30,000 Photographs of Black History & Culture Are Available Online in a New Getty Images Archive

in Archives, History, Photography | July 15th, 2022

Image of Charles S.L. Baker with his Superheating Demonstration

Black History Month is February in the United States and Canada, and October in the United Kingdom and Europe. It may be July right now, but if you’re interested in a subject, there’s no reason not to get more deeply into it all year round. This is underscored by the opening, this month, of Getty Images’ Black History and Culture Collection. As Petapixel’s Matt Growcoot writes, it contains “30,000 rarely seen images of the Black diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States that date back to the 19th century,” drawing from the domains of “politics, sport, music, culture, military, and celebrity.”

In the Black History and Culture Collection you’ll find pictures of cultural figures like Duke Ellington and Jay‑Z, Jack Johnson, Venus and Serena Williams, Sojourner Truth, and Bernardine Evaristo. These names only hint at the range of the archive, which you can also browse by category tags: “civil rights,” “governance,” and “sports,” to name a few examples, but also “families,” “fashion,” and “hair.”

There are, of course, an enormous number of photos filed under “American Culture,” which would itself be unimaginable without the contributions of the people documented. But the same could be said of the other side of the pond; hence the inclusion of a “Black British Culture” label as well.

Creating the Black History and Culture Collection involved more than just tagging photos. You can learn more about what went into it in the short video above, which includes the voices of collaborators like NYU Tisch School of the Arts’ Deborah Willis and the University of Pennsylvania’s Tukufu Zuberi. The artist Renata Cherlise speaks of the value of the images of famous people, but also those of everyday life as it was lived in places and times like Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom in the nineteen-forties. Whether or not your own heritage is tied into this history, you stand to learn a great deal from it. As Zuberi put sit, “Black culture is the original human culture, so there is no culture that is alien to black culture. The future of black culture is the future of human culture. Let’s go.”

via Petapixel/Colossal

The Names of 1.8 Million Emancipated Slaves Are Now Searchable in the World’s Largest Genealogical Database, Helping African Americans Find Lost Ancestors

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

Hear the Voices of Americans Born in Slavery: The Library of Congress Features 23 Audio Interviews with Formerly Enslaved People (1932–75)

Photos of 19th-Century Black Women Activists Digitized and Put Online by The Library of Congress

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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Walter Benjamin Explains How Fascism Uses Mass Media to Turn Politics Into Spectacle (1935)

in Film, History, Politics | July 15th, 2022

Image via Wikimedia Commons

In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura” to describe an authentic experience of art. Aura relates to the physical proximity between objects and their viewers. Its loss, Benjamin argued, was a distinctly 20th-century phenomenon caused by mass media’s imposition of distance between object and viewer, though it appears to bring art closer through a simulation of intimacy.

The essay makes for potent reading today. Mass media — which for Benjamin meant radio, photography, and film — turns us all into potential actors, critics, experts, he wrote, and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle. Yet it retains the pretense of ritual. We make offerings to cults of personality, expanded in our time to include influencers and revered and reviled billionaires and political figures who joust in the headlines like professional wrestlers, led around by the chief of all heels. As Benjamin writes:

The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity.

Benjamin’s focus on the medium as not only expressive but constitutive of meaning has made his essay a staple on communications and media theory course syllabi, next to the work of Marshall McLuhan. Many readings tend to leave aside the politics of its epilogue, likely since “his remedy,” writes Michael Jay — “the politicization of art by Communism — was forgotten by all but his most militant Marxist interpreters,” and hardly seemed like much of a remedy during the Cold War, when Benjamin became more widely available in translation.

Benjamin’s own idiosyncratic politics aside, his essay anticipates a crisis of authorship and authority currently surfacing in the investigation of a failed coup that includes Twitter replies as key evidence — and in the use of social media more generally as a dominant form of political spectacle.

With the increasing extension of the press, which kept placing new political, religious, scientific, professional, and local organs before the readers, an increasing number of readers became writers—at first, occasional ones. It began with the daily press opening to its readers space for “letters to the editor.” And today there is hardly a gainfully employed European who could not, in principle, find an opportunity to publish somewhere or other comments on his work, grievances, documentary reports, or that sort of thing. Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to lose its basic character.

Benjamin’s analysis of conventional film, especially, leads him to conclude that its reception required so little of viewers that they easily become distracted. Everyone’s a critic, but “at the movies this position requires no attention. The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one.” Passive consumption and habitual distraction does not make for considered, informed opinion or a healthy sense of proportion.

What Benjamin referred to (in translation) as mechanical reproducibility we might now just call The Internet (and the coteries of “things” it haunts poltergeist-like). Later theorists influenced by Benjamin foresaw our age of digital reproducibility doing away with the need for authentic objects, and real people, altogether. Benjamin himself might characterize a medium that can fully detach from the physical world and the material conditions of its users — a medium in which everyone gets a column, public photo gallery, and video production studio — as ideally suited to the aims of fascism.

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life.

The logical result of turning politics into spectacle for the sake of preserving inequality, writes Benjamin, is the romanticization of war and slaughter, glorified plainly in the Italian Futurist manifesto of Filippo Marinetti and the literary work of Nazi intellectuals like Ernst Junger. Benjamin ends the essay with a discussion of how fascism aestheticizes politics to one end: the annihilation of aura by more permanent means.

Under the rise of fascism in Europe, Benjamin saw that human “self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. This is the situation of politics which Fascism is rendering aesthetic.” Those who participate in this spectacle seek mass violence “to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology.” Distracted and desensitized, they seek, that is, to compensate for profound disembodiment and the loss of meaningful, authentic experience.

You can read Benjamin’s essay here, or find it in this collected volume.

Toni Morrison Lists the 10 Steps That Lead Countries to Fascism (1995)

Are You a Fascist?: Take Theodor Adorno’s Authoritarian Personality Test Created to Combat Fascism (1947)

The Story of Fascism: Rick Steves’ Documentary Helps Us Learn from the Hard Lessons of the 20th Century

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

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art Restores the Original Colors to Ancient Statues

in Art, History | July 14th, 2022

The idea that the human species can be neatly bracketed into racial groups based on superficial characteristics like skin, hair, and eye color only developed in the 18th century, and mainly took root as a pseudo-scientific justification for slavery and colonialism. Central to that idea was the Classical Ideal of Beauty, a standard supposedly set by Greek and Roman statuary from antiquity. As beliefs in regional supremacy in Western Europe transformed in the modern era into “White” supremacy, the stark whiteness of antique statuary became a specific point of pride. But ancient people did not think in terms of race, and ancient sculptors never intended their creations to stand around in public without color. “For the ancient Greeks and Romans,” Elaine Velie writes at Hyperallergic, “white marble was not considered the final product, but rather a blank canvas.”

As Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Seán Hemingway says, “White supremacists have latched onto this idea of white sculpture — it’s not true but it serves their purposes.” Art historians and conservators have known for decades that statues from antiquity were once covered in paint, silver and gilding, a process known as polychromy. Over time, the colors dulled, faded, then disappeared, leaving behind only the faintest traces.

Husband-and-wife research team Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrich Koch-Brinkmann have spent over 40 years studying polychromy and reconstructing ancient sculptures as they would have appeared to their first viewers. “Their Gods in Color exhibition has been touring since 2003,” Velie writes, “and their replicas have been included in museums around the world.”

Now fourteen of those reconstructions, as well as a couple dozen more created by Met conservators, scientists, and curators, are scattered throughout the Met’s sculpture halls, with a small upstairs gallery dedicated to an exhibit. The exhibition explains how researchers determined the statues’ colors, “the result of a wide array of analytical techniques, including 3D imaging and rigorous art historical research,” writes the Met. As Artnet notes, the “richly colored version of the Met’s Archaic-period Sphinx finial,” which you can see at the top of the post, “serves as the centerpiece of the show” – one of the only pieces placed adjacent to its original so that visitors can compare the two (using an Augmented Reality app to do so; see video above).

Chroma: Ancient Sculpture in Color, which opened on July 5th, disabuses us of old ideas about the blank whiteness of antiquity, but that’s hardly its only intent. As it does today, color “helped convey meaning in antiquity.” The colors of ancient statues were not simply decorative surfaces – they were integral to the presentation of these works. Now, color can again be part of how we understand and appreciate classical statuary. And the full acceptance of polychromy in major collections like the Met can begin to put to rest false notions about a classical devotion to whiteness as some ideal of perfection. Learn more about the 40 reconstructions in the exhibition at the Met here, and learn more about polychromy and ancient uses of color at the links below.

via Hyperallergic

How Ancient Greek Statues Really Looked: Research Reveals Their Bold, Bright Colors and Patterns

The Met Digitally Restores the Colors of an Ancient Egyptian Temple, Using Projection Mapping Technology

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

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The Homes of 2020 Imagined in 1989: Wireless Audio Systems, Smart Heating, Windows That Turn Into TVs & More

in Architecture | July 14th, 2022

Many trends in architecture and home design have come and gone over the past thirty years, and some have not spread as far as they might have. The green architectural movement in much of Asia, for example, in which skyscrapers practically drip with growing things, hasn’t caught on in congested cities in the West, and perhaps it never will. Granted, few urban areas have such concerns about air quality as cities in China where green buildings have taken hold recently — where 2/3rds of the population is slated to live in cities by 2050; and where a massive population boom in the last twenty years has required four to five million new buildings. But even if we don’t live in a burgeoning city with an urgent mandate to reduce carbon emissions for basic public health, it’s time for brand-new building standards everywhere.

The creators of the 1989 BBC episode of Tomorrow’s World had a sense of environmental urgency, though it wasn’t first on their list of home improvements for the buildings of 2020. After casually wondering whether the homes of the future will “protect the environment,” presenter Judith Hann turns things over to Christine McNulty of the Applied Futures project, who surveyed people to learn “what people would want from their homes.” What will they want? “All the benefits of modern technology” with few of the drawbacks, such as the unwieldy boxes and tangled wires that constituted audio systems of yore (archaic-looking here even by 1989 standards).

We got what we wanted: audio/visual systems can integrate seamlessly into our homes, with bluetooth and wireless and unobtrusive components. We are living in a golden age of consumer entertainment. We are also living in a glorious time of home automation, which co-host Howard Stableford introduces in the next segment. Stableford shows how we will be able to walk from room to room and have lights turn off and on as we go, technology currently available at your local big box store. Later, David Button of Pilkington Glass introduces futuristic tech that could change windows or walls into a TV, something we do not see in homes today and for which few consumers seem to clamor.

Finally, in the last two segments, we get to projections about energy management and smart heating. “Homes are going to have to change,” says Stableford, to meet what McNulty calls “enormous pressure to cut down on our burning of fossil fuels.” Hann introduces building materials that could “bring heating bills down to zero.” Stableford returns to the idea of automation for energy efficient “smart heating.” There is no mention of the need for cooling homes in a rapidly warming world, especially in parts reaching average temperatures inhospitable to human life. 1989 had a pretty good read on what we would want in our individual homes, but it could not foresee how those desires would overrun care for the one home we share.

How Previous Decades Predicted the Future: The 21st Century as Imagined in the 1900s, 1950s, 1980s, and Other Eras

In 1922, a Novelist Predicts What the World Will Look Like in 2022: Wireless Telephones, 8‑Hour Flights to Europe & More

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

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“Downton Abbey” and the Allure of Historical Drama — Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast #127

in Film, Podcasts, Pretty Much Pop, Television | July 14th, 2022

We discuss the appeal of this Julian-Fellowes-penned British historical drama in light of the new film. Is this really “a new era” or just more of the same, and is that bad?

Your Pretty Much Pop host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by returning guest Jon Lamoreaux (host of The Hustle music podcast), plus a couple: former newscaster Corrinne MacLeod (whom Mark SCANDOLOUSLY went on one date with at age 12) and her husband, the photographer Michael MacLeod.

We talk about the excellent casting and how such a big cast gets juggled, the appeal of this particular historical setting, revolutions against the class system in the show, and the soapy plots. How can a film give us enough of such a big cast? We also touch on The Gilded Age, Bridgerton, Howard’s End, Gosford Park, The Great, Poldark, and more.

A few relevant articles we looked at include:

“Downton Abbey: How the Period Franchise Has Remained Popular” by Jessica Brajer
“Downton Abbey: A New Era Is Really the Same Old Downton Abbey” by Jen Chaney
“‘Downton Abbey’ reminds us what ‘conservatism’ really means” by Max Boot
“‘Downton Abbey’ 602: What Are This Show’s Politics, Anyway?” By Meghan O’Keefe
“How Downton Abbey went from great to awful to pretty good again” by Constance Grady
“Thomas Barrow, Iconic Chaotic Gay, Gets Bland but Happy Ending in ‘Downton Abbey: A New Era’—Happy Pride Month” by Princess Weekes

Hear more Pretty Much Pop, including recent episodes on Jackass, This Is Us, and The Expanse. Support the show at patreon.com/prettymuchpop or by choosing a paid subscription through Apple Podcasts. This podcast is part of the Partially Examined Life podcast network.

Pretty Much Pop: A Culture Podcast is the first podcast curated by Open Culture. Browse all Pretty Much Pop posts.

by Mark Linsenmayer | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

John Waters’ Comical & Inspiring Commencement Speech: “You Too Can Fail Upwards” (2022)

in Art, Film | July 13th, 2022

John Waters hasn’t made a movie in quite some time, but that doesn’t mean he’s gone quiet. In fact he’s remained as visible a cultural figure as ever by working in other forms: writing a new novel, acting on television, delivering commencement addresses. His dedication to that last pursuit is such that he even kept it up in 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. That year he delivered his commencement speech for New York’s School of Visual Arts not at Radio City Music Hall, as scheduled, but in front of a green screen in Baltimore — which, of course, only enriched the Watersesque sensibility of the proceedings.

Having been forced into the role of “virtual keynote speaker,” Waters made up for it this year by delivering, in person, a make-up commencement address for the SVA classes of both 2020 and 2021. And he did it onstage at Radio City, a venue “known for family movies and the Rockettes. What the hell am I doing here?” As usual in this phase of his career, Waters expresses surprise to find himself in the role of elder statesman.

“In 2020, the School of Visual Arts gave me an honorary degree for, I guess, causing trouble,” he says. “This year, the National Film Registry — yes, that’s part of the Library of Congress, the U.S. Government, for god’s sake — selected my film Pink Flamingos, which New York magazine once called ‘beyond pornography,’ to its annual list of 25 culturally historic films.”

Safe to say that, half a century after its release, Waters’ most notorious motion picture doesn’t repel the establishment as it once did. And indeed, here in the 2020s, how can an artist get transgressive at all? Waters has much encouragement and advice for young people in search of new boundaries to violate. “Outsider old master paintings, narrative abstract expressionism, impenetrable pop, decorative minimalism, non-conceptualism, video folk art, appropriated NFT”: these are just a few of the artistic ventures not yet attempted that could turn their popularizers into cultural phenomena. “You too can fail upwards, if you try,” Waters insists, but you’ve got to do it with a sense of humor. “Mock yourself first. Then you can be as crazily righteous as you want.”

David Byrne’s Graduation Speech Offers Troubling and Encouraging Advice for Students in the Arts

An Anti, Anti-Smoking Announcement from John Waters

David Lynch Gives Unconventional Advice to Graduates in an Unusual Commencement Address

John Waters Talks About His Books and Role Models in a Whimsical Animated Video

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The First Photographs Taken by the Webb Telescope: See Faraway Galaxies & Nebulae in Unprecedented Detail

in Astronomy, Technology | July 13th, 2022

Late last year we featured the amazing engineering of the James Webb Space Telescope, which is now the largest optical telescope in space. Capable of registering phenomena older, more distant, and further off the visible spectrum than any previous device, it will no doubt show us a great many things we’ve never seen before. In fact, it’s already begun: earlier this week, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center released the first photographs taken through the Webb telescope, which “represent the first wave of full-color scientific images and spectra the observatory has gathered, and the official beginning of Webb’s general science operations.”

The areas of outer space depicted in unprecedented detail by these photos include the Carina Nebula (top), the Southern Ring Nebula (2nd image on this page), and the galaxy clusters known as Stephan’s Quintet (the home of the angels in It’s a Wonderful Life) and SMACS 0723 (bottom).

That last, notes Petapixel’s Jaron Schneider, “is the highest resolution photo of deep space that has ever been taken,” and the light it captures “has traveled for more than 13 billion years.” What this composite image shows us, as NASA explains, is SMACS 0723 “as it appeared 4.6 billion years ago” — and its “slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.”

All this can be a bit difficult to get one’s head around, at least if one is professionally involved with neither astronomy nor cosmology. But few imaginations could go un-captured by the richness of the images themselves. Sharp, rich in color, varied in texture — and in the case of the Carina Nebula or “Cosmic Cliffs,” NASA adds, “seemingly three-dimensional” — they could have come straight from a state-of-the-art science-fiction movie. In fact they outdo even the most advanced sci-fi visions, as NASA’s Earthrise outdid even the uncannily realistic-in-retrospect views of the Earth from space imagined by Stanley Kubrick and his collaborators in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

But these photos are the fruits of a real-life journey toward the final frontier, one you can follow in real time on NASA’s “Where Is Webb?” tracker. “Webb was designed to spend the next decade in space,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “However, a successful launch preserved substantial fuel, and NASA now anticipates a trove of insights about the universe for the next twenty years.” That’s quite a long run by the current standards of space exploration — but then, by the scale of space and time the Webb telescope has newly opened up, even 100 millennia is the blink of an eye.

How to Take a Picture of a Black Hole: Watch the 2017 Ted Talk by Katie Bouman, the MIT Grad Student Who Helped Take the Groundbreaking Photo

How Scientists Colorize Those Beautiful Space Photos Taken By the Hubble Space Telescope

The Very First Picture of the Far Side of the Moon, Taken 60 Years Ago

The First Images and Video Footage from Outer Space, 1946–1959

The Beauty of Space Photography

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The German Cast of Hamilton Sings the Title Track, “Alexander Hamilton” in German

in Music, Theatre | July 12th, 2022

Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton is coming to Hamburg in October 2022. And this video gives audiences a taste of what awaits them: The title track “Alexander Hamilton” sung in German. Enjoy…

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via Metafilter

Lin-Manuel Miranda Breaks Down How He Wrote Hamilton‘s Big Hit, “My Shot”

Watch Lin-Manuel Miranda Perform the Earliest Version of Hamilton at the White House, Six Years Before the Play Hit the Broadway Stage (2009)

A Whiskey-Fueled Lin-Manuel Miranda Reimagines Hamilton as a Girl on Drunk History

by OC | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

What Americans Ate for Breakfast & Dinner 200 Years Ago: Watch Re-Creations of Original Recipes

in Food & Drink, History | July 12th, 2022

For all the other faults of the 2020s, most of humanity now enjoys culinary variety the likes of which it has never before known. Two centuries ago, the selection was considerably narrower. Back then the United States of America, yet to become the highly developed leader of “the free world,” remained for the most part a fairly hardscrabble land. This comes through in a book like Democracy in America, which Alexis de Tocqueville wrote after traveling across the county in the 1830s — or on a Youtube channel like Early American, which re-creates life as lived by Americans of decades before then.

Not long ago, Early American’s viewership exploded. This seems to have owed to cooking videos like the one at the top of the post, “A Regular Folks’ Supper 200 Years Ago.” The menu, on this imagined March day in 1820 Missouri, includes beef, mashed turnips, carrots, rolls, and boiled eggs: not a bad-looking spread, as it turns out, though its flavors may leave something to be desired for the twenty-first-century palate.

Many of Early American’s new commenters, writes channel co-creator Justine Dorn, are telling her “to add this seasoning and this and that,” but “then it would no longer be loyal to the actual original recipe, which is why you all are here to begin with.”

In the case of the regular folks’ supper, its recipes come straight from an 1803 volume called The Frugal Housewife. As for the johnnycakes featured in “Making a Working Class Breakfast in 1820,” you’ll find their recipe in Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery from 1796, the first known cookbook written by an American. The meal also includes a yeastless bread for which no proper recipe exists. However, Dorn writes, “there are several mentions of working class people who baked bread without yeast in the autobiographies of travelers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Because of this we know that it was a common practice.”

Made from a modified family recipe passed down since the 1750s, this yeastless bread looks appealing enough, especially toasted over the fire and served with apple butter. But we must acknowledge that tastes have changed over the centuries. “I am not claiming that this food is good,” Dorn writes. “Sometimes it isn’t. A lot of the foods and seasonings that we take for granted today were very hard to get back then or were only seasonally available.” But with seasonal, “locally sourced” ingredients in vogue these days, it’s worth examining what, 200 years ago, really went into a simple Indian meal pudding or an early macaroni and cheese — albeit one prepared, in true 2020s fashion, ASMR-style.

Tasting History: A Hit YouTube Series Shows How to Cook the Foods of Ancient Greece & Rome, Medieval Europe, and Other Places & Periods

An Archive of 3,000 Vintage Cookbooks Lets You Travel Back Through Culinary Time

A Database of 5,000 Historical Cookbooks–Covering 1,000 Years of Food History–Is Now Online

Archive of Handwritten Recipes (1600 – 1960) Will Teach You How to Stew a Calf’s Head and More

10,000 Vintage Recipe Books Are Now Digitized in The Internet Archive’s Cookbook & Home Economics Collection

Real Interviews with People Who Lived in the 1800s

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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 7 ) |

Listen to Earth.fm, a Free Archive of Natural Soundscapes That Can Re-Connect You with Nature & Improve Your Wellbeing

in Nature | July 12th, 2022

“Just listen. Silence is the poetics of space. What it means to be in a place…. Silence isn’t the absence of something, but the presence of everything.” – acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton

The study of acoustic ecology doesn’t get much mainstream attention. But if you’ve been a reader of Open Culture, you’ve likely come across a post about preserving natural sounds by streaming recordings of the world’s many environments. These projects all, in one way or another, contribute to goals articulated by Canadian composer and writer R. Murray Schafer, the “self-declared father” of acoustic ecology, which involves the study, conservation, and appreciation of environmental sound.

As Neil Clarke notes at Earth.fm, Schaffer’s complex discipline can seem difficult to grasp, as it “straddles ‘acoustics, architecture, linguistics, music, psychology, sociology and urban planning.’ ” Maybe all we need to know to appreciate the goals of Earth.fm — another excellent entry in a growing list of natural-sound streaming sites – comes through in Clarke’s description of Schaffer’s World Soundscape Project (WSP):

It was hoped that, eventually, the WSP would be able to create a balance “between the human community and its sonic environment.” To this end, listening and “ear-cleaning” practices, including “soundwalks” – a walking meditation where a high sonic awareness is maintained – were designed to increase individuals’ consciousness of the sounds around them. By prompting engagement with the realities of contemporary soundscapes, listeners were intended to gain awareness of their part in these soundscapes’ creation, and therefore appreciate their responsibility towards them.

Schaffer began recording soundscapes (a word he coined) in Vancouver in the early 70s. Since then, his work has inspired and complemented that of other field recordists/acoustic theorists/sound archivists like Bernie Krauss and Gordon Hempton. Although the early acoustic ecologists could not have foreseen streaming media, it has without a doubt become for many of us a dominant vehicle for sound in our daily lives, including sounds of the natural world.

Without an appreciation for the sounds of natural silence (which we know, since John Cage, does not mean absolute quiet), our understanding of rainforests, deserts, and oceans as living, breathing realities can become dulled, just as much as we lose touch with the green spaces outside our windows. Reconnecting through sound has the dual effect of calming our inner states and attuning us more closely to the outer world as it is, without the distractions of recorded music and video laid overtop.

Billing itself as “like Spotify, but for natural soundscapes,” Earth.fm, offers not a rival streaming service, but an alternative in which users can make their own playlists, The Verge explains, “zipping from Brazil to Egypt in a matter of minutes.” New sounds are added every three days. “You can listen to bird species in Malaysia or India or forest sounds in Ghana. The sounds are gathered from numerous contributors who have experience recording the natural world in places including Brazil, Spain, Norway, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.”

We can intuit Earth.fm’s mission not only as therapeutic and preservationist but also as an ethical attempt to approach the crisis streaming media has introduced in the arts. Human-made sounds (or “anthropophy”) are just as much a part of our environment as those made by frogs, rivers, and antelope. Our constant, often mindless streaming, however — made possible by infinite digital repositories and cheap (for now) energy — can be seen as a form of noise pollution, and a significant contributor to energy overconsumption.

The ethics of streaming must account for the impact on the beings (in this case, us) who make these sounds. Big Tech commodification of music requires a “vast conversation,” argues an essay on the Earth.fm site, that includes “the format’s impact on those at the heart of this whole undertaking: those who create music.” By implication, Earth.fm and other sites that stream acoustic recordings of natural sounds (like those in the links below), offer an ethical alternative to music streaming — one that reconnects us, Elizabeth Waddington writes on the site, to “the music of a changing world.” Learn more about Earth.fm’s activities here.

Sounds of the Forest: A Free Audio Archive Gathers the Sounds of Forests from All Over the World

Tune Into Tree.fm: An Online Radio Station That Streams the Soothing Sounds of Forests from Around the World

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

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Watch the Titanic Sink in This Real-Time 3D Animation

in Animation, History | July 11th, 2022

Minute by minute timelines have become a staple of disaster reporting.

Knowing how the story ends puts the public in the position of helpless bystander, especially at those critical junctures when someone in a position of authority exercised poor judgment, resulting in a larger loss of life.

Youtuber Phillip W, creator of Titanic Animations, allows us to experience the famed luxury liner’s final two and half hours as a timestamped horror show, above, without resorting to theatrics, or a crowd pleasing fictional romance.

Verified crew orders, CQD reports, and vacant lifeboat seats provide ample drama alongside mesmerizing CGI recreations of the doomed luxury liner, its lighted portholes reflected in the dark water.

It took around 2 and a half hours for the Titanic to sink, just four days into her maiden voyage, after striking an iceberg around 11:40 pm.

As the Smithsonian National Museum of American History recounts:

The berg scraped along the starboard or right side of the hull below the waterline, slicing open the hull between five of the adjacent watertight compartments. If only one or two of the compartments had been opened, Titanic might have stayed afloat, but when so many were sliced open, the watertight integrity of the entire forward section of the hull was fatally breached.

Titanic Animations tracks myriad crew members from this moment on, using factual titles, lightly supplemented with sound effects of ocean noises, alarm bells, and period tunes that would’ve been in the repertoire of the band that famously did (or didn’t) play on. The head baker directs staff to carry armloads of bread to provision the lifeboats. These morsels of information and the relatively placid views affords our imagination free rein to fill in the confusion, panic and mounting desperation of those aboard.

This real time sinking animation is rendered without human figures, but Titanic Animation’s Twitter indicates that Phillip W has been hard at work on a new project that places crew and passengers on deck, a — forgive us — titanic undertaking that also finds him striving to recreate every rivet and ripple. A status update from earlier this spring reads, “2.5 months in. 52,035 frames completed.178,364 left to go.”

The original animation, above, took multiple years to complete:

A friend and I started working on the first version back in 2012/2013 and it was released in 2015. It’s been updated over the years, and now I’m the only one left after my friend departed after losing interest. So around 8–9 years, give or take, and about $8000 in research and renderfarms to complete.

If you’re inclined to mess around with your own Titanic animations, Philip W. has shared a Cinematic Filming Model of the Titanic’s exterior, featuring accurate porthole placements, telegraphs, funnels, rigging, ventilation equipment placements, lifeboats, and approximately 95,000 rivets.

Subscribe to Titanic Animations here. Those with an interest in 3D animation will appreciate archived livestreams that give a peek at the process.

Navigate to key moments in real time sinking animation using the links below.

00:00:00 — Intro

00:05:00 — Iceberg Collision

00:10:00 — 10 Degree List to Starboard

00:11:00 — Steam begins to escape the Funnels

00:15:45 — Mail Room begins to flood

00:25:00 — Midnight

00:30:00 — Squash Court begins to flood

00:37:15 — Lifeboats ordered to be readied

00:42:00 — Band Begins Playing

00:49:40 — Thomas Andrews relays news to Capt. Smith

00:51:40 — First Distress Call is Sent

01:01:18 — Distress Coordinates are Corrected

01:01:38 — Carpathia Makes Contact

01:04:00 — Boat 7 (First Boat) is Launched

01:06:00 — The Straus’ Refuse Entry to Boat 8

01:07:00 — Grand Staircase F‑Deck Begins Flooding

01:08:10 — Boat 5 is Launched

01:10:00 — Boxhall & Smith spot Carpathia

01:12:10 — 1st Distress Rocket Fired

01:15:00 — Grand Staircase E‑Deck Begins Flooding

01:20:00 — Boat 3 is Launched

01:21:00 — Titanic Begins Sending SOS

01:25:00 — 1AM Boat 8 is Launched

01:30:00 — Boat 1 is Launched

01:35:00 — Boat 6 is Launched

01:35:15 — Boiler Room 5 Floods

01:40:00 — Water Climbs Grand Staircase

01:44:30 — Boiler Room 4 is Abandoned

01:45:00 — Boat 16 is Launched

01:50:00 — Boat 14 is Launched

01:55:15 — Boats 9 and 12 are Launched

02:00:00 — Boat 11 is Launched

02:04:00 — Titanic lists to Port

02:05:00 — Boat 13 is Launched

02:06:00 — Boat 15 is Launched

02:09:00 — D‑deck Reception Room Floods

02:10:00 — Boat 2 is Launched

02:12:00 — Well Deck is Awash

02:14:00 — D‑Deck Reception Room Goes

02:15:00 — Boat 10 is Launched

02:15:10 — Boat 4 is Launched

02:25:00 — 2AM Boat C is Launched

02:26:10 - Power Begins to Fade

02:29:00 — Boat D is Launched

02:37:15 — Nearer My God to Thee

02:40:00 — Final Plunge

02:42:00 — Breakup

The Titanic: Rare Footage of the Ship Before Disaster Strikes (1911–1912)

How the Titanic Sank: James Cameron’s New CGI Animation

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

- 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.

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

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