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Monday, January 10th, 2022
| Time | Event |
| 7:56a | Alberto Giacometti: A Documentary Look at the Life & Work of the Great Modernist Artist
Actor Stanley Tucci has had a longstanding interest in the great modernist artist Alberto Giacometti, so much so that he created a film about Giacometti called Final Project (2018). In this documentary, the Tucci “reveals why Giacometti was one of the most relentlessly honest and enquiring artistic minds to have ever lived – a man riven by doubt in his own abilities, yet compelled to keep producing sculptures and paintings that are now hailed as some of the greatest of the 20th century.” You can watch it above. You can also view 1,000+ works (sculptures, paintings, drawings and decorative art objects) by Giacometti in this online database. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please 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, Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto. Thanks! Related Content 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities. An Intimate Look at Alberto Giacometti in His Studio, Making His Iconic Sculptures (1965) Watch as Alberto Giacometti Paints and Pursues the Elusive “Apparition” (1965)
Alberto Giacometti: A Documentary Look at the Life & Work of the Great Modernist Artist is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 9:00a | Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism
The Matrix gave a generation or two reason to reconsider, or indeed first to consider, Plato’s allegory of the cave. That era-defining blockbuster’s cavalcade of slick visual effects came delivered atop a plot about humanity’s having been enslaved — plugged into a colossal machine, as I recall, like an array of living batteries — while convinced by a direct-to-brain simulation that it wasn’t. Here in real life, about two and a half millennia earlier, one of Plato’s dialogues had conjured up a not-dissimilar scenario. You can see it retold in the video above, a clip drawn from a form as representative of the early 21st century as The Matrix‘s was of the late 20th: Legion, a dramatic television series based on a comic book. “Imagine a cave, where those inside never see the outside world,” says narrator Jon Hamm (himself an icon of our Golden Age of Television, thanks to his lead performance in Mad Men). “Instead, they see shadows of that world projected on the cave wall. The world they see in the shadows is not the real world, but it’s real to them. If you were to show them the world as it actually is, they would reject it as incomprehensible.” Then, Hamm suggests transposing this relationship to reality into life as we know it — or rather, as we two-dimensionally perceive it on the screens of our phones. But “unlike the allegory of the cave, where the people are real and the shadows are false, here other people are the shadows.”  This propagates “the delusion of the narcissist, who believes that they alone are real. Their feelings are the only feelings that matter, because other people are just shadows, and shadows don’t feel.” And “if everyone lived in caves, then no one would be real. Not even you.” With the rise of digital communication in general and social media in particular, a great many of us have ensconced ourselves, by degrees and for the most part unconsciously, inside caves of our own. Over the past decade or so, increasingly sobering glimpses of the outside world have motivated some of us to seek diagnoses of our collective condition from thinkers of the past, such as social theorist Christopher Lasch. “The new narcissist is haunted not by guilt but by anxiety,” Lasch writes The Culture of Narcissism. “Liberated from the superstitions of the past, he doubts even the reality of his own existence” — wonders, in other words, whether he isn’t one of the shadows himself. Nevertheless, he remains “facile at managing the impressions he gives to others, ravenous for admiration but contemptuous of those he manipulates into providing it,” and dependent on “constant infusions of approval and admiration.” Social media has revealed traces of this personality, belonging to one who “sees the world as a mirror of himself and has no interest in external events except as they throw back a reflection of his own image,” in us all. It thus gives us pause to remember that Lasch was writing all this in the 1970s; but then, Plato was writing in the fifth century B.C. Related Content: Two Animations of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave: One Narrated by Orson Welles, Another Made with Clay Plato’s Cave Allegory Animated Monty Python-Style New Animation Explains Sherry Turkle’s Theories on Why Social Media Makes Us Lonely A 1947 French Film Accurately Predicted Our 21st-Century Addiction to Smartphones Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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. Jon Hamm Narrates a Modernized Version of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, Helping to Diagnose Our Social Media-Induced Narcissism is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 12:00p | Laurie Anderson Turns Zoom Into an Art Form: Watch Her Hypnotic Harvard Lecture Series on Poetry, Meditation, Death, New York & More
These days the term multimedia sounds thoroughly passé, like the apotheosis of the 1990s techno-cultural buzzword. But perhaps it also refers to a dimension of art first opened in that era, of a kind in which trend-chasers dabbled but whose potential they rarely bothered to properly explore. But having established herself as a formally and technologically daring artist long before the 1990s, Laurie Anderson was ideally placed to inhabit the multimedia era. In a way, she’s continued to inhabit it ever since, continually pressing new audiovisual platforms into the service of her signature qualities of expression: contemplative, articulate, highly digressive, and finally hypnotic.
Anderson’s commitment to this enterprise has brought her no few honors. Biographies often mention her time as NASA’s first (and, it seems, last) artist-in-residence; more recently, she was named Harvard University’s 2021 Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry. This position entails the delivery of the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture, a series meant to deal with poetry “in the broadest sense,” encompassing “all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.” Norton lecturers previously featured here on Open Culture include Leonard Bernstein, Herbie Hancock, and Jorge Luis Borges. “I am pretty sure that the Norton committee at Harvard made an enormous mistake when they asked me to do this lecture series,” Anderson told the Harvard Gazette, “and it was really my own sense of the absurd that made me want to say yes.”
Few could seriously have doubted Anderson’s ability to rise to the occasion. She did, however, face a unique challenge in the history of the Norton Lectures: delivering them on Zoom, that now-ubiquitous video-conferencing application of the COVID-19 era. Despite belonging to a generation not all of whose members demonstrate great proficiency with such technologies, Anderson herself appears to have taken to Zoom like the proverbial duck to water. Such, at least, is the impression given by “Spending the War Without You: Virtual Backgrounds,” her six-part Norton Lecture series now available to watch on Youtube. Its subtitle hints at one feature of Zoom of which she makes rich use — but hardly the only feature.
Throughout “Spending the War Without You,” Anderson also superimposes a variety of virtual faces over her own: Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Loni Anderson, and even her musical collaborator Brian Eno. This sort of thing wouldn’t have been possible even in the longtime fantasy she cites as an inspiration for these lectures: hosting a radio show at 4:00 a.m., “a time when reality and dreams just sort of merge and it’s hard to tell the difference between them.” That’s just the right headspace in which to listen to Anderson make her elegantly spaced-out way through such topics as her life in New York, tai chi and meditation, language as a virus, the death of John Lennon, the culture of the internet, Catherine the Great, the combination of sound and image, The Wind in the Willows, non-fungible tokens, and American cheese. Taking advantage of her digital medium, she also plays the violin, explores virtual realms, and dances alongside her younger self.
The collision of all these elements feels not unlike Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, Nam June Paik’s television broadcast of New Year’s Day 1984. Anderson also took part in that project, sharing with Paik an artistic willingness to embrace new media. “I’ve almost always been a wirehead,” she says in these lectures 38 years later. “But it’s become a nightmare in some ways, with people attached now to their devices, with a death grip on their phones. At the same time, it’s the same machine that created celebrity culture.” Looking back on a “humiliating” clip of herself and Peter Gabriel performing on Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, she recalls her state of mind during the commercial and technological onrush of the 1980s: “Everything was moving fast, and I just wasn’t thinking. That’s my excuse, anyway.” See the full lecture series here, or up top. The lectures will be added to our collection: 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.
Related Content: Hear Laurie Anderson Read from The Tibetan Book of the Dead on New Album Songs from the Bardo Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Three Rules for Living Well: A Short and Succinct Life Philosophy Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967-8 Norton Lectures On Poetry (And Everything Else Literary) Herbie Hancock Presents the Prestigious Norton Lectures at Harvard University: Watch Online Leonard Bernstein’s Masterful Lectures on Music (11+ Hours of Video Recorded at Harvard in 1973) Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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. Laurie Anderson Turns Zoom Into an Art Form: Watch Her Hypnotic Harvard Lecture Series on Poetry, Meditation, Death, New York & More is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 3:00p | Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten Updated to Reflect Our Modern Understanding of the Universe
We’ve experienced some mindblowing technological advances in the years following designers Charles and Ray Eames’ 1977 film Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero. And y’know, all sorts of innovative strides in the fields of medicine, communications, and environmental sustainability. In the above video for the BBC, particle physicist Brian Cox pays tribute to the Eames’ celebrated eight-and-a-half-minute documentary short, and uses the discoveries of the last four-and-a-half decades to kick the can a bit further down the road. The original film helped ordinary viewers get a handle on the universe’s outer edges by telescoping up and out from a one-meter view of a picnic blanket in a Chicago park at the rate of one power of ten every 10 seconds. Start with something everybody can understand, right?
At 100 (102) meters — slightly less than the total length of an American football field, the picnickers become part of the urban landscape, sharing their space with cars, boats at anchor in Lake Michigan, and a shocking dearth of fellow picnickers. One more power of 10 and the picknickers disappear from view, eclipsed by Soldier Field, the Shedd Aquarium, the Field Museum and other longstanding downtown Chicago institutions. At 1024 meters — 100 million light years away from the starting picnic blanket, the Eames butted up against the limits of the observable universe, at least as far as 1977 was concerned. They reversed direction, hurtling back down to earth by one power of ten every two seconds. Without pausing for so much as handful of fruit or a slice of pie, they dove beneath the skin of a dozing picnicker’s hand, continuing their journey on a cellular, then sub-atomic level, ending inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell. It still manages to put the mind in a whirl. Sit tight, though, because, as Professor Cox points out, “Over 40 years later, we can show a bit more.” 2021 relocates the picnic blanket to a picturesque beach in Sicily, and forgoes the trip inside the human body in favor of Deep Space, though the method of travel remains the same — exponential, by powers of ten. 1013 meters finds us heading into interstellar space, on the heels of Voyagers 1 and 2, the twin spacecrafts launched the same year as the Eames’ Powers of Ten — 1977. Having achieved their initial objective, the exploration of Jupiter and Saturn, these spacecrafts’ mission was expanded to Uranus, Neptune, and now, the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain. The data they, and other exploratory crafts, have sent back allow Cox and others in the scientific community to take us beyond the Eames’ outermost limits:
According to NASA, the Voyager crafts have sufficient power and fuel to keep their “current suite of science instruments on” for another four years, at least. By then, Voyager 1 will be about 13.8 billion miles, and Voyager 2 some 11.4 billion miles from the Sun:
If this dizzying information makes you yearn for 1987’s simple pleasures, this Wayback Machine link includes a fun interactive for the original Powers of Ten. Click the “show text” option on an exponential slider tool to consider the scale of each stop in historic and tangible context. Related Content: Carl Sagan’s “The Pale Blue Dot” Animated 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. Charles and Ray Eames’ Powers of Ten Updated to Reflect Our Modern Understanding of the Universe is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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