History of the Typewriter Recited by Michael Winslow. Definitely one of the more unexpected videos that I’ve seen bouncing around the web lately. A type history tour de force by everyone’s favorite human sound machine!
(Via Kottke)
Bleep Labs gives a quick soldering demo. I wish all videos like this had such excellent synthy noises to accompany the action.
GelSight, a high-resolution, portable 3D imaging system from researchers at MIT, basically what looks like a small piece of translucent rubber injected with metal flakes. Watch the video to see some of the microscopic scans they’re able to get using this. I love non-showy SIGGRAPH tech demos like this one.
(Via ACM TechNews)
I’m not sure how I feel about the minor key version of the song (hard to beat the Pointer Sisters original), but…OMG STOPMOTION PINBALL NUMBER COUNT!
OnetwothreefourFIVEsixseveneightninetenELEVENTWELVE!
(Via Make)
If you’re a fan of the old Lucasfilm Games (and the kind of video game nerd that likes this sort of weird find…), don’t let your week go by without watching this internal Lucasfilm Games parody video unearthed by Mix n’ Mojo. Shots of Skywalker Ranch, Ron Gilbert, Larry Holland, jokes riffing off of the “Bo Knows” and “Spielvergnügen” (erm, Fahrvergnügen) ads, and even a song sung on the Ranch’s porch about their adventure games. It doesn’t get much more 1990 then this, folks!
(Bonus: watch for the boxed copy of King’s Quest V on the desk at around 8 minutes in — how’d that get in there??)
Extremities: six GoPro cameras attached to the skateboarder’s arms, legs, head, and one mounted underneath the deck (my favorite), combined with a couple of static cameras for context. Between this and the hula hoop video, these little cameras are cranking out some fascinating new perspectives this week.
(Source: blog.makezine.com)
Mates of State “My Only Offer” (by Retread Sessions)
Filmed at the Driskill in downtown Austin.
I miss KUT’s Retread Session video series – a great set of musicians playing in unexpected places.
More from the “things I did not know” file: Paul Rubens’s first widely-seen appearances, years before he hit it big as Pee-Wee Herman, were on the Gong Show.
The behind-the-scenes of one of my favorite Spike Jonze music videos, Pharcyde’s Drop (original video). The group had to learn to rap backwards to create the right lipsync for the effect, so Jonze hired a professional linguist to help transcribe the reversed audio track!
(Source: therumpus.net)
Experimental animation pioneer Mary Ellen Bute’s short film Tarentella was selected this week for preservation in the National Film Registry as a culturally significant film. From the press release:
“Tarantella” is a five-minute color, avant-garde short film created by Mary Ellen Bute, a pioneer of visual music and electronic art in experimental cinema. With piano accompaniment by Edwin Gershefsky, “Tarantella” features rich reds and blues that Bute uses to signify a lighter mood, while her syncopated spirals, shards, lines and squiggles dance exuberantly to Gershefsky’s modern beat. Bute produced more than a dozen short films between the 1930s and the 1950s and once described herself as a “designer of kinetic abstractions” who sought to “bring to the eyes a combination of visual forms unfolding with the … rhythmic cadences of music.” Bute’s work influenced many other filmmakers working with abstract animation during the ‘30s and ‘40s, and with experimental electronic imagery in the ‘50s.
Bute’s final piece was an interpretation of Finnegans Wake, one of the very few attempts ever made at staging Joyce’s novel of troubled dreams.
(Source: cartoonbrew.com)
Sunset on Mars, as seen by the long-lived rover Opportunity. Otherworldly yet primal.
(Source: blogs.discovermagazine.com)
Eyewriter 2.0 + Robot Arm = Livewriter. Combining the FFFFAT Lab’s inspirational Eyewriter project (named this week as one of Time’s top 50 inventions of 2010, and now glasses-free!) with their GML RoboTagger Sharpie Magnum-wielding robot arm, kids were able to try out the eye-tracking graffiti system to print out giant-sized tags of their own names. These projects touch on so many of my favorite areas of interest, so very cool.
Frank Zappa as the mystery guest on What’s My Line. Pretty dry, to be honest, although some might find interest in hearing him go into surprising detail about the video-to-film process used in filming 200 Motels (it was shot and edited in PAL video then upconverted to 35mm, a novel process at the time).
So why do I post this? Because at the 2:50 mark he references the awesome Time Life photo of him and his parents, confessing that it was “too purple.”
From Dentsu London, Making Future Magic:
We use photographic and animation techniques that were developed to draw moving 3-dimensional typography and objects with an iPad. In dark environments, we play movies on the surface of the iPad that extrude 3-d light forms as they move through the exposure. Multiple exposures with slightly different movies make up the stop-frame animation.
Take that, Picasso.
A novel way to view Graffiti Markup Language tags: Obama GML Playa.
And speaking of the Graffiti Research Lab, if you happen to be in Houston next week, you can see the local chapter demonstrating their laser tagging as part of the MEDIA ARCHEOLOGY event at the Menil.
