Film, Video & Music
bioephemera | October 19, 2010Reader Miles suggested Danny Cooke's graceful documentary about ornamental glass & sign artist David A. Smith, who uses traditional techniques like gilding, silvering, and etching to create ornate glass signs and windows with aesthetics from Victorian to Art Nouveau. Time-lapse sequences offer a surreal glimpse of Smith dexterously floating giant panels of glass around his studio, gently pressing them against grinders to carve the distinctive beveled patterns and fonts so familiar from vintage pubs or storefronts.
David A Smith - Sign Artist from Danny Cooke on Vimeo.
Particularly if…
bioephemera | May 24, 2010
This is my current favorite song, by the underrated band Fanfarlo. The lyrics, which remind me of Roswell crossed with Spoon River Anthology, are a touching portrayal of the eternal plight of the social misfit. But the video is exactly what we'd have gotten if the Dharma initiative had set up its own music television station. So in honor of last night's long-awaited and poignant end to LOST, here's "Harold T. Wilkins, or How to Wait for a Very Long Time."
Lyrics (from here)
You've been packing your bags for the tenth time
You've been up on the roof again
And you're biding your time but it's…
bioephemera | May 19, 2010Der Mensch als Industriepalast [Man as Industrial Palace] from Henning Lederer on Vimeo.
So awesome! Fritz Kahn's poster reimagined as an animation by Henning Lederer. Via Bora.
bioephemera | May 18, 2010They're using DNA tests for everything now - even to catch canine vandals and their miscreant owners.
Robert Frost was right: good forensics make good neighbors.
bioephemera | May 16, 2010A German home improvement company turns an old apartment building into a modern wonder cabinet, as part of an ad campaign: first they covered the facade with a flock of shoes (Dr. Isis must have been their muse) and then they installed concept art throughout the whole thing (some of it nuts, and some of it pretty remarkable). They won a 2009 Mobius Award for their work. Check it out:
I think we'd all like to have the room with the giant air mattress/bubble in it. Mmmmmmm, sleeping on a giant bubble.
bioephemera | May 13, 2010Via Jennifer Ouellette, a wonderful TED talk by Dan Meyer, high school math teacher, which is about so much more than math or education. It's about how we think about problems in the real world, how we handle ambiguity, and the problem with impatient problem-solving: "what we're doing here is taking a compelling question, a compelling answer, but paving a smooth, straight path from one to another, and congratulating our students for how they step over the cracks along the way".
In his words, Meyer "sells a product to a market that doesn't want it, but is forced by law to buy it." So he's…
bioephemera | April 23, 2010The Anachronism (Full Film) from Anachronism Pictures on Vimeo.
The full length version of The Anachronism, a short film by Matthew Gordon Long, has been released online. The only thing wrong with it is that it isn't longer. Give yourself a treat this weekend, enjoy the steampunk, and, if you're like me, reminisce about taking a textbook out into the forest to name things in Latin! I'll just give you one warning: this is a filmmaker who, unlike many others, knows how to let a mystery rest undisturbed. Yes, the film leaves you curious as heck, but in the end, I think that's a much better…
bioephemera | April 20, 2010I'm not going to comment too much on this, but this is hilariously wrong. I learned from this EFF post that the maker of the oft-parodied Hitler film The Downfall sent a bunch of takedown notices (or something similar using filtration technology) to YouTube, prompting removal of a swath of Hitler meltdown scene parodies.
Not only are many of these parodies clear cases of fair use, the parodies even included one by EFF's Brad Templeton,
"which depicted Hitler as a producer at Constantin Films. He hears about all the videos and orders DMCA takedowns. His lawyers (generals) have to explain…
bioephemera | April 19, 2010
One of the DC bands I like, Honor By August, has a new cd out- and the cover (the e-cover at least, I haven't seen a hard copy) plays with biomedical imagery.
Sweet - love the little bird! I'd totally take that on a T-shirt and wear it.
bioephemera | April 18, 2010
WTF! My boyfriend, an astrophysicist, says the Sun "does this all the time." I am going to hide under my bed now until I die.
bioephemera | April 17, 2010
Up There is a short documentary about the sign painters who still work in cities like New York, hand-applying mural-style ads to brick walls. In this short preview clip, you see an accelerated version of a series of murals painted over three weeks to advertise Stella Artois. Each image is drawn cartoon-style onto paper, holes are burned through the cartoon, and charcoal is applied to pattern the brick wall. Then the painters fill in the mural, mixing their paint as they go.
It's truly humbling to see such skilled painters, able to fill a wall with a proportional, almost photorealistic mural…
bioephemera | April 17, 2010
A recommendation from reader Calle: a time-lapse view of a Rocky Mountains park over a year, accompanied by sound bytes from the news. Occasionally pretty eerie.
News, Weather & Sports - a year long time-lapse documents the seasonal changes and the recreational activities of visitors to a public park. This is a preview clip of a looping video art project by Dan Hudson (www.danhudson.ca). Location: Canmore, Alberta, Canada. Music: Chris Jennings. Support: Canada Council for the Arts.
bioephemera | April 15, 2010For the past two months, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats has been showing films . . . to potted plants.
Specifically, the flora will be seeing travel documentaries showing off glorious European skies. Will the green cinematic scheme backfire when the plants are too entertained to foresee their possible extinction?"Our destruction of the environment is bad news for plants," the brain-teasing Keats, who also pens Wired's Jargon Watch feature, said in an e-mail interview with Wired.com "I think it's only fair that shrubs and trees know what's happening, that they realize that the cataclysm…
bioephemera | April 13, 2010
In this TED clip, Natalie Merchant sings haunting arrangements of old poetry from her new album, Leave Your Sleep (2CD). If you have limited time, skip ahead to about 8:00 for the beautiful ee cummings poem "maggie and milly and molly and may", followed by the gently rebellious "if no one ever marries me" by Laurence Alma-Tadema (who never did marry), and then "Margaret" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
I'd forgotten how moving Merchant's voice is. I'll definitely be ordering this one when it's released.
Watch an interview with Natalie Merchant about this project at Granta.
bioephemera | April 12, 2010
Reader Jake alerts me that Wired has just put up a gallery of robot spiders (and spider-like critters). If you've always wanted to be creeped out by a 40-foot robot Shelob, be my guest!
bioephemera | April 4, 2010Here's a pretty little visualization by Hybrid Medical Animation: a demo reel of clips portraying various physiological processes and medical devices in action, in various styles of animation:
hybrid 2010 reel from hybrid medical animation on Vimeo.
One of my frustrations with medical animations is that they're a Disneyfied look at the body. Real biology is dirty, sticky, unpredictable, and a little dangerous - kind of like Times Square used to be. But in medical animations the body is always a minimalist, sterile Kubrickian utopia, usually in Pottery Barn colors, where pretty little…
bioephemera | March 29, 2010I don't think I've posted yet about Andrew Chase's graceful articulated metal sculptures. His cheetah is particularly stunning.
Click the image to watch it run!
Chase's mechanical sculptures have way more personality than metal should. The soulful eyes of his elephants and giraffes could reflect some futuristic world in which extinct flesh-and-blood animals have been (inadequately) replaced with patchwork gestures at nature. Or perhaps they look lonely because they're intimidated by the flesh-and-blood inspirations of which they are ingenious, but dead, replicas.
Robot Timmy Recharging…
bioephemera | March 22, 2010
A short, wordless film inspired by numbers, geometry and nature, and created by Cristóbal Vila. Thanks to reader Esmeralda for passing this one along!
bioephemera | March 21, 2010From iO9: the trailer for "The Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec," a new film directed by Luc Besson (the Fifth Element), which appears to be about a female French Indiana Jones in period costumes. With a dinosaur.
Adèle Blanc-Sec - Le film-annonce. sur Yahoo! Vidéo
iO9 promises that "a pterodactyl threatens steampunk Paris," and I certainly hope the film's got steampunk garnishes, although the usual trappings of steampunk aren't readily apparent in this trailer. But even if the only steampunky thing about it is the locomotive scene, it is certainly more steampunk than a Cheez Whiz TV tube…