CULTURE

Image by Jernej Fur­man, via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons It would be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine the last cou­ple of years with­out arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, even if you don’t use it. Can you recall the last day with­out some AI-relat­ed news item or social-media...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNbvSWjz4Sc To help cel­e­brate SNL’s 50th anniver­sary, Archi­tec­tur­al Digest has released a new video fea­tur­ing Hei­di Gard­ner, Chloe Fine­man, and Ego Nwodim giv­ing a tour of the Sat­ur­day Night Live set. The show has been broad­cast­ing live from Stu­dio 8H,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkPcA8dngB4 Set­ting aside just one day for the Lou­vre is a clas­sic first-time Paris vis­i­tor’s mis­take. The place is sim­ply too big to com­pre­hend on one vis­it, or indeed on ten vis­its. To grow so vast has tak­en eight cen­turies,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7HJZPlJn_U Through­out the years, we’ve fea­tured per­for­mances of Choir!Choir!Choir!–a large ama­teur choir from Toron­to that meets week­ly and sings their hearts out. You’ve seen them sing Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Soundgar­den’s “Black Hole Sun” (to hon­or Chris Cor­nell) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hal­lelu­jah.”...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xc4g00FFLk At a time when much of ani­ma­tion was con­sumed with lit­tle anthro­po­mor­phized ani­mals sport­ing white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent direc­tion. His work is all about danc­ing geo­met­ric shapes and abstract forms spin­ning around a flat...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDtncFNhZRE Even if you’ve nev­er read Frank Her­bert’s Dune, you may well have encoun­tered its adap­ta­tions to a vari­ety of oth­er media: com­ic books, video games, board games, tele­vi­sion series, and of course films, David Lynch’s 1984 ver­sion and Denis...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYNzqgU7na4 When they make their first transocean­ic voy­age, more than a few Amer­i­cans choose to go to Eng­land, on the assump­tion that, what­ev­er cul­ture shock they might expe­ri­ence, at least none of the dif­fi­cul­ties will be lin­guis­tic. Only when it’s...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTl6xVMbJ6Y Though he nev­er said so direct­ly, we might expect that Sit­u­a­tion­ist Guy Debord would have includ­ed Sat­ur­day Night Live in what he called the “Spec­ta­cle”—the mass media pre­sen­ta­tion of a total­iz­ing real­i­ty, “the rul­ing order’s non­stop dis­course about itself,...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7mO3ilVHa8 Bri­an Eno was think­ing about the pur­pose of art a decade ago, as evi­denced by his 2015 John Peel Lec­ture (pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture). But he was also think­ing about it three decades ago, as evi­denced by...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRPey4Hy_ZM 50 years of Sat­ur­day Night Live. It all start­ed here with this first episode, aired on Octo­ber 11, 1975. George Car­lin host­ed the show. Bil­ly Pre­ston and Janis Ian served up the music. Jim Hen­son staged an elab­o­rate pup­pet...