Behold the World’s Oldest Animation Made on a Vase in Iran 5,200 Years Ago

in Animation, History | October 13th, 2022

By some accounts, the history of animation stretches back to the turn of the twentieth century. Since that time, animators have brought an astounding variety of visions to artistic life. But looked at another way, this enterprise — which has so far culminated in feature-film spectacles by studios like Pixar and Ghibli — actually has it roots deep in antiquity. In order to find the first work of animation, broadly conceived, one must go to Shahr‑e Sukhteh, Iran’s famous “Burnt City.” Now a UNESCO World Heritage site, it dates back more than five millennia, about four of which it spent under a layer of ash and dust, which preserved a great many artifacts of interest within.

Shahr‑e Sukhteh was first excavated in 1967. About a decade later, an Italian archaeological team unearthed the pottery vessel bearing designs now considered the earliest example of animation. “The artifact bears five images depicting a wild goat jumping up to eat the leaves of a tree,” says the web site of the Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies. “Several years later, Iranian archaeologist Dr. Mansur Sadjadi, who became later appointed as the new director of the archaeological team working at the Burnt City discovered that the pictures formed a related series.” The animal depicted is a member of Capra aegagrus, “also known as ‘Persian desert Ibex’, and since it is an indigenous animal to the region, it would naturally appear in the iconography of the Burnt City.”

Image by Emesik, via Wikimedia Commons

This amusingly decorated goblet, now on display at the National Museum of Iran, is hardly the only find that reflects the surprising development of the early civilization that produced it. “The world’s first known artificial eyeball, with two holes in both sides and a golden thread to hold it in place, has been unearthed from the skeleton of a woman’s body in Shahr‑e Sukhteh,” says Mehr News. Excavations have also turned up “the oldest signs of brain surgery,” as well as evidence that “the people of Shahr‑e Sukhteh played backgammon,” or at least some kind of table game involving dice. But only the Burnt City’s pioneering work of flip-book-style art “means that the world’s oldest cartoon character is a goat.” Historians of animation, update your files accordingly.

The Early Days of Animation Preserved in UCLA’s Video Archive

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

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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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Watch Vintage Videos Capturing Life in Japan from the 1960s Through Today

in Film, History, Travel | October 12th, 2022

Just yesterday, Japan fully re-opened its borders to tourism after a long period of COVID-19-motivated closure. This should prove economically invigorating, given how much demand to visit the Land of the Rising Sun has built up over the past couple of years. Even before the pandemic, Japan had been a country of great interest among world travelers, and for more than half a century at that. Much of that attractiveness has, of course, to do with its distinctive nature, which manifests both deep tradition and hyper-modernity at once.

But some of it also has to do with the fact that, since rising from the devastation of the Second World War, Japan has hardly shied away from self-promotion. “A Day in Tokyo,” the short film at the top of the post, was produced by the Japan National Tourism Organization in 1968.

Its vivid color footage of Japan’s great metropolis, “the world’s largest and liveliest,” captures everyday life as it was then lived in Tokyo’s department stores, stock exchanges, construction sites, and zoos.

The film puts a good deal of emphasis on the capital’s still-ongoing postwar transformation: “In a constant metabolic cycle of destruction and creation, Tokyo progresses at a dizzying pace,” declares the film’s narrator. “People who haven’t seen Tokyo for ten years, or even five, would scarcely recognize it today.” And if Tokyo was dizzying in the late nineteen-sixties, it became positively disorienting in the eighties. On the back of that era’s economic bubble, Japan looked about to become the wealthiest country in the world, and Tokyoites both worked and played accordingly hard.

This two-part compilation of scenes from Japan in the eighties conveys that time with footage drawn from a variety of sources, including feature films (not least Itami Jūzō’s beloved 1985 ramen comedy Tampopo.) “It was a magical place at a magical time,” remembers one American commenter who lived in Japan back then. “Everything seemed possible. Everybody was prospering. Almost every crazy business idea seemed to succeed. People were happy and shared their happiness and good fortune with others. It was like no other place on earth.”

As dramatically as the bubble burst at the end of the eighties, Japanese life in the subsequent “lost decades” has also possessed a richness of its own. You can see it in this compilation of footage of Japan in the nineties and two-thousands from the same channel, TRNGL. Though it no longer seemed able to buy up the rest of the world, the country had by that era built up a global consciousness of its culture by exporting its films, its animation, its music, its video games, and much more besides. Even if you haven’t seen this Japan in person, you’ve come to know it through its art and media.

If you’re considering making the trip, this video of “Japan nowadays” will give you a sense of what you’ve been missing. The Tokyo of the twenty-first century shown in its clips certainly isn’t the same city it was in 1968. Yet it remains “an intermingling of Orient and Occident, seemingly new, but actually old,” as the narrator of “A Day in Tokyo” puts it. “Beneath its modern exterior, there still lingers an atmosphere of past glories. The citizens remain unalterably Japanese, and yet this great city is able to accommodate and understand people of all races, languages, and beliefs” — people now arriving by the thousands once again.

Watch Life on the Streets of Tokyo in Footage Recorded in 1913: Caught Between the Traditional and the Modern

1850s Japan Comes to Life in 3D, Color Photos: See the Stereoscopic Photography of T. Enami

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

An Introduction to Japanese Kabuki Theatre, Featuring 20th-Century Masters of the Form (1964)

How Youtube’s Algorithm Turned an Obscure 1980s Japanese Song Into an Enormously Popular Hit: Discover Mariya Takeuchi’s “Plastic Love”

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 to Predict What the World Will Look Like in 2122: Insights from Futurist Peter Schwartz

in Harvard, History, Technology | October 10th, 2022

“It’s very easy to imagine how things go wrong,” says futurist Peter Schwartz in the video above. “It’s much harder to imagine how things go right.” So he demonstrated a quarter-century ago with the Wired magazine cover story he co-wrote with Peter Leyden, “The Long Boom.” Made in the now techno-utopian-seeming year of 1997, its predictions of “25 years of prosperity, freedom, and a better environment for a whole world” have since become objects of ridicule. But in the piece Schwartz and Leyden also provide a set of less-desirable alternative scenarios whose details — a new Cold War between the U.S. and China, climate change-related disruptions in the food supply, an “uncontrollable plague” — look rather more prescient in retrospect.

The intelligent futurist, in Schwartz’s view, aims not to get everything right. “It’s almost impossible. But you test your decisions against multiple scenarios, so you make sure you don’t get it wrong in the scenarios that actually occur.” The art of “scenario planning,” as Schwartz calls it, requires a fairly deep rootedness in the past.

His own life is a case in point: born in a German refugee camp in 1946, he eventually made his way to a place then called Stanford Research Institute. “It was the early days that became Silicon Valley. It’s where technology was accelerating. It was one of the first thousand people online. It was the era when LSD was still being used as an exploratory tool. So everything around me was the future being born,” and he could hardly have avoided getting hooked on the future.

That addiction remains with Schwartz today: most recently, he’s been forecasting the shape of work to come for Salesforce. The key question, he realized, “was not what did I think about the future, but what did everybody else think about the future?” And among “everybody else,” he places special value on the abilities of those possessed of imagination, collaborative ability, and “ruthless curiosity.” As for the greatest threat to scenario planning, he names “fear of the future,” calling it “one of the worst problems we have today.” There will be more setbacks, more “wars and panics and pandemics and so on.” But “the great arc of human progress, and the gain of prosperity, and a better life for all, that will continue.” Despite all he’s seen – and indeed, because of all he’s seen — Peter Schwartz still believes in the long boom.

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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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Behold a 21st-Century Medieval Castle Being Built with Only Tools & Materials from the Middle Ages

in Architecture, Design, History, Video - Arts & Culture | October 7th, 2022

Construction sites are hives of specialized activity, but there’s no particular training needed to ferry 500 lbs of stone several stories to the masons waiting above. All you need is the stamina for a few steep flights and a medieval treadwheel crane or “squirrel cage.”

The technology, which uses simple geometry and human exertion to hoist heavy loads, dates to ancient Roman times.

Retired in the Victorian era, it has been resurrected and is being put to good use on the site of a former sandstone quarry two hours south of Paris, where the castle of an imaginary, low ranking 13th-century nobleman began taking shape in 1997.

There’s no typo in that timeline.

Château de Guédelon is an immersive educational project, an open air experimental archeology lab, and a highly unusual working construction site.

With a project timeline of 35 years, some 40 quarrypeople, stonemasons, woodcutters, carpenters, tilers, blacksmiths, rope makers and carters can expect another ten years on the job.

That’s longer than a medieval construction crew would have taken, but unlike their 21st-century counterparts, they didn’t have to take frequent breaks to explain their labors to the visiting public.

A team of archeologists, art historians and castellologists strive for authenticity, eschewing electricity and any vehicle that doesn’t have hooves.

Research materials include illuminated manuscripts, stained glass windows, financial records, and existing castles.

The 1425-year-old Canterbury Cathedral has a non-reproduction treadmill crane stored in its rafters, as well as a levers and pulleys activity sheet for young visitors that notes that operating a “human treadmill” was both grueling and dangerous:

Philosopher John Stuart Mill wrote that they were “unequalled in the modern annals of legalized torture.”

Good call, then, on the part of Guédelon’s leadership to allow a few anachronisms in the name of safety.

Guédelon’s treadmill cranes, including a double drum model that pivots 360º to deposit loads of up to 1000 lbs wherever the stonemasons have need of them, have been outfitted with brakes. The walkers inside the wooden wheels wear hard hats, as are the overseer and those monitoring the brakes and the cradle holding the stones.

The onsite worker-educators may be garbed in period-appropriate loose-fitting natural fibers, but rest assured that their toes are steel-reinforced.

Château de Guédelon guide Sarah Preston explains the reasoning:

Obviously, we’re not trying to discover how many people were killed or injured in the 13th-century.

Learn more about Château de Guédelon, including how you can arrange a visit, here.

Explore the history of treadmill cranes here.

And see how the Château de Guédelon has housed Ukrainian refugees here.

via The Kids Should See This

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

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Why Monet Painted The Same Haystacks 25 Times

in Art, History | October 6th, 2022

In the nineteen-twenties, as George Orwell remembers it, “Paris was invaded by such a swarm of artists, writers, students, dilettanti, sight-seers, debauchees and plain idlers as the world has probably never seen. In some quarters of the town the so-called artists must actually have outnumbered the working population.” Along stretches of the Seine, “it was almost impossible to pick one’s way between the sketching-stools.” Legitimate or otherwise, these artists were genuine descendants of Claude Monet, at least in the sense that the latter pioneered painting en plein air, distilling art directly from the world all around him.

“When artists had to grind their own pigments or buy paints contained in fragile pig bladders,” says Evan “Nerdwriter” Puschak in the video essay above, “it was much easier to work in a studio. The advent of tubes of paint, like these flexible zinc tubes invented by John Rand in 1841, in which the paint would not dry out, enabled a portability that made outdoor painting easy and feasible.” As usual in modernity, a development in technology enabled a development in culture, but to show what kind of possibilities had been opened up took an artist of rare vision as well as rare brazenness: more specifically, an artist like Monet.

“Obsessed, most of all, with light and color, and the ways they register in the human mind,” Monet “rejected the popular conventions of his time, which prioritized line, color, and blended brushstrokes that concealed the artist’s hand in favor of several short, thick applications of solid color placed side by side, largely unblended.” His paintings, which we now credit with launching the Impressionist movement, show us not so much colors as “color relationships that seem to change and vibrate as your eye scans across the canvas.” But then, so does real life, whose constantly changing light ensures that “every few minutes, we experience a subtly different color palette.”

For Puschak, nowhere is Monet’s artistic enterprise more clearly demonstrated than in the so-called “Haystacks.” The series consists of 25 paintings depicting just what that name suggests (and which, belonging to Monet’s neighbor in Giverny, were well placed to catch his eye), each painted at a different time of day. Each image represents Monet’s attempt to capture the light colors just as he perceived them at a particular moment, straight from nature. Taken together, they constitute “maybe the definitive expression of the Impressionist movement” — as well as a reminder that, haystack or water lily, we never truly set eyes on the same thing twice.

You can now purchase a copy of the Nerdwriter’s new book, Escape into Meaning: Essays on Superman, Public Benches, and Other Obsessions.

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Artist Makes Astonishing Armor for Cats & Mice

in Art, Design, History, Uncategorized, Video - Arts & Culture | October 5th, 2022

As a child, Jeff De Boer, the son of a sheet metal fabricator, was fascinated by the European plate armor collection in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum:

There was something magical or mystical about that empty form, that contained something. So what would it contain? A hero? Do we all contain that in ourselves?

After graduating from high school wearing a partial suit of armor he constructed for the occasion, De Boer completed seven full suits, while majoring in jewelry design at the Alberta College of Art and Design.

A sculpture class assignment provided him with an excuse to make a suit of armor for a cat. The artist had found his niche.

Using steel, silver, brass, bronze, nickel, copper, leather, fiber, wood, and his delicate jewelry making tools, DeBoer became the cats’ armorer, spending anywhere from 50 to 200 hours producing each increasingly intricate suit of feline armor. A noble pursuit, but one that inadvertently created an “imbalance in the universe”:

The only way to fix it was to do the same for the mouse.

“The suit of armor is a transformation vehicle. It’s something that only the hero would wear,” De Boer notes.

Fans of David Petersen’s Mouse Guard series will need no convincing, though no real mouse has had the misfortune to find its way inside one of his astonishing, custom-made creations.

Not even a taxidermy specimen, he revealed on the Making, Our Way podcast:

It’s not an altogether bad idea. The only reason I don’t do it is that hollow suit of armor like you might see in a museum, your imagination will make it do a million things more than if you stick a mouse in it will ever do. I have put armor on cats. I can tell you, it’s nothing like what you think it’s going to be. It’s not a very good experience for the cat. It does not fulfill any fantasies about a cat wearing a suit of armor.

Though cats were his entry point, De Boer’s sympathies seem aligned with the underdog — er, mice. Equipping humble, hypothetical creatures with exquisitely wrought, historical protective gear is a way of pushing back against being perceived differently than one wishes to be.

Accepting an Honorary MFA from his alma mater earlier this year, he described an armored mouse as a metaphor for his “ongoing cat and mouse relationship with the world of fine art…a mischievous, rebellious being who dares to compete on his own terms in a world ruled by the cool cats.”

Each tiny piece is preceded by painstaking research and many reference drawings, and may incorporate special materials like the Japanese silk haori-himo cord lacing the shoulder plates to the body armor of a Samurai mouse family.

Additional creations have referenced Mongolian, gladiator, crusader, and Saracen styles — this last perfect for a Persian cat.

“I mean, “Why not?” he asks in his TED‑x Talk,Village Idiots & Innovation, below.

His latest work combines elements of Maratha and Hussar armor in a veritable puzzle of minuscule pieces.

See more of Jeff De Boer’s cat and mouse armor on his Instagram.

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

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Why Goya Made His Haunting “Black Paintings” at the End of His Life

in Art, History | October 5th, 2022

Though most of us see Francisco Goya’s Saturno devorando a su hijo, or Saturn Devouring His Son, at least every few months, we were never meant to see it all. The same is true of all fourteen of the so-called “Black Paintings,” which Goya executed late in his life on the walls of his villa outside Madrid. They now hang at the Prado where, as one tour guide put it to the Guardian’s Stephen Phelan, “some people can hardly even look at them.” When visitors enter the room that contains these often grim and bizarre visions, “they are always surprised. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a visitor whose expression hasn’t changed.”

What could have moved Goya to create such paintings? In the new Great Art Explained video essay above, gallerist and Youtuber James Payne lays out the relevant factors in Goya’s life and the turbulent society in which he lived. His Enlightenment views and penchant for brazen satire drew suspicion, as did his willingness to paint for French and pro-French clients during that country’s occupation of Spain.

At the age of 72 he ended up putting himself into a kind of countryside exile, taking up residence in an estate called the Quinta del Sordo (the “Villa of the Deaf,” and suitably enough, since Goya himself happened to have lost his hearing by that point).

It was in the Quinta del Sordo, and indeed on it, that Goya (or, according to certain theories, Goya’s son) set his artistic worldview free to realize its most grotesque and jaundiced forms. Even apart from Saturn’s act of cannibalistic filicide, Phelan writes, “a humanoid billy goat in a monkish cassock bleats a satanic sermon to a gasping congregation of witches. A desperately expressive little dog appears to plead for rescue, submerged up to its neck in a mud-colored mire beneath a gloomy, void-like firmament of negative space.” Known as El Perro, or The Dog, that last artwork is one of the most beloved in Spain — and, in its ascetic way, the most haunting Black Painting of all.

European Paintings: From Leonardo to Rembrandt to Goya — A Free Online Course from the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M)

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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.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Cats in Medieval Manuscripts & Paintings

in Art, History, Religion, Video - Arts & Culture, Video - Politics/Society | October 3rd, 2022

Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) never saw a rhino himself, but by relying on eyewitness descriptions of the one King Manuel I of Portugal intended as a gift to the Pope, he managed to render a fairly realistic one, all things considered.

Medieval artists’ renderings of cats so often fell short of the mark, Youtuber Art Deco wonders if any of them had seen a cat before.

Point taken, but cats were well integrated into medieval society.

Royal 12 C xix f. 36v/37r (13th century)

Cats provided medieval citizens with the same pest control services they’d been performing since the ancient Egyptians first domesticated them.

Ancient Egyptians conveyed their gratitude and respect by regarding cats as symbols of divinity, protection, and strength.

Certain Egyptian goddesses, like Bastet, were imbued with unmistakably feline characteristics.

The Vintage News reports that harming a cat in those days was punishable by death, exporting them was illegal, and, much like today, the death of a cat was an occasion for public sorrow:

When a cat died, it was buried with honors, mummified and mourned by the humans. The body of the cat would be wrapped in the finest materials and then embalmed in order to preserve the body for a longer time. Ancient Egyptians went so far that they shaved their eyebrows as a sign of their deep sorrow for the deceased pet.

Aberdeen University Library, MS 24 f. 23v (England, c 1200)

The medieval church took a much darker view of our feline friends.

Their close ties to paganism and early religions were enough for cats to be judged guilty of witchcraft, sinful sexuality, and fraternizing with Satan.

In the late 12th-century, writer Walter Map, a soon-to-be archdeacon of Oxford, declared that the devil appeared before his devotees in feline form:

… hanging by a rope, a black cat of great size. As soon as they see this cat, the lights are turned out. They do not sing or recite hymns in a distinct way, but they mutter them with their teeth closed and they feel in the dark towards where they saw their lord], and when they find it, they kiss it, the more humbly depending on their folly, some on the paws, some under the tail, some on the genitals. And as if they have, in this way, received a license for passion, each one takes the nearest man or woman and they join themselves with the other for as long as they choose to draw out their game.

Pope Innocent VIII issued a papal bull in 1484 condemning the “devil’s favorite animal and idol of all witches” to death, along with their human companions to death.

13th-century Franciscan monk Bartholomaeus Anglicus refrained from demonic tattle, but neither did he paint cats as angels:

He is a full lecherous beast in youth, swift, pliant, and merry, and leapeth and reseth on everything that is to fore him: and is led by a straw, and playeth therewith: and is a right heavy beast in age and full sleepy, and lieth slyly in wait for mice: and is aware where they be more by smell than by sight, and hunteth and reseth on them in privy places: and when he taketh a mouse, he playeth therewith, and eateth him after the play. In time of love is hard fighting for wives, and one scratcheth and rendeth the other grievously with biting and with claws. And he maketh a ruthful noise and ghastful, when one proffereth to fight with another: and unneth is hurt when he is thrown down off an high place. And when he hath a fair skin, he is as it were proud thereof, and goeth fast about: and when his skin is burnt, then he bideth at home; and is oft for his fair skin taken of the skinner, and slain and flayed.

Pigs and rats also had a bad rep, and like cats, were tortured and executed in great numbers by pious humans.

The Worksop Bestiary Morgan Library, MS M.81 f. 47r (England, c 1185)

Not every medieval city was anti-cat. As the Academic Cat Lady Johanna Feenstra writes of the above illustration from The Worksop Bestiary, one of the earliest English bestiaries:

Some would have interpreted the image of a cat pouncing on a rodent as a symbol for the devil going after the human soul. Others might have seen the cat in a completely different light. For instance, as Eucharistic guardians, making sure rodents could not steal and eat the Eucharistic wafers.

Bodleian Library Bodley 764 f. 51r (England, c 1225–50)

St John’s College Library, MS. 61 (England (York), 13th century)

It took cat lover Leonardo DaVinci to turn the situation around, with eleven sketches from life portraying cats in characteristic poses, much as we see them today. We’ll delve more into that in a future post.