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We admire Johannes Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring for many reasons, not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he […] A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece...

You can go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today, and in real life at that. This isn’t true of all the world’s great art institutions, still shut down as many are by measures in response to the past year’s coronavirus pandemic. But then, none of them have offered a digital visiting experience quite like […] Take a New Virtual Reality Tour of the...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1cUUfMeOijg Try not to think too hard about the concept of randomness — and especially about the question of how, exactly, one generates a random number. Most of us, of course, simply ask a computer to do it. But how can a computer, which by its very nature follows unambiguous directions in a predictable manner, come up […] How Lava Lamps Help Secure the Internet is...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nuzYpuPQCI Thanks for allowing me to be a poet. A noble effort, doomed, but the only choice. —John Giorno, Thanx for Nothing Dialing a poem today, I’m connected to Joe Brainard, who died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1994, reading an excerpt of “I Remember.” He stumbles over some words. It’s exciting. There’s a feeling of immediacy. When the […] Dial-a-Poem: The Groundbreaking Phone Service That Let People...

Psst. Amazon currently has AirPods Pro headphones for $199, while Apple has them listed for $249. It’s the deal of the day for anyone looking for wireless Bluetooth earbuds, with noise-cancelling, immersive sound. H/T Rolling Stone Technology Arbitrage: Amazon is Selling Airpods Pro Headphones for $50 Less Than Apple is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or...

Imagine that, this time last year, you’d heard that your family’s holiday gatherings in 2020 would happen on the internet. Even if you believed such a future would one day come, would you have credited for a moment that kind of imminence? Yet our videoconference toasts this season were predicted — even rendered in clear […] In 1896, a French Cartoonist Predicted Our Socially-Distanced...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nAgdT-YO_nc Tis the season when we’re never more than one singalong Messiah away from wishing we had a better voice. David Li’s interactive Blob Opera allows us to pretend. The machine learning experiment takes its cues from four opera singers—soprano Olivia Doutney, mezzo-soprano Joanna Gamble, tenor Christian Joel, and bass Freddie Tong—who provided it with 16 hours of recorded material. The result is truly […] The Blob Opera Lets You Create Festive Music...

Current auto-industry wisdom holds that no car without cup holders will sell in America. Though this also seems to have become increasingly true across the rest of the world, I like to imagine there still exists a country or two whose driving public holds fast against that particular design vulgarism. Such places would, of course, […] The Hertella Coffee Machine Mounted on a Volkswagen...

Flash is finally dead, and the world… does not mourn. Because the announcement of its end actually came three years ago, “like a guillotine in a crowded town square,” writes Rhett Jones at Gizmodo. It was a slow execution, but it was just. So useful in Web 1.0 days for making animations, games, and serious […] The Internet Archive is Saving Classic Flash Animations...

Are you open to the idea of otherworldly beings moving amongst us, benign but unseen? Director Gökalp Gönen seems to be in the above video for jazz innovator Ilhan Ersahin’s “Hurri-Mitanni” (Good News). Things kick off in a decidedly low key manner—a young woman sets off for a nighttime stroll through the streets of Istanbul, her face deliberately […] Watch Digital Dancers Electrify the Streets of Istanbul...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Erj_mz30SDI “A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like,” the late anthropologist David Graeber once wrote in the Baffler. This refers to “a particular generational promise — given to those who were children in the fifties, […] A Flying Car Took to the Skies in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1JAZV5KNsc Today we associate the word polygraph mainly with the devices we call “lie detectors.” The unhidden Greek terms from which it originates simply mean “multiple writing,” which seems apt enough in light of all those movie interrogation scenes with their juddering parallel needles. But the first “polygraph machine” meriting the name long predates such cinematic […] The Polygraph: The Proto-Photocopy Machine Machine Invented in...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWr67v620kY Buckminster Fuller had a difficult time as an inventor in his early years. “Having been expelled from Harvard for irresponsible conduct,” notes The Guardian, “he struggled to find a job and provide a living for his young family in his early 30s.” Despite later successes, and a later reputation as legendary as Nikola Tesla’s, he […] The Eden Project Built a Rainforest Ecosystem Inside...

Peter Paul Rubens’ zaftig beauties and plump little angels burst with health. His “powerful and exuberant style,” notes one analysis of his technique, “came to characterize the Baroque art of northern Europe.” Rubens’ name became synonymous with figures who were “realistic, fleshy and indeed corpulent… set in dynamic compositions that echo the grand organizations of […] Rubens’ Cupid Escapes His Painting & Flies Around...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM If any cultural, political, or technological phenomenon of the past couple of decades hasn’t been lampooned by South Park, it probably didn’t happen. But the 21st century has brought forth so much nonsense that even Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of that at once crude and multidimensionally satirical cartoon show, have had to […] Watch Sassy Justice, the New Deepfake Satire Show...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gzBhTL4oAs Just shy of 120 years ago, “the wisest and most careful men in our greatest institutions of science and learning” told America what would change by the far-flung dawn of 2001. C, X and Q gone from the alphabet; “Air-Ships” in the skies, strictly for military purposes (passenger traffic being handled by “fast electric […] Futurist from 1901 Describes the World of 2001:...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fu40YANO1M Billy Idol has long evaded straightforward musical classification, being a full-on star but one fully belonging to neither rock nor pop. He may have come up in the 1970s as the frontman of Generation X, the first punk band to play Top of the Pops, but the hits he went on to make as […] When Billy Idol Went Cyberpunk: See His Tribute...

We have featured some great acts of imagination when it comes to telephone technology–from the worlds’ first mobile phone shown in this 1922 British Pathé newsreel, to when Fritz Lang “invented” the video phone in Metropolis in 1927. “Phone Relief,” the ultimate hands-free headset marketed in 1993, will never qualify as a great act of […] Phone Relief: The Ultimate Hands-Free Headset (1993) is...