle, The Big Risk by Claude Sautet, Play­time by Jacques Tati, Vagabond by Agnès Var­da (her­self a one­time rue Daguerre res­i­dent), The Crime of Mon­sieur Lange by Jean Renoir, and The Man Who Loved Women by François Truf­faut.

Oth­er of Ander­son­’s selec­tions involve his col­lab­o­ra­tors: his pro­duc­tion design­er Adam Stock­hausen worked on Steven Spiel­berg’s Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies, his direc­tor of pho­tog­ra­phy Robert Yeo­man worked on Gus Van San­t’s Drug­store Cow­boy. Find­ing Mel Stu­ar­t’s Willy Won­ka and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry prompts him to dis­cuss his own upcom­ing Roald Dahl adap­ta­tion, a short film for Net­flix (cur­rent own­er of Dahl’s work) called The Won­der­ful Sto­ry of Hen­ry Sug­ar. Not long there­after he comes around to the ani­me sec­tion, where he express­es his appre­ci­a­tion for Isao Taka­hata’s fea­ture Only Yes­ter­day and Hidea­ki Anno’s series Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion. He imag­ines the pos­si­bil­i­ty of “some­one becom­ing a Neon Gen­e­sis Evan­ge­lion fanat­ic and mak­ing it their reli­gion”; the fact that he has­n’t seen the actu­al­i­ty sug­gests that, how­ev­er inter­na­tion­al his life and work have become, he has yet to spend time in Mex­i­co.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Wes Anderson’s Favorite Films

David Cro­nen­berg Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies

Wes Ander­son Names 12 of His Favorite Art Films

Ter­ry Gilliam Vis­its a Video Store & Talks About His Favorite Movies and Actors

Books in the Films of Wes Ander­son: A Super­cut for Bib­lio­philes

Steal Like Wes Ander­son: A New Video Essay Explores How Wes Ander­son Pays Art­ful Trib­ute to Alfred Hitch­cock, Ing­mar Bergman & Oth­er Direc­tors in His Films

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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Explore Exquisite Kimono Designs from 19th-Century Japan

in Art, Books, Fashion, Museums | July 6th, 2023

Japan’s 19th-cen­tu­ry kimonos blur the lines between art and fash­ion.

Mei­ji era cus­tomers could browse hina­ga­ta-bon, tra­di­tion­al­ly bound pat­tern books, on vis­its to drap­ers and fab­ric mer­chants. These col­or­ful vol­umes offered a glam­orous update of the Edo period’s black-and-white kimono pat­tern books.

Aspir­ing design­ers also stud­ied hina­ga­ta-bon, as many of the designs fea­tured with­in were the work of cel­e­brat­ed artists.

Each page fea­tured a stan­dard kimono out­line in a back or side view, embell­ished with the pro­posed design. These range from tra­di­tion­al flo­ral motifs to bold land­scapes to strik­ing geo­met­ric pat­terns, some arrest­ing, some dis­creet.

As Hunter Dukes observes in the Pub­lic Domain Review, the Mei­ji era ush­ered in a peri­od of tech­no­log­i­cal advance­ment. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Japan­ese tex­tile indus­try ven­tured abroad, embrac­ing and adapt­ing dying process­es they saw prac­ticed in the Unit­ed States and Europe. The abil­i­ty to sten­cil pastes of chem­i­cal dye onto silk helped to indus­tri­al­ize the kimono-mak­ing process. Peo­ple who pre­vi­ous­ly could­n’t have afford­ed such a gar­ment could now choose from a vari­ety of designs.

The explo­sion in kimono pro­duc­tion spurred demand for fresh designs. Pub­lish­ers began to release hina­ga­ta-bon annu­al­ly. Pre­vi­ous years’ pat­tern books were of lit­tle inter­est to sophis­ti­cat­ed cus­tomers clam­or­ing for the lat­est fash­ions.

Unlike today’s dis­pos­able fash­ion mags, how­ev­er, the pat­tern books’ high aes­thet­ic and pro­duc­tion qual­i­ty saved them from destruc­tion.

In her 1924 book, Block Print­ing and Book Illus­tra­tion in Japan, author Louise Nor­ton Brown wrote that cast-off hina­ga­ta-bon could be “found in all the sec­ond­hand book shops of Japan … (where they were) com­par­a­tive­ly inex­pen­sive.”

These days, you can find Mei­ji era pat­tern books in a num­ber of world class institution’s col­lec­tions includ­ing the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art, the British Library, the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go, and The Smith­son­ian Nation­al Muse­um of Asian Art, which dig­i­tized the kimono designs by Seiko Ueno fea­tured in this post.

Explore four Mei­ji era kimono pat­tern books here.

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Explore the Beau­ti­ful Pages of the 1902 Japan­ese Design Mag­a­zine Shin-Bijut­sukai: Euro­pean Mod­ernism Meets Tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese Design

1,000+ His­toric Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Dig­i­tized & Put Online by the Smith­son­ian: From the Edo & Meji Eras (1600–1912)

Hun­dreds of Won­der­ful Japan­ese Fire­work Designs from the Ear­ly-1900s: Dig­i­tized and Free to Down­load

– Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo and Cre­ative, Not Famous Activ­i­ty Book. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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A 3D Animation Reveals What Paris Looked Like When It Was a Roman Town

in History | July 5th, 2023

The stan­dard tour of Paris feels like a jour­ney back through time: the Eif­fel Tow­er stands for the eigh­teen-eight­ies, the Arc de Tri­om­phe for the turn of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry, Les Invalides for the turn of the eigh­teenth cen­tu­ry, Notre-Dame for the mid-four­teenth cen­tu­ry, Sainte-Chapelle for the mid-thir­teenth cen­tu­ry, and so on. But of course, this is much too sim­ple a way of see­ing it, since so many of France’s his­tor­i­cal land­marks have been repeat­ed­ly expand­ed, ren­o­vat­ed, or mod­i­fied over the cen­turies. (The Lou­vre, for exam­ple, bog­gles the mind with not just its sheer scale, but also the span of eras embod­ied by its con­struc­tion.)

Paris’ his­to­ry also goes much deep­er than many tourists imag­ine. To dis­cov­er it, they must go deep­er in a lit­er­al sense, down into the Crypte Arche­ologique de l’île de la Cité. Con­ve­nient­ly locat­ed right next to Notre-Dame, this under­ground muse­um con­tains arti­facts of the city as it was 2,000 years ago, when it was a rel­a­tive­ly mod­est Gal­lo-Roman town called Lute­tia, or in French, Lutèce.

On dis­play there as well are some of the ani­ma­tions seen in the video above, which recon­struct Lutèce at the height of the Roman Empire in 3D. The aer­i­al view it pro­vides shows the Ile de la Cité, rec­og­niz­able today in form but not func­tion: 1,300 years before the com­ple­tion of Notre-Dame, it had yet even to be occu­pied by the fortress of its Roman gov­er­nor.

Long gone is the dom­i­nant fea­ture of Lutèce’s built envi­ron­ment: its Roman forum, which was locat­ed on a choice piece of real estate between the cur­rent Boule­vard Saint-Michel and Rue Saint-Jacques. But one impor­tant frag­ment of Luté­cien pub­lic life does sur­vive: the Arènes de Lutèce, l’orgueil de la cité, which host­ed spec­ta­cles both reli­gious and impe­r­i­al, as well as no few glad­i­a­to­r­i­al con­tests. In this longer broad­cast of Des Racines et des Ailes, you can see the 3D recon­struc­tion of the amphithe­ater woven in with footage of its remains as they look in the mod­ern day. Fran­coph­o­nes should note that it also includes an inter­view with Sylvie Robin, a con­ser­va­tor from the Musée Car­navalet — anoth­er essen­tial des­ti­na­tion for any­one with a seri­ous inter­est in Parisian time trav­el.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Roman Roads of Gaul Visu­al­ized as a Mod­ern Sub­way Map

Take an Aer­i­al Tour of Medieval Paris

A 3D Ani­mat­ed His­to­ry of Paris: Take a Visu­al Jour­ney from Ancient Times to 1900

Paris in Beau­ti­ful Col­or Images from 1890: The Eif­fel Tow­er, Notre Dame, The Pan­théon, and More (1890)

A Vir­tu­al Tour of Ancient Rome, Cir­ca 320 CE: Explore Stun­ning Recre­ations of The Forum, Colos­se­um and Oth­er Mon­u­ments

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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How Much of What You See Is Actually a Hallucination?: An Animated TED-Ed Lesson

in Animation, Neuroscience | July 5th, 2023

All of us have, at one time or anoth­er, been accused of not see­ing what’s right in front of us. But as a close exam­i­na­tion of our bio­log­i­cal visu­al sys­tem reveals, none of us can see what’s right in front of us. “Our eyes have blind spots where the optic nerve blocks part of the reti­na,” says the nar­ra­tor of the new ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above. “When the visu­al cor­tex process­es light into coher­ent images, it fills in these blind spots with infor­ma­tion from the sur­round­ing area. Occa­sion­al­ly we might notice a glitch, but most of the time, we’re none the wis­er.” This absence of gen­uine infor­ma­tion in the very cen­ter of our vision has long cir­cu­lat­ed in the stan­dard set of fas­ci­nat­ing facts.

What’s less well known is that these same neu­ro­log­i­cal process­es have made the blind see — or rather, they’ve induced in the blind an expe­ri­ence sub­jec­tive­ly indis­tin­guish­able from see­ing. It’s just that the things they “see” don’t exist in real­i­ty.

Take the case of an elder­ly woman named Ros­alie, with which the video opens. On one oth­er­wise nor­mal day at the nurs­ing home, “her room sud­den­ly burst to life with twirling fab­rics. Through the elab­o­rate drap­ings, she could make out ani­mals, chil­dren, and cos­tumed char­ac­ters,” even though she’d lost her sight long before. “Ros­alie had devel­oped a con­di­tion known as Charles Bon­net Syn­drome, in which patients with either impaired vision or total blind­ness sud­den­ly hal­lu­ci­nate whole scenes in vivid col­or.”

This leads us to the coun­ter­in­tu­itive find­ing that you don’t need sight to expe­ri­ence visu­al hal­lu­ci­na­tions. (You do need to have once had sight, which gives the brain visu­al mem­o­ries on which to draw lat­er.) But “even in peo­ple with com­plete­ly unim­paired sens­es, the brain con­structs the world we per­ceive from incom­plete infor­ma­tion.” Take that gap in the mid­dle of our visu­al field, which the brain fills with, in effect, a hal­lu­ci­na­tion, albeit not one of the elab­o­rate, some­times over­whelm­ing kinds induced by “recre­ation­al and ther­a­peu­tic drugs, con­di­tions like epilep­sy and nar­colep­sy, and psy­chi­atric dis­or­ders like schiz­o­phre­nia.” At the end of the les­son, the nar­ra­tor sug­gests that inter­est­ed view­ers seek out the work of neu­rol­o­gist-writer Oliv­er Sacks, which deals exten­sive­ly with what opens gaps between real­i­ty and our per­cep­tions — and which we here at Open Cul­ture are always pre­pared to rec­om­mend.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Oliv­er Sacks Explains the Biol­o­gy of Hal­lu­ci­na­tions: “We See with the Eyes, But with the Brain as Well”

Real­i­ty Is Noth­ing But a Hal­lu­ci­na­tion: A Mind-Bend­ing Crash Course on the Neu­ro­science of Con­scious­ness

A Beau­ti­ful 1870 Visu­al­iza­tion of the Hal­lu­ci­na­tions That Come Before a Migraine

Alice in Won­der­land Syn­drome: The Real Per­cep­tu­al Dis­or­der That May Have Shaped Lewis Carroll’s Cre­ative World

This is What Oliv­er Sacks Learned on LSD and Amphet­a­mines

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, 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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