Film, Video & Music
bioephemera | December 31, 2009
This explanatory video from Wired/the Exploratorium shows how "Dr. Megavolt" (Austin Richards) created a birdcage-topped stainless steel bodysuit, so he can play with the giant Tesla coil he built. This guy knows how to have fun, man.
bioephemera | December 30, 2009
the Hallelujah Mountains
film stills from Avatar by James Cameron
The Messengers
Christophe Vacher
Fantasy artist Christophe Vacher was doing the floating mountain thing for years before Avatar.
Update: apparently, for those of you who remember the 1970s, Roger Dean was doing it too:
Jason R suggests this link for more images. (None of them look even remotely familiar to me).
bioephemera | December 13, 2009
Okay, so these tricks aren't rocket science. But I think lighting and extinguishing candles remotely is a pretty entertaining diversion - definitely for an audience experiencing a post-holiday meal food coma. You can lecture them all about chemistry, and they won't be able to flee! Bwahahahahaha! Good stuff.
Then I found this "Extreme Physics Party Trick". . . and I'm still laughing.
EXTREME!
bioephemera | December 6, 2009
Origami is as ephemeral as art gets - delicate paper, with no more than creases and physics to maintain its shape. It's also the ideal art form for blurring the boundary between art and science, because it's all about geometry. You could argue that the origami medium is math, just as much as it's paper.
That's why Between the Folds, a documentary film by Vanessa Gould about origami-happy artists, mathematicians and scientists "working in the shadows between art and math," is such a success: the connections between math, science, art and paper aren't strained at all, so you can sit back and…
bioephemera | December 2, 2009The best Lady Gaga parody yet? Judge for yourself:
I lay it out like they do in magazines
check out this typeface it's like smoking nicotine (I love it)
using Adobe's not the same without a Mac
if it was lead it would be lined up on a track
Oh yeah! Via Jennifer Ouellette.
bioephemera | December 2, 2009Product placement is old news, but just in case you're wondering how saturated films really are with implicit advertising, brandchannel.com's brandcameo-films index tells you which brands were featured where:
It's hard to make audiences feel okay, and even good, about innocent people being gored, beheaded and axed to death--but Friday the 13th knows the trick is to populate the film with beautiful, shallow characters who feel self-entitled to a life of partying, comfort and money. Enter Jason Voorhees, the maladjusted and disfigured karma-maker. Though none of the characters seem to have…
bioephemera | November 30, 2009
Via 1o9, a timelapse BBC video of hundreds of unbelievably colorful Antarctic invertebrate species swarming and devouring a seal carcass. It's beautiful but somewhat graphic - be warned, some people may find the giant worms in particular rather skin-crawling. (And I thought I overindulged at Thanksgiving. . . )
bioephemera | November 5, 2009Magnetic Movie from Semiconductor on Vimeo.
Last week, at the imagine science film festival in New York, Magnetic Movie won the Nature Scientific Merit Award:
In 2009, the Nature Scientific Merit Award went to the film judged to be not only the most deserving but also the most scientifically accurate, Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhard's Magnetic Movie.
I love Magnetic Movie, too - but what think you about the scientific accuracy angle? See what I had to say about it in my Art vs. Science series, earlier this year:
Art vs. Science, Part One: Semiconductor
Art vs. Science, Part Two: You want raw data…
bioephemera | November 2, 2009
The very epitome of bioephemera, from Microbial Art:
Artist JoWOnder presents a pre-Raphaelite painting of Ophelia created with bacteria. The demise of the painting is filmed using time-lapse photography, showing a story of death and creation of new life. The colors and animation for '6 Days Goodbye Poems Of Ophelia' were created in a laboratory at Surrey University UK with the help of microbiologist Dr. Simon Park. When displayed in 2010, this will be an outdoor video installation of Ophelia with poems submitted from the public. Composer Milton Mermikides will be producing a sound track…
bioephemera | November 1, 2009*That's the Amazon rainforest - not Amazon.com!
Check out this interview from MAKE with Google's Rebecca Moore, who helped an Amazon chief use Google Earth to fight illegal logging.
Lots more here.
bioephemera | October 3, 2009I'm guessing this type of behavior is why this breed of bird is so rare:
Thank 3QD for the laugh. ;)
bioephemera | October 1, 2009Okay, everyone, here is something intriguing. The following video is amateurish, bizarre, has terrible production values, and appears to be the work of either a master performance artist or someone who lacks any self-consciousness whatsoever (shades of Little Edie Bouvier Beale).
But, if you start the video, then click over to some other window (go check your Gmail) and just listen to the audio without video, you're suddenly listening to a dusty, scratchy gramophone record that documents a forgotten, eccentric self-taught Appalachian folk musician from the turn of the century. Or something…
bioephemera | September 15, 2009
An enigmatic photo from Morbid Anatomy's review of the Quay Brothers show at Parsons in NYC. Read all about it here.
bioephemera | September 10, 2009"It will die, eventually, because no one will know how to do it." But for now, a few miles from here, Firefly Press' John Kristensen is keeping the tradition of letterpress alive, as seen in this beautiful video by Chuck Kraemer.
Via NOTCOT.
bioephemera | September 9, 2009I previously blogged about Jennifer Angus' insect installation, Insecta Fantasia, in the Newark Museum's Victorian Ballantine House. For those of you who couldn't make it to the show this YouTube video is a wonderful tour.
Note the layered interplay of 2D wallpaper patterns with 3D insects - some of which have lasercut words and patterns cut into their carapaces - and the insect-populated dollhouses. An insect house within an insect house - it's the kind of intimate yet fantastic inner world created by the best children's books. I'm thrilled that this video lets everyone experience it.…
bioephemera | September 4, 2009This ad for Scribe notebooks - depicting a world of doodle-covered scratchpaper - is almost entirely created with digital imaging software. Am I the only one who finds that a little ironic?
Via NotCot.
bioephemera | August 28, 2009
The Science and Entertainment Exchange blog has an interesting post up about artist Willard Wigan, who creates sculptures that can only be seen through a microscope.
Wigan's story is touching - he started sculpting as a child, when his dyslexia made school a painful challenge. He says,
"I started making houses for ants because I thought they needed somewhere to live. Then I made them shoes and hats. It was a fantasy world I escaped to."
(That totally reminds me of the scene from Zoolander where the none-too-bright model played by Ben Stiller stares at a scale model of a proposed school…
bioephemera | August 25, 2009An irreverent, sometimes wince-inducing, profoundly touching sampler of the ephemeral moments we take for granted:
Video by Will Hoffman and team, found via Scibling/author Jonah Lehrer.
bioephemera | August 12, 2009I missed a few weeks of Jon Stewart while we didn't have cable, so many thanks to David Bruggeman for pointing out this awesome Daily Show clip of scientists failing to communicate. I'm still chortling.
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart
Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Human's Closest Relative
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes
Political Humor
Spinal Tap Performance
My favorite part is when Oliver gets the chimp guy to admit no one will read his papers.
bioephemera | August 12, 2009
Japanese artist Kawano Takeshi's 2007 rendition of global warming is simple, a little funny, and a lot sad.
For another version of the same theme - using a real child's toy - check out Ours (the Bear), a video by French artist Simon Dronet. I'll try to embed it, but the link's wonky, so you might have to click through to see it.
OursUploaded by laperitel.
Via Fubiz