400,000+ Sound Recordings Made Before 1923 Have Entered the Public Domain

in Archives, History, Internet Archive, Music | January 4th, 2022

A cen­tu­ry ago, the Unit­ed States was deep into the Jazz Age. No writer is more close­ly asso­ci­at­ed with that heady era than F. Scott Fitzger­ald, who (in addi­tion to coin­ing the verb to cock­tail) took it upon him­self to pop­u­lar­ize its name. In 1922 he even titled a short sto­ry col­lec­tion Tales from the Jazz Age, which entered the pub­lic domain not long ago. You may be more famil­iar with anoth­er work of Fitzger­ald’s that fol­lowed Tales from the Jazz Age into free­dom just last year: a nov­el called The Great Gats­by. But only this year have the actu­al sounds of the Jazz Age come into the pub­lic domain as well, thanks to the Music Mod­ern­iza­tion Act passed by U.S. Con­gress in 2018.

“Accord­ing to the act, all sound record­ings pri­or to 1923 will have their copy­rights expire in the US on Jan­u­ary 1, 2022,” says the Pub­lic Domain Review. This straight­ens out a tan­gled legal frame­work that pre­vi­ous­ly would­n’t have allowed the release of pre-1923 sound record­ings until the dis­tant year of 2067.

And so all of us now have free use of every sound record­ing from a more than 60-year peri­od  that “com­pris­es a rich and var­ied playlist: exper­i­men­tal first dab­blings, vaude­ville, Broad­way hits, rag­time, and the begin­nings of pop­u­lar jazz. Includ­ed will be the works of Scott Joplin, Thomas Edison’s exper­i­ments, the emo­tive war­blings of Adeli­na Pat­ti and the first record­ing of Swing Low, Sweet Char­i­ot.”

If you’d like to have a lis­ten to all this, the Pub­lic Domain Review rec­om­mends start­ing with its own audio col­lec­tion, a search for all pre-1923 record­ings on Inter­net Archive, and two projects from the Library of Con­gress: the Nation­al Juke­box and the Cit­i­zen DJ project, the lat­ter of which “has plans to do some­thing spe­cial with the pre-1923 record­ings once they enter the pub­lic domain.” You might also have a look at the Asso­ci­a­tion for Record­ed Sound Col­lec­tions’ list of ten notable pre-1923 record­ings, which high­lights such pro­to-jazz records as “Crazy Blues” and “Dix­ieland Jass Band One-Step” (along with the whol­ly non-jazz work of Enri­co Caru­so and Pablo Casals).

Accord­ing to Alex­is Rossi at the Inter­net Archive Blog, the sound record­ings just lib­er­at­ed by the Music Mod­ern­iza­tion act come to about 400,000 in total. Among them you’ll find “ear­ly jazz clas­sics like ‘Don’t Care Blues’ by Mamie Smith and her Jazz Hounds, ‘Ory’s Cre­ole Trom­bone’ by Kid Ory’s Sun­shine Orches­tra, and ‘Jazz­in’ Babies Blues’ by Ethel Waters.” Rossi also high­lights the nov­el­ty songs such as Bil­ly Mur­ray’s 1914 ren­di­tion of “Fido is a Hot Dog Now,” “which seems to be about a dog who is def­i­nite­ly going to hell.” The Jazz Age soon to come would exhib­it a more rau­cous but also more refined sen­si­bil­i­ty: as Fitzger­ald wrote in 1931, with the era he defined (and that defined him) already past, “It was an age of mir­a­cles, it was an age of art, it was an age of excess, and it was an age of satire.”

via Mefi

Relat­ed con­tent:

Free: The Great Gats­by & Oth­er Major Works by F. Scott Fitzger­ald

What’s Enter­ing the Pub­lic Domain in 2022: The Sun Also Ris­es, Win­nie-the-Pooh, Buster Keaton Come­dies & More

Hear the First Jazz Record, Which Launched the Jazz Age: “Liv­ery Sta­ble Blues” (1917)

The Clean­est Record­ings of 1920s Louis Arm­strong Songs You’ll Ever Hear

Great New Archive Lets You Hear the Sounds of New York City Dur­ing the Roar­ing 20s

How the Inter­net Archive Has Dig­i­tized More than 250,000 78 R.P.M. Records: See the Painstak­ing Process Up-Close

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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Download 215,000 Japanese Woodblock Prints by Masters Spanning the Tradition’s 350-Year History

in Archives, Art, Museums | December 8th, 2021

If you enjoy Japan­ese wood­block prints, that appre­ci­a­tion puts you in good com­pa­ny: with Vin­cent van Gogh, for exam­ple, and per­haps even more flat­ter­ing­ly, with many of your fel­low read­ers of Open Cul­ture. So avid is the inter­est in ukiyo‑e, the tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese “pic­tures of the float­ing world,” that you might even have missed one of the large, free online col­lec­tions we’ve fea­tured over the years. Take, for instance, the one made avail­able by the Van Gogh Muse­um itself, which fea­tures the work of such well-known mas­ters as Kat­sushi­ka Hoku­sai, artist of The Great Wave off Kanaza­wa, and Uta­gawa Hiroshige, he of the One Hun­dred Views of Edo.

Edo was the name of Tokyo until 1868, a decade after Hiroshige’s death — an event that itself marked the end of an aes­thet­i­cal­ly fruit­ful era for ukiyo‑e. But the his­to­ry of the form itself stretch­es back to the 17th cen­tu­ry, as reflect­ed by the Unit­ed States Library of Con­gress’ online col­lec­tion “Fine Prints: Japan­ese, pre-1915.”

There you’ll find plen­ty of Hoku­sai and Hiroshige, but also oth­ers who took the art form in their own direc­tions like Uta­gawa Yoshi­fu­ji, whose prints include depic­tions of not just his coun­try­men but vis­it­ing West­ern­ers as well. (The results are some­what more real­is­tic than the ukiyo‑e Lon­don imag­ined in 1866 by Uta­gawa Yoshi­to­ra, anoth­er mem­ber of the same artis­tic lin­eage.)

As if all this was­n’t enough, you can also find more than 220,000 Japan­ese wood­block prints at Ukiyo‑e.org. Quite pos­si­bly the most expan­sive such archive yet cre­at­ed, it includes works from Hiroshige and Hoku­sai’s 19th-cen­tu­ry “gold­en age of print­mak­ing” as well as from the devel­op­ment of the art form ear­ly in the cen­tu­ry before. Even after its best-known prac­ti­tion­ers were gone, ukiyo‑e con­tin­ued to evolve: through Japan’s mod­ern­iz­ing Mei­ji peri­od in the late 19th and ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, through var­i­ous aes­thet­ic move­ments in the years up to the Sec­ond World War, and even on to our own time, which has seen the emer­gence even of pro­lif­ic non-Japan­ese print­mak­ers.

Of course, these ukiyo‑e prints weren’t orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed to be viewed on the inter­net; the works of Hoku­sai and Hiroshige may look good on a tablet, but not by their design. Still, they did often have the indi­vid­ual con­sumer in mind: these are artists “known today for their wood­block prints, but who also excelled at illus­tra­tions for deluxe poet­ry antholo­gies and pop­u­lar lit­er­a­ture,” writes the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art cura­tor John Car­pen­ter. His words greet the vis­i­tor to the Met’s online col­lec­tion of more than 650 illus­trat­ed Japan­ese books, which presents ukiyo‑e as it would actu­al­ly have been seen by most peo­ple when the form first explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty — not that, even then, its enthu­si­asts could imag­ine how many appre­ci­a­tors it would one day have around the world.

Below you can find a list of pri­or posts fea­tur­ing archives of Japan­ese wood­block prints. Please feel free to explore them at your leisure.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

Down­load Vin­cent van Gogh’s Col­lec­tion of 500 Japan­ese Prints, Which Inspired Him to Cre­ate “the Art of the Future”

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

The Met Puts 650+ Japan­ese Illus­trat­ed Books Online: Mar­vel at Hokusai’s One Hun­dred Views of Mount Fuji and More

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

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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The Black Film Archive: A New Site Highlights 200+ Noteworthy Black Films Made Between 1915–1979

in Archives, Film | August 30th, 2021

The just launched Black Film Archive is a labor of love for the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion, thanks to audi­ence strate­gist, Maya Cade.

Begin­ning in June 2020, she began research­ing films pro­duced between 1915 to 1979 that are avail­able for stream­ing, and “have some­thing sig­nif­i­cant to say about the Black expe­ri­ence; speak to Black audi­ences; and/or have a Black star, writer, pro­duc­er, or direc­tor.”

Thus far, she’s col­lect­ed over 200 films, span­ning the peri­od between 1915’s Black-pro­duced silent slap­stick short, Two Knights of Vaude­ville and 1978’s star­ry big bud­get musi­cal, The Wiz, a com­mer­cial flop that “major Hol­ly­wood stu­dios used … as a rea­son to stop invest­ing in Black cin­e­ma.”

Cade rea­sons that the rise of Black inde­pen­dent film in the 80s makes 1979 “feel like a nat­ur­al stop­ping point” for the archive. She’s also push­ing back against the notion of Black Films as trau­ma porn:

As debates about Black film’s asso­ci­a­tion with trau­ma rage on, I hope Black Film Archive can offer a dif­fer­ent lens through which to under­stand Black cin­e­mat­ic his­to­ry, one that takes into con­sid­er­a­tion the full weight of the past. Through this lens, it is easy to see that the notion that “Black films are only trau­mat­ic” is based on gen­er­al­iza­tions and impres­sions of recent times (often pinned to the suc­cess of films like 12 Years a Slave) rather than a deep­er engage­ment with his­to­ry, which reveals that “slave films” con­sti­tute only a small per­cent­age of the Black films that have been made. I hope con­ver­sa­tions evolve to con­sid­er the expan­sive archive of rad­i­cal ideas and expres­sion found in Black films’ past.

The col­lec­tion, which Cade will be updat­ing month­ly, has some­thing for every­one — com­e­dy, dra­ma, doc­u­men­taries, musi­cals, silent films, for­eign films, and yes, Blax­ploita­tion.

Some of the titles — To Sir with Love, A Raisin in the Sun, Shaft — are far from obscure, and you’ll find appear­ances by many Black per­form­ers and doc­u­men­tary sub­jects whose lega­cies endure: Paul Robe­son, Cice­ly Tyson, Sid­ney Poiti­er, Josephine Bak­er, Dorothy Dan­dridge, Bil­ly Dee Williams and Richard Pry­or, Muham­mad Ali, Mal­colm X, Light­nin’ Hop­kins.…

But the archive is also a won­der­ful oppor­tu­ni­ty to dis­cov­er direc­tors, per­form­ers, and films with which you may be utter­ly unfa­mil­iar.

Black Girl, 1966, was the first fea­ture of Ous­mane Sem­bène, the father of African cin­e­ma, and the first fea­ture made in Africa by a sub-Saha­ran African to attract inter­na­tion­al notice. It fol­lows a Sene­galese domes­tic work­er serv­ing a wealthy white fam­i­ly on the Côte d’Azur. Ear­ly on Dioua­na is seen work­ing in the kitchen, naive­ly dream­ing of adven­tures that sure­ly await once she’s fin­ished prepar­ing “a real African dish” for her employer’s din­ner guests:

Maybe we’ll go to Cannes, Nice, Monte Car­lo. We’ll look in all the pret­ty stores and when the mis­tress pays me, I’ll buy pret­ty dress­es, shoes, silk undies, and pret­ty wigs. And I’ll get my pic­ture tak­en on the beach, and I’ll send it back to Dakar, and they’ll all die of jeal­ousy!

One of sev­er­al adap­ta­tions of Tim­o­thy Shay Arthur’s pop­u­lar 1854 tem­per­ance nov­el, The Col­ored Play­ers Film Cor­po­ra­tion of Philadelphia’s 1926 melo­dra­ma, Ten Nights in a Bar Room, fea­tures a star turn by the mul­ti-tal­ent­ed Charles Gilpin, the most suc­cess­ful Black stage per­former of the ear­ly 20th Cen­tu­ry.

The Emper­or Jones may have pro­vid­ed Paul Robe­son with his icon­ic, break­through role, but the part was first played onstage by Gilpin, who was fired by play­wright Eugene O’Neill after it was dis­cov­ered he was repeat­ed­ly swap­ping out the script’s many instances of the N‑word for gen­tler terms like “Black boy.”

As Indy Week’s Byron Woods notes in a pre­view of N, Adri­enne Ear­le Pender’s play about O’Neill and Gilpin:

A 1921 review in Negro World con­clud­ed, “We imag­ine if Mr. Gilpin is an intel­li­gent and loy­al Negro, his heart must ache and rebel with­in him as he is forced to belie his race.” When the work was staged in Harlem, Langston Hugh­es recalled that the audi­ence “howled with laugh­ter.”

The Oscar nom­i­nat­ed The Qui­et One, from 1948, was the first major Amer­i­can film to posi­tion a Black child — 10-year old non-actor Don­ald Thomp­son — front and cen­ter.

Osten­si­bly a doc­u­men­tary, it took an unflinch­ing look at the emo­tion­al­ly tur­bu­lent exis­tence of a neglect­ed Harlem boy, and offered no easy solu­tions, even as he begins to come out of his shell at the Wiltwyck School for Boys.

The cast, includ­ing a num­ber of stu­dents from the Wiltwyck School, is almost entire­ly Black, with Ulysses Kay’s jazz score pro­vid­ing an urgent pulse to real life scenes of mid-cen­tu­ry Harlem.

The white pro­duc­tion team fea­tured sev­er­al high pro­file, social­ly con­scious names — nov­el­ist and film crit­ic James Agee con­tributed poet­ic com­men­tary and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Helen Levitt was one of two prin­ci­pal cam­era peo­ple.

Cur­rent­ly, the Black Film Archive is orga­nized by decade, though we hope one day this might be expand­ed to encom­pass gen­res, as well as a search option that would allow view­ers to dis­cov­er work by direc­tor and per­form­ers.

For now, Cade’s cura­tor picks are an excel­lent place to begin your explo­rations.

This mam­moth under­tak­ing is a self-fund­ed one-woman oper­a­tion. Dona­tions are wel­come, as are paid sub­scrip­tions to the Black Film Archive Sub­stack.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Free Films by African Amer­i­can Film­mak­ers in the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion … and the New Civ­il Rights Film, Just Mer­cy

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

Watch Lime Kiln Club Field Day, One of the Ear­li­est Sur­viv­ing Fea­ture Films with an All Black Cast (1913)

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Stream 160 In-Depth Radio Interviews with Clive James, Pico Iyer, Greil Marcus & Other Luminaries from the Marketplace of Ideas Archive

in Archives, Podcasts, Radio | June 15th, 2021

Would you like to to hear a long-form con­ver­sa­tion about the his­to­ry of the vinyl LP? Or about the his­to­ry of human rights? About the plight of book review­ing in Amer­i­ca? The wild excess­es of the art mar­ket? The nature of bore­dom? The true mean­ing of North Kore­an pro­pa­gan­da? What it’s like to live in Bangkok? What it’s like to go on a road trip with David Fos­ter Wal­lace? The answer to all of the above: of course you do. And now you can hear these con­ver­sa­tions and many more besides in the com­plete archive of the pub­lic radio show The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, which has just now come avail­able to stream on Youtube.

How, you may won­der, did I get such ear­ly word of this inter­view tro­ve’s avail­abil­i­ty? Because, in the years before I began writ­ing here on Open Cul­ture, I cre­at­ed, pro­duced, and host­ed the show myself. The project grew, in a sense, out of my dis­sat­is­fac­tion with the radio inter­views I’d been hear­ing, the vast bulk of which struck me as too brief, frag­men­tary, and pro­gram­mat­ic to be of any real val­ue.

What’s more, it was often painful­ly obvi­ous how lit­tle inter­est in the sub­ject under dis­cus­sion the inter­view­ers had them­selves. With The Mar­ket­place of Ideas, I set out to do the oppo­site of prac­ti­cal­ly every­thing I’d heard done on the radio before.

Like all worth­while goals, mine was para­dox­i­cal: to con­duct inter­views of the deep­est pos­si­ble depth as well as the widest pos­si­ble breadth. On one week the top­ic might be evo­lu­tion­ary eco­nom­ics, on anoth­er the philo­soph­i­cal quar­rel between David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, on anoth­er the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can film com­e­dy, on anoth­er the lega­cy of Robert Pir­sig’s Zen and the Art of Motor­cy­cle Main­te­nance, and on anoth­er still the ascent of Cal­i­forn­ian wine over French. (This prin­ci­ple also applied to the polit­i­cal spec­trum: I delight­ed in bring­ing on, say, the grand­daugh­ter of Bar­ry Gold­wa­ter as well as a for­mer mem­ber of the Weath­er Under­ground.) An inter­est­ing per­son is, as they say, an inter­est­ed per­son, and through­out the show’s run I trust­ed my lis­ten­ers to be inter­est­ing peo­ple.

The same went for my inter­vie­wees, what­ev­er their cul­tur­al domain: nov­el­ists like Alexan­der Ther­oux, Tom McCarthy, Joshua Cohen, and Geoff Dyer; sci­en­tists like David P. Barash, Alan Sokal (he of the “Sokal Hoax”), and Sean Car­roll; crit­ics like James Wood, Greil Mar­cus, Jonathan Rosen­baum, Dave Kehr, and J. Hober­man; econ­o­mists like Tyler Cowen (twice), Robin Han­son, Steven E. Lands­burg, and Tim Har­ford (twice); biog­ra­phers of Bri­an Eno, Nick Drake, and Michel de Mon­taigne;  trans­la­tors of Jorge Luis Borges, César Aira, and Robert Walser; broad­cast­ers like Peter Sagal, Robert Pogue Har­ri­son (of Enti­tled Opin­ions), Jesse Thorn, and Michael Sil­verblatt; philoso­phers like Kwame Antho­ny Appi­ah and Simon Black­burn; tech­nol­o­gists like Steve Woz­ni­ak and Kevin Kel­ly; film­mak­ers like Ramin Bahrani (direc­tor of the exis­ten­tial Wern­er Her­zog-nar­rat­ed plas­tic-bag short pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture), So Yong Kim, Andrew Bujal­s­ki, Aaron Katz; and musi­cians like Nick Cur­rie, a.k.a Momus (twice), Jack Hues of Wang Chung, and Chaz Bundick of Toro y Moi.

The Mar­ket­place of Ideas aired between 2007 and 2011, and the pas­sage of a decade since the show’s end prompt­ed me to take a look — or rather a lis­ten — back at it. So  did the fact that a fair few of its guests have since shuf­fled off this mor­tal coil: Arts & Let­ters Dai­ly founder Denis Dut­ton, film crit­ic Peter Brunette, lit­er­ary schol­ar Angus Fletch­er, doc­u­men­tar­i­an Pepi­ta Fer­rari, writer and edi­tor Daniel Menaker, cul­tur­al poly­math Clive James. That inter­view with James was a dream ful­filled, due not just to my per­son­al enthu­si­asm for his writ­ing but the ide­al of intel­lec­tu­al omniv­o­rous­ness he rep­re­sent­ed — an ide­al toward which I strove on the show, and con­tin­ue to strive in my pur­suits today.  Even more than our con­ver­sa­tion itself, I fond­ly remem­ber an exchange after we fin­ished record­ing but before we hung up the phone. He thanked me for actu­al­ly read­ing his book, and I told him I’d thought all inter­view­ers did the same. His response: “That’s the first naïve thing you’ve said all hour.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The New Studs Terkel Radio Archive Will Let You Hear 5,000+ Record­ings Fea­tur­ing the Great Amer­i­can Broad­cast­er & Inter­view­er

Enti­tled Opin­ions, the “Life and Lit­er­a­ture” Pod­cast That Refus­es to Dumb Things Down

An Archive of 1,000 “Peel Ses­sions” Avail­able Online: Hear David Bowie, Bob Mar­ley, Elvis Costel­lo & Oth­ers Play in the Stu­dio of Leg­endary BBC DJ John Peel

The 135 Best Pod­casts to Enrich Your Mind: An Intro­duc­tion to Our New List

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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Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks Get Digitized: Where to Read the Renaissance Man’s Manuscripts Online

in Archives, Art, History, Science | May 13th, 2021

From the hand of Leonar­do da Vin­ci came the Mona Lisa and The Last Sup­per, among oth­er art objects of intense rev­er­ence and even wor­ship. But to under­stand the mind of Leonar­do da Vin­ci, one must immerse one­self in his note­books. Total­ing some 13,000 pages of notes and draw­ings, they record some­thing of every aspect of the Renais­sance man’s intel­lec­tu­al and dai­ly life: stud­ies for art­works, designs for ele­gant build­ings and fan­tas­ti­cal machines, obser­va­tions of the world around him, lists of his gro­ceries and his debtors. Intend­ing their even­tu­al pub­li­ca­tion, Leonar­do left his note­books to his pupil Francesco Melzi, by the time of whose own death half a cen­tu­ry lat­er lit­tle had been done with them.

Absent a prop­er stew­ard, Leonar­do’s note­books scat­tered across the world. Six cen­turies lat­er, their sur­viv­ing pages con­sti­tute a series of codices in the pos­ses­sion of such enti­ties as the Bib­liote­ca Ambrosiana, the British Muse­um, the Insti­tut de France, and Bill Gates.

In recent years, they and their col­lab­o­rat­ing orga­ni­za­tions have made efforts to open Leonar­do’s note­books to the world, dig­i­tiz­ing them, trans­lat­ing them, and orga­niz­ing them for con­ve­nient brows­ing on the web. Here on Open Cul­ture, we’ve pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured the Codex Arun­del as made avail­able to the pub­lic by the British Library, Codex Atlanti­cus by the Visu­al Agency, and the three-part Codex Forster by the Vic­to­ria & Albert Muse­um.

Oth­er col­lec­tions of Leonar­do’s note­books made avail­able to view online include the Madrid Codices at the Bib­liote­ca Nacional de España, the Codex Trivulzianus at the Archi­vo Stori­co Civi­co e Bib­liote­ca Trivulziana, and the Codex on the Flight of Birds at the Smith­son­ian Nation­al Air and Space Muse­um. (Pub­lished as a stand­alone book, his Trea­tise on Paint­ing is avail­able to down­load at Project Guten­berg.) Even so, many of the pages Leonar­do wrote haven’t yet made it to the inter­net, and even when they do, gen­er­a­tions of inter­pre­tive work — well beyond revers­ing his “mir­ror writ­ing” — will sure­ly remain. Much as human­i­ty is only now putting some of his inven­tions to the test, the full pub­li­ca­tion of his note­books remains a work in progress. Leonar­do him­self would sure­ly under­stand: after all, one can’t cul­ti­vate a mind like his with­out patience.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Ele­gant Math­e­mat­ics of Vit­ru­vian Man, Leonar­do da Vinci’s Most Famous Draw­ing: An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion

Down­load the Sub­lime Anato­my Draw­ings of Leonar­do da Vin­ci: Avail­able Online, or in a Great iPad App

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Bizarre Car­i­ca­tures & Mon­ster Draw­ings

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Hand­writ­ten Resume (1482)

Leonar­do Da Vinci’s To Do List (Cir­ca 1490) Is Much Cool­er Than Yours

Why Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Write Back­wards? A Look Into the Ulti­mate Renais­sance Man’s “Mir­ror Writ­ing”

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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The Letterform Archive Launches a New Online Archive of Graphic Design, Featuring 9,000 Hi-Fi Images

in Archives, Art, Design | April 8th, 2021

An online design muse­um made by and for design­ers? The con­cept seems obvi­ous, but has tak­en decades in inter­net years for the real­i­ty to ful­ly emerge in the Let­ter­form Archive. Now that it has, we can see why. Good design may look sim­ple, but no one should be fooled into think­ing it’s easy. “After years of devel­op­ment and months of feed­back,” write the cre­ators of the Let­ter­form Archive online design muse­um, “we’re open­ing up the Online Archive to every­one. This project is a labor of love from every­one on our staff, and many gen­er­ous vol­un­teers, and we hope it pro­vides a source of beau­ti­ful dis­trac­tion and inspi­ra­tion to all who love let­ters.”

That’s let­ters as in fonts, not epis­tles, and there are thou­sands of them in the archive. But there are also thou­sands of pho­tographs, lith­o­graphs, silkscreens, etc. rep­re­sent­ing the height of mod­ern sim­plic­i­ty. This and oth­er uni­fy­ing threads run through the col­lec­tion of the Let­ter­form Archive, which offers “unprece­dent­ed access… with near­ly 1,500 objects and 9,000 hi-fi images.”

You’ll find in the Archive the sleek ele­gance of 1960s Olivet­ti cat­a­logs, the icon­ic mil­i­tan­cy of Emory Dou­glas’ designs for The Black Pan­ther news­pa­per, and the eeri­ly stark mil­i­tan­cy of the “SILENCE=DEATH” t‑shirt from the 1980s AIDS cri­sis.

The site was built around the ide­al of “rad­i­cal acces­si­bil­i­ty,” with the aim of cap­tur­ing “a sense of what it’s like to vis­it the Archive” (which lives per­ma­nent­ly in San Fran­cis­co). But the focus is not on the casu­al onlook­er — Let­ter­form Archive online caters specif­i­cal­ly to graph­ic design­ers, which makes its inter­face even sim­pler, more ele­gant, and eas­i­er to use for every­one, coin­ci­den­tal­ly (or not).

The graph­ic design focus also means there are func­tions spe­cif­ic to the dis­ci­pline that design­ers won’t find in oth­er online image libraries: “we encour­age you to use the search fil­ters: click on each cat­e­go­ry to explore dis­ci­plines like let­ter­ing, and for­mats like type spec­i­mens, or com­bine fil­ters like decades and coun­tries to nar­row your view to a spe­cif­ic time and place.”

From the rad­i­cal typog­ra­phy of Dada to the rad­i­cal 60s zine scene to the sleek designs (and Neins) found in a 1987 Apple Logo Stan­dards pam­phlet, the muse­um has some­thing for every­one inter­est­ed in recent graph­ic design his­to­ry and typol­o­gy. But it’s not all sleek sim­plic­i­ty. There are also rare arti­facts of elab­o­rate­ly intri­cate design, like the Per­sian Yusef and Zulaikha man­u­script, below, dat­ing from between 1880 and 1910. You’ll find dozens more such trea­sures in the Let­ter­form Archive here.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Where to Find Free Art Images & Books from Great Muse­ums, and Free Books from Uni­ver­si­ty Press­es

The First Muse­um Ded­i­cat­ed Exclu­sive­ly to Poster Art Opens Its Doors in the U.S.: Enter the Poster House

Dis­cov­er Iso­type, the 1920s Attempt to Cre­ate a Uni­ver­sal Lan­guage with Styl­ish Icons & Graph­ic Design

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

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The Archive of Healing Is Now Online: UCLA’s Digital Database Provides Access to Thousands of Traditional & Alternative Healing Methods

in Archives, Health | April 1st, 2021

Pho­to by Kather­ine Han­lon on Unsplash

Folk med­i­cine is, or should be, anti­thet­i­cal to cap­i­tal­ism, mean­ing it should not be pos­si­ble to trade­mark, copy­right, or oth­er­wise own and sell plants and nat­ur­al reme­dies to which every­one has access. The entire rea­son such prac­tices devel­oped over the course of mil­len­nia was to help com­mu­ni­ties of close affil­i­a­tion sur­vive and thrive, not to fos­ter mar­ket com­pe­ti­tion between com­pa­nies and indi­vid­u­als. The impulse to prof­it from suf­fer­ing has dis­tort­ed what we think of as heal­ing, such that a strict­ly allo­path­ic, or “West­ern,” approach to med­i­cine relies on ethics of exclu­sion, exploita­tion, and out­right harm.

What we tend to think of as mod­ern med­i­cine, the Archive of Heal­ing writes, “is object-ori­ent­ed (phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals, tech­no­log­i­cal­ly dri­ven) and struc­tured by his­tor­i­cal injus­tice against women and peo­ple of col­or.” The Archive, a new dig­i­tal project from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, offers “one of the most com­pre­hen­sive data­bas­es of med­i­c­i­nal folk­lore in the world,” Valenti­na Di Lis­cia writes at Hyper­al­ler­gic. “The inter­ac­tive, search­able web­site boasts hun­dreds of thou­sands of entries describ­ing cures, rit­u­als, and heal­ing meth­ods span­ning more than 200 years and sev­en con­ti­nents.”

In coun­tries like the Unit­ed States, where health­care is treat­ed as a scarce com­mod­i­ty mil­lions of peo­ple can­not afford, access to knowl­edge about effec­tive, age-old nat­ur­al wis­dom has become crit­i­cal. There may be no treat­ments for COVID-19 in the data­base, but there are like­ly tra­di­tion­al reme­dies, rit­u­als, prac­tices, treat­ments, oint­ments, etc. for just about every oth­er ill­ness one might encounter. The archive was curat­ed over a peri­od of more than thir­ty years by “a team of researchers at UCLA, work­ing under the direc­tion of Dr. Way­land Hand and then Dr. Michael Owen Jones,” the site notes in its brief his­to­ry.

The mate­r­i­al from the col­lec­tion, which was orig­i­nal­ly called the “archive of tra­di­tion­al med­i­cine,” came from “data on heal­ing from over 3,200 pub­li­ca­tions, six uni­ver­si­ty archives, as well as first-hand and sec­ond-hand infor­ma­tion from anthro­po­log­i­cal and folk­loric field­notes.” In 2016, when Dr. Del­ga­do Short­er took over as direc­tor of the pro­gram, he “reor­ga­nized it with an eye to social shar­ing and allow­ing for users to sub­mit new data and com­ment on exist­ing data,” notes UCLA’s School of the Arts and Archi­tec­ture in an inter­view with Short­er, who describes the project’s aims thus:

The whole goal here is to democ­ra­tize what we think of as heal­ing and knowl­edge about heal­ing and take it across cul­tures in a way that’s respect­ful and gives atten­tion to intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty rights.

This may seem like a del­i­cate bal­anc­ing act, between the schol­ar­ly, the folk­loric, and the realms of rights, remu­ner­a­tion, and social pow­er. The Archive strikes it with an ambi­tious set of tenets you can read here, includ­ing an empha­sis on offer­ing tra­di­tion­al and Indige­nous heal­ing prac­tices “out­side of often expen­sive allo­path­ic and phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal approach­es, and not as alter­na­tives but as com­ple­men­tary modal­i­ties.”

The archive states as one of its the­o­ret­i­cal bases that health should be treat­ed “as a social goal with social meth­ods that affirm rela­tion­al­i­ty and kin­ship.” Those wish­ing to get involved with the Archive as part­ners or advi­so­ry board mem­bers can learn how at their About page, which also fea­tures the fol­low­ing dis­claimer: “State­ments made on this web­site have not been eval­u­at­ed by the Food and Drug Admin­is­tra­tion. The infor­ma­tion con­tained here­in is not intend­ed to diag­nose, treat, cure or pre­vent any dis­ease.” Use the infor­ma­tion wise­ly, at your own risk, in oth­er words.

To use the Archive of Heal­ing, you will need to reg­is­ter with the site first.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

1,000-Year-Old Illus­trat­ed Guide to the Med­i­c­i­nal Use of Plants Now Dig­i­tized & Put Online

The Illus­trat­ed Med­i­c­i­nal Plant Map of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca (1932): Down­load It in High Res­o­lu­tion

Down­load 100,000+ Images From The His­to­ry of Med­i­cine, All Free Cour­tesy of The Well­come Library

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

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Alexander Calder’s Archive Goes Online: Explore 1400 Works of Art by the Modernist Sculptor

in Archives, Art | March 8th, 2021

Like all great artists, Alexan­der Calder left his medi­um quite unlike he found it. Near­ly 45 years after his death, Calder’s expan­sion of the realm of sculp­ture in new direc­tions of form, col­or, and engi­neer­ing remains a sub­ject of volu­mi­nous dis­cus­sion, includ­ing crit­ic Jed Per­l’s Calder: The Con­quest of Time and Calder: The Con­quest of Space, a two-part biog­ra­phy pub­lished in full last year. More recent­ly, a wealth of mate­r­i­al has come avail­able that enables us to con­duct Calder­ian inves­ti­ga­tions of our own: the Calder Foun­da­tion’s online research archive, which as Hyper­al­ler­gic’s Valenti­na Di Lis­cia reports includes “over 1,300 Calder works across dif­fer­ent media.”

But wait, there’s more: the archive also offers “1,000 pho­tographs and archival doc­u­ments,” “48 his­toric and recent texts by the artist, his con­tem­po­raries, and present-day schol­ars,” and “over 40 microsites explor­ing Calder’s exhi­bi­tion his­to­ry.” (This in addi­tion to the Calder Foun­da­tion’s Vimeo chan­nel, where you’ll find the films seen here.)

Pace Gallery, which rep­re­sents Calder, high­lights the “new inter­ac­tive map fea­ture called ‘Calder Around the World,’ which allows view­ers to find pub­lic instal­la­tions of his mon­u­men­tal sculp­ture in 20 states domes­ti­cal­ly and 21 coun­tries inter­na­tion­al­ly, includ­ing muse­ums with impor­tant Calder hold­ings and per­ma­nent and tem­po­rary exhi­bi­tions ded­i­cat­ed to the artist.”

As that map reveals, much of Calder’s work cur­rent­ly resides in his home­land of the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca, pri­mar­i­ly in the north­east where he spent most of his life, but also the Cal­i­for­nia in which he did some grow­ing up — not to men­tion the Paris where he lived for a time and met fel­low artists like Mar­cel Duchamp and Fer­nand Léger, infor­ma­tion about whom also appears in the online archive. You may locate a Calder near you, even if you live in anoth­er region of the world, entire­ly: liv­ing in Seoul as I do, I now see I’ll have to pay a vis­it to 1963’s Le Cèpe and 1971’s Grand Crinkly. Though this ever-more-exten­sive Calder Archive can help us under­stand this most opti­mistic of all Mod­ernists, there’s noth­ing quite like being in the pres­ence of one of his sculp­tures.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Dis­cov­er Alexan­der Calder’s Cir­cus, One of the Beloved Works at the Whit­ney Muse­um of Amer­i­can Art

Watch Alexan­der Calder Per­form His Cir­cus, a Toy The­atre Piece Filled With Amaz­ing Kinet­ic Wire Sculp­tures

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

178 Beau­ti­ful­ly-Illus­trat­ed Let­ters from Artists: Kahlo, Calder, Man Ray & More

The Guggen­heim Puts 109 Free Mod­ern Art Books Online

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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