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a music video titled “The Child” created by Antoine Bardou-Jacquet for the french DJ Alex Gopher. it shows a virtual world created only with animated typographics.

a simple story set in New York in which a young couple rush across town to the Central Hospital in order to deliver their baby is made into an exciting race. they travel through an alphabetical jungle where buildings, bridges & roads are made up entirely of words.

very beautiful!

many more infographic movies here.

[link: partizanlab.com & amazon.com|thnkx Matthew]

Originally from information aesthetics on November 14, 2007, 12:52am

[display_podcast]
Hand inked 8mm film projected onto a few objects which were then acquired with a Nikon D50 and recompiled into video.

»Screen Burn (please wait)«, 2005. Steven Read wrote a software program in Apple II Integer Basic that displays an image on the monitor’s screen. Then he ran the program continuously for about 6 months. The software image was eventually burned into the screen because the internal phosphor compounds which emit light lost their luminosity and left behind a ghostly trace. The ‘please wait’ text is actually an image which took over 1000 lines of software code to create. The old Apple II operating systems (DOS 3.x, ProDOS, etc.) did not come with any font facilities, if you wanted a font you had to code it from scratch.

Originally by mail from VVORK at March 28, 2007, 04:53, published by Luis Silva

Originally from Rhizome.org on March 28, 2007, 3:47am

The Daily Show on cloned meat:

Originally from Gristmill on March 29, 2007, 4:26pm

Amerikuh (2006, 6.88MB, 1:32 min)

Neat satirical mash-up by Brian Liloia,
made for ( &, I gather, a semi-finalist at) the
stockstock film festival, so doubly impressive
when you consider he was allocated
the footage.
Nice work - hats off!

Originally from DVblog on March 21, 2007, 3:00am

Mark Frauenfelder:

Here’s a link to the free documentaries on Google Video — all 3,713 of them, including a 1978 BBC documentary of a road trip with Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman called Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision and a 40-minute documentary about Richard Feynman called The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.

These days, there are fewer reasons than ever to turn on the television.

Link | RSS feed

Originally by Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing on February 28, 2007, 8:14pm

Filed under: Robots

We’re still chuckling about Asimo’s sad little tumble last year, but Anybots’ breakthrough dynamically balancing biped robot, Dexter, is no laughing matter. While he’s sans arms for now, the 135-pound, 5′10″ robot is being celebrated for the sole fact that he isn’t pre-programmed and can support his own strut — and supposedly, he’ll soon be able to run. Dexter’s partner in crime is Monty, a two-wheeled, two-armed bot with one fully articulated, 18-motor gripper hand. Driven by compressed air and controlled remotely by a human operator, both of these humanoid robots were developed with the intent to be of assistance in various household and industrial tasks.

[Via Slashdot]

Read - Anybots’ Dexter and Monty humanoid robots
Read - Video of Dexter taking shoves from Monty

 

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BOLD MOVES: THE FUTURE OF FORD A new documentary series. Be part of the transformation as it happens in real-time

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!

Robots will extend the life of the human being. Once we make this Earth unhospitable for us as we are, we will see a human-machine merger, and those without technology will die out while the fittest will survive. LR IV

Originally posted by Jeannie Choe from Engadget, ReBlogged by Leon Reid on Feb 28, 2007 at 07:49 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on February 28, 2007, 6:49pm

Cory Doctorow:

NORML has announced the winners of its “Ron Mann’s Cannabis Clip” video contest. There’re some damned funny pot videos here.

Link

(Thanks, Ron!)

See also Make a pro-dope short, win $1k

Originally by Cory Doctorow from Boing Boing on February 27, 2007, 11:59pm

Originally from Split Screen on February 20, 2007, 5:30pm

Originally from Split Screen on February 21, 2007, 11:46pm

Originally from Split Screen on February 22, 2007, 11:59pm

Xeni Jardin:

Following up on yesterday’s BB post about a new youtube soundtrack for the 1902 silent film Voyage Dans La Lune, John Brownlee of the Wired blog Table of Malcontents points us to a recent Wired.com piece he did on silent film revivalism online. He explains:

The piece explores modern scoring of silent films and the future of silent films on the ubiquitous video displays of major cities (as well as all silent, black and white plays based on Louise Brooks films… oh, and Cthulhu): Link.

It hadn’t even occurred to me to talk to some of the people rescoring films on the Internet for the piece, and now the heel of my palm is shuddering against my forehead for missing that angle, because it’s one of the cooler aspects of silent film revivalism. It doesn’t even stop at silent film: for example, there’s this experimental rescoring to the trippy French animated classic Fantastic Planet.

I’m actually posting up an interview over the next couple days with the girl who did an all silent, black and white play (part one: Link) and I’ll be following up over the next week or two with a bunch of other interviews with
artists involved with silent film revivalism.

Image: a still from the contemporary silent film by Paolo Cherchi Usai, which is mentioned in Brownlee’s Wired story.

Previously on BoingBoing:

Voyage dans la Lune with electronica soundtrack

Video: Fantastic Planet with electronica soundtrack

Originally by Xeni Jardin from Boing Boing on February 27, 2007, 1:08pm

For years, WK Interact’s massive and strikingly beautiful black and white murals on an abandoned gas station on Lafayette street were a fixture of lower Manhattan. Not just for people who were following the street art scene, but to everyone who saw them. In many ways WK’s work on Lafayette Street defined the neighborhood. But then, about 18 months ago, all of the work was destroyed when bulldozers took down the gas station to make way for a hamburger joint.

But this week, we’re able to return to Lafayette Street as WK discovered that one of the people filming him that morning has posted some of the footage on Youtube. You can watch it below…

Originally from Wooster Collective, ReBlogged by Rosanna Flouty on Feb 26, 2007 at 10:00 PM

Originally from Eyebeam reBlog on February 26, 2007, 9:00pm

a novel data visualization system that allows users to interactively explore complex flow scenarios represented as Sankey diagrams. the system provides an overview of the flow graph & allows users to zoom in & explore details on demand. the system is applied to the energy flow in a city. different forms of energy are distributed within the city & they are transformed into heat, electricity, or other forms of energy. these processes are visualized & can be interactively explored.

an interesting energy Sankey flow diagram was published in the February issue of Science Magazine (via scienceblogs.com), that demonstrates how “… more than half of the energy produced (in the US) is wasted”.

see also situational awareness map & flow maps & pivotgraph & .

[link: uni-weimar.de & uni-weimar.de (mov)]

Originally from information aesthetics on February 27, 2007, 11:15pm

by Adam Pash

If you use iTunes on the Mac, you should know about Doug’s AppleScripts for iTunes, a repository of scripts that add tons of useful functionality to Apple’s music player.

Doug’s AppleScripts not only plug obvious holes in iTunes’ feature set; they also add functionality to iTunes you never knew you wanted. Today I’m rounding up my 13 favorite iTunes AppleScripts, from simple “why isn’t this already in iTunes” add-ons like automatically removing dead tracks to more interesting scripts that build playlists and search for your music in Wikipedia.

NOTE: Doug Adams’ collection of iTunes scripts has been around in one form or another since before iTunes was even iTunes (the original scripts were SoundJam AppleScripts). Unfortunately, AppleScript is a Mac-only thing. Sorry Windows users, this is one of those times there isn’t really much of a Windows counterpart.

The following scripts need to be installed to ~/Library/iTunes/Scripts (if this directory doesn’t exist, you may need to create it). Some of the scripts make it drag-and-drop easy, others require you to manually copy the file. Just be sure to check each script’s Readme to ensure proper installation and use.

Maintenance:

1. Super Remove Dead Tracks: Like the name implies, this script scans your music library for all of your missing tracks (indicated by the little exclamation mark) and removes them. Simple, quick, and handy if you ever move some files around and end up with a bunch of scattered dead tracks.

Playlisting:

2. Block Party!: Over President’s Day weekend, I enjoyed a “three-for-all” weekend at one of the San Francisco radio stations, in which the station played 3-song blocks of music from the same band. (I enjoyed it for the first day, at least - turns out that radio station could only find about 5 bands with 3 songs to play.) The Block Party! script creates playlists of random blocks of artists in your iTunes library of any size you choose. Fun!

3. Gather Up the One-Hits: Got a lot of one-hit wonders in your iTunes library? Gather them all into one united playlist of one-off delight called One Hit Wonders.

4. Make Album Playlists: Not as exciting as the above two scripts, this script creates a playlist for every album in your iTunes library. I’d only recommend this one if you like to have all of your albums available in your playlist sidebar; personally, I don’t, since it makes for a lot of sidebar clutter, but I can see where the script might come in handy.

Metadata:

5. Rate Me! Rate Me!: I’ve never been good at rating the music in my iTunes library. I love that I can use my ratings to splice my music with smart playlists, but I’m terrible about remembering to rate my music. This script throws up a nag window every time an unrated song starts playing to remind you to rate it. Potentially very annoying, but also guaranteed to get those songs rated.

6. Get Lyrical: This script searches the lyrics database at http://lyrics.astraweb.com/ for a match to either the currently playing or selected song(s) and, if it finds a match, automatically imports the lyrics to the lyrics tab of your metadata. It can be a bit hit or miss, especially if your music’s more obscure, so do check the matches. Even though I had a few false positives, it’s still pretty handy.

Internet:

7. Search Wikipedia: I love reading about the music as I’m listening to it, so I love this little guy. You can choose to search Wikipedia for the currently playing or selected song, then choose to search by album, artist, or composer name.

8. Google Video Search: Like the Wikipedia search, this script searches Google Video using either the selected or currently playing track, this time by song, artist, or album.

9. Search for Pandora Stations: Here at Lifehacker, we all think Pandora is just swell. Apparently so does Doug Adams, who put together this script to search for stations on Pandora based on artist, album, or composer of your selected or playing track.

iPod:

10. Import iPod Audio Files: This handy little gem lets you grab audio tracks (AAC, MP3, Apple Lossless, AIF WAV, and Audible) from a plugged in iPod and automatically adds the tracks to iTunes.

Exporting info:

11. Make PDF Booklet: Ever made a CD for someone and wished for an easy way to quickly throw together a booklet with whatever metadata you choose in a nicely formatted PDF? If so, you have very specific needs… and you’re in luck! The Make PDF Booklet script does just that (the more and better metadata you have, the better), then copies the PDF to the iTunes playlist from whence it came.

12. Playlist to papercdcase.com: This handy little critter sends up to 28 tracks worth of information to previously mentioned web site Paper CD Case , so making a CD case for your burned CDs is completely painless. You can select which fields are included, so you can choose song and artist info for compilations or just the song title for regular albums. Paper CD Case will spit out a PDF all sized up for folding into a CD case complete with track info.

Controlling iTunes:

13. Script Shortcut Maker:

If you’ve correctly installed your scripts, they should be available through the iTunes menu by clicking the little script icon. But since we’re so keen on keyboard shortcuts here at Lifehacker, we’d be remiss not to point out that any of your scripts can be accessed via customizable keyboard shortcut - because who needs to use a mouse? Not you, that’s for damn sure. The Script Shortcut Maker is still in a pretty rough beta state (and didn’t work that well for me), but you can also assign shortcuts using this tried and true method from Doug’s AppleScripts.

As of this writing, there are 423 scripts in Doug’s AppleScripts repository - meaning I’ve definitely skipped over someone’s favorite. Let’s hear which AppleScripts you’ve come to rely on in the comments.

Adam Pash is a senior editor for Lifehacker who loves free, scripted, homegrown software solutions. His special feature Hack Attack appears every Tuesday on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Hack Attack RSS feed to get new installments in your newsreader.

Originally from Lifehacker on February 27, 2007, 11:00am

the storyteller (2001-4, 4.3MB, 2:24 min.)

Six pieces originally shown as a gallery installation.
Says their creator, the artist Nathaniel Stern :
‘The odys series consists of six short digital video poems / monologues for
small screen viewing in an intimate gallery space. By stuttering between
odys’ actions and words, listeners construct his person. As he attempts
to re-member, bringing the past back to his body and calling it his own,
listeners attempt to piece together a story for themselves. Viewers are
encouraged to re-visit and jump over juxtaposed media, and create a
shifting collage of, and in response to, his person.’

This is work of huge ambition both aesthetically & technically &
it’s brave and it’s edgy, sometimes to the point of being uncomfortable to
watch. Neither does Stern fear engaging with complex & difficult ideas.
Definitely worth more than one viewing.

noise (2001-4, 2.4MB, 2:08)

they may be giant (2001-4, 3.6MB, 2:06 min.)

multiplicity (2001-4, 1.7MB, 1;17 min.)

Originally from DVblog on February 28, 2007, 2:00am

Recently, I had a chance to discuss what online video might look like in the next 10 years with a group of very smart people at the Video on the Net: Beyond YouTube? breakout session at the Beyond Broadcast conference.

There are those who beleive that the video internet is currently going through it’s growth spurt much like text internet did in the 1990s. In some respects, I very much agree. The phenominal growth of activities such as video blogging, aggregation, playlisting and podcasting have gone far to make video a normal part of the web.

In other respects, I see a long road still ahead. Mike Lanza of Click.TV outlined a thought that is very pertinant. He stated that in the current iteration of online video, interaction, particularly social interaction occurs around the video with tools that are firmly based in the world of the textual web: tagging, commenting, sharing and the like. This is evident all through the popular video aggregators and video blogs, a quick trip to YouTube should illustrate enough.

Of course, there is more that is happening. People are remixing, starting to make comments in-time with video, people are creating videos in response to other videos but these are certainly not the dominant forms.

It is obvious that online video must and is taking a different form from the video that we have all experienced over the past 50 years (namely TV). It is on-demand, lean forward and nessecarily of limited quality and duration.

What is slightly less obvious is that current iterations of the popular online video formats are black boxes. They depend on the the text around them to provide the context and searchability. Metadata, which could provide some of this information is non-standard if existant at all. In other words, we are moving from a pure text internet to a multimedia internet but that multimedia in order to be useful needs to be described or put back into text in some manner.

Now, I am not saying this is a bad thing or useless thing. We can scan text, pull out key points in a non-linear fashion, navigate through text. None these things are easy with video in it’s current form. Video is rich and has tremendious emotional impact but it also has a lot of baggage.

One of the the things we discussed in our group discussion was “What would a video wiki look like?” A wiki being a very successful example of many of the things that the web was originally designed for. Wikis are open platforms for anyone to write, edit, erase, converse and otherwise publish content online.

Unfortunately, no one really had an answer. There are thoughts that collaborative editing platforms are getting there but editing is only one aspect of the language of video. There is also all of the production in the first place. Perhaps wikis just don’t translate into something where there is an infinite number of variables. In text, language adds some semblance of the finite, in video there isn’t a defined language with parseable portions.

My thesis here (and this is not new nor original) is that for video on the net to reach the relevance of text on the net, to be truly searchable, scannable and sharable it must be parseable at the very least. We must be able to hyperlink to portions, drill deeper within it, copy and paste it and search it.

What would a video wiki look like?

Last a note: Researchers, Academics, Cinematographers and practicioners who use video have been talking about these issues for as long as video has been around. This is not a new conversation but certainly one that is becoming increasingly relevant. One place that you might find people discussing these very issues is netvidtheory Yahoo Group.

Originally posted by vanevery from Not sLop, ReBlogged by yatta on Feb 26, 2007 at 11:26 PM

Originally from unmediated on February 26, 2007, 10:26pm

Metavid is a project which seeks to capture, stream, archive and facilitate real-time collective [re]mediation of legislative proceedings. Metavid makes use of entirely free and open source software and video codecs to make both the footage and the archit

Originally posted by vanevery from del.icio.us/tag/unmediated, ReBlogged by yatta on Feb 26, 2007 at 11:23 PM

Originally from unmediated on February 26, 2007, 10:23pm

Originally posted by JD Lasica from Social Media, ReBlogged by yatta on Feb 26, 2007 at 11:14 PM

Originally from unmediated on February 26, 2007, 10:14pm