The Mathematics Behind Origami, the Ancient Japanese Art of Paper Folding

in Art, Math, Technology, TED Talks | March 23rd, 2021

The two characters at the core of origami (折り紙), one of the best-known Japanese words around the world, mean “folding” and “paper.” You might well have guessed that, but given the variety and elaborateness of the constructions produced by origami masters over the past few centuries, the simplicity of the practice’s basic nature bears repeating. Those masters must develop no slight degree of manual dexterity, it goes without saying, but also a formidable mathematical understanding of their medium. In many cases that understanding is intuitive; in the TED-Ed lesson above, origami artist Evan Zodl makes it explicit.

Zodl’s lesson explains that “though most origami models are three-dimensional, their crease patterns are usually designed to fold flat, without introducing any new creases or cutting the paper.”(Incidentally, the Japanese word for paper art involving cuts is kirigami, or 切り紙.)

An “abstract, 2D design” thus becomes, in the origami master’s hands, “a 3D form,” but only in accordance with a set of four simple rules Zodl explains. He does so clearly and understandably — and in a way that for many of us may exhume buried geometry-class memories — but like actual works of origami, they’re better shown than described: hence the vivid accompanying animations of Charlotte Arene.

Origami’s principles and products may be fascinating to contemplate, but “the ability to fold a large surface into a compact shape” has also proven to have serious real-world applications. Zodl points to an origami-based re-imagination of “the traditional stent graft, a tube used to open and support damaged blood vessels.” This in addition to “airbags, solar arrays, self-folding robots, and even DNA nanostructures” — as well as a massive “star shade” for space telescopes that blocks the glare of nearby stars. If you’d like to get started on your own tactile understanding of all this, do have a look at Zodl’s own Youtube channel, as well as others like Origami Instructions. Don’t let the elaborately folded flowers, boats, or animals you’ve seen intimidate you; start with a simple box and work your way up from there. If origami shows us anything, after all, it’s that complexity begins with simplicity.

A Database of Paper Airplane Designs: Hours of Fun for Kids & Adults Alike

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The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper: A Short Film Documents an 800-Year-Old Tradition

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 Edward Munch Signaled His Bohemian Rebellion with Cigarettes (1895): A Video Essay

in Art, History | March 23rd, 2021

When we think of Edvard Munch, we think of The Scream. Though not explicitly a self-portrait, that iconic 1893 canvas does, to anyone who’s read up on the painter’s life, look like a plausible expression of his troubled internal state. But “Self-Portrait with Cigarette made two years later, though less jarring, is just as concerned with Munch’s personal psychology and the dark underside of his identity as The Scream is.” So argues Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, in his video essay “Edvard Munch: What A Cigarette Means.” Through the artist’s smoke of choice, it seems, we can approach and understand the different time in which he lived.

“At the end of the 19th century,” Puschak explains, “the cigarette existed at the center of a lot of different cultural forces.” In fact it hadn’t quite caught on, having yet to overcome its lower-class image compared to cigars and pipes. But as with so much that eventually goes mainstream, the cigarette was first widely adopted by bohemians.

Among them Munch and his contemporaries “found their alternative to the suffocating middle-class value system. They traded in drawing rooms for late-night cafés, dinner parties for nightclubs, and cigars for cigarettes.” Puschak pulls up a painting by Munch’s mentor Christian Krohg showing a 21-year-old Munch “lighting up with his friends and fellow painters in his studio.”

Even as he inhabited it, Munch himself also captured this floating world in his art. In one of his etchings, “smoke snakes and fills up the atmosphere of a café, where bohemian intellectuals of both genders drink and debate art and ideas.” To the social reformers of late 19th-century Norway such scenes were anathema, and “the cigarette was symptomatic of society’s degeneration.” These figures thought little more of Munch’s art, whether the work in question was a relatively naturalistic image like Self-Portrait with Cigarette or a violently expressionist one like The Scream. Regarded today as examples of high, refined culture, his paintings have in some sense lost their edge; but then so has the cigarette, a onetime liberating symbol of social and artistic revolution now reduced to a squalid public-health hazard.

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Edvard Munch’s The Scream Animated to the Psychedelic Sounds of Pink Floyd: The Winter Version

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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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The Aesthetic of Anime: A New Video Essay Explores a Rich Tradition of Japanese Animation

in Animation, Television | March 22nd, 2021

Giant robots, superpowered schoolgirls, berzerker martial artists: we all know the sort of figures that represent anime. Though clichéd, the widespread nature of these perceptions actually shows how far Japanese animation has come over the past few decades. Not so long ago, the average Westerner didn’t know the meaning of the world anime, let alone its origin. Today, thanks not least to the films of Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli, the average Westerner has likely already been exposed to one or two masterworks of the form. This viewing experience provides a sense of why Japanese animation, far from simply animation that happens to be Japanese, merits a term of its own: any of us, no matter how inexperienced, can sense “The Aesthetic of Anime.”

Taking that concept as the title of their latest video essay, Lewis and Luiza Liz Bond of The Cinema Cartography show us a range of cinematic possibilities that anime has opened up since the 1980s. I recall, long ago, staying up late to tune in to the Sci-Fi Channel’s “Saturday Night Anime” block to catch such classics from that decade as Venus Wars and Project A‑Ko.

While Japanese animation in all its forms has gone much more mainstream around the world since then, it hasn’t resulted in a loss of artistic, narrative, and thematic inventiveness. On the contrary, Bond argues: over the past quarter-century, series like Neon Genesis Evangelion, Serial Experiments Lain, and Death Note have not only pushed the boundaries of anime, but demonstrated a power to “re-signify storytelling conventions that go beyond the anime form itself.”

In the effort to reveal the true nature of “the misunderstood and often disregarded world of anime,” this video essay references and visually quotes dozens of different shows. (It stops short of the also-vast realm of feature films, such as Ghost in the Shell or the work of Satoshi Kon.) Its range includes the “existential meditation on loneliness” that is Cowboy Bebop, subject of another Bond exegesis previously featured here on Open Culture, and “city pop-fueled Superdimensional Fortress Macross,” which did so much back in the 80s to define not just giant-robot anime but anime itself. Trope-heavy, over-the-top, and “unapologetically weird” though it may seem (but usually not, as Bond implies, without self-awareness), anime continues to realize visions not available — nor even conceivable — to any other art form.

The Animations That Changed Cinema: The Groundbreaking Legacies of Prince Achmed, Akira, The Iron Giant & More

The Philosophy, Storytelling & Visual Creativity of Ghost in the Shell, the Acclaimed Anime Film, Explained in Video Essays

How Master Japanese Animator Satoshi Kon Pushed the Boundaries of Making Anime: A Video Essay

The Philosophy of Hayao Miyazaki: A Video Essay on How the Traditional Japanese Religion Shinto Suffuses Miyazaki’s Films

The Origins of Anime: Watch Free Online 64 Animations That Launched the Japanese Anime Tradition

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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Three Leonard Cohen Animations

in Animation, Music, Philosophy, Poetry | March 22nd, 2021

Leonard Cohen, High Priest Of Pathos…

Lord Byron of Rock and Roll…

Gentleman Zen

Master Of Misery…Morbidity… Erotic Despair…

Prince of Pessimism…Pain…

Troubadour For Troubled Souls…

The gravel-voiced singer-songwriter accumulated hundreds of nicknames over a career spanning more than half a century. He wasn’t thrilled by some of them, remarking to the BBC, “You get tired, over the years, hearing that you’re the champion of gloom.”

Taken all together, however, they make for a decent composite portrait of a prolific artist whose sensuality, mordant wit, and obsession with love, loss, and redemption never wavered.

He took some hiatuses, including a 5‑year stint as a monk in California’s Mount Baldy monastery, but never retired.

His final studio album, You Want It Darker, was released mere weeks before his death.

Journalist Rob Sheffield articulated the Cohen mystique in a Rolling Stone eulogy:

This man was both the crack in everything and the light that gets in. Nobody wrote such magnificently bleak ballads for brooding alone in the dark, staring at a window or wall – “Joan of Arc,” “Chelsea Hotel,” “Tower of Song,” “Famous Blue Raincoat,” “Closing Time.” He was music’s top Jewish Canadian ladies’ man before Drake was born, running for the money and the flesh. Like Bowie and Prince, he tapped into his own realm of spiritual and sexual gnosis, and like them, he went out at the peak of his musical powers. No songwriter ever adapted to old age with more cunning or gusto.

Cohen also excelled at interviews, leaving behind a wealth of generous, freewheeling recordings, at least three of which have become fodder for animators.

The animation at the top of the page is drawn from Cohen’s 1966 interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Adrienne Clarkson, shortly after the release of his experimental novel, Beautiful Losers. (His debut album was still a year and a half away.)

Earlier in the interview, Cohen mentions the “happy revolution” he encountered in Toronto after an extended period on the Greek island of Hydra:

I was walking on Yorkville Street and it was jammed with beautiful, beautiful people last night. I thought maybe it could spread to the [other] streets and maybe even … where’s the money district? Bay Street?… I thought maybe they could take that over soon, too.

How to tap into the source of all this happiness?

The future Zen monk Cohen was pretty convinced it could be located by sitting quietly, though he doesn’t condemn those using drugs or alcohol as an assist, explaining that his fellow Canadian, abstract expressionist Harold Town, “gets beautiful under alcohol. I get stupid and generally throw up.”

8 years later, WBAI’s Kathleen Kendel came armed with a poem for Cohen to read on air, and also plumbed him as to the origins of “Sisters of Mercy,” one of his best known songs, and the only one that didn’t require him to “sweat over every word.” (Possibly the consolation prize for his dashed hopes of erotic adventure with the song’s protagonists.)

(The animation here is by Patrick Smith for PBS’ Blank on Blank series.)

Animator Joe Donaldson riffs on an excerpt from Cohen’s final major interview, with The New Yorker’s editor-in-chief, David Remnick, above.

Remnick recalled that his subject, who died a few days later, was “in an ebullient mood for a man… who knew exactly where he was going, and he was headed there in a hurry. And at the same time, he was incredibly gracious.”

The 82-year-old Cohen spoke enthusiastically if somewhat pessimistically about having a lot of new material to get through, “to put (his) house in order,” but also admitted, “sometimes I just need to lie down.”

Ladies and Gentlemen… Mr. Leonard Cohen: The Poet-Musician Featured in a 1965 Documentary

Leonard Cohen Plays a Spellbinding Set at the 1970 Isle of Wight Festival

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

A Finnish Astrophotographer Spent 12 Years Creating a 1.7 Gigapixel Panoramic Photo of the Entire Milky Way

in Astronomy, Photography | March 22nd, 2021

In the final, climactic scene of Japanese novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s Snow Country, the Milky Way engulfs the protagonist — an aesthete who keeps himself detached from the world, a universal perspective overtaking an insignificant individual.

We now know the Milky Way itself to be a minuscule part of the whole, just one of 100 to 200 billion galaxies. But until Edwin Hubble’s observations in 1924, it was thought to contain all the stars in existence.

The Milky Way-as-universe is a powerful image, and certainly more comprehensible than the universe as astronomers currently understand it. Its vastness can’t be compressed into a symbolic form like the via lactea, “Milky Way,” or as the Greeks called it, galaktikos kýklos, “milky circle.” Andy Briggs summarizes just a few of the ancient myths and legends:

To the ancient Armenians, it was straw strewn across the sky by the god Vahagn. In eastern Asia, it was the Silvery River of Heaven. The Finns and Estonians saw it as the Pathway of the Birds.… Both the Greeks and the Romans saw the starry band as a river of milk. The Greek myth said it was milk from the breast of the goddess Hera, divine wife of Zeus. The Romans saw the river of light as milk from their goddess Ops.

A barred spiral galaxy spinning around a “galactic bulge” with an empty center, a “monstrous black hole,” notes Space.com, “billions of times as massive as the sun”… the Milky Way remains an awesome symbol for a universe too vast for us to hold in our minds.

Witness, for example, the just-released image further up, a 1.7 gigapixel panoramic photo of the Milky Way, from Taurus to Cygnus, 100,000 pixels wide, pieced together from 234 panels by Finnish astrophotographer J‑P Metsavainio, who began the project all the way back in 2009. “I can hear music in this composition,” he writes at his site, “from high sparks and bubbles at left to deep and massive sounds at right.”

Over 12 years, and around 1250 hours of exposure, Michael Zhang writes at Petapixel, Metsavainio “focused on different areas and objects in the Milky Way, shooting stitched mosaics of them as individual artworks.” As he began to knit the galactic clouds of stars and gasses together into a Photoshop panorama, he discovered a “complex image set which is partly overlapping with lots of unimaged areas between and around frames.” Over the years, he filled in the gaps, shooting the “missing data.” He describes his equipment and process in detail, for those fluent in the technical jargon. The rest of us can stare in silent wonder at more of Metsavainio’s work on his website (where you can also purchase prints) and Facebook, and let ourselves be overtaken by awe.

via Petapixel and Kottke

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

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How Edward Hopper’s Paintings Inspired the Creepy Suspense of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window

in Art, Film | March 19th, 2021

Certain directors like to implicate their audience in their onscreen crimes, drawing on decades of expectations created by popular cinematic tropes and playing with the viewer’s innate desires. Filmmaker Michael Haneke takes a Hitchcockian approach in this regard, in nightmarish visions like Benny’s Video, The Piano Player, and Caché. “Haneke uses voyeurism to dismantle the space between the film and audience,” writes Popmatters,” and in doing so, he takes advantage of what might be thought of as Hitchcock’s voyeur apparatus and forces the audience to question its place within the narrative.”

Hitchcock’s “voyeur apparatus” has inspired many another idiosyncratic filmmaker — most notably, perhaps, David Lynch. Like Jimmy Stewart’s Jeff Jeffries in Hitchcock’s Rear Window, Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey in Lynch’s Blue Velvet becomes corrupted by illicit vision.

These are classic iterations of the Peeping Tom, the casual voyeur sexually awakened by covert observations of others. The road from Hitchcock to the psychosexual alienation of later arthouse cinema may be a short one, but where did Hitchcock’s framing of the voyeuristic gaze come from?

One answer, says writer Diane Doniol-Valcroze — daughter of Cahiers Du Cinéma co-founder Jacques Doniol-Valcroze — is found in a comparison of Hitchcock’s visual sense with that of Edward Hopper, the inventer of midcentury modern loneliness and also himself kind of a classic Peeping Tom. In a series of juxtapositions on Twitter, Doniol-Valcroze shows how Hitchcock adopted the framing of paintings like Hopper’s Automat (1927), Night Windows (1928), Hotel Room (1931), Room in New York (1932) for shots of Rear Window’s “Miss Torso” and “Miss Lonelyhearts.” She is not the only critic to make the comparison.

“For Hitchcock in particular,” writes Finn Blythe at Hero, “Hopper’s gaze was like a petri dish from which an infinite number of possible narratives could grow. Evidence of Hopper’s influence can be found throughout Hitchcock’s oeuvre, but especially his 1954 classic Rear Window. Just as the power of Hopper’s paintings lies in what he chooses to exclude, so the tension and spectacle in Hitchcock’s Rear Window relies on what is obscured or unseen.” Hopper’s figures are not only lonely and alienated, they are vulnerable, and especially so in private, unguarded moments in their own homes.

Hitchcock takes Hopper’s gaze, so often framed by windows, and makes it about cinema itself. “As viewers,” writes Blythe, “we become complicit in the same morbid human fantasies,” as Stewart’s creepy Jeff, “rubber-necking the same lurid acts from the safe vantage point of our chairs.” As the cinematic image of the voyeur has shown us, however — in Hitchcock, Haneke, Lynch, and its many iterations of what Laura Mulvey called the “male gaze” — the act of watching from a distance can become a kind of violence all its own; in Hitchcockian cinema, the menace that often seems to lurk just out of frame in Hopper’s paintings can burst into the picture at any moment.

via Diane Doniol-Valcroze

Edward Hopper’s Iconic Painting Nighthawks Explained in a 7‑Minute Video Introduction

How Edward Hopper “Storyboarded” His Iconic Painting Nighthawks

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

A Celebration of Typewriters in Film & Television: A Supercut

in Film, Health, Writing | March 19th, 2021

There are a number of ways to come at video essayist Ariel Avissar’s two-minute supercut of typewriters in action on film and television.

Cinema buffs will itch to connect The Typewriter’s clips to titles. Here are some of the ones we were able to identify:

Zodiac

Stranger Than Fiction

Citizen Kane

Finding Forrester

The Magic of Belle Isle

The Shining

Adaptation

Mad Men

Barton Fink

All the President’s Men

Misery

Ruby Sparks

Trumbo

And then there are the typewriter enthusiasts, more concerned with make and model than anything relating to cinema:

Royal

Underwood

Olivetti

Olympia

Clark Nova

Smith Corona

IBM Selectric

Given the obsessive nature of both camps, it’s not surprising that there would be some crossover.

Here’s a delightfully nerdy investigation of the onscreen typewriters in Naked Lunch, David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burrough’s novel.

This collector’s top 10 list gives extra consideration to scripts that “place typewriters at the heart of the story.” First and second place feature typewriters on their posters.

An IBM Selectric III in Avissar’s supercut caused one viewer to reminisce about the anachronistic use of Selectric IIs in Mad Men’s first season secretarial pool. Creator Matthew Weiner admits the choice was deliberate. The first Selectric model is period appropriate, but much more difficult to find and challenging to maintain, plus their manual carriage returns would have created a headache for sound editors.

Avissar’s round up also serves to remind us of a particularly modern problem—the ongoing quest to portray texts and social media messages effectively on big and small screens. This dilemma didn’t exist back when typewriters were the primary text-based devices. A close up of whatever page was rolled onto the platen got the job done with a minimum of fuss.

Two of the most celebrated typewriter sequences in film history did not make the cut, possibly because neither features actual working typewriters: the NSFW anthropomorphic typewriter-bug in David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William S. Burrough’s Naked Lunch and Jerry Lewis’ inspired pantomime in Who’s Minding the Store, performed, like Avissar’s supercut, to the tune of composer Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter.

Up for another challenge? Which top Hollywood star is “obsessed with typewriters”?

Watch more of Ariel Avissar’s supercuts, including a supermoon tribute and The Silence of the Lambs’ “clever, careful fingers” on his Vimeo channel.

Discover the Ingenious Typewriter That Prints Musical Notation: The Keaton Music Typewriter Patented in 1936

Ray Bradbury Wrote the First Draft of Fahrenheit 451 on Coin-Operated Typewriters, for a Total of $9.80

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

by Ayun Halliday | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Michael Winslow, the “Man of 10,000 Sound Effects”, Impersonates the Sounds of Jimi Hendrix’s and Led Zeppelin’s Electric Guitars with His Voice

in Comedy | March 18th, 2021

Even if you weren’t a huge fan of the Police Academy movies, there was one character that made them watchable: Larvell Jones, played by Michael Winslow, “The Man of a 10,000 Sound Effects.” His character is a sort of oddball presence throughout the series, whose ability to sound like a siren, a machine gun, a guard dog, or any number of things, invariably helps his team save the day. He’s been the only consistent character through all eight entries of the movie series, a brief television spin-off, and an animated cartoon series. And I dare say he’s the franchise’s reason to exist, as a Police Academy without Larvell Jones would be…what? A bunch of crappy cops?

And while you might think of him as a master of machine noises, Winslow is actually a very musical performer, as his above impression of Jimi Hendrix, both vocals and guitar, proves. Winslow was an army brat, moved all over the place, and his imitation skills developed at an early age, a coping mechanism for a lonely childhood. He kept at it, and made it onto The Gong Show in 1978. The prize money allowed him to stay in Los Angeles and start making the club rounds. He got scouted for Police Academy while opening for the Count Basie Orchestra, performing “some fusion jazz sounds,” as he described it in an interview. Fortunately, the filmmakers let him improvise through his scenes and his career took off from there.

As the clips here show, Winslow can jam hard. His Hendrix impression is a little bit stoned, and he gets the voice right. With a backing band on tape, he goes on to provide the vocals and the distorted, flanged guitar. You can see that little has changed from the version from the ‘80s at the Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal, Canada, and a 2011 performance from the Dubomedy International Performing Arts Festival in Dubai. The latter has better sound quality and separation so you can hear Winslow’s work.

His Led Zeppelin impression combines both Robert Plant and Jimmy Page, and I won’t spoil the joke, but Winslow explains how Plant came up with “Immigrant Song.”

And there’s no sound effects involved in his Tina Turner impression, but a good wig, and an impressive set of pipes that only get wobbly a few times. But then again, so do his legs.

Side note: Before Winslow there was a comedian called Wes Harrison, who had a similar talent and a similar rise to stardom: from talent show winner to a regular guest on late night shows in the 1960s to a steady stream of nightclub appearances.

In 1988, the two men, separated by 35 years, performed together on a Dick Clark variety show. It is perhaps the only time the two shared a stage.

via Metafilter

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Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the Notes from the Shed podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

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A Search Engine for Finding Free, Public Domain Images from World-Class Museums

in Art, Technology | March 18th, 2021

Even before the pandemic, museums were putting their art online. Here on Open Culture, we’ve covered such ambitious efforts of digitization and making-available on the part of the Rijksmuseum, the Art Institute of Chicago, and other major institutions, some of whom have gone so far as to upload their holdings under Creative Commons licenses or in other free-to-use forms. And now you can call forth artworks from the open online collections and others all at once with the search engine Museo.

“Museo is a visual search engine that connects you with the Art Institute of Chicago, the Rijksmuseum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art and the New York Public Library Digital Collection,” writes creator Chase McCoy, who also emphasizes that connections with more such collections are to come.

“Every image you find here is in the public domain and completely free to use, although crediting the source institution is recommended!”

Imagine you need images to illustrate an essay about, say, travel. Punch that word into Museo (or a related one like “journey”) and out come a variety of paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, books, maps, housewares, and other items found in museums. Here we have Adolph Menzel’s In a Railway Carriage (After a Night’s Journey) from 1851, Katsushika Hokusai’s The Eastern Journey of the Celebrated Poet Ariwara no Narihira from 1806, Aelbert Cuyp’s River Landscape with Riders from the mid-1650s, Seth Eastman’s Indians Travelling from 1850, and Richard Newton’s On a Journey to a Courtship in Wales from 1795.

The results are hardly limited to conventional works like these: you’ll also find such curiosities as an early 19th-century traveling desk; a portable bank from 1904 called the “traveling teller”; a 1920 image “showing the earth bisected centrally through the polar openings and at right angles to the equator, giving a clear view of the central sun and the interior continents and oceans”; Henry Corry Rowley Becher’s 1880 travelogue A Trip to Mexico; and the Automobile Club of Hartford’s 1922 Motor Trips guide to New England and eastern New York.

Most of the art available through Museo comes, as public-domain material tends to, from times long past. But that, in its own way, encourages their creative use: many of the images returned for “entertainment,” “food,” “sports,” and even “technology” fairly demand surprising 21st-century recontextualization. As its network of collections expands, do make a point of visiting Museo every so often to search for your own subjects of interest; your next big idea may well be inspired by art from a century or two (or three, or four) ago.

via Austin Kleon

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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 ( 2 ) |

Researchers Develop a Digital Model of the 2,200-Year-Old Antikythera Mechanism, “the World’s First Computer”

in Astronomy, History, Science | March 18th, 2021

What’s the world’s oldest computer? If you answered the 5‑ton, room-sized IBM Mark I, it’s a good guess, but you’d be off by a couple thousand years or so. The first known computer may have been a handheld device, a little larger than the average tablet. It was also hand-powered and had a limited, but nonetheless remarkable, function: it followed the Metonic cycle, “the 235-month pattern that ancient astronomers used to predict eclipses,” writes Robby Berman at Big Think.

The ancient artifact known as the Antikythera mechanism — named for the Greek Island under which it was discovered — turned up in 1900. It took another three-quarters of a century before the secrets of what first appeared as a “corroded lump” revealed a device of some kind dating from 150 to 100 BC. “By 2009, modern imaging technology had identified all 30 of the Antikythera mechanism’s gears, and a virtual model of it was released,” as we noted in an earlier post.

The device could predict the positions of the planets (or at least those the Greeks knew of: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), as well as the sun, moon, and eclipses. It placed Earth at the center of the universe. Researchers studying the Antikythera mechanism understood that much. But they couldn’t quite understand exactly how it worked, since only about a third of the complex mechanism has survived.

Image by University College London

Now, it appears that researchers from the University College of London have figured it out, debuting a new computational model in Scientific Reports. “Ours is the first model that conforms to all the physical evidence and matches the scientific inscriptions engraved on the mechanism itself,” lead author Tony Freeth tells The Engineer. In the video above, you can learn about the history of the mechanism and its rediscovery in the 20th century, and see a detailed explanation of Freeth and his team’s discoveries.

“About the size of a large dictionary,” the artifact has proven to be the “most complex piece of engineering from the ancient world” the video informs us. Having built a 3D model, the researchers next intend to build a replica of the device. If they can do so with “modern machinery,” writes Guardian science editor Ian Sample, “they aim to do the same with techniques from antiquity” — no small task considering that it’s “unclear how the ancient Greeks would have manufactured such components” without the use of a lathe, a tool they probably did not possess.

Image by University College London

The mechanism will still hold its secrets even if the UCL team’s model works. Why was it made, what was it used for? Were there other such devices? Hopefully, we won’t have to wait another several decades to learn the answers. Read the team’s Scientific Reports article here.

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

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread

in Art, History | March 17th, 2021

The Bayeux Tapestry, one of the most famous artifacts of its kind, isn’t actually a tapestry. Technically, because the images it bears are embroidered onto the cloth rather than woven into it, we should call it the Bayeux Embroidery. To quibble over a matter like this rather misses the point — but then, so does taking too literally the story it tells in colored yarn over its 224-foot length. Commissioned, historians believe, as an apologia for the Norman conquest of England in 1066, this elaborate work of narrative visual art conveys events with a certain slant. But in so doing, the Bayeux’s 75 dramatic, bloody, ribald, and sometimes mysterious episodes also capture how people and things (and even Halley’s Comet) looked in medieval Europe.

It does this in great, if stylized detail, at which you can get a closer look than has ever before been available to the public at the Bayeux Museum’s web site. The museum “worked with teams from the University of Caen Normandie to digitize high-resolution images of the tapestry, which were taken in 2017,” says Medievalists.net.

“A simple interface was created to access the digital version, which allows users to zoom in and explore it in great detail with access to Latin translations in French and English.” Made of 2.6 billion pixels (which brings it to eight gigabytes in size), the online Bayeux Tapestry lets us zoom in so far as to examine its individual threads — the same level at which it was inspected in real life earlier last year in anticipation of its next restoration.

“A team of eight restorers, all specialists in antique textiles, carried out the detailed inspection in January 2020, a period when the museum was closed to visitors,” says Medievalists.net. “Among their findings were that the tapestry has 24,204 stains, 16,445 wrinkles, 9,646 gaps in the cloth or the embroidery, 30 non-stabilized tears, and significant weakening in the first few metres of the work.” (Notably, the colors applied in a 19th-century restoration have faded much more than the vegetable dyes used in the original.) Though currently a bit rough around the edges, the Bayeux Tapestry looks pretty good for its 950 or so years, as any of us can now look more than closely enough to see for ourselves. This is a credit to its makers — whose identities, for all the scrutiny performed on the work itself, may remain forever unknown. Explore the high-resolution scan of the Tapestry here.

via Smithsonian Magazine and Medievalists.net

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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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The Bayeux Tapestry Gets Digitized: View the Medieval Tapestry in High Resolution, Down to the Individual Thread

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