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The Walkman’s Invention 40 Years Ago Launched a Cultural Revolution

In 1979, when Sony introduced the Walkman—a 14-ounce cassette player, blue and silver with buttons that made a satisfying chunk when pushed—even the engineers inside Sony weren’t impressed. It wasn’t particularly innovative; cassette players already existed, and so did headphones. Plus, the Walkman could only play back—it couldn’t record. Who was going to want a device like that?

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Digital Nihilism on Tap: Download Nietzsche’s Major Works as Free eBooks

In times of deep distress I’ve often found the brutal, unsparing candor of Friedrich Nietzsche a strange comfort. While wholly enamored of the aristocratic, Hellenistic past of literary invention, the often bilious German philosopher nonetheless had no illusions about the nature of power, which does as it will and is not held in check by what we take for common values.

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Messaging App Telegram Moves to Protect Identity of Hong Kong Protesters

WASHINGTON—Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging app, will allow users to cloak their telephone numbers to safeguard Hong Kong protesters against monitoring by authorities, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort.

The update to Telegram, planned for release over the next few days, will allow protesters to prevent mainland Chinese and Hong Kong authorities from discovering their identities in the app’s large group chats.

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Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirrored Room’ to Go on View Permanently at Crystal Bridges Museum in Arkansas

Most times, when Yayoi Kusama’s “Infinity Mirrored Rooms” get shown at museums, they stay on view for several months at a time, and during their run, they get stormed with visitors. But one U.S. museum has plans to keep a Kusama installation for much longer than usual.

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Instantly add colour to black and white photos with this free and easy website

 

Recent World War One doc They Shall Not Grow Old mesmerised many over Christmas with its hours of colourised war footage, but the ability to add colour to black and white imagery is no longer in the domain of top-end production studios.

Created by GovTech Singapore, the website Colourise SG allows anyone to upload any black and white photo for a simple and almost instantaneous colourisation.

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Dreamlike indie game Etherborn draws inspiration from Monument Valley – and classic artists of the past

Classic 20th century artists such as  Escher, Mondrian and de Chirico have influenced a surreal new platformer from studio Altered Matter.

Indie games have been becoming more dream-like these past few years, ranging from the ethereal classics of Monument Valley and Gris to the Twin Peaks bad-trip of Petscop.

A new name to add to 2019’s roster of anticipated games is Etherborn, as created by Barcelona’s Altered Matter studio and distributed by 20th Century Fox games label FoxNext this spring.

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Inside the visual aesthetic of Kubrick’s films

A new exhibition highlights the auteur’s keen eye for design and the work of collaborators like Saul Bass and Milena Canonero.

20 years after his death, the vision of auteur Stanley Kubrick continues to resonate, whether in homages found in films like Ready Player One, the style of Christopher Nolan or album covers by the Arctic Monkeys.

The influence of his visual aesthetics came in part from Kubrick’s background as a photographer, and his collaborations with designers like Milena Canonero and Eliot Noyes to create the look of cinema classics like A Clockwork Orange and 2001: A Space Odyssey.

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Play Chess with Marcel Duchamp: A Virtual Online Chess Game

A new software program makes it possible to play chess with a virtual Marcel Duchamp. It is basically a chess program with one intriguing feature: the game features an opponent based on Duchamp’s recorded chess matches.

marcel-duchamp-chess

“I’ve come to the personal conclusion that while not all artists are chess players,
all chess players are artists.” Marcel Duchamp

Earlier this year, Colin Marshall told you how “Chess has obsessed many of humanity’s finest minds over centuries and centuries and Marcel Duchamp seems to have shown little resistance to its intellectual and aesthetic pull.”

His passion for the game led Duchamp to design a now iconic Art Deco chess set, to print an array of chess tournament posters, and to become an adept chess player himself, eventually earning the title of “grand master” as a result.

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What Are Literature, Philosophy & History For? Alain de Botton

Once upon a time, questions about the use-value of art were the height of philistinism. “All art is quite useless,” wrote the aesthete Oscar Wilde, presaging the attitudes of modernists to come. Explaining this statement in a letter to a perplexed fan, Wilde opined that art “is not meant to instruct, or to influence action in any way.” But if you ask Alain de Botton, founder of “cultural enterprise,” The School of Life, art—or literature specifically—does indeed have a practical purpose. Four to be precise.

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The First Photograph of a Human Being

Human01D“I have seized the light. I have arrested its flight.”
LOUIS DAGUERRE, 1839

This picture, the earliest known photograph to include a recognizable human form, was taken in Paris, France, in 1838 by Louis Daguerre. The human in question is standing in the bottom-left of the photograph, on the pavement by the curve in the road. He is having his boots shined.

The exposure time for the image was around seven minutes, and although the street would have been busy with traffic and pedestrians, it appears deserted. Everything moving was too fast to register on the plate.

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