Watch Vintage Footage of Tokyo, Circa 1910, Get Brought to Life with Artificial Intelligence

in Film, History, Technology | July 6th, 2020

For more than 200 years, the rulers of Japan kept the country all but closed to the outside world. In 1854, the "Black Ships" of American commander Matthew Perry arrived to demand an end to Japanese isolation — and a commencement of Japanese world trade. Within decades, many fashion-forward Europeans and even Americans couldn't get enough things Japanese, especially the art, crafts, and clothing that exemplified kinds of beauty they'd never known before. (Vincent van Gogh was a particularly avid fan.) But if Japan changed the West, the West transformed Japan, a process fully in effect in the footage above, shot on the streets of Tokyo between 1913 and 1915.

These scenes may look familiar to dedicated Open Culture readers, and indeed, we previously featured another version of this film back in 2018. With its speed corrected to remove the herky-jerkiness common to old films and with background noise added, these glimpses of the men, women, and many children of the Japanese capital, all of them living between the inward-looking tradition of their country as it had been and the onrush of modernity from without, already felt realistic.




But now you may feel you've been personally transported to this culturally and economically heady time in the Land of the Rising Sun thanks to the work of Denis Shiryaev, a Youtuber who specializes in enlarging and restoring vintage film clips with artificial intelligence.

Shirayev is also responsible for the enhanced versions of scenes from Belle Époque Paris, czarist Moscow, Victorian England, New York City in 1911, and even the Lumière Brothers’ early motion picture The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station. At the beginning of this video he reveals the stages of the process that brought this century-old footage of Tokyo to greater vividness: de-noising and damage removal, colorization, facial restoration, and upscaling to 4K resolution at 60 frames per second — all assisted by neural networks that, "trained" on relevant visual materials new and old, crisp and weathered, to determine the best ways to make it all look more convincing. The results may make you wonder what else will soon be possible — surely not a feeling unknown to  these early 20th-century Tokyoites.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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16th Century Bookwheels, the E-Readers of the Renaissance, Get Brought to Life by 21st Century Designers

in Books, History, Technology | July 3rd, 2020

Most of us, through our computers or our even our phones, have access to more books than we could ever read in one lifetime. That certainly wouldn't have been the case in, say, the middle ages, when books — assuming you belonged to the elite who could read them in the first place — were rare and precious objects. Both books and literacy became more common during the Renaissance, though acquaintance with both could still be considered the sign of a potentially serious scholar. And for the most serious Renaissance scholars of all, Italian military engineer Agostino Ramelli designed the bookwheel, an elaborate mechanical device allowing the user to turn from one book to another in relatively quick succession.

First drawn by Ramelli in 1588 (and previously featured here on Open Culture in 2017) but never actually constructed by him, the bookwheel has attracted renewed attention in the 21st century. "In 2018, a group of undergraduate engineering students at the Rochester Institute of Technology set out to build two," writes Atlas Obscura's Claire Voon. "They began by diligently studying the Italian engineer’s illustration, then procured historically accurate materials, such as European beech and white oak.




With the help of modern power tools and processes, such as computer modeling and CNC routing, they brought it to life." You can see the RIT bookwheels under construction and in action in the video above. (Its schematics, near-impossibly complex by the standards of Ramelli's day, are also available at RIT's web site.)

Others have also brought Ramelli's design into reality. In the video just above, for example, we have writer Joshua Foer (previously featured here for his work on the science of memorization) taking his own reproduction for a spin. "It's a ferris wheel for books," Foer explains, "so that a scholar can have eight books in front of them, sort of like tabbed browsing before tabbed browsing." The device's cherry wood and laser-cut gears are certainly handsome, but what of its practicality? "I often read multiple books at one time, and this way I can have them all open in front of me." Most all of us start more books than we can finish, and as we attempt to read them all in parallel, occasionally one or two do get forgotten. Hence one advantage, even in our modern times, of Ramelli's book wheel: any book placed on it becomes as unignorable as the machine itself.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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The End of an Era: A Short Film About The Last Day of Hot Metal Typesetting at The New York Times (1978)

in History, Technology | June 25th, 2020

This is usually what happens when I write a piece for Open Culture: As I drink an overpriced coffee at my local coffee shop, I research a topic on the internet, write and edit an article on Microsoft Word and then copy and paste the whole thing into WordPress. My editor in Open Culture’s gleaming international headquarters up in San Francisco gives it a look-over and then, with the push of a button, publishes the article on the site.

It’s sobering to think what I casually do over the course of a morning would require the effort of dozens of people 40+ years ago.




Until the 1970s, with the rise in popularity of computer typesetting, newspapers were printed the same way for nearly a century. Linotype machines would cast one line at a time from molten lead. Though an improvement from handset type, where printers would assemble lines of type one character at a time, linotype still required numerous skilled printers to assemble each and every newspaper edition.

The New York Times transitioned from that venerated production method to computer typesetting on Sunday, July 2, 1978. David Loeb Weiss, a proofreader at the Times, documented this final day in the documentary Farewell - Etaoin Shrdlu.

The title of the movie, by the way, comes from the first two lines of a printer’s keyboard, which are arranged according to a letter’s frequency of use. When a printer typed "etaoin shrdlu," it meant that the line had a mistake in it and should be discarded.

Watching the movie, you get a sense of just how much work went into each page and how printers were skilled craftsmen. (You try spotting a typo on a page of upside down and backwards type.) The film also captures the furious energy and the cacophony of clinks and clanks of the composing room. You can see just how much physical work was involved. After all, each page was printed off of a 40-pound plate made of lead.

The tone of the movie is understandably melancholy. The workers are bidding farewell to a job that had existed for decades. “All the knowledge I’ve acquired over my 26 years is all locked up in a little box now called a computer,” notes one printer. “And I think most jobs are going to end up the same way.” Someone else wrote the following on the composing room’s chalkboard. “The end of an era. Good while it lasted. Crying won’t help.”

You can watch the full documentary above. It will also be added to our list of 200 Free Documentaries, a subset of our meta collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc..

Note: This post originally appeared on our site in August 2015.

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Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads.  The Veeptopus store is here.

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Artificial Intelligence Brings to Life Figures from 7 Famous Paintings: The Mona Lisa, Birth of Venus & More

in Art, Creativity, Software, Technology | June 17th, 2020

Denis Shiryaev is an AI wizard who has liberally applied his magic to old film—upscaling, colorizing, and otherwise modernizing scenes from Victorian England, late Tsarist Russia, and Belle Époque Paris. He trained machines to restore the earliest known motion picture, 1888’s Roundhay Garden Scene and one of the most mythologized works of early cinema, the Lumière Brothers 50-second Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station.

Shiryaev’s casual distribution of these efforts on YouTube can make us take for granted just how extraordinary they are. Such recreations would have been impossible just a decade or so ago. But we should not see these as historic restorations. The software Shiryaev uses fills in gaps between the frames, allowing him to upscale the frame rate and make more naturistic-looking images. This often comes at a cost. As Ted Mills wrote in an earlier Open Culture post on Shiryaev’s methods, “there are a lot of artifacts, squooshy, morphing moments where the neural network can’t figure things out.”




But it’s an evolving technology. Unlike wizards of old, Shiryaev happily reveals his trade secrets so enterprising coders can give it a try themselves, if they’ve got the budget. In his latest video, above, he plugs the NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000, a $4,000 graphics card (and does some griping about rights issues), before getting to the fun stuff. Rather than make old film look new, he’s “applied a bunch of different neural networks in an attempt to generate realistic faces of people from famous paintings.”

These are, Shiryaev emphasizes, “estimations,” not historical recreations of the faces behind Leonardo’s Mona Lisa and Lady with an Ermine, Botticelli’s model for The Birth of Venus, Vermeer’s for Girl with a Pearl Earring, or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. In the case of American Gothic, we have a photo of the model, artist Grant Wood’s sister, to compare to the AI’s version. Frida Kahlo's Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and Hummingbird gets the treatment. She left perhaps a few hundred photographs and some films that probably look more like her than the AI version.

The GIF-like “transformations,” as they might be called, may remind us of a less fun use of such technology: AI’s ability to create realistic faces of people who don’t exist for devious purposes and to make “deep fake” videos of those who do. But that needn’t take away from the fact that it’s pretty cool to see Botticelli’s Venus, or a simulation of her anyway, smile and blink at us from a distance of over 500 years.

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

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Watch a Mesmerizing Stream of Unwatched YouTube Videos: Astronaut.io Lets You Discover the Hidden Dimensions of the World’s Largest Video Platform

in Computer Science, Life, Technology, Travel, YouTube | June 8th, 2020

When times are hard, it often helps to zoom out for a moment—in search of a wider perspective, historical context, the forest full of trees…

Astronaut.io, an algorithmic YouTube-based project by Andrew Wong and James Thompson, offers a big picture that’s as restorative as it is odd:

Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see.

If the stars look very different today, it’s because they’re human, though not the kind who are prone to attracting the paparazzi. Rather, Astronaut is populated by ordinary citizens, with occasional appearances by pets, wildlife, video game characters, and houses, both interior and exterior.

Launch Astronaut, and you will be bearing passive witness to a parade of uneventful, untitled home video excerpts.

The experience is the opposite of earthshaking.

And that is by design.

As Wong told Wired’s Liz Stinson:

There’s this metaphor of being on a train …you see things out the window and think, 'Oh what is that?' but it’s too late, it’s already gone by. Not letting someone go too deep is pretty important.

After some trial and error on Twitter, where video content rarely favors the restful, Wong and Thompson realized that the sort of material they sought resided on YouTube. Perhaps it’s been reflexively dumped by users with no particular passion for what they’ve recorded. Or the account is a new one, its owner just beginning to figure out how to post content.

The videos on any given Astronaut journey earn their place by virtue of generic, camera-assigned file names (IMG 0034, MOV 0005, DSC 0165…), zero views, and an upload within the last week.

The overall effect is one of mesmerizing, unremarkable life going on whether it’s observed or not.

Children perform in their living room

A woman assembles a bride’s bouquet

A kitten bats a toy

A pre-fab home is moved into place

The vision is heartwarmingly global.

Astronaut is anti-star, but there are some frequent sightings, owing to the number of nameless inconsequential videos any one user uploads.

This week a Vietnamese fashionista, a karaoke space in Argentina, and a boxing ring in Montreal make multiple appearances, as do some very tired looking teachers.

The effect is most soothing when you allow it to wash over you unimpeded, but there is a red button below the frame, if you feel compelled to linger within a certain scene.

(You can also click on whatever passes for the video’s title in the upper left corner to open it on YouTube, from whence you might be able to suss out a bit more information.)

A very young Super Mario fan has apparently colonized a parent’s account for his narrated gaming videos.

Halfway around the world, a formally dressed man sits behind a desk prior to his first-ever upload.

Some gifted dancers fail to rotate prior to uploading.

A recently acquired night vision wildlife cam has already captured a number of coyotes.

And everyone who comes through the door of a Chinese household adores the happy baby within.

It’s unclear if the algorithm will alight on any cell phone footage documenting the shocking scenes at recent protests sparked by the death of George Floyd. Perhaps not, given the urgency to share such videos, titling them to clue viewers in to the what, who, where, when, and why.

For now Astronaut appears to be the same floaty trip Jake Swearingen described in a 2017 article for New York Magazine:

The internet is a place that often rewards the shocking, the sad, the rage-inducing — or the nakedly ambitious and attention-seeking. A morning of watching Astronaut.io is an antidote to all that.

Begin your explorations with Astronaut here.

h/t to reader Tom Hedrick

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Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine.  Every day since March 15, she has uploaded a set of 10 micrhvisions of socially distanced New York City. Follow her @AyunHalliday.

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This Is What The Matrix Looks Like Without CGI: A Special Effects Breakdown

in Film, Sci Fi, Technology | May 29th, 2020

Those of us who saw the The Matrix in the theater felt we were witness to the beginning of a new era of cinematically and philosophically ambitious action movies. Whether that era delivered on its promise — and indeed, whether The Matrix's own sequels delivered on the franchise's promise — remains a matter of debate. More than twenty years later, the film's black-leather-and-sunglasses aesthetic may date it, but its visual effects somehow don't. The Fame Focus video above takes a close look at two examples of how the creators of The Matrix combined traditional, "practical" techniques with then-state-of-the-art digital technology in a way that kept the result from going as stale as, in the movies, "state-of-the-art digital technology" usually has a way of guaranteeing.

By now we've all seen revealed the mechanics of "bullet time," an effect that astonished The Matrix's early audiences by seeming nearly to freeze time for dramatic camera movements (and to make visible the eponymous projectiles, of which the film included a great many). They lined up a bunch of still cameras along a predetermined path, then had each of the cameras take a shot, one-by-one, in the span of a split second.




But as we see in the video, getting convincing results out of such a groundbreaking process — which required smoothing out the unsteady "footage" captured by the individual cameras and perfectly aligning it with a computer-generated background modeled on a real-life setting, among other tasks — must have been even more difficult than inventing the process itself. The manual labor that went into The Matrix series' high-tech veneer comes across even more in the behind-the-scenes video below:

In the third installment, 2003's The Matrix Revolutions, Keanu Reeves' Neo and Hugo Weaving's Agent Smith duke it out in the pouring rain as what seem like hundreds of clones of Smith look on. Viewers today may assume Weaving was filmed and then copy-pasted over and over again, but in fact these shots involve no digital effects to speak of. The team actually built 150 realistic dummies of Weaving as Smith, all operated by 80 human extras themselves wearing intricately detailed silicon-rubber Smith masks. The logistics of such a one-off endeavor sound painfully complex, but the physicality of the sequence speaks for itself. With the next Matrix film, the first since Revolutions, due out next year, fans must be hoping the ideas of the Platonically techno-dystopian story the Wachowskis started telling in 1999 will be properly continued, and in a way that makes full use of recent advances in digital effects. But those of us who appreciate the enduring power of traditional effects should hope the film's makers are also getting their hands dirty.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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This Huge Crashing Wave in a Seoul Aquarium Is Actually a Gigantic Optical Illusion

in Art, Technology | May 25th, 2020

I live in Seoul, and whenever I'm back in the West, I hear the same question over and over: what's Gangnam like? Presumably Westerners wouldn't have had anything to ask me before the virality of "Gangnam Style," and specifically of the music video satirizing the image of that part of the Korean capital. In Korean, "Gangnam" literally means "south of the river," the waterway in question being the Han River, which runs through modern Seoul much as the Thames and the Seine run through London and Paris. Developed in the main only since the 1970s, after Korea's unprecedentedly rapid industrialization had begun, Gangnam looks and feels quite different from the old city north of the Han. In the financial center of Gangnam, everything's bigger, taller, and more expensive — all of it meant to impress.

With Psy's novelty song a thing of the distant past — in internet years, at least — the world now thrills again to another glimpse of Gangnam style: a digital screen that looks like a giant water tank, full of waves perpetually crashing against its walls. When video of this high-tech optical illusion went viral, it looked even more uncanny to me than it did to most viewers, since I recognized it from real life.




Though I happen to live in Gangbuk ("north of the river"), whenever I go to Gangnam, I usually come out of the Samsung subway station, right across the street from COEX. A convention-center complex embedded in a set of difficult-to-navigate malls, COEX also includes SM Town COEX Artium, a flashy temple of K-pop run by music company SM Entertainment. Announcing SM Town's presence, this colossal wraparound display, the largest of its kind in the country, usually offers up either fresh-faced pop stars or ads for Korean-made cars.

Occasionally the SM Town screen's programming gets more creative, and "#1_WAVE with Anamorphic illusion" has made the most striking use of its shape and dimensions yet. Designed by Gangnam's own d'strict, this piece of public video art "serves as a sweet escape and brings comfort and relaxation to people" — or so says d'strict's Sean Lee in an interview with Bored Panda's Robertas Lisickis. It's even impressed Seoulites, accustomed though they've grown to large-scale video screens clamoring for their attention. Even up in Gangbuk, the LED-covered facade of the building right across from Seoul Station has turned into a "Digital Canvas" every night for nearly a decade. Though that artistic installation never displays advertising, most of the increasingly large screens of Seoul are used for more overtly commercial purposes. There may be something dystopian about this scale of digital advertisement technology in public space — but as every Blade Runner fan knows, there's something sublime about it as well.

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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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.

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