I found this over on the AdaFruit blog where they have neat stuff you can build and also cool ideas to infect your mind with.
Peter Coyote is perhaps best known by the mass audience as the guy with the jangling keys in E.T. but he’s got an incredible body of work and a life that embraces significant cultural and political issues - so when he talks about art and creativity - you listen:
The folks at AdaFruit were especially tweaked by Coyote’s statements on how important the integration of the arts and sciences are - that they are not and should not be isolated endeavours. It’s well known that music and math are inextricably linked - so why do we constantly see music programs being cut from schools while pressure is brought to bear to produce better math students? It’s insane. It’s misguided. It’s dumbass cracker dogma and it’s gotta stop.
Art is life - we must infuse every aspect of our lives with artistic and creative purpose. This makes us better people and makes for a better world.
So anytime some ignorant yahoo smug-faced know-it-all politician tells you the arts aren’t important and need to be cut back - you stand up and tell them to fuck off.
There seems to be a lot of death going on these days. The passing of Frank Frazetta touches me because his art - on covers of magazines and novels strewn throughout my youth and up to this very day - was so compelling and influential.
Thanks for the images, dreams, nightmares and lovely ladies, Frank.
This one is called a “3D Zoetrope” - and while it’s not really 3D it is fucking cool.
Pretty neat, huh? In this age of the hidden magic of digital tech it’s refreshing to see analog works that thrive as much on their process as they do on their content.
I’ve always been in love with flipbooks, zoetropes, praxinoscopes and any other simple gadgetry that creates the illusion of movement and life ever since I first started drawing little airplanes in the corners of my math text book, making them swoop down and bomb the crap out of the page numbers. I like how Visnic employed the music from the record player as part of the apparatus - brilliant stuff. Someday I’ll cobble together my own old ideas for a gallery show of kinetic sculptures, photos and sketches that merges everyday mechanical objects with pathetically dumb visual gags - someday.
But right now I go draw some airplanes on a pad of post-it notes.
The title of this article is as bizarre as the video itself. I found this over on Bruce Sterling’s blog Beyond The Beyond and it is a wondrously brain melting bit of video wizardry that dissects and reassembles the images and sound of the formerly linear presentation of media - much like the Yooouuutube site I blogged about earlier.
That it uses one of my favourites and the best movie musical of all time - “Singin’ In The Rain” - only helps but it also serves to reinforce the ideas behind the technique since it incorporates dance and music. Have a lookey-loo and I’ll rant at ya after you’ve had your head opened up just a little bit.
Now at first blush this might seem like just a weird and trippy gimmick - and it could certainly remain as such. But consider the choices made in the creation of this little gem - it’s not arbitrary work. The repetition of the lyrics, the overlapping layers of the melody, the attendant visuals that are given focus at the requisite moment(s) in time - it’s just fucking brilliant. Check out their otherwork.
And not just as a mashup. The images and sounds drip like rain water upon a pane of glass. This is poetry, folks.
At the risk of hauling out the old adage poetry in motion - it is just that. Regardless of whether the content is repurposed or original, this is a stunning example of where our culture is heading.
I hear you say: “What the fuck are you on about, Robbo?”
Fair enough. Just this:
We are emerging from a culture that has been dominated by visuals - motion visuals. The moving image has become the lingua franca of the past century - it defines us and it defines our world. The power once held by a painted image, a photograph or a sound bite has long ago relinquished its hold upon the minds of our culture - and in its place is the moving image.
Technological and market forces decreed that such images would always come from a combined creative and business elite - a one-way and top-down conversation. The democratization of this technology is allowing the once passive viewer to speak back to those once hierarchal images - to craft a response in a myriad of forms - to redefine our culture by adopting the language of moving pictures and transforming them into poetry. We also get to speak to each other in this way - transforming the culture further by adopting the methods of what was once voices from above to our own voices from within.
Poetry.
Giambattista Vico postulated - back in the early 1700’s - a recurring cycle of three ages of culture: The Poetic, The Mnemotic & The Vulgar. It doesn’t take a great mind to look about and realize what age we are currently wallowing our way through. Vulgar doesn’t even begin to describe it.
But it is a cycle.
The wheel turns - slowly, yes - but it does turn.
And thus we enter an age where the content of our former culture becomes transformed into the poetic. McLuhan oft stated the content of new media was the media of old. This is but one of the reasons why fighting to retain public access to common culture is important. Our voices stem from our ability to speak of what once was by using the voices of that recent time past.
Blah blah blah blah blah blah.
I easily foresee a culture that speaks like the video above. Songs, stories, music, dance, narrative, marketing, instruction - the whole gamut of human communication - parlayed through what now would be perceived as an incoherent too-well-stirred pot of media.
We shall speak in video.
And this speech will not merely be regarded as art or a sub-culture of hipster dialect, Daddio - it will be how we converse.
Just as easily as I type - and you read - these words.
Welcome to the future.
Say what?
Cheers.
P.S. This reminds me of the work of Graham Smith, who I used to hang out with a bit in the early ’80’s when he was at OCA creating his photography based work Skinned and messing around with early experiments in video and cludgey virtual reality simulations. He’s currently deep into the telepresence and immersive video world but still crafting very compelling images.
I had meant to post about this yesterday but as a man once said: “Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.”
It’s hard to believe that it was 29 years ago when John Lennon died and left us a legacy of music, art and the relentless quest for peace.
Too many people engage in building saints and martyrs from the remains of those who have gone before us, providing examples of what it means to be a decent caring human being who refuses to profit from the suffering of others. Lennon was no saint - he was just a man - but a damned fine one and we should all be so lucky as to find a part of who he was, and what he believed in, within ourselves.
There’s been a lot of bullshit happening in Canada as the Harper government does its best to look pretty whilst wearing the brown lipstick of the U.S. media industry. You can find out more about the pitiful shenanigans of the music industry, blatantly stacking town hall meetings to discuss copyright reform, and the suppression of alternative voices at these so called “open and public discussions”, on other blogs like Michael Geist and Jill Golick or P2P.net and BoingBoing. I’ve ranted and raved about it before - and doubtless will again - but right now it’s the weekend and I’m lazy and I’m gonna go lie down and read a cheap mystery novel.
In the meantime, here’s a short video of Prof. Lawrence Lessig giving a talk this past February at the New York Public Library (along with Steven Johnson and Shepard Fairey) addressing the very real concerns that our copyright laws are being hijacked by dying media industries to support a failed and archaic business model and in those efforts to stem the inevitable tide of technological and cultural progress they are stealing our voices, stealing our right to speak and hear about our world.
Will copyright laws stifle creativity? If the major media companies are allow to corrupt our elected officils and subvert our democratic processes to assert their right to define what culture is - as in: whatever they sell us and nothing else - then Yes the laws of copyright are a threat to creativity and freedom of speech as well as freedom of thought.
Make noise. Kick these fuckers in the nuts.
Cheers.
P. S. Actually the mystery novel is not cheap, it’s Dashiel Hammett’s classic “The Big Knockover” - in case you were wondering.
The industry of cinema may be dying or reinventing itself but the Art of cinema will live on. One of the great things about the movies was not the recreation of reality but the creation of non-reality.
The techniques of manipulating light to create moving images is centuries old and has been absorbed into our psyche, our culture and our day-to-day vocabulary to such a degree we are no longer the same kind of human beings which existed before the dawn of cinema. I won’t get into arguments as to whether that’s good or bad - it just is.
Newer technologies are calling to us now and changing us further. It always helps to take a look back now and then to remind ourselves where we came from and how far we’ve travelled on this journey of augmented evolution. And it’s fun too!
I found this over at Gizmodo. It’s 100 years of visual effects crammed into 5 minutes.
If you have any others to add go to the Gizmodo post and offer your comments - they’ve allowed for posting of video snips too.
I’ve posted this extraordinary audio and video mash-up by Kutiman before but it keeps popping up and I just love the visceral example it provides of how our tech allows us to craft culture that reflects who we are, when we are and what we are surrounded with.
What you are about to see is a mix of unrelated YouTube videos/clips edited together to create Thru-You. In other words - what you see is what you hear.
The existing materials are re-worked to craft anew an expression that would not have been possible prior to the now readily available media tools - and what we get is far from the usual corporate packaged dreck that is inflicted upon us.
Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. Mashable reports on an awesomely psychedlic site called Yooouuutuuube which lets you put tens, even hundreds, of YouTube videos into rows and columns, creating an utterly trippy experience. Just enter a YouTube (YouTube reviews) video ID and frame width for each “piece” of the mosaic, and Yooouuutuuube will generate a video grid.
which shows brilliantly how much of what we took for granted as being real in cinema was actually images painted by hand.
