Showing only Notes + Links tagged videos
Just listened to Alissa Walker’s interview on Humble Pied about “ignoring your job title.”
It’s the same idea that had me all excited about Gabriel Orozco’s show at the MoMA.* He doesn’t feel constrained by the collective consciousness definition of what an artist can be, or I, at least, don’t get the feeling that he’s trying too hard to create capital A-R-T. Either way, the joy is evident and in the breadth of the work there is clarity.
Like Alissa says, whatever you do becomes your body of work!
* and now that I think about it, this is the same reason that I get excited about anything. Maybe it’s also why I like reading writing about writing, I can’t find the quote, but somebody said that the business of a writer is living life, if that connection makes sense at all.
My opinion of the olympics is generally in line with @joehewitt, who tweeted: “All hail the power of marketing convincing people they need to suddenly care about these obscure, dull sports once every 2 years.”
But, at the closing ceremony of the winter olympics, 20 giant “Zygote” touch-responsive glowing bouncy balls—based on open-source software—were released into the crowd. How cool is that?
I knew I liked this William Wegman fella. I feel I have been remiss in not reminding 20x200 collectors that he directed New Order’s video for Blue Monday.
This is so rad. Probably my second favorite* music video ever.
* First favorite being this gem by Queen Latifah.
American Express: Don’t Take Chances. Take Charge. (via AmericanExpressCo)
See also: Steven Heller writes about it.
Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium’s Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.
(via Kottke)
The Complex of All of These (via januarypress)
A little while back I posted Abigal Uhteg’s amazing printmaking process photographs but I didn’t realize that there was also an amazing video set to Ratatat. Excellent!
This (inexplicably rude!) guy gives a cool breakdown of how Philip Glass’s music is constructed.
(via Kottke)
Beautiful animated short on procrasination, except that it’s clearly not a result of procrastination in any way shape of form.
(via zefrank)
Watch this music video for the song “Triumph of a Heart” by Bjork (directed by Spike Jonze) and you will be rewarded generously with a cat dance sequence. It just might make your day.
The Convergence of Media into Generative Events
There’s a post so-great-it-makes-my-head-explode by Robin Sloan at Snarkmarket hypothesizing that in the future (though it’s a bit of a stretch), magazine articles, albums, and novels could converge into events like TED or Phootcamp.
TED is one of the surprise media successes of the last few years, but not by chance. Their insight was that a conference can be a machine for making media—media that can build a big audience on the web. They invested in media production, and it paid off.
I think everyone’s frustration with TED is that we’re not exactly sure what it accomplishes besides the fact that A) it leaves us with a warm, glowingly-inspired feeling and B) we love that.
But TED is just a starting point. They’ve done a remarkable job, but—this always happens—it’s almost too big at this point. Too homogenizing. You could squint your eyes and recognize a TED talk by its red-blue glow. And—snark aside—it has a real weakness.
This is what got me so excited a few months ago about PhootCamp, a get-together-and-make-things style photography meetup organized by Laura Brunow Miner, a former editor of community photography magazine JPG. Where Phootcamp bested TED, writes Sloan, is that instead of “recitation” it was a fest of “generation.”
Riffing on this, Liz Danzico thinks that this is “evidence of a potential return to the oral tradition in practice.”
Studies of some of the oldest living oral cultures demonstrate that the structure of oral narrative itself, before the advent of writing, show this pattern. Prior to the advent of writing — long before texts of any kind — performers would compose oral narratives much in the way Robin describes, relying on generative formulas. They were composing texts while they were performing them live. The “publishable” aspect was different, of course, but the intent the same.
Social media has long been showing signs we’re returning there, but the event aspect pointed out here feels like a new step in this direction.
It reminds me of a previously linked to reblog from Attention Industry, full of interesting notes about New Models for Online Journalism, like:
5 person teams: editor / writer (2), developer, videographer / editor, designer. Publishing on a dual schedule: ongoing social media updates from dedicated accounts, and weekly complete, collaborative stories.
And of course, of McSweeney’s, the publishing house that seems to be 10 years ahead of the game _(with a fantastic iPhone app, upcoming one-time reinvention of the newspaper, tutoring centers across America, I could go on…). Issue 18 of their Quarterly Concern had a beautiful intro by editor Eli Horowtiz:
After a couple of somewhat elaborate issues in a row, we were excited to settle down, get back to basics—a paperback book…but it leaves us still with our hunger for simplicity. Thus, the following vow. Issue 19 will be handwritten on a large sheet of butcher paper. There will be only one copy. We will pack up a 1991 Volvo 240, black, with tinted windows and a broken sunroof, and drive around the country, visiting each subscriber. Each will be given one hour with the text, or maybe slightly more if we’re provided with lemonade or granola. Non-subscribers can visit our offices in San Francisco, where the issue will be available for viewing on our back porch. As usual, we’re grateful for your faith and constancy.
I wish.
As I was putting together the second issue of Process, I was telling Phoebe my muddled thoughts about the combination of conversation, video, transcription, slides, creative response, and interaction and she said to me…”you mean real life?”
D’oh!
See also: the recently posted vignettes by Jonathan Harris on building meaningful experiences online.
And don’t miss: the aforementioned Liz Danzico, Jason Santa Maria (who designs every single one of his blog posts individually!), and Paul Ford (who by some act of strange magic moved the entire printed history of one of the oldest magazines ever onto the internet, and made it well designed) will be doing a panel on meaningful experiences on the web this coming Tuesday, but unfortunately I will be in class. Luckily for me, I have no doubts that the video will end up on the internet.
The Walt Disney Company is now offering refunds for all those “Baby Einstein” videos that did not make children into geniuses.
They may have been a great electronic baby sitter, but the unusual refunds appear to be a tacit admission that they did not increase infant intellect.
“We see it as an acknowledgment by the leading baby video company that baby videos are not educational, and we hope other baby media companies will follow suit by offering refunds,” said Susan Linn, director of Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which has been pushing the issue for years.
Installation Footage of Roxy Paine on the Roof: Maelstrom (via metmuseum)
I guess that this is how they will get it down…except in reverse.
Kill the Kindle / AIGA Make Think 2009
Charles Brock’s (almost) 60 second presentation at this year’s AIGA’s Make/Think conference. Being a book designer, Charles has an (*ahem) unique perspective on the Kindle. To clarify, nothing of value was destroyed in the making of this film.
Curtis Mann is an artist who bleaches found photography into graphic, abstract and vaguely apocalyptic compositions. I LOVE this four minute documentary by Alan Del Rio Ortiz on how he makes his work. (both for its content and production)
Also interesting to me is how somebody who is so down and dirty with analog processes so vehemently defends both the good and bad aspects of digital photography. Look for a similar post about this on the 20x200 blog sometime this week, I’ll update this post with a link when it goes live.
A Different Approach on Learning by Adam Dirks
I think I’ve always wished that reading an encyclopedia could be more like break dancing. This video improved my day, a lot.
