It was probably two years ago that I stumbled across Folkert Gorter. I found him because I liked the work that he did, but I bookmarked his site for another reason. One of the sites in his body of work was named SpaceCollective. I clicked on the link and found a glowing orb with the words “Coming Soon”. When I provoked the orb with my mouse it subtly changed to reveal a log in form. I thought that this was quite peculiar.
A band called Francis and the Lights has made a video for their song The Top. I really appreciate the simplicity of the video and so I thought I would share.
They are led by Francis Farewell Starlite. They have sold out the Mercury Lounge twice. Their short record A Modern Promise is now available at amodernpromise.com, where Francis performs his song The Top on 35mm film.Video After the jump.
A couple of months ago, Radiohead released the separated “stems” (vocals, guitar, bass, strings/FX and drums) of their single Nude, announcing a remix contest. It is a difficult song to remix at 6/8 timing and 63 bpm, and Tom Yorke + co. apparently had a blast making fun of all the generic 4/4 entries.
James Houston had a bit of a different idea of using the stems, which were available for $.99 each in the iTunes Store. He reconstructed the original song by forcing old printers and hardrives do acoustic tricks and play the stems as an orcestra. Fast forward the clip to about 1:15 for the tune (after the jump).
Read more…
Sometimes things are moving so fast that it is hard to keep up to all of the change. We are rapidly finding new ways to do things and not always considering the consequences. This animated short makes a great commentary on humans’ interaction with their environments and how they inflict change on the things around them. It was nominated for an academy award in 2003 and is a great 8 mins.
Check it out and let us know what you think.
[Video after the jump]
With this post, I send many apologies for the time between this and the last post. I hope you won’t hold a grudge. A great friend of mine sent me this video a couple of days ago thinking that it would be good for a discussion, and I agree. What I find most interesting about this concept is:
One of the biggest problems with intellectual thought is that it more often than not stays within intellectual circles. Alan Watts, has been attempting to change that by using the internet, producing podcasts, audio files, and videos. Yesterday, I came across a set of animations that were produced by Trey Parker and Matt Stone (the creators of South Park) that narrate Watts’ recordings. The video’s have a light a whimsical feel, and most certainly take the discussion out from the intellectual circles and into the hands of everyone else.
Video’s are after the jump.
As a science, creating robotics that are self aware is a field that is on the verge of creating artificial intelligence. Hod Lipson has a great TED talk in which he introduces two robotic experiments that touch on self awareness and evolution. One is a four legged machine that becomes self aware and teaches itself to walk. It is a fascinating and somewhat scary thought that we can create machines that have an understanding of a goal and not only have the means to reach the goal, but have the means to teach themselves to reach the goal.
![muto animation by blu [blublu.org]](http://intwo.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/muto-tape.jpg)
This animated short by street artist Blu, was drawn on public walls in Buenos Aires. Needless to say, this animation technique has a lot of constraints, and the result is organic and jawdropping. The theme reminds me of the fractal bubbling infinity of life. Go full-screen on this one, and turn on your sound.
Read more…
For many of us, in thoughts or dialogue about the state of the world and how it can be changed we reach a wall that is made up of a political system intertwined with corporate economics. You can try to climb the wall but it seems that the wall always manages to be bigger. You can try to break the wall, but people have spent their entire lives breaking the wall without making much change. Lawrence Lessig has been trying, again and again to fight with this massive obstacle but recently, he has decided to try a new technique. He is now attempting to change the wall. He will inject a virus of good into it with the goal of morphing it from a looming, impermeable form to a road with signs and maps.
Maybe a bit abstract. This might be better: Read more…
Feedr is a concept I am working on. The name is a play on “News Reader” – just like a reader makes your favorite blogs and online news available from within one interface, feedr allows you to search newly blogged-about videos. The idea is that you enter a search word/term, and the software searches blog posts tagged with those words that include videos. What you get in the feedr player is a continuous stream of videos. There are controls to pause, skip ahead and back, and there is a link to the original video.
I am posting this to get some feedback on the idea. I want to keep the interface extremely minimal – the inspiration is a TV, but instead of a predetermined set of channels, you ‘zap’ by entering search terms, and the channels are ever changing – reflecting the current online trends and discussions. As soon as I get a working prototype up and running, I will post a link here.