This is really, really… really fucking pretty. The only problem is that it’s too short.
Above the Sea is Amanda Burleson, and she’s channeled a whole lotta longing into “Handfed”. It feels like a thousand years of yearning wrapped up in there, with a video directed with a beautiful, dramatic flourish by Oh, Hello‘s Dan Brown.
Vodpod videos no longer available.Via No Fat Clips
I got tipped off to this completely kick ass vid by the equally kick ass Josh Spear. Designer Jean-Charles de Castelbajac revealed his Spring/Summer 2009 collection in an animated LEGO-populated fashion show video, called “JCDC Vs. Lego.” It’s pure win. Everything happiness-inducing is right here: LEGO, clouds, models, rainbows, animation, electro-beats. I can’t take how cool this is…
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Via Hypebeast
Water is both a lucid dream and a contradictory nightmare.
Despite our evolution, it’s a place we’re no longer allowed to be. Comprised of it, our very bodies draw us toward it; the water in our cells and the water of the world are like magnets constantly reaching out to each other. Life-sustaining and essential, we can’t live without water but despite our desire we aren’t allowed to live within in either. It beckons us but will just as easily, without thought, drown us. It promises everything yet assures us of nothing.
Viscous and prismatic, we are visually enthralled by its sights and sounds and within its heights and depths we can have an experience as close to flight as anything an unaided human will ever know. Though never far from our minds we know that this buoyancy can shift to prison without warning. Water is false freedom, and we are inevitably ether moored within it forever or expelled out. We may only visit. The moment you let yourself think only of its wonder is when you must immediately remind yourself of its treachery. Or you will die.
I’ve found photos that capture these thoughts. James Cooper’s amazing photos reflect every mood of water: beauty, deceit, abandon, hindrance, effulgence, release, life, and death. They are superb in every sense.
Via Tiny Vices
There are very few things in the world that fill me with unbridled joy like a good lipdub. It’s like kareoke without having to hear bad singing. It harnesses everyone’s secret rockstar gladhanding without having to actually hear them. It’s fucking brilliant.
I first discovered lipdub about over a year ago, when a bunch of guys and gals at the office for Connected Ventures released the now legendary “Flagpole Sitta Lipdub”. There’s a good chance you’ve seen it, since it went one to amass more than 1.5 million hits, got coverage in major media outlets like BBC and The Washington Post, and spawned an office lip dub sub-culture that spread around the world. This shit is epic. It’s the “Titanic” of lipdubs. There have been remakes and sequels and tributes. There’s even a Making Of Video.
The beauty of lipdubs, like ponies and cupcakes and fireflies, is that they make everyone happy. Everyone. There’s a spontaneous, communal, bombastic energy that’s energizing to watch. “Flagpole Sitta Lipdub” never gets old. It’s like medicine. It’s psychologically impossible to not feel happier after watching it.
Inspired by the original office lipdubs, some digital media students at Germany’s Hochschule Furtwangen University shot “Univeristy Lipdub”. This is the first lipdub I’ve seen that rivals the original. Keep in mind, as you watch this, that it’s all done in one shot. Altman would be proud.
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This is my idea of hell. Have we learned nothing from the Trojans? That’s right. I’m waiting for this thing to open up and the army of mechanical mini-spiders to slowly colonize the planet. Didn’t anyone else see Cloverfield? Why do the Brits seem so excited about this thing? It must be all that Marmite.
To kick off a 5-day outdoor theatre piece celebrating Capital of Culture, last night a freaky big mechanical spider appeared on the side of a building called Concourse House in Liverpool, England. The £1.8 million dollar soon-to-be arachnid overlord was foolhartedly commissioned by Artichoke House and then built by French company La Machine. Standing 50 feet high and weighing in at 37 tonnes, this robo-spider encompasses all that is evil in nature and will surely devour us all. Hello, Lord of the Rings? Arachnaphobia… even Eight Legged Freaks? England has no idea what it’s getting itself into.
Has anyone stopped to consider that France might be invading England? I don’t think we’re looking at all the angles here.
From BBC News (via The Denver Egotist)
The spider is believed to be “waking up” on Friday. It will descend from its current position on the side of Concourse House on Thursday to be moved to the city’s new arena, before coming to life on Friday. The creature will then begin exploring the city later that evening.
“Waking up”? EXPLORING! The last things we need any gigantic spider-bots to do is wake up and explore. Lest we forget, spiders consider “exploring” to be capturing and eating everything they find, then making hundreds of like-minded spider babies. Whatever the geographic pole is to Liverpool, England, I’m going there now. I suggest you all follow.
UPDATE: With this nifty online tool, I’ve found the geographic opposite of Liverpool. Good news is that it’s close to New Zealand. Bad news is that New Zealand is an island, and so being “close” to it often means being in the ocean, as is the case here. So, we’re left with swimming to New Zealand or being dis-membered by the evil mega-spider.
If art is in the eye of the beholder, then here is what happens when the beholders are creating the art. In the hills near Cambridge, Ontario, Gorbet Design Inc. (made up of Matt, Rob, and Susan LK Gorbet) has created Solar Collector.
Just the online description itself gets my little new-media-modern-artist’s heart a-thumping:
In a collaboration between the community and the sun, Solar Collector gathers human expression and solar energy during the day, then brings them together each night in a performance of flowing light.
How awesome does THAT sound? Integrating the cycles of it’s natural environment into an interaction-based work of outdoor art, similar to Jiyeon Song’s beautiful “One Day Poem Pavilion”, almost every aspect of Solar Collector’s design took a completely holistic and thought-out approach to it’s natural surroundings. Despite the high-tech aspect of its workings, there is a subtle, organic reasoning behind almost every element of the piece.
The 12 aluminum shafts are held at separate angles in the hillside. Each shaft has three LED lights and three solar collectors, gathering the sun’s energy to power their noctural illumination. The angles of the shaft represent the sun’s position throughout the year: the tallest shaft faces the sun’s location at winter solstice, and the lowest shaft faces does the same for summer solstice. If you’re a techie kinda person, you can check out all the detailed specs here.
During the day, while sunlight charges the batteries within each shaft, people go online and create their own patterns and send them electronically to solar collector. At sunset, Solar Collector comes to life and creates it’s display not just from the energy of light but from the creative energy of human beings. As the solar power in the batteries diminishes during the night, the light from each shaft slowly fades away and darkens until they’re energized by the sun again the next morning. It’s as natural and universal a cycle as breathing.
There’s also a kind of delightful shock to the location of Solar Collector. For those of you who don’t live in Southern Ontario, Cambridge isn’t exactly the first place you’d expect to find an interactive outdoor light sculpture. In fact, it may be one of the last. The randomness of its locale adds to it’s overall coolness.
Via Stimulant
I think my brain just caved in on itself, and I’m not sure how to recover. I feel a lot like I did in Grade 10, when you still had to take Algebra even if it was clear you were going to be an English major. I remember sitting in the desk and knowing that my mind was on the verge of understanding something, but just wouldn’t completely comprehend it no matter how hard i tried. It’s a lot like being underwater. Or high.
So what’s the source of this mindfuck? Though produced decades apart, I’ve found two films that explore the great polarities of the universe. The outer and inner taken to their complete extremes, they both examine the very limits of distance in both directions: the absolute greatest and the absolute smallest. In the process your brain goes into hyperdrive – how can we comprehend such incomprehensible distances? Both films begin by starting at the centre, ourselves, and then moving outward or inward to the points of infinity.
Created in 1977 by iconic husband and wife team Charles and Ray Eames (yeah, the same man behind all those chairs you’re considering paying so much for…) “Powers of Ten” is a classic science film. Not science fiction, but science fact. So classic, in fact, that it has its own day. That’s right – October 10 in Powers of Ten Day, as stated by the Eames Office on the Powers of Ten website.
Thought parts of it are outdated, the journey is universal and timeless:
(If the soundtrack is just too gruesome for you to endure, then there’s a nice version here. Unfortunately the narration is removed, but this version is set to some other-worldly proper ambient from Sigur Rós, which is never a bad thing.)
Charles Eames said “eventually, everything connects”, and that’s exactly what blows my mind about this. No matter how far you go inward or outward, you eventually end up in a big nothingness. There’s a Physics term for this – the way that the universe tends to work in patterns and imitate itself – called “self similarity”. I need Stephen Hawking to explain this all to me one day. I’m sure homeboy’s got this shit down pat.
The script of the narration is fascinating and integral to really understanding the breadth of the film, but the music is just so gratingly awful. Apparently the far reaches of the universe sound like a very dissonant pipe organ. If you’re into it, Nikon Camera created a really interesting mini-site, Universcale, that gives an immediate, interactive way of exploring the powers of size.
It’s interesting to compare “Powers of Ten” to another film clearly inspired by it, the 1996 IMAX release “Cosmic Voyage”, directed by Bailey Silleck. It’s a lot smoother and modern, and a little less trippy. Plus “Cosmic Voyage” benefits greatly from the all-knowing, all-seeing, omnipotent vocal stylings of Mr. Morgan Freeman. If there’s anything that hasn’t become more dramatic thanks to his narrative skills, I haven’t found it yet. I’m pretty sure that when you die, Morgan Freeman’s voice is the last thing you hear…
So in the end, we’re really just on either ends of two infinite universes – one that grows forever larger and another that gets forever smaller. Literally, everything everywhere is going on forever all around us in any direction you look.
The other thought I’m left with is how mentally limited we are in comparison to the realities of time and distance. The universe is 13 billion years old but 9-5 seems long. The time it’s taken to lift the Himalayas is beyond our understanding, but in the scope of the planet it’s just another rise and fall. A breath. A wink. We’re specks. Motes. Maybe the greatest obstacle to humans truly evolving is our inability to understand our own inconsequence. For the life of our planet is just another blip in the scope of the universe. For everything we think we’ve done, for all our self-importance, for all our history books and great literature and supposed humanity, we could all disappear in an instant and there are a quintillion quadrillion trillion stars that would never even turn to notice.
Something amazing has happened today. Truly, gloriously, angel-trumpetingly amazing. If I was Mahalia Jackson, I would literally be breaking into a deep-throated chorus of “Oh Happy Day”. That’s just how happy today is.
A bit of history. A few years ago, I stumbled upon oneword. I wasn’t as much of a writer/geek/internet whore as I am now. shape+colour was just a twinkle in my eye. Beautifully simple, each day oneword gives you – wait for it – one word and you have 60 seconds to free-flow write about it. Be literal, be poetic, be non-sensical, be Seussian – it’s all up to you. I went to oneword religiously, daily, without fail. Something about the creative simplicity of a little poetic outburst and it’s accompanying mind-drain was therapuetic, cathartic, and mildly euphoric.
And then one dark, evil day, oneword was down. The error message was non-sensical, not a site-based message but just a random geek speak. There was no soothing reassurance, no explanation, no time frame of it’s return. I didn’t realize how much I liked… nay, loved… oneword until I suddenly couldn’t have it. I checked it a few more times and begrudgingly let it go for the day.
Except that it was down the next day too. And that’s why my deepest fears were realized, as each day for the next two weeks I went to oneword and the same completely unhelpful message of broken nothingness still sat there. Eventually, for my own sanity, I had to give up. I checked a few more times, randomly, over the following weeks but after a while it just became annoying. The fucking thing was just gone.
And so, as it is with so many things that are worth loving, oneword slipped out of my life as quietly as it had slipped into it. Until last night. When, for whatever reason and I have no idea why, I went to oneword and it was back. Glory.
Here’s my oneword for today. The word was “substance”:
Created by Arvind Singh, not only was the site back up but with an explanation on his blog about what had happened: server switch error. God damn servers. I’m trying not to think about it too much because I don’t want to jinx it. My beloved oneword is back in action. That’s all that really matters.
Trollbäck + Company is one of my fave visual design studios in the world. They kick ass each and every time, and it blows my mind a little. Usually when shops are so consistenly innovation it’s because their out of the box thinking lives in every aspect of their company, not just their product. To me, this short film proves how Trollbäck does things differently… with kick ass results.
In “Things We Think About Before Sleep”, designers Tetsuro, Peter, Anna, Paul, Emre, Christina and Tolga got full reign to create a visual and sonic glimpse into what runs through their minds once their heads hit the pillow. The results are so different, but each so interesting, that you can easily tell why these guys are at the top of their game.
Click below to check it out in high res…
Via Motionographer
This makes me happy. Dr. Fredric J. Baur, food chemist designer of the iconic Pringles’ can, passed away on May 4 at the age of 89. After cremation, his family honoured his request to have his ashes buried inside one of his cans, which his daughter Linda told the Cincinnati Enquirer was his “proudest accomplishment”. I hope one day I do something I’m so freakin’ proud of that I want to put my cremains in it.
Apparently, contrary to Pringles’ advertising slogan, once you pop… you can stop.
Via BoingBoing
shape+colour 