Film, Video & Music
bioephemera | April 8, 2011While we're on the bioanimation topic, I recently heard from Jess at Nervous System, who sent me links to some animations of their new jewelry line, hyphae, "growing" in virtual space. Check it out:
Hyphae - growth of the Vessel Pendant from Nervous System on Vimeo.
They explain,
Hyphae is a collection of 3D printed artifacts constructed of rhizome-like networks. Inspired by the vein structures that carry fluids through organisms from the leaves of plants to our own circulatory systems, we created a simulation which uses physical growth principles to build sculptural, organic structures.…
bioephemera | April 8, 2011Remember when I said more bio grad students should play with coding and modeling? Here's an example of what I mean. Laurence Frabotta directed me to this animation by phylogeneticist/bioinformatics programmer Liam Revell, an assistant professor at U Mass Boston, who used the statistical package 'R' to write a short code generating all possible bifurcating and multifurcating phylogenetic trees for a set of taxa. Apparently there are 2,752 for seven taxa (I have to take his word for it, my basic math skills have long since escaped me) and this animation runs through all of them. It's not…
bioephemera | April 6, 2011Wait - did Peter Nowogrodski just shoehorn everything I love into one meandering, indulgent multimedia essay??*
Tolkien's Shire appears as a coherent ecosystem, cradled by productive fields and populated by abundant orchards, caches of edible mushroom, and even the fishable Bywater Pool, ornamented with an authentic churning mill. The land at Hobbiton is changing still: Jackson's crowning oak tree now sits in sun-scarred pieces behind a rotten wooden fence at the termination of Bagshot Row, a home for the welcome swallows that course through air above. In the pastures opposite Bag End, a…
bioephemera | April 1, 2011
It's the very last installment of Zombiefest - one more book review, this time for one I heartily recommend!
Daniel Drezner, a professor of international politics at Tufts, prefaces his new book about zombies with an unexpected vignette - a visit to Graceland:
By the time my tour hit the Jungle Room, it was obvious that the thirty-odd people walking through Elvis Presley's mansion fell into two groups. The first contingent was thoroughly, utterly sincere in their devotion to all things Elvis. They were hardcore fans, and Graceland was their Mecca, their Jerusalem, and their Rome. . . the…
bioephemera | March 30, 2011Here's Alexis Madrigal on why the slow loris' newfound YouTube fame could be the worst possible thing for the little primates:
Talk about a buzzkill: watching a video of a cute animal on the Internet may -- in some small way -- lead to it being ripped from its mother, abused, and sold on the global market.
I know, I know: most of us can coo over small furry critters with extreme neoteny, while refraining from buying them on the black market. And it's not YouTube's fault that the loris is adorable. It's just truly sad that popularizing an endangered animal most people don't even realize exists…
bioephemera | March 25, 2011SOLAR from Ben Reubold on Vimeo.
Passed along by reader Miles, this visualization by Ben Reubold appears to depict a solar device patterned after a flower silently unfolding in space. I have no idea what the back story is, but it's very cool.
bioephemera | March 17, 2011
I guess it's not surprising, my dopamine is rising
And my glutamate receptors are all shot
I'd surely be bemoaning all the extra serotonin
But my judgement is impaired and my confidence is not
Allosteric modulation
No Long Term Potentiation
Hastens my inebriation
Give me a beer. . .
Physiology professors, I trust you know what to do with this holiday treasure by cadamole. Nothing makes neurobiology seem relevant like a beer.
bioephemera | March 16, 2011
The Cyclotrope from tim Wheatley on Vimeo.
The cyclotrope is a cycle of 18 images that is spun at a certain speed so that the frame rate of the camera filming it gives the illusion of animation.
A humble suggestion to high school art/science/media teachers: if your curriculum is not already too constrained by standards and tests, there are near-infinite possibilities in a bicycle wheel, a camera, and art. . . think Muybridge.
bioephemera | February 21, 2011Perfect for a holiday* with big fluffy slo-mo snowflakes** and wintry, brittle light, Clemento's Macro Kingdom short films. The most recent one is below, and the two prior films are below the fold.
I love the incorporation of the fragile, distorted type, but can't resist observing that the words are more in the nature of a poem than labels. Don't expect clarity (or scientific accuracy) about what you are seeing - just enjoy the lovely juxtapositions. :)
macro kingdom III from clemento on Vimeo.
macro kingdom II from clemento on Vimeo.
macro kingdom from clemento on Vimeo.
*for many of you,…
bioephemera | February 20, 2011It's strangely artistic, like a Dutch still life: this disturbing short film by Sam-Taylor Wood defies our expectations of decomposition, as a rabbit churns with decay while a peach sitting nearby remains fresh. (Video below the fold, so as not to gross anyone out by surprise).
Via wouldn't you like to see something strange - there's a second video over there, though not as creepy as this one.
bioephemera | February 10, 2011Okay, I knew that planets are big, intellectually, but a well-done graphic is worth a thousand words, and a pretty HD video is even better. Brad Goodspeed made this video to suggest what other planets would look like, if they orbited Earth at the same distance as the Moon does. I've embedded it, but you should seriously watch it in HD, full-screen for maximum effect.
Scale from Brad Goodspeed on Vimeo.
I have nightmares like that. Seriously. But is the video accurate?
In addition to being full-on creepy, Brad's video produced a fascinating discussion in the comments and on various sites…
bioephemera | February 9, 2011I get mail with wonderful links in it, but I'm hard pressed to find the time to post them, so my apologizes to those who've sent me things and not heard back. I'm beyond swamped. In the meantime, perhaps you'll enjoy these two nontraditional takes on "mapping." First up, map as music (or is it vice versa?):
"Conductor" by Alexander Chen
Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA's actual subway schedule, the piece begins in realtime by spawning trains which departed in the last minute, then continues accelerating through a 24 hour loop.…
bioephemera | February 8, 2011Remember the synthetic biology documentary I blogged about a while back? Well, the filmmakers are still working toward their goal. They have a little less than a month left, and I just noticed that they've seriously beefed up the rewards you can get for funding them. There are some interesting gifts from $10 up, but now at $300$1000*, they will send you a rough cut, solicit your input, and credit you in the final version. For everyone concerned about how scientists appear in the film, this is an intriguing option!
*Correction -the cost is actually $1000. For some reason Kickstarter bins all…
bioephemera | February 5, 2011
"we find ourselves constantly experimenting and pushing the boundaries. . . the really great thing about our business is the fact that we take raw materials, and we design, we color, we make. . . and we have complete control of the process. It's very gratifying."
Danny Cooke, maker of the short documentary about glass painting that I featured last October, has a new short film to distract you this Sunday. It's about a team of glassblowers, Mark Tranter, Patricia Tranter-Edmonds, and Lee James, who set up a small studio in a historic stableyard in Cockington Village, UK. The first three…
bioephemera | January 23, 2011
From NextNature, an intriguing post about the Institute for Digital Biology:
During the exhibition, visitors were able to feed a colony of microscopical pop-up creatures, save Chinese websites from a pageview-shortage, preserve an Amazone tribe from extinction by subscribing to its homepage and view a short documentary on how the living internet established itself.
Artist Walewijn den Boer also created a peculiar, twelve-minute faux-documentary, which uses animation to bring his digital biology concepts into meatspace (check it out below the fold).
Update 1:
I think the clunkiness of the…
bioephemera | January 22, 2011I got a very nice email today from Sam Gaty, one of the filmmakers behind the Synthetic Biology Documentary I blogged about earlier. He acknowledged the "mad scientist" type concerns, but emphasized that's not what they're going for in the final documentary, and suggested I share another short clip. This one is far more, I don't know how to describe it, techno-chic?
I can definitely see that sort of presentation getting kids interested in biology. It spins bench science as something intriguing, cutting edge, maybe a little hipster. Framing really is all in the aesthetics, isn't it?
Check…
bioephemera | January 21, 2011
An impressive short film, "Core," by animation group selfburning, via Fubiz. The music is lovely.
bioephemera | January 21, 2011So I'm all in favor of promoting struggling artists, and that includes documentary filmmakers. But I have to say I'm a little taken aback by the aesthetic of the "Synthetic Bio" documentary project by Field Test Films (and endorsed by Carl Zimmer). They've posted a short over at Kickstarter, where they're trying to raise $30K to finish the film in time for Sundance. But as one of my biologist friends pointed out, the soundtrack they use for the sample short (on producing spider silk in goat's milk) is eerie, mad-scientist stuff, complete with a Exorcist-like choir at the end.
I'm posting the…
bioephemera | January 7, 2011
Well, this is certainly ephemera: a Norwegian musician made instruments out of ice and then played them. Sounds like a lot of very cold work to me.
PS: The msnbc clip I initially found suffers on embedding from A) a stupid preliminary ad, B) high volume on the stupid ad, and C) practically no volume at all on the, ahem, musical clip that is supposed to be the focus of attention. Pathetic, msnbc. I retaliated by replacing it with an itnnews clip from YouTube that has none of those problems. Click through to see the msnbc clip if you'd like more ice music.
bioephemera | January 6, 2011Unfortunately, the shift to digital music sales has largely eliminated the art of traditional album design - framing the music in cleverly designed sleeves and cases. The new Shidlas cd, "Saliami Postmodern," is a meaty exception. Yum:
Via Fubiz (the weirdest thing about the fubiz post is when they show the cd in a Discman. Who still has those?)
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