A Brief History of IDEO: A Short Documentary Takes You Inside the Design Firm That Changed the Way We Think about Design

in Design | April 10th, 2019

The design firm IDEO was found­ed in 1991, which may not sound like an espe­cial­ly long time ago, but con­sid­er it in tech­no­log­i­cal terms: what kind of devices were we using in 1991? How did they look and feel? Chances are not just that the phone and com­put­er you now car­ry around bear no resem­blance to the ones you would have car­ried around — not that most of them could be car­ried around — 28 years ago, but that your fur­ni­ture and house­hold appli­ances have changed as well. And think, too, of your every­day expe­ri­ences with shop­ping, med­ical care, and gov­ern­ment ser­vices: some have trans­formed, usu­al­ly for the bet­ter, and if oth­ers haven’t, it’s prob­a­bly not a good thing that they’ve stayed the same.

IDEO has worked on the design of prod­ucts and ser­vices in all those fields and oth­ers, and has indeed done much to rede­fine the field of design itself. The com­pa­ny’s founders and employ­ees tell the sto­ry in their own words in the short doc­u­men­tary video IDEO and a Sto­ry of Design above, which focus­es on IDEO’s achieve­ments in chang­ing the way we think about design (exem­pli­fied by the time they redesigned the hum­ble shop­ping cart on Night­line).

And though IDEO as a cor­po­rate enti­ty has only exist­ed since the ear­ly 1990s, it has deep­er roots in the his­to­ry of design, appear­ing as it did as a merg­er of four exist­ing firms, David Kel­ley Design, ID Two, Matrix Prod­uct Design in Cal­i­for­nia, and Mog­gridge Asso­ciates in Lon­don. Kel­ley, who’s also a pro­fes­sor at Stan­ford, appears in the video not only to remem­ber IDEO’s found­ing, but also to talk about its future.

So does Tim Brown, who after nine­teen years as IDEO’s CEO announced last week that he will step down, pass­ing the posi­tion on to for­mer glob­al man­ag­ing direc­tor Sandy Spe­ich­er. When IDEO enters a world, Spe­ich­er says in the video, “we bring our cre­ative lens, imag­in­ing how we can make that world bet­ter. I’m care­ful about words like ‘solu­tion’ or ‘the answer,’ because these are peo­ple-based sys­tems.” That remark, as well as the oth­ers made by the vari­ety of IDEO peo­ple — in a vari­ety of accents befit­ting a now-glob­al firm with nine loca­tions around the world — pro­vide a glimpse into IDEO’s mutu­al­ly insep­a­ra­ble cor­po­rate cul­ture and its con­cep­tion of design. And if all their talk about rein­ven­tion, respon­sive­ness, and ask­ing the big ques­tions sounds a bit high-flown, most of it may come down to an old say­ing that holds up in every domain just as well today as it did in 1991: There’s always room for improve­ment.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free: A Crash Course in Design Think­ing from Stanford’s Design School

Down­load 20 Free eBooks on Design from O’Reilly Media

Saul Bass’ Advice for Design­ers: Make Some­thing Beau­ti­ful and Don’t Wor­ry About the Mon­ey

Pao­la Antonel­li on Design as the Inter­face Between Progress and Human­i­ty

Mil­ton Glaser’s 10 Rules for Life & Work: The Cel­e­brat­ed Design­er Dis­pens­es Wis­dom Gained Over His Long Life & Career

Dieter Rams Lists the 10 Time­less Prin­ci­ples of Good Design–Backed by Music by Bri­an Eno

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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New Augmented Reality App Celebrates Stories of Women Typically Omitted from U.S. History Textbooks

in History, Technology | April 10th, 2019

How do we know if we’ve lived through a major shift toward greater equal­i­ty? Maybe it’s when his­to­ry text­books start telling dif­fer­ent sto­ries than the ones they’ve always told about heroes in knee breech­es, waist­coats, epaulets, top hats, and beards. Aside from the occa­sion­al his­tor­i­cal fig­ure in bon­net or bloomers, most texts real­ly have just told “his sto­ry.”

In the U.S., at least, stud­ies show that only 11% of the sto­ries in his­to­ry text­books are about women. Is this because 50% of the pop­u­la­tion only con­tributed to 11% per­cent of the country’s events? No, even the kids know—like the kids in the video above from a new app called Lessons in Her­sto­ry—his­to­ry most­ly fea­tures men because “a lot of it was writ­ten by men and was most­ly all about men.”

Text­book mak­ers, and the school boards who give them march­ing orders, may stick to their guns, so to speak, but anoth­er major shift could ren­der their dic­tates irrel­e­vant. Smart­phone and tablet tech­nol­o­gy has become so famil­iar to today’s kids that instead of turn­ing the pages, they “swipe, like, in the his­to­ry books,” as one of the young­sters puts it.

Stu­dents stuck with the old patri­ar­chal ped­a­go­gies can eas­i­ly sup­ple­ment, enhance, or sub­sti­tute their edu­ca­tion with new media. While there are some seri­ous down­sides to this phe­nom­e­non, giv­en a dis­tinct lack of qual­i­ty con­trol online, the inter­net has also opened up innu­mer­able oppor­tu­ni­ties for telling the sto­ries of women in his­to­ry.

Lessons in Her­sto­ry, built by an orga­ni­za­tion called Daugh­ters of the Evo­lu­tion, takes a unique approach. Instead of sup­plant­i­ng text­books, it adds to them in an aug­ment­ed real­i­ty smart­phone app (cur­rent­ly designed for ios devices) stu­dents can point at pic­tures of his­tor­i­cal dudes to pull up sto­ries about a notable women from the same time.

Grant­ed, some of these women, like Har­ri­et Tub­man and Saca­gawea, had already been grant­ed access to the lim­it­ed space allot­ted female fig­ures in grade school text­books. But a great many oth­er peo­ple in the app have not. Fea­tur­ing a diverse selec­tion of 75 her­stor­i­cal women, Lessons in Her­sto­ry is the prod­uct of ad agency Good­by Sil­ver­stein & Part­ners’ chief cre­ative offi­cer Mar­garet John­son, who launched it at this year’s SXSW.

The app has pret­ty lim­it­ed appli­ca­tion at the moment. It works with one text­book, A His­to­ry of US, Book 5: Lib­er­ty for All? 1820–1860, and with a hand­ful of his­tor­i­cal pho­tographs on its web­site. (Many of the women fea­tured made their mark after 1860.) But with plans to expand and with the back­ing of a large ad agency, who may or may not have their own designs in mar­ket­ing Lessons in Her­sto­ry, it promis­es to make women’s his­to­ry more acces­si­ble to stu­dents who already spend more time star­ing at screens than pages.

“There’s a say­ing,” writes Cara Cur­tis at The Next Web, “’you can’t be what you can’t see.’” Apps like Lessons in Her­sto­ry, along with a num­ber of influ­en­tial books and web­sites for young peo­ple that nar­rate the past through the lens of women, indige­nous peo­ple, African-Amer­i­cans, artists, activists, work­ing peo­ple, and so on, show kids that no mat­ter who they are or where they come from, peo­ple who looked like them have always made sig­nif­i­cant con­tri­bu­tions to his­to­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Matil­da Effect”: How Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists Have Been Denied Recog­ni­tion and Writ­ten Out of Sci­ence His­to­ry

The Ency­clo­pe­dia of Women Philoso­phers: A New Web Site Presents the Con­tri­bu­tions of Women Philoso­phers, from Ancient to Mod­ern

Pop Art Posters Cel­e­brate Pio­neer­ing Women Sci­en­tists: Down­load Free Posters of Marie Curie, Ada Lovelace & More

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

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When the Nazis Declared War on Expressionist Art (1937)

in Art, Film, History | April 9th, 2019

The 1937 Nazi Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion dis­played the art of Paul Klee, Wass­i­ly Kandin­sky, Georg Grosz, and many more inter­na­tion­al­ly famous mod­ernists with max­i­mum prej­u­dice. Ripped from the walls of Ger­man muse­ums, the 740 paint­ings and sculp­tures were thrown togeth­er in dis­ar­ray and sur­round­ed by deroga­to­ry graf­fi­ti and hell-house effects. Right down the street was the respectable Great Ger­man Art Exhi­bi­tion, designed as coun­ter­pro­gram­ming “to show the works that Hitler approved of—depicting stat­uesque blonde nudes along with ide­al­ized sol­diers and land­scapes,” writes Lucy Burns at the BBC.

View­ers were sup­posed to sneer and recoil at the mod­ern art, and most did, but whether they were gawk­ers, Nazi sym­pa­thiz­ers, or art fans in mourn­ing, the exhib­it drew mas­sive crowds. Over a mil­lion peo­ple first attend­ed, three times more than saw the exhi­bi­tion of state-sanc­tioned art—or more specif­i­cal­ly, art sanc­tioned by Hitler the failed artist, who had endured watch­ing “the real­is­tic paint­ings of build­ings and land­scapes,” of stur­dy peas­ants and suf­fer­ing poets, “dis­missed by the art estab­lish­ment in favour of abstract and mod­ern styles.” The Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion “was his moment to get his revenge,” and he had it. Over a hun­dred artists were denounced as Bol­she­viks and Jews bent on cor­rupt­ing Ger­man puri­ty.

After­wards, thou­sands of works of art were destroyed or dis­ap­peared, as did many of their cre­ators. Many artists fled, many could not. Enraged by the eclipse of sen­ti­men­tal aca­d­e­m­ic styles and by his own igno­rance, Hitler railed against “works of art which can­not be under­stood in them­selves,” as he put it in a speech that sum­mer. These “will nev­er again find their way to the Ger­man peo­ple.” Many such quo­ta­tions sur­round­ed the offend­ing art. The 1993 doc­u­men­tary above, writ­ten, pro­duced, and direct­ed by David Gru­bin, tells the sto­ry of the exhi­bi­tion, which has in time proven Hitler’s great­est cul­ture war fol­ly. It accom­plished its imme­di­ate pur­pose, but as Jonathan Petropou­los, pro­fes­sor of Euro­pean His­to­ry at Clare­mont McKen­na Col­lege points out, “this art­work became more attrac­tive abroad…. I think that over the longer run it was good for mod­ern art to be viewed as some­thing that the Nazis detest­ed and hat­ed.”

Not every anti-Nazi crit­ic saw mod­ern art as sub­vert­ing fas­cism. Ten years after the Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion, philoso­pher Theodor Adorno, him­self a refugee from Nazism, called Expres­sion­ism “a naïve aspect of lib­er­al trust­ful­ness,” on a con­tin­u­um between fas­cist tools like Futur­ism and “the ide­ol­o­gy of the cin­e­ma.” Nonethe­less, it was Hitler who most bore out Adorno’s gen­er­al obser­va­tion: “Taste is the most accu­rate seis­mo­graph of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence…. React­ing against itself, it rec­og­nizes its own lack of taste.” The hys­ter­i­cal per­for­mance of dis­gust sur­round­ing so-called “degen­er­ate art” turned the exhib­it into a sen­sa­tion, a block­buster that, if it did not prove the virtues of mod­ernism, showed many around the world that the Nazis were as crude, dim, and vicious as they alleged their sup­posed ene­mies to be.

In the doc­u­men­tary, you’ll see actu­al footage of the the­atri­cal exhi­bi­tion, jux­ta­posed with film of a 1992 Berlin exhi­bi­tion of much of that for­mer­ly degen­er­ate art. Restaged Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tions have become very pop­u­lar in the art word, bring­ing togeth­er artists who need no fur­ther expo­sure, in order to his­tor­i­cal­ly reen­act, in some fash­ion, the expe­ri­ence of see­ing them all togeth­er for the first time. From a recent his­tor­i­cal review at New York’s Neue Gal­lerie to the dig­i­tal exhib­it at MoMA.org, degen­er­ate art ret­ro­spec­tives show, as Adorno wrote, that indeed “taste is the most accu­rate seis­mo­graph of his­tor­i­cal expe­ri­ence.”

The orig­i­nal exhi­bi­tion “went on tour all over Ger­many,” writes Burns, “where it was seen by a mil­lion more peo­ple.” Thou­sands of ordi­nary Ger­mans who went to jeer at it were exposed to mod­ern art for the first time. Mil­lions more peo­ple have learned the names and styles of these artists by learn­ing about the his­to­ry of Nazism and its cult of pet­ti­ness and per­son­al revenge. Learn much more in the excel­lent doc­u­men­tary above and at our pre­vi­ous post on the Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion.

Degen­er­ate Art — 1993, The Nazis vs. Expres­sion­ism will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nazi’s Philis­tine Grudge Against Abstract Art and The “Degen­er­ate Art Exhi­bi­tion” of 1937

Titan­ic: The Nazis Cre­ate a Mega-Bud­get Pro­pa­gan­da Film About the Ill-Fat­ed Ship … and Then Banned It (1943)

When Ger­man Per­for­mance Artist Ulay Stole Hitler’s Favorite Paint­ing & Hung it in the Liv­ing Room of a Turk­ish Immi­grant Fam­i­ly (1976)

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

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550 Million Years of Human Evolution in an Illustrated Flipbook

in Art, Science | April 9th, 2019

Graph­ic artist Juri­an Moller cre­at­ed a flip­book that lets you watch 550 mil­lion years of human evo­lu­tion unfold in a mat­ter of sec­onds. He writes: “This flip­book goes back in time and shows you the evo­lu­tion of the gen­er­a­tions in both a per­son­al and sci­en­tif­ic way. The dif­fer­ences between the gen­er­a­tions on each page are very dif­fi­cult to see, but the long, con­tin­u­ous ances­tral line goes right back to our very ori­gins.”

The action is on full dis­play above. Below, watch the same flip­book in an ani­mat­ed form. Pur­chase the book in var­i­ous for­mats at Moller’s site here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Carl Sagan Explains Evo­lu­tion in an Eight-Minute Ani­ma­tion

10 Mil­lion Years of Evo­lu­tion Visu­al­ized in an Ele­gant, 5‑Foot Long Info­graph­ic from 1931

Richard Dawkins Explains Why There Was Nev­er a First Human Being

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What Does “Machiavellian” Really Mean?: An Animated Lesson

in Philosophy, Politics | April 9th, 2019

The word Machi­avel­lian has come to invari­ably refer to an “unscrupu­lous schemer for whom the ends jus­ti­fy the means,” notes the ani­mat­ed TED-Ed video above, a descrip­tion of char­ac­ters “we love to hate” in fic­tion past and present. The adjec­tive has even become enshrined in psy­cho­log­i­cal lit­er­a­ture as one third of the “dark tri­ad” that also fea­tures nar­cis­sism and psy­chopa­thy, per­son­al­i­ties often mis­tak­en for the Machi­avel­lian type.

The ter­m’s “last­ing noto­ri­ety comes from a brief polit­i­cal essay known as The Prince,” writ­ten by Renais­sance Ital­ian writer and diplo­mat Nic­colò Machi­avel­li and “framed as advice to cur­rent and future mon­archs.” The Prince and its author have acquired such a fear­some rep­u­ta­tion that they seem to stand alone, like the work of the Mar­quis de Sade and Leopold von Sach­er-Masoch, who like­wise lent their names to the psy­chol­o­gy of pow­er. But Machi­avel­li’s book is part of “an entire tra­di­tion of works known as ‘mir­rors for princes’ going back to antiq­ui­ty.”

Machi­avel­li inno­vat­ed on the tra­di­tion by cast­ing fuzzy abstrac­tions like jus­tice and vir­tu­ous­ness aside to focus sole­ly on virtù, the clas­si­cal Ital­ian word derived from the Latin vir­tus (man­hood), which had lit­tle to do with ethics and every­thing to do with strength, brav­ery, and oth­er war­like traits. Though thinkers in the tra­di­tion of Aris­to­tle argued for cen­turies that civic and moral virtue may be syn­ony­mous, for Machi­avel­li they most cer­tain­ly were not, it seems. “Through­out [The Prince] Machi­avel­li appears entire­ly uncon­cerned with moral­i­ty except inso­far as it’s help­ful or harm­ful to main­tain­ing pow­er.”

The work became infa­mous after its author’s death. Catholics and Protes­tants both blamed Machi­avel­li for the oth­ers’ excess­es dur­ing the bloody Euro­pean reli­gious wars. Shake­speare coined Machi­av­el “to denote an amoral oppor­tunist.” The line to con­tem­po­rary usage is more or less direct. But is The Prince real­ly “a man­u­al for tyran­ny”? The book, after all, rec­om­mends com­mit­ting atroc­i­ties of all kinds, oppress­ing minori­ties, and gen­er­al­ly ter­ri­fy­ing the pop­u­lace as a means of quelling dis­sent. Keep­ing up the appear­ance of benev­o­lence might smooth things over, Machi­avel­li advis­es, unless it doesn’t. Then the ruler must do what­ev­er it takes. The guid­ing prin­ci­ple here is that “it is much safer to be feared than loved.”

Was Machi­avel­li an “unsen­ti­men­tal real­ist”? A Renais­sance Kissinger, so to speak, who saw the greater good in polit­i­cal hege­mo­ny no mat­ter what the cost? Or was he a neo-clas­si­cal philoso­pher hear­ken­ing back to antiq­ui­ty? He “nev­er seems to have con­sid­ered him­self a philoso­pher,” writes the Stan­ford Ency­clo­pe­dia of Phi­los­o­phy—“indeed, he often overt­ly reject­ed philo­soph­i­cal inquiry as beside the point.” Or at least he seemed to have reject­ed the Chris­t­ian-influ­enced human­ism of his day. Nonethe­less, “Machi­avel­li deserves a place at the table in any com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of phi­los­o­phy,” not least because “philoso­phers of the first rank did (and do) feel com­pelled to engage with his ideas.”

Of the many who engaged with Machi­avel­li, Isa­iah Berlin saw him as reclaim­ing ancient Greek val­ues of the state over the indi­vid­ual. But there’s more to the sto­ry, and it includes Machiavelli’s polit­i­cal biog­ra­phy as a defend­er of repub­li­can gov­ern­ment and a polit­i­cal pris­on­er of those who over­threw it. On one read­ing, The Prince becomes a “scathing descrip­tion” of how pow­er actu­al­ly oper­ates behind its var­i­ous masks; a guide not for princes but for ordi­nary cit­i­zens to grasp the ruler’s actions for what they are tru­ly designed to do: main­tain pow­er, pure­ly for its own sake, by any means nec­es­sary.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Salman Rushdie: Machiavelli’s Bad Rap

How Machi­avel­li Real­ly Thought We Should Use Pow­er: Two Ani­mat­ed Videos Pro­vide an Intro­duc­tion

What “Orwellian” Real­ly Means: An Ani­mat­ed Les­son About the Use & Abuse of the Term

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

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Behold the Sola-Busca Tarot Deck, the Earliest Complete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

in History | April 9th, 2019

What­ev­er you think of the pre­dic­tive pow­er of tarot cards, the sto­ry of how human­i­ty has pro­duced them and put them to use pro­vides a fas­ci­nat­ing cul­tur­al his­to­ry of the last 500 years or so. We’ve fea­tured a vari­ety of tarot decks here on Open Cul­ture, most­ly from the past cen­tu­ry: decks designed by Aleis­ter Crow­ley, Sal­vador Dalí, and H.R. Giger, as well as one fea­tur­ing the char­ac­ters from Twin Peaks. But today we give you the old­est extant exam­ple, and a high­ly dis­tinc­tive one for rea­sons not just his­tor­i­cal but aes­thet­ic: the Sola-Bus­ca tarot deck, dat­ing from the ear­ly 1490s, which L’I­ta­lo Amer­i­cano’s Francesca Bez­zone describes as “78, beau­ti­ful­ly illus­trat­ed cards, 22 major arcana and 56 minor arcana, engraved on card­board and hand paint­ed with tem­pera col­ors and gold.”

The Sola-Bus­ca tarot deck, whose name derives from those of its last two own­ers Mar­quise Bus­ca and Count Sola, set a struc­tur­al prece­dent for decks to come by being divid­ed into those sets of major arcana (or “major secrets”) and minor arcana (or “minor secrets”).

In the cards of the major arcana, which trace the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, “Clas­si­cal and Bib­li­cal fig­ures take the place of tra­di­tion­al tarot illus­tra­tions: for instance, the arcana of jus­tice is Nero and that of the world is Neb­uchad­nez­zar. Among oth­ers rep­re­sent­ed Gaius Mar­ius, uncle of Juluis Cae­sar, and Bac­chus,” as well as now more dif­fi­cult-to-iden­ti­fy per­son­ages from lat­er cen­turies. The minor arcana cards, writes Bez­zone, “are also dif­fer­ent from all oth­er decks’, because they are fine­ly and rich­ly illus­trat­ed with scenes of dai­ly life.”

But even the every­day images con­tain secrets: “This is par­tic­u­lar­ly evi­dent in the suit of coins, which appar­ent­ly illus­trates the process of coin mint­ing, but in real­i­ty alludes to the com­plex and secret prac­tices of the Opus Alchemicum, that is, the method used to cre­ate the lapis philosopho­rum, the philosopher’s stone, alchemic instru­ment of immor­tal­i­ty and per­fec­tion.” But “in spite of the refined and del­i­cate artistry behind their illus­tra­tions, the name of the man, or men, who cre­at­ed them remained shroud­ed in dark­ness for cen­turies,” though in 1938 art his­to­ri­an Arthur Mayger Hind deter­mined that, based on the ref­er­ences to the Repub­lic of Venice in the deck­’s art­work, its was like­ly made for a Venet­ian client, pos­si­bly by the engraver Mat­tia Ser­rati da Cosan­dola or, accord­ing to anoth­er the­o­ry, the painter Nico­la di Mae­stro Anto­nio and his­to­ri­an Marin Sanudo.

Il seg­re­to dei seg­reti, an exhi­bi­tion on the Sola-Bus­ca deck at Milan’s Pina­cote­ca di Brera gallery, brings anoth­er Renais­sance fig­ure into the mix: “While large­ly unknown today, the Human­ist and Her­meti­cist Ludovi­co Laz­zarel­li from San Sev­eri­no Marche played a sig­nif­i­cant role in Ital­ian court Human­ism,” and because of “his per­son­al­i­ty, role, and inter­est in Her­met­ic and alchem­i­cal themes” as well as his rela­tions with pow­er­ful courts of the day “is believed to have designed the com­plex icono­graph­i­cal pro­gram of the Sola-Bus­ca tarots.” The tenets of Renais­sance Her­meti­cism held that mankind could trans­form nature by appre­hend­ing it, mak­ing it in some sense a fore­run­ner to mod­ern sci­en­tif­ic think­ing. And while the notion that we can see our future in the turn of play­ing cards may not itself sound wild­ly sci­en­tif­ic, an arti­fact like the Sola-Bus­ca deck, all of whose 78 carts you can see here, still has more to teach us about our past. Decks can also be pur­chased online.

via L’I­ta­lo Amer­i­cano

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ale­jan­dro Jodor­owsky Explains How Tarot Cards Can Give You Cre­ative Inspi­ra­tion

Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Pro­vide Door­ways to the Uncon­scious, and Maybe a Way to Pre­dict the Future

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

The Tarot Card Deck Designed by Sal­vador Dalí

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley

Twin Peaks Tarot Cards Now Avail­able as 78-Card Deck

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Watch the Trailer for Echo in the Canyon, the New Documentary on the 1960s Laurel Canyon Music Scene

in Film, Music | April 8th, 2019

Next month will mark the release of Echo in the Canyon. Direct­ed by Andrew Slater, the new doc­u­men­tary revis­its the 60s music scene that emerged in L.A.‘s Lau­rel Canyon–a fer­tile peri­od when folk went bril­liant­ly elec­tric. Find the brand new trail­er above, and a short sum­ma­ry below:

Echo In The Canyon cel­e­brates the explo­sion of pop­u­lar music that came out of LA’s Lau­rel Canyon in the mid-60s as folk went elec­tric and The Byrds, The Beach Boys, Buf­fa­lo Spring­field and The Mamas and the Papas gave birth to the Cal­i­for­nia Sound. It was a moment (1965 to 1967) when bands came to LA to emu­late The Bea­t­les and Lau­rel Canyon emerged as a hotbed of cre­ativ­i­ty and col­lab­o­ra­tion for a new gen­er­a­tion of musi­cians who would soon put an indeli­ble stamp on the his­to­ry of Amer­i­can pop­u­lar music.

Fea­tur­ing Jakob Dylan, the film explores the begin­nings of the Lau­rel Canyon music scene. Dylan uncov­ers nev­er-before-heard per­son­al details behind the bands and their songs and how that music con­tin­ues to inspire today. Echo in the Canyon con­tains can­did con­ver­sa­tions and per­for­mances with Bri­an Wil­son, Ringo Starr, Michelle Phillips, Eric Clap­ton, Stephen Stills, David Cros­by, Gra­ham Nash, Roger McGuinn and Jack­son Browne as well as con­tem­po­rary musi­cians they influ­enced such as Tom Pet­ty (in his very last film inter­view), Beck, Fiona Apple, Cat Pow­er, Regi­na Spek­tor and Norah Jones.

The film will be released in LA on May 24th and in NYC on May 31st.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Neurons as Art: See Beautiful Anatomy Drawings by the Father of Neuroscience, Santiago Ramón y Cajal

in Art, Neuroscience, Science | April 8th, 2019

Art depends on pop­u­lar judg­ments about the uni­verse, and is nour­ished by the lim­it­ed expanse of sen­ti­ment. . . . In con­trast, sci­ence was bare­ly touched upon by the ancients, and is as free from the incon­sis­ten­cies of fash­ion as it is from the fick­le stan­dards of taste. . . . And let me stress that this con­quest of ideas is not sub­ject to fluc­tu­a­tions of opin­ion, to the silence of envy, or to the caprices of fash­ion that today repu­di­ate and detest what yes­ter­day was praised as sub­lime.

- San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal

The above draw­ing is the sort of sub­lime ren­der­ing that attracts throngs of vis­i­tors to the world’s great mod­ern art muse­ums, but that’s not the sort of renown the artist, Nobel Prize-win­ning father of mod­ern neu­ro­science San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal (1852 ‑1934), active­ly sought.

Or rather, he might have back before his father, a pro­fes­sor of anato­my, coerced his wild young son into trans­fer­ring from a provin­cial art acad­e­my to the med­ical school where he him­self was employed.

After a stint as an army med­ical offi­cer, the artist-turned-anatomist con­cen­trat­ed on inflam­ma­tion, cholera, and epithe­lial cells before zero­ing in on his true muse—the cen­tral ner­vous sys­tem.

At the time, retic­u­lar the­o­ry, which held that every­thing in the ner­vous sys­tem was part of a sin­gle con­tin­u­ous net­work, pre­vailed.

Ramón y Cajal was able to dis­prove this wide­ly held belief by using Gol­gi stains to sup­port the exis­tence of indi­vid­ual ner­vous cells—neurons—that, while not phys­i­cal­ly con­nect­ed, com­mu­ni­cat­ed with each oth­er through a sys­tem of axons, den­drites, and synaps­es.

He called upon both his artis­tic and med­ical train­ing in doc­u­ment­ing what he observed through his micro­scope. His metic­u­lous free­hand draw­ings are far more accu­rate than any­thing that could be pro­duced by the micro­scop­ic-image pho­to­graph­ic tools avail­able at the time.

His pre­ci­sion was such that his illus­tra­tions con­tin­ue to be pub­lished in med­ical text­books. Fur­ther research has con­firmed many of his sup­po­si­tions.

As art crit­ic Rober­ta Smith writes in The New York Times, the draw­ings are “fair­ly hard-nosed fact if you know your sci­ence”:

If you don’t, they are deep pools of sug­ges­tive motifs into which the imag­i­na­tion can dive. Their lines, forms and var­i­ous tex­tures of stip­pling, dash­es and faint pen­cil cir­cles would be the envy of any mod­ern artist. That they con­nect with Sur­re­al­ist draw­ing, bio­mor­phic abstrac­tion and exquis­ite doo­dling is only the half of it.

The draw­ings’ prag­mat­ic titles cer­tain­ly take on a poet­ic qual­i­ty when one con­sid­ers the con­text of their cre­ation:

Axon of Purk­in­je neu­rons in the cere­bel­lum of a drowned man

The hip­pocam­pus of a man three hours after death

Glial cells of the cere­bral cor­tex of a child

His spec­i­mens were not lim­it­ed to the human world:

Reti­na of lizard

The olfac­to­ry bulb of the dog

In his book Advice for a Young Inves­ti­gator, Ramón y Cajal took a holis­tic view of the rela­tion­ship between sci­ence and the arts:

The inves­ti­ga­tor ought to pos­sess an artis­tic tem­pera­ment that impels him to search for and admire the num­ber, beau­ty, and har­mo­ny of things; and—in the strug­gle for life that ideas cre­ate in our minds—a sound crit­i­cal judg­ment that is able to reject the rash impuls­es of day­dreams in favor of those thoughts most faith­ful­ly embrac­ing objec­tive real­i­ty.

Explore more of Ramón y Cajal’s cel­lu­lar draw­ings in Beau­ti­ful Brain: The Draw­ings of San­ti­a­go Ramón y Cajal, the com­pan­ion book to a recent trav­el­ing exhi­bi­tion of his work. Or immerse your­self at the neur­al lev­el by order­ing a repro­duc­tion on a beach tow­el, yoga mat, cell phone case, show­er cur­tain, or oth­er neces­si­ty on Sci­ence Source.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Leonar­do da Vinci’s Vision­ary Note­books Now Online: Browse 570 Dig­i­tized Pages

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in New York City April 15 for the next install­ment of her book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Cinema Lovers Rejoice, the New Criterion Channel Launches Today: Get a 14-Day Free Trial

in Film | April 8th, 2019

If you lament­ed the demise of Film­struck last year, you’ll sure­ly wel­come the rise of the new Cri­te­ri­on Channel. It launch­es today. Accord­ing to Cri­te­ri­on, the “new ser­vice will host the Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion and Janus Films’ ever-grow­ing library of more than 1,000 fea­ture films, 350 shorts, and 3,500 sup­ple­men­tary fea­tures, includ­ing trail­ers, intro­duc­tions, behind-the-scenes doc­u­men­taries, inter­views, video essays, com­men­tary tracks, and rare archival footage.” In addi­tion, you will get access to a “con­stant­ly refreshed selec­tions of Hol­ly­wood, inter­na­tion­al, art-house, and inde­pen­dent movies.”

The Cri­te­ri­on Chan­nel will launch in the U.S. and Cana­da. It can be accessed on desk­top browsers and also apps for Apple TV, Ama­zon Fire, Roku, iOS, and Android and Android TV devices. If you sign up now, you can get a 14 day free tri­al. Find more infor­ma­tion on the chan­nel here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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Deconstructing Steely Dan: The Band That Was More Than Just a Band

in Music | April 8th, 2019

How do you explain Steely Dan to some­one who’s nev­er heard of them? Two pre­ten­tious, per­fec­tion­is­tic, and very tal­ent­ed white guys who love Bebop and R&B meet in pass­ing at Bard Col­lege in 1967. They start a series of bands, one of them fea­tur­ing Chevy Chase on drums. They rub every­one the wrong way and write songs too com­pli­cat­ed for pop and TV but too good to go away, so they become a cel­e­brat­ed stu­dio unit, named after a fic­tion­al steam-pow­ered dil­do in a William S. Bur­roughs’ Naked Lunch.

They obsess over stu­dio pro­duc­tion, putting togeth­er a revolv­ing cast of high-end ses­sion musi­cians and push­ing them through take after take. They care­ful­ly edit songs togeth­er from hours and hours of tape. And some­how, they end up cre­at­ing some of the funki­est music of the 70s—the smoothest of smooth jazz, the yacht-iest of yacht rock… then, a gen­er­a­tion lat­er, they become per­haps the most sam­pled band of all time, their grooves a sine qua non of hip hop’s evo­lu­tion….

Hard­ly sounds plau­si­ble. But there it is: Don­ald Fagen and Wal­ter Becker—two super-fans of the gen­res they cre­ative­ly appropriated—made some incred­i­ble, snarling, cyn­i­cal, vicious­ly groovy easy lis­ten­ing music, and it has more than held up over the decades since they released their debut album Can’t Buy a Thrill in 1972. Despite decades of crit­i­cal praise and hit after hit, they also remain a pro­found­ly mis­un­der­stood band.

That is, if we can even call them a band. The Poly­phon­ic video above con­vinc­ing­ly argues oth­er­wise. Beck­er and Fagen main­tained total con­trol at all times over the project, and most­ly resist­ed tour­ing to focus on build­ing albums out of thou­sands of per­fect takes. They were curat­ing “an aes­thet­ic… one that relied on intense per­fec­tion­ism” and satir­i­cal, oblique lyri­cism. Some­thing of a con­cep­tu­al art project that nev­er once broke char­ac­ter.

The ele­ments were there from the beginning—in “Do it Again,” for exam­ple, from their first album—and they grew more sophis­ti­cat­ed and cal­cu­lat­ed through­out the decade. The band’s obses­sion with qual­i­ty cul­mi­nat­ed in their mas­ter­piece Aja and their swan song (before re-unit­ing 20 years lat­er), the slick and bit­ter Gau­cho. Their hyper-crit­i­cal detach­ment can be off-putting to peo­ple who pre­fer to see musi­cians tele­graph pas­sion­ate authen­tic­i­ty, but for Steely Dan fans, the aloof­ness is part of the appeal.

Major gui­tar-rock hit “Reel­in’ in the Years,” a song Fagen called “dumb, but effec­tive,” sat­i­rizes 60s nos­tal­gia long before that became a major cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non. The song mocks the very peo­ple who most respond to it, like Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” tips the sacred cows of many of its biggest fans. Even Steely Dan’s detrac­tors can’t help but admire their abil­i­ty to choose the per­fect play­ers for every song and to coax, or brow­beat, out of them the best pos­si­ble per­for­mances.

Their per­fec­tion­ism and stu­dio pol­ish, qual­i­ties you’ll learn much more about in the video, masked a dark, sub­ver­sive core. “For Fagen and Beck­er,” writes Chris Mor­ris at Vari­ety, “the beau­ti­ful­ly tooled music they made with their stu­dio cohorts served as the ulti­mate alien­ation effect. The true import of their work, which addressed for­bid­den impuls­es that moved to the edge of crime and fre­quent­ly beyond, was always garbed in satiny ele­gance; its sar­don­ic and hor­rif­ic essence was mar­ket­ed as the purest ear can­dy.”

Or, maybe, put dif­fer­ent­ly, if you get the dark humor of Patrick Bate­man earnest­ly extolling the virtues of Huey Lewis and the News, Whit­ney Hous­ton, and Phil Collins before a cap­tive audi­ence of his mur­der vic­tims in Mary Harron’s Amer­i­can Psy­cho, there’s a good chance you get Steely Dan. As Jay Black, lead singer of Jay and the Amer­i­cans, once said, Beck­er and Fagen were “the Man­son and Stark­weath­er of rock ‘n’ roll,” refer­ring, of course, to Charles Man­son and spree killer Charles Stark­weath­er. With that in mind, you might nev­er hear “Rik­ki Don’t Lose that Num­ber” the same way again.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How Steely Dan Went Through Sev­en Gui­tarists and Dozens of Hours of Tape to Get the Per­fect Gui­tar Solo on “Peg”

How Steely Dan Wrote “Dea­con Blues,” the Song Audio­philes Use to Test High-End Stere­os

Steely Dan Cre­ates the Deadhead/Danfan Con­ver­sion Chart: A Wit­ty Guide Explain­ing How You Can Go From Lov­ing the Dead to Idol­iz­ing Steely Dan

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

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Watch Great Directors, a Documentary That Explores the Minds of 10 Great Auteurs: David Lynch, Agnès Varda, Richard Linklater & More

in Film | April 8th, 2019

When we first start watch­ing movies, often we decide what to watch by set­tling on a favorite genre, divi­sions first solid­i­fied by video-store shelves: action, com­e­dy, dra­ma, sci­ence fic­tion, and so on. When we’ve watched more movies, many of us move on to fol­low­ing the work of a par­tic­u­lar actor, which takes us across not just gen­res but eras as well. And prac­ti­cal­ly all cinephiles will remem­ber when it dawned on us that no fig­ure could bet­ter guide our view­ing than the direc­tor — about the same time we usu­al­ly learn the term auteur, which iden­ti­fies cer­tain direc­tors as the pri­ma­ry “authors” of their films. From that point on, we had only to mas­ter the knowl­edge of as many direc­tors’ fil­mo­gra­phies as pos­si­ble, then deter­mine those too whom we would pledge our alle­giance — thus forg­ing bonds with (or draw­ing bat­tle lines against) all oth­er film fans.

If the best movies come pri­mar­i­ly from the minds of their direc­tors, then there must be a great deal else of inter­est in those direc­to­r­i­al minds. Or so implic­it­ly argues Angela Ismai­los’ 2010 doc­u­men­tary Great Direc­tors, which con­sists of inter­views with ten auteurs of the late 20th and ear­ly 21st cen­tu­ry whose work has not only drawn crit­i­cal acclaim but also pro­voked the full range of audi­ence opin­ion, even inspir­ing some view­ers to ded­i­cate them­selves to cin­e­ma.

“I want­ed to cov­er the French cin­e­ma and I love the con­tro­ver­sial cin­e­ma of Cather­ine Breil­li­at and how she por­trays the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal tra­vails of women in her cin­e­ma,” Ismai­los says of the pro­jec­t’s ori­gin in an inter­view with Film­mak­er mag­a­zine. Then came Agnès Var­da, and after her a line­up includ­ing Bernar­do Bertoluc­ci, Lil­iana Cavani, Todd Haynes, Richard Lin­klater, John Sayles, Ken Loach, and Stephen Frears. “The last direc­tor I added to the film was David Lynch. He was the most dif­fi­cult to get.”

Put togeth­er, these ten fil­mo­gra­phies — con­tain­ing pic­tures from Mate­wan to My Beau­ti­ful Laun­drette, The Last Emper­or to Vel­vet Gold­mine, Poor Cow to Eraser­head, Fat Girl to Slack­er — con­tain an impres­sive­ly wide range of cin­e­mat­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties. But what do the ten direc­tors, com­ing as they do from sev­er­al dif­fer­ent coun­tries and cul­tures, have in com­mon? “In their films they’re try­ing… to break moral stan­dards,” says Ismai­los. “They are not sur­ren­der­ing to pre­con­ceived notions of com­merce or audi­ence pop­u­lar­i­ty or pre­con­cep­tion of what cin­e­ma should be. I believe through the years they are con­stant­ly ask­ing their audi­ence to grow and face the uncer­tain­ties and unpre­dictabil­i­ty of adult life. This is the cin­e­ma I per­son­al­ly love.” She’s cer­tain­ly not the only one, and all the rest of us with an inter­est in films of that kind — and thus an inter­est in direc­tors of this kind — will cer­tain­ly be glad that she’s made Great Direc­tors free to view online.

Great Direc­tors will be added to our list of Free Doc­u­men­taries, a sub­set of our col­lec­tion, 4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

via Wel­come to Twin Peaks

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“The Direc­tors Series” Presents Free Immer­sive Stud­ies of Stan­ley Kubrick, the Coen Broth­ers, David Finch­er, Paul Thomas Ander­son & Christo­pher Nolan

Great Film­mak­ers Offer Advice to Young Direc­tors: Taran­ti­no, Her­zog, Cop­po­la, Scors­ese, Ander­son, Felli­ni & More

Stan­ley Kubrick’s Rare 1965 Inter­view with The New York­er

Lis­ten to Eight Inter­views of Orson Welles by Film­mak­er Peter Bog­danovich (1969–1972)

5 Hours of Free Alfred Hitch­cock Inter­views: Dis­cov­er His The­o­ries of Film Edit­ing, Cre­at­ing Sus­pense & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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